Free Unity 6 e-book, and Doom takes another casualty

Also Two ways to do Game Dev, and AI comes for Paint and Notepad

Author

Code Monkey
November 10, 2024

Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

Are you taking care of your fitness? I just did a half-marathon race earlier today in the beautiful city of Nazaré! 2:00:55! Fun!

Lately my main task has been preparing 2 massive free videos, my 12 hour free C# course, and the 7 hour free DOTS course sample coming out this Friday.

I'm a big believer in free education and I really hope these videos help out a ton of people who can't afford the paid versions. If you can afford it and you pick up the premium versions then thank you so much! You are helping people who can't afford it (like me when I was a kid) be able to have access to high quality education! (and hopefully learning a lot yourself!)

  • Game Dev: URP e-book, Two ways Game Dev

  • Tech: Paint and Notepad AI

  • Fun: Doom Alarmo

Game Dev

Unity 6 URP e-book!

Unity has made a ton of excellent e-books, if you're never heard about them then check out their entire library.

The recent one on programming patterns was awesome, the one on 2D was also super awesome, as were a bunch more.

Now one of their e-books, the one on URP, has been updated to Unity 6. You can get it for FREE here.

This is pretty important because Unity 6 has a bunch of awesome new Graphics features. Things like the GPU Resident Drawer which helps you render faster, GPU Occlusion Culling which uses the GPU to efficiently calculate only what needs to be rendered, Adaptive Probe Volumes which get auto placed and allow you to have high quality lighting and interpolate between it (time of day), Render Graph viewer to let you see exactly how your scene is being rendered, and lots more.

I plan to make a video covering these new graphics features sometime soon.

The entire e-book is 189 pages long full of info, I highly recommend you go through it. I made a video deep-dive on the previous version of this e-book a few years ago if you want to see a nice summary.

I love these e-books, clearly they put a ton of effort into making them. I've learned a bunch of things myself from several e-books and I hope they continue making and updating them for a long time.

Affiliate

Realistic 99% OFF, 2D 98% OFF!

Do you like the Realistic artstyle? Need some assets? There’s an excellent HumbleBundle with Leartes Studios assets for 99% OFF!

Dozens of really good looking realistic environments worth $3800 for just $30!

Check the page HERE to see all the assets.

The Publisher of the Week this time is SpeedTutor, lots of tiny interesting tools and mechanics.

Get the FREE Object Insights Highlighter which is a nice simple tool for identifying and highlighting objects in front of the player and displaying some text.

Get it HERE and use coupon SPEEDTUTOR at checkout to get it for FREE!

If you’re more into 2D there is an excellent HumbleBundle with tons of stuff. There’s VFX, UI, SFX, Music, Guns, Cars, Badges and tons more.

Maybe make a retro RPG, maybe a top down shooter like GTA, maybe sci-fi like the original XCOM, or build a Cyberpunk demake.

Huge pack for just $20, get it HERE!

Game Dev

Two Paths to do Game Dev

Every week there are posts on Reddit or videos on YouTube of some developer talking about their journey and sharing results for their games, some are successes and some are failures. 

One thing I've mentioned several times is how it's up to YOU to define that. Success can mean just publishing the game, or it can mean selling 10 copies, or it can mean making $10 million, all of those are valid definitions of success. What is really important is that you define for yourself what success means to YOU.

Recently on Reddit there was a post from a developer basically very distraught that their game did not sell well at all after spending years working on it. More important than the main post is the first reply which shares some simple advice, there are two ways to do game dev, Hobby or Commercial, and it's very very important to figure out which path you are following.

If you treat it like a Hobby but analyze the results like a Commercial project, then you will likely end up very frustrated. So ask yourself that question and get some clarity for yourself, which path are you following? If it’s a Hobby then don’t worry about results, if it’s Commercial then spend significant time doing market research and don’t just make the first idea that “sounds fun”.

This post is also a great reminder to take care of your mental health, one game is NOT your entire life so keep things in perspective. And also a great reminder to NOT spend 5 years working on a single game, you learn much more by publishing multiple smaller games.

I think this is one of the most important questions you need to answer for yourself. What path are you following? Getting clarity for yourself will make the process much more enjoyable and less frustrating. I made an entire video on making games for FUN, you don't have to always chase money.

For example for me fitness is clearly a hobby, I have absolutely no intention of ever making any money from running / cycling / bodybuilding / powerlifting. I do it because it gives me pleasure and that’s it.

Tech

Paint and Notepad with AI

Nowadays it seems AI is everywhere, sometimes it's useful and many times it's just a gimmick. In the latest Windows update it has even gone into where I never expected, Paint and Notepad.

These are examples of super simple programs that do just one thing, but now even they have AI. On Paint you now have Generative fill, you can select an area, write some text like "Castle" and it will draw a castle.

The post mentions how this is only available in Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, so I wonder if that means it's all running locally? There's no mention of cloud or OpenAI or Bing AI anywhere.

Same thing on Notepad, you can use AI to help you rewrite some section. Select some text, then select some settings like length, tone, format, and it will generate some text.

I love how Paint and Notepad are super basic programs so I find it interesting that they are spending a non-trivial amount of resources on these new features. Are they trying to turn them into non-simple programs? If they keep this up then soon enough they will become heavy and feature rich like Photoshop or Word, is that a good or bad thing?

Fun

DOOM takes on another device!

It's basically a long running gag how if you have something with some kind of CPU and some kind of screen, someone will get DOOM running on it.

The latest casualty of that long running gag is the Nintendo Alarmo.

It has a big button that can be clicked and rotated, naturally that's first person rotation and forward movement. Then there's a smaller button for shooting and opening doors. That's all you need to play the game.

There's a GitHub if you have an Alarmo and want to do it yourself.

I always love this, getting DOOM on anything is such a silly tradition at this point, I wonder if 100 years from now people will be putting DOOM on something like a Microwave on a Mars station.

Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!

(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)

Thanks for reading!

Code Monkey

Reply

or to participate.