Game Dev

Game using Assets made MILLIONS!

If you've been following my stuff for a while you've certainly heard me talking about this many times before, players just want fun games to play, they don't care what assets or tools you use to build them, you don't get bonus points for handcrafting everything yourself.

One of the best examples of this just hit 1.0, the game Soulstone Survivors is fully out after spending almost 3 years in Early Access, in all that time it has been played by over a million people (perhaps $10 MILLION in revenue?) and gathered 21,000 Very Positive reviews.

The game is very very clearly using Synty Assets, at a glance you can easily see that easily identifiable style on all the characters and environments. And yet despite that the game is still a huge hit and loved by players!

These developers even made an interesting interview with Synty themselves talking about how they used Assets to Fast Track Development. Also some excellent advice from that interview: "Don’t Build in the Dark"

So to you I say: Don't be afraid of using assets! Use every tool at your disposal to make the best game possible.

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Game Dev

Why did Unity make a game? Will they make more?

Unity has just recently published their very first game! (or technically second if you count GooBall from 2005) The game is Survival Kids which is available on the Switch 2 and published by Konami.

In an interview with Game Developer they talk about the goals behind this project and what is next for Unity and in-house projects. And they also made a near 2 hour livestream talking about development of this game.

The main goal was to better understand the normal Unity dev journey making a game from start to finish by going through everything a normal developer goes through. They went through the entire process beginning with actually talking to a publisher and pitching ideas where the first idea was actually rejected.

In terms of Team size on average they had 10 developers working on the game and a peak of 20 during heavy production, over the course of around 2 years, that’s a very similar scope to a lot of Unity teams. In making a game just like any other Unity user they were able to validate all the Unity Tools and ensure they work in production, they used URP, Shader Graph, Netcode for Entities, Mecanim, Timeline, etc.

There will be more detailed blog posts in the coming weeks talking about more technical details on how this game was made.

So yup it sounds like they learned a lot from this interesting experience. And of course all these learnings translate into improvements for the engine itself to make it better for every single developer using it.

On that interview they talked about whether they will make another game or not. The answer is how the main goal is improving the engine itself and this game was made with a specific goal of validating a bunch of tools, so perhaps in the future they will do another one if they find another right opportunity.

If you want to make multiplayer games then the tools nowadays are insanely good and easy to use, I have two FREE Courses on making a simple Multiplayer game using either Netcode for Game Objects or Netcode for Entities

Tech

Blue Screen of Death is dead!

For 40 years there has been one color that has terrified Windows users, Blue. Whenever you saw a Blue Screen of Death it meant something went terribly wrong, and you might have even lost some progress!

Later this summer on Windows 11 you will no longer see a blue screen of death, now it's black with less text. In theory it's to simplify the UI and make it easier to read and understand. And while that seems like a nice goal I don't get the reason behind getting rid of the iconic blue, they could still simplify the UI while keeping the color scheme.

Thankfully the acronym BSoD still works!

Fun

Adblock in Real-Life!

Do you hate ads? Most people do. Online you can use something like Adblock, but what about in real life? There are billboards and flashy ads all over the place, could you hide those?

One developer did exactly that! He made an XR app that runs on Snap Spectacles AR Glasses, it uses Gemini to detect and block ads in the environment

This is honestly insanely good, considering how it's using Gemini which as far as I know doesn't have a local mode, I have no idea how he has low enough latency to both identify the ad and keep the shape perfectly on top of it. Perhaps there's one local system identifying rectangular shapes, and another system talking to Gemini to identify what it is?

Also interesting how it's slightly transparent, is that intentional or is it a limitation of these AR glasses that they cannot make something 100% opaque? Not sure.