Game Dev

Roblox is MASSIVE! And maybe you can use that?

You probably already know how Roblox is massive, but you might not know just how MASSIVE it really is. It's bigger than Minecraft, bigger than GTA, bigger than even Fortnite!

One single game, Grow a Garden (made by a 16 year old) has managed to hit 22 million concurrent players!

And based on this, as a Game Dev yourself there is a potentially very successful strategy that you can follow. You can keep a watch on the Roblox most played games list, and then take that as a base and remake it with proper visuals (non-Roblox) and proper UI, UX, a lot more polish but keeping the same core concept and publish as a standalone game on Steam.

I believe this strategy could find a lot of success. Like this you already have a clear validation that the game idea has a player base, so all you have to do is build upon it and improve it to match what Steam players expect.

Examples of top played games on Roblox:

• Grow a Garden: You manage a garden, buy seeds, plant them, wait for them to grow, harvest, make money, buy more expensive and profitable seeds and keep going. Also plants grow while offline.

• 99 Nights in Forest: Build a camp with your friends, at night a monster comes out and you need to get back to the fire. Keep lighting and upgrading the fire, go out in the day and find resources and special items.

• Steal a Brainrot: Buy a unique character, it generates money. Other players are in the same map, they also have characters which you can steal and bring back to your base. You can lock your base, buy defensive items and hit other players with a bat. Has rebirth/prestige mechanic.

The one big difference is of course age. Roblox has a massive player base under 13, so would that impact what games are popular on Roblox vs Steam? Honestly I don't think so, Grow a Garden is basically a Tycoon / Incremental game, exactly the kinds of games that are successful on Steam.

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Game Dev

Don't be afraid of Silksong

Last week one of the most anticipated things of all time actually happened, Hollow Knight: Silksong got a release date!

It's coming out in a few days on the 4th of September. And due to this surprise fast release date announcement there are some indie devs that are changing their release date to try to avoid Silksong. There's at least 8 developers making this change.

This is an interesting topic, the question is does a very popular game coming out actually hurt your chances?" Should you be afraid of Silksong or some other huge game launching on the same day as your game? The answer is, most likely, no.

The reason is because Steam and the gaming market is absolutely MASSIVE. If you're on the internet regularly then it might seem like Silksong is widely anticipated, which it is. But remember how Steam has 400 million users, Consoles have something like 200 million more. Hollow Knight, despite being a mega hit, sold 15 million copies, meaning there are 585 million players who did not play the original and likely have no interest in the sequel despite the fact that it seems like EVERYONE wants Silksong.

So for the most part you do not have to freak out if some popular game is launching on the same day or near the release date of your own game. The only scenario where I would recommend you do change your release date is if your game offers a very very similar experience to the one coming out. So if you have a metroidvania platformer then yeah perhaps don't launch on Sep 4, but for every other game in every other genre, it won't matter.

And there's actually data to back up what I'm saying here. Have you heard of the game Chillquarium? It is a mega hit, likely made around $1.5 million, and yet it launched on the exact same day as Starfield. Since they are clearly targeting a very different audience of players it did not matter.

If you're afraid of this then I highly recommend you read Chris' blog post on this topic.

Tech

Google's Nano Banana AI model is super impressive!

Just last week in this Game Dev Report I wrote about how the AI bubble might be popping since Meta has frozen AI hiring, Sam Altman says there might be a bubble, a study found 95% of AI investment yielded no results, and the much hyped GPT5 was apparently a disappointment.

However Google has just unveiled Gemini Flash 2.5 aka Nano Banana and it's genuinely very impressive, it does seem to be a big jump forward in terms of image generation and especially image editing. You can use it in its own website but apparently you have just 2 free credits, or try it out in the Google AI Studio.

You can generate images from text, as usual, but then you can also reference other images and include them in the prompt, or just edit individual parts of the image.

One of the biggest issues with AI in general is how it's all very much like a slot machine. If you don't get the right output you need to generate a random seed and try again, but in doing so usually it erases the things that were already good so it might fix some parts and mess up some other parts.

I tried generating an image of a ninja standing in front of a full moon which it generated with ease, as usual. But then I asked it to turn the moon blood red, which is something previous models would have done but while also messing up the rest of the image, and this model did manage to edit exactly just the moon and nothing else, impressive!

So this one does appear to be a nice leap forward in terms of AI image generation and editing. Does this mean AI has not plateaued after all? Or perhaps the LLMs hit a plateau but not the Image/Video generators? No one knows but this is certainly impressive.

Fun

Draw Dynamic Space Invaders!

Space Invaders has a very iconic style. It's interesting how with so few pixels you can make something so instantly recognizable.

One developer went ahead and made a tool for dynamically generating Space Invaders! The result is super impressive, you can really generate all kinds of creatures that all look like space invaders.

Perhaps most impressive of all is how the developer wrote a blog post explaining how it works. Not only is the post great at explaining each step that goes into making it, but it also has some very cool JavaScript running on the side showcasing an interactive preview of each step in the process, awesome!