One of the most valuable things in game development is simply watching players interact with your game and seeing where they struggle. Not guessing, not assuming, actually watching. That's why playtesting is so CRUCIAL!

One dev on Reddit wrote about what they learned from playtesting over 22 indie games, and the interesting part is how the same issues kept showing up over and over again across completely different games.

Some of the biggest ones were exactly the sort of things that are very easy to overlook when you're deep in development. Static menus that make the game feel unfinished which gives a bad first impression, tutorials that only show keyboard controls even though the game also supports controller is another classic beginner mistake.

Demos that include broken levels, mechanics that sound interesting on paper but just are not actually fun, and of course the classic one: the developer assumes something is obvious when it is not. I made an entire video on this very common mistake.

One that is a problem in either extreme is just in terms of game content. Too little or too much is a problem. Either players get bored or overwhelmed.

And a very simple lesson: "Wall of text tutorials are as bad as no tutorial". I highly recommend you to make more interactive tutorials, and use the VideoPlayer component to SHOW not TELL.

These are the kind of lessons that showcase why playtesting is so insanely valuable. After working on a game for months, or years, you are way too familiar with your own game, so your brain cannot comprehend what a completely fresh look into your game looks like. You know where everything is, you know what every button does, you know what the player is "supposed" to understand. But the player does not have that context, so they will get confused by things that seem to you impossible to miss.

So use this as a reminder to get fresh eyes on your game as early as possible. Not just once, but constantly. Watch people play, see where they hesitate, see what they ignore, see what they misunderstand. Because very often you can massively improve how much the player likes your game by just not making these mistakes.

There’s an awesome HumbleBundle this week, this one all about Realistic Assets!

It includes a ton of awesome stuff from some excellent publishers. You can find Vehicles, FPS Devices, Environments, Characters, Tanks, Zombies and more.

All in a super high quality high resolution realistic style.

Get it HERE!

The Publisher of the Week this time is SwishSwoosh, publisher with lots of Music and Sound Effects.

Get the FREE Sci-Fi Weapons: Bullet Hell Sound Effects Pack which is a pack of almost 400 sound effects about all kinds of weapons.

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

Here's a super interesting game engine story. You might know about S&box, it's an interesting sort of game engine being made by the team behind Garry's Mod and Rust. It's a fork of the Source 2 engine that they've been building for a while.

But until now it has worked sort of like Roblox or Fortnite, in that you build a game that exists inside the S&box platform. However they recently announced that coming soon you will be able to export standalone games and ship them on Steam as if it were made with anything else.

Even more important than that, they have made a deal with Valve to allow those developers to publish those standalone games completely Royalty FREE! Meaning you don't owe anything to either Facepunch or Valve for using this engine.

And that is kind of a huge deal, because it basically means indie devs now have a real path to building games on top of Source 2 tech without having to give up a cut of their revenue. It is not the same thing as Valve directly opening Source 2 to everyone, you still need direct contacts with Valve to get that, but in practice this is almost the same thing since S&box is built on top of Source 2.

A lot of people love Source 1 and a lot of people have been looking for a broad release of Source 2, and this is basically it! Not only that but being Royalty Free is an excellent bonus!

As to why they are doing this? Gary, the owner of Facepunch, basically said how he already has infinite money (Garry's Mod and Rust have both made hundreds of millions) and he wants to give an opportunity to someone today just like he had the opportunity for this to become his job 20 years ago. That's a great sentiment!

S&box itself will be launching on Steam on April 28th. I'm looking forward to seeing what the reception to this engine is. One year from now will we see a mega hit made with this engine? Will all games share that Source 2 look? We shall see!

The big news in the AI world this week is how Claude Code source code got leaked! This wasn't a hack, someone accidentally pushed an update that included a link to a .zip file that contained the entire source code.

By looking at this leak anyone (competitors) can see how they built it, and importantly, what they're planning to build in the future. They're working on the ability for Claude to review what was done in the last session to study improvements for the future, making a "persistent assistant" that keeps running even while the user is idle, how they are focused on long autonomous tasks, deeper memory and multi-agent collaboration.

The source code is pretty massive, 2000 files and 500,000 lines of code. One person quickly built a nice website that has an interactive visualization of how it actually works which is quite neat!

How the user writes their message, it gets packaged into their format, then pushed into the history conversation array, sent to their servers, uses whatever tools it has access to, returns the output, and saves some logic to its internal memory.

It's quite fascinating how it all works, and the website is beautiful!

It's that time of the year again, April 1st or April Fools! This is always such a fun day, I love it. It's awesome to see all the jokes that everyone makes.

This year one of my favorites is the Payday NPC Game Mode! heh it's so funny to play as a mundane boring NPC, they really went above and beyond in making the trailer. Perfect ending "Don't be a hero!"

Another hilarious one was CKSS which pokes fun at the recent DLSS controversy. It's hilarious to see the dagger at 00:30 turn into something else heh.

The Witcher 3 made Project R.O.A.C.H. which features a physical hobby horse controller.

In terms of general tech, Elgato made a fun lever you add to your Stream Deck. MSI made a Monitor Arm for your cat (which actually looks useful!) or if you want you can make sure you never lose a sock again!