Are you familiar with the term Vampire-Survivor-likes? That "name" is pretty wordy, some people have tried to make the term "Bullet Heaven" a reality, and now it might just become reality! Steam just updated its official store tags, Bullet Heaven is a new tag!

I also think this update is a super useful signal for developers. Tags are super important, it's how a lot of Steam visibility works so Steam adding or removing tags means they think some genres/themes are more important nowadays, it means more players are searching for games that fit these categories. When Steam adds new tags, it is basically saying: "There are now enough games like this and enough players looking for these games that we need a proper category for them."

Valve added 17 new tags, removed 28, and renamed or merged several others.

Other than Bullet Heaven, it's interesting to see new tags for Desktop Companion (these games blew up since Rusty's Retirement 2 years ago), Organizing, Cleaning, and Decorating (lots of cozy games).

Clicker has been renamed into Incremental. That makes sense since the Incremental genre is blowing up and is mostly taking over the previous clicker genre. Pool was being used by games that featured swimming pools, so they have renamed that one to Billiards.

Some removed tags are surprising too, like Kickstarter, GameMaker, and Warhammer 40K. Valve says things like Warhammer 40K are better handled through franchise tags, which makes sense in theory, although it still feels a little strange because Warhammer 40K games are made by many different developers and span tons of genres.

So my takeaway is: pay attention to Steam tags. They are NOT just random labels. They are discovery tools, expectation setters, and sometimes a quiet signal of what Steam thinks is becoming important enough to organize properly.

If you ask 100 Unity Developers what is their favorite Unity tool, chances are Odin will be at the top of the list.

It’s an absolutely excellent tool for helping you make awesome custom inspectors which in turn helps you make awesome complex games better and faster. This is the ultimate productivity multiplier tool.

Odin was already awesome, but now they updated it with the Visual Designer which makes it even better! Previously you would create the custom inspectors by adding Attributes in your code, now you use a visual tool to just drag and drop. You can take inspectors from this to this in literally seconds!

I have also published a super detailed video showcasing just how easy it is to use.

On top of that they have an awesome completely FREE 90 day trial, no need for a credit card or anything, you can freely try out this tool to see how it will make you a lot more efficient.

Or if you're a student get it for free with the educational license.

And when you pick it up you can use the coupon CODEMONKEY20 to get 20% OFF!

Check out Odin HERE!

A few weeks ago I wrote about the imminent release of S&box, this is the spritual successor to Garry's Mod but taken to 11. It is meant to be a fork of Source 2 that is available for every dev (whereas Source 2 is invite only).

It has potential to be a competitive game engine considering how massive Garry's Mod is, although it stumbled a bit at launch with concerns of people that expected literally Garry's Mod 2.0 (which it isn't) and concerns due to it being flooded with AI slop almost instantly. But still this is a long term project so we will see how it shakes out.

One awesome thing about this project is how the company behind it makes all their numbers public! Here is their finance page where it shows how on launch day they made $1 MILLION! And even though the launch was a bit weak compared to what it could have been, they are still raking in $10k+ per day.

Although that's gross revenue, thankfully the page also shows all their costs. From that $1mil Valve took 25% (facepunch is a massive company so they get a better deal), refunds were about 8%, and they paid $8k that day to their staff.

That page has tons more stats, like Startup Times, Game Performance, Crash Reports, and even how much money they pay out every day for their Play Fund. Neat!

Unity is running an surprising bundle! Surprising because I instantly spotted how it contains one of my most recommended assets of all time, that I definitely did not expect to be bundled!

It’s worth it for that asset alone (Asset Inventory) and on top of that getting all the other assets is just an awesome bonus. The whole thing has a huge discount and it’s mostly made up of new assets so you probably don’t have any yet. (I only had one asset myself)

Get it HERE!

The Publisher of the Week this time is Michsky, who makes lots of UI-related tools and assets.

Get the FREE Motion Titles Pack which is a great set of animations for introducing your games’ name or some location title screen.

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

Are you making a 2D game? Check out this awesome HumbleBundle!

It features thousands of tiles to help you build any 2D game level you want, any theme, any perspective, it’s all up to you!

It’s 96% OFF! Get it HERE!

Microsoft launched a new Xbox Player Voice portal where fans can vote on what they want Xbox to do next, and the answers are pretty clear: Xbox fans want exclusive games, more backward compatibility, and free online multiplayer. I guess none of these are that surprising, but it's still nice to see some confirmation of what people really want.

The biggest one is exclusives. Xbox has spent the past few years moving more and more games to PlayStation and Switch, which might sometimes make business sense if you look at Microsoft as a giant publisher, but it creates a very obvious problem for the hardware: why buy an Xbox? One highly upvoted fan post basically says Xbox was built on great exclusives, and without them there is no strong reason to pick the console over the competition.

Personally I've never been interested in the "console wars" so for me more people able to play more games seems like a win, but some people really want their console of choice to mean only they can play some specific games.

The other big requests are very understandable. Backward compatibility is one of Xbox's best features, so of course fans want more of it. And free online multiplayer is another obvious one, for me as someone who has always been a PC player where multiplayer is free, it always struck me as an odd console-tax. And now it makes even less sense considering how Xbox has so many games on PC/Steam where multiplayer is free. At the same time for them it's basically free money, so they don't have much of an incentive to make it free.

Having Xbox ask fans what they want is a great first step, but of course now the question is whether Microsoft actually listens or if this is just a marketing plan that will quickly be forgotten about. Technically there is a chance this might lead to some changes since the Xbox leadership recently swapped so the new CEO is likely wanting to make a few changes to make her mark.

Fonts sometimes seem like something that just "exists" and you can't really innovate, you just pick "Arial" and that's it. But that's not really it! Fonts actually super important and the right font can give your game an extra visual boost.

Here is a website that tries to analyze what makes a font look futuristic.

You start with a normal sans-serif font, you make it italic to make it seem the font is stretching towards the future, you round the edges, add a dashthrough, emboss it, texture it, and welcome to the future!