Game Dev

Unity’s Indie Survival Guide

One thing that Unity does quite a lot, and in the past few months they've been very regular, are the livestreams. They invite various devs to talk about all kinds of topics, I even joined them recently for a fun one!

Now they have grouped a bunch of those into what they are calling the Indie Survival Guide, these contain lots of info and advice for indie devs to make it in this tough industry. There are 4 livestreams on that page and they also made 3 separate pages with the main takeaways from those livestreams if you don’t have time to watch the full videos.

Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zukowski joined Unity to talk all about how to market your game. Check out my videos with Chris!

The developer behind Citizen Sleeper talked about how to make games by yourself.

Or do you need to get funding? Check out the video with an industry vet on how to get funding and pitching your game to potential publishers.

The page also showcases the upcoming streams. There is one on Roguelite game design with the team behind Dead Cells. Learn how to run an indie studio with the dev from Thirsty Suitors, or how to craft great narratives from the dev behind 1000xResist.

And if you enjoy these videos then definitely check out their Creator Spotlight series, it's another excellent one with tons of tips and tricks from devs of really successful games like Dredge, Ship of Fools, V Rising, and many more.

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Game Dev

You can put PLAYABLE games on Reddit!

Apparently you can put playable WebGL games directly on Reddit! One developer did just that here.

The dev explains: "If you wanna do this, export your unity project for web. You can then plug it into reddits developer platform and load it in a webview!"

This is pretty fascinating, it reminds me of the Flash days where both devs and players have such easy access to both publish and play games, without having to install anything.

I wonder if this will take off. Reddit already has a huge userbase so it could become a large web games platform, which again would be great for developers to publish short games and get tons of feedback, just like in the Flash era.

Tech

Google's AI improved itself!

Google's DeepMind research division just published a new paper on AlphaEvolve, it's an AI agent that is capable of improving algorithms. The name is based on how it improves those algorithms through evolution.

You input a problem along with possible avenues to explore, then an AI agent tries to generate code to solve those problems, while another AI tries to evaluate and verify that the solution works and is better than the others. After finding a great valid solution it picks that as a new starting point and continues generating more possible solutions.

Using this method it has achieved some very impressive results!

It improved data center scheduling which helped Google lower their resource usage by 0.7% which might seem like a small amount but on a giant company the size of Google it is actually an insane number! It helped engineers design a better hardware chip design, and it found a better solution for a matrix math problem that has existed since 1969!

The paper also mentions how they used AlphaEvolve to improve itself by improving the underlying large language model. This is the kind of thing that used to be Sci-Fi just a few short years ago!

Fun

4 Special Birthdays in May!

For some reason the month of May has 4 important birthdays for me! I say for some reason just because it wasn't planned, it just turned out that several important things happened in May's of previous years.

In May 2024, 1 year ago, I started this newsletter, it's been one year since I started writing and I hope you're enjoying reading it every week!

In May 2018, 7 years ago, I started my YouTube channel, I've really enjoyed making videos teaching all kinds of interesting topics, I hope you've learned a lot!

In May 2013, 12 years ago, I made my first Steam game, Survivor Squad, it was much more successful than I expected and finally allowed me to make a living and become a professional indie game developer!

In May 1988, 37 years ago, I was born!

It's crazy to think how time flies. It seems like just yesterday I was making the big decision of jumping from Flash onto Steam, and yet it also feels like it was a lifetime ago.