Game Dev

FREE VFX Unity 6 ebook!

Unity has launched another awesome FREE e-book, this one is all about VFX and it's been updated to Unity 6!

It teaches you all about VFX Graph, Unity's awesome tool for making visual effects and rendering super quickly on the GPU. And of course you can combine it with Shader Graph to get some really impressive results.

The excellent samples have also been updated, they showcase bite-sized demos meant to teach you individual topics like Flipbooks, Orientation, Lighting and more.

The free e-book is 167 pages long packed full of info. Maybe take some time during the holidays to really dive deep on this one.

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Tech

Google Genie 2 creating game worlds with AI

For some super impressive tech, Google has just unveiled Genie 2. This is an AI model capable of generating playable 3D worlds from a single image prompt.

The characters can actually move within the world and interact with objects, it is genuinely impressive. Characters can be in first or third person (animated!), they can walk and jump, boats generate waves on the water, red barrels can explode and balloons can be popped.

This model apparently also fixes one huge problem with these sorts of AIs, how usually if you look away and then look back the world has changed, this one apparently has memory to solve that problem.

Main limitation is time, as the world gets generated it produces more and more artifacts until after about 30 seconds it just devolves into a mess of pixels.

Every time I mention any sort of AI improvement there are always people asking me "should I just quit being a game dev?" or “will AI replace me?” to which my answer is no. This AI and others like it are super impressive but they're meant to work WITH you not replace you. In this case this would be excellent for hiring a concept artist and using this AI to explore that concept image to come up with ideas for how to actually produce the game you have in mind.

Gaming

Legendary Indie game sold 60 MILLION copies!

One of the most legendary best indie games of all time, Terraria, has surpassed 60 MILLION copies sold! That's insane!

Launched in 2011, it's crazy to think how a game that started as "Minecraft but in 2D" has gone on to become such a massive game. The developers have been updating the game non-stop throughout the years, the “final update” was technically launched back in 2020 but they kept going.

Supposedly they are working on Terraria 2 which will be using a new engine that will allow them to expand upon it even further and explore new ideas. It will be interesting if/when Terraria 2 comes out if they will be able to launch it with the same number of features as Terraria 1, that would be tricky.

If you've never played it and you like exploration, crafting, building, combat in a sidescroller then I really recommend you try it, it's a really great game!

Fun

From scribbles to PRO!

Here is an excellent example of how even in super high budget projects, many things start with super rough sketches.

This example showcases the poster for Arcane (really high budget League of Legends Netflix Show) and how it started with just some scribbles that eventually turned into gorgeous professional art!