Game Dev

10 Lessons from 6 Years of Unity dev

I always say how one of the most powerful forces in the world is simply Experience. The more games you make, the more code you write, the better and wiser you become.

One developer wrote about what they learned in the past 6 years of using Unity. It's interesting how many of these match up with my own 10 year Unity dev experience. If you don't yet have that much experience then reading this post is a great way to avoid the pitfalls that this dev (and myself) have experienced.

Out of the 10 Lessons these are my favorite ones:

• Your first architecture will be garbage, and that's fine

  I certainly remember making my games before I started learning about clean code principles and how terrible my code was. Every script was tightly coupled with every other script, using lots of strings everywhere, tons of public fields and classes being responsible for a dozen different tasks. As a beginner I thought as long as it worked that was all that mattered, until I started making more and more complex games and realized the quick and dirty approach was just making things more difficult (or impossilbe)

• Playtesting reveals how little you know about your own game

  As a dev you forget how much intimate knowledge you have about your own game until you see someone completely new try to play it. Suddenly things that you think are perfectly clear become extremely frustrating for that player. Playtesting is absolutely crucial, especially for making a great first few minutes with a nice smooth tutorial learning curve. Nowadays demos make or break games, and if your game is confusing then players will just quit within 30 seconds and simply go play another game.

• Perfectionism is the enemy of shipping

  I am constantly giving the advice of "make more games, and make them small" and a very important part of that advice is, SHIP THEM! You cannot just make 90% of the game, you have to take it all the way in order to squeeze every ounce of experience and learnings from that one project. Games are never perfect, technically you can always keep adding more and more things until infinity, that's where you need to apply your skills of scope management and game design to make one nice complete, if imperfect, experience and publish it for others to play.

The other lessons are on the power of Documentation, how you should avoid Premature Optimization, how the Asset Store is very good but can also set you back, and more.

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Tech

Meta reads brain signals from your wrist!

One of the most anticipated wearables (at least by me) is something Meta showcased a few years ago, a wristband that can read tiny motions. Input systems haven't evolved much over the past 50 years, we have a Keyboard, Mouse, and relatively recently the Touchscreen. This one seems to be a very capable very interesting new input device.

There is a blog post talking about it in detail, it's literally a wristband that you wear that uses surface electromyography (sEMG) which reads signals that your brain sends to your muscles to move your fingers. By using machine learning models they are able to read and understand those signals.

The result is you can do all kinds of swipes and clicks using some tiny finger motions. And perhaps most impressive of all is how you can write with your fingers in the air and it genuinely understands what you're writing! Awesome!

Using this you could control all kinds of devices without requiring a flat surface to work on. It's also very important how it's non-invasive, there's no need to jam electrodes in your brain, just a simple band you wear on your wrist works perfectly.

Gaming

Battlefield 6 is finally unveiled!

After months of rumors and leaks, Battlefield 6 has finally been showcased! There is a trailer, which as usual is excellent, Battlefield always has some of the best trailers, although it has no gameplay. Hearing the Battlefield theme again is awesome! The trailer showcases combined arms with Infantry, Tanks, Helicopters, Fighter Jets, and of course lots of destruction!

The game is set in modern times, and the description focuses on the Squad aspect without any mention of Specialists. For the most part it seems like a straight sequel from Battlefield 4 which is exactly what people have been asking for.

There will be a multiplayer reveal on July 31st, I can't wait! There's already a Steam page and in just 2 days it already gathered a quarter million wishlists! Release date is set as Coming Soon, but on the website it briefly displayed October 10th.

Technically there's already leaked gameplay footage on YouTube and yup it looks like Battlefield!

Fun

Rope Robots!

Normally robots involve something like servos or hydraulics, using gears or pulleys, but there is a new type of robot that is highly accurate, high torque, low cost, it's using ropes!

The robot is called CARA which stands for Capstans Are Really Awesome, apparently a capstan is sort of like a winch? I'd never heard the word capstan but it seems to be a winch on a vertical orientation.

The entire page has a lot of detail if you want to learn how it all works, and there's a dedicated video talking about the whole journey. Impressive how he designed such a complex system by himself, including calculating IK from scratch!

It's an extremely clever design and the robot is clearly very capable and very dynamic, at the end he even does the famous kick test and the robot stays upright.