Game Dev

Roadmaps for Game Dev SUCCESS in 2026!

2026 is finally here and the goal of a lot of people (maybe you?) is to finally publish either their first game or finally have a successful game!

To help you with that here are my three roadmaps you can follow to find success in 2026. One for Beginners, one for Intermediates and one all about Game Marketing.

Beginner Game Dev Roadmap 2026

If you're a beginner then I highly recommend you start off by learning the basics, it's really important to have a very solid foundation of knowledge before you start taking things to the next level.

On that note there are two paths I recommend beginners to follow, depending on whether you prefer something more technical or not.

If you prefer a practical approach, then I recommend you follow my FREE Kitchen Chaos 3D course or my Lua Lander 2D course. Both are great beginner Unity courses, roughly on the same level of difficulty (Kitchen Chaos hits the intermediate level in the later stages), so just choose whether you prefer 2D or 3D. But whichever one you start with make sure you do the other one after.

Both of these courses will teach you a really solid foundation of Game Development with Unity and C#. You will learn how to create a new project, how to set it up, what all the windows do, how to use Game Objects, Prefabs, Cameras, Scenes, etc. All the basics you need to make any game you can imagine.

Or alternatively, if you prefer a more technical path, then you can follow my C# course. This one is focused more on the language itself which is extremely valuable since you will need to work with the language alongside Unity to build the games you want to build. I recommend you follow the Beginner and Intermediate sections in that course. The Advanced section is full of interesting but very niche features of the language, so don't worry about that until after you're already an Advanced user.

The Beginner section covers everything from the absolute basics like how to Install Visual Studio, what is a Variable and a Function. Then the Intermediate section covers very useful topics like Interfaces and Generics.

However in order to have a really solid foundation of knowledge I recommend you do all those 3, the order is up to you.

• You can do C# Beginner -> C# Intermediate -> Kitchen Chaos -> Lua Lander

• Or Lua Lander -> C# Beginner -> C# Intermediate -> Kitchen Chaos

Basically any combination of these three courses will work, it's up to you to decide whether you prefer to start with a more technical approach, or start with 2D or 3D. By doing all these 3 courses you will gain an extremely solid foundation of knowledge that will then help you build whatever games you want.

And as always remember to TAKE YOUR TIME! The only goal is that you're learning, so don't rush, don't get frustrated at how long things take, don't compare yourself to others. As long as you're learning then you're doing great so just keep doing that.

Intermediate Game Dev Roadmap 2026

If you're already on the Intermediate stage then that means you already have a solid technical foundation and from here you have several paths you can follow. You can either keep pushing that technical foundation to make more complex games, or build something without a guide, or build individual systems. To keep improving your technical skills is a very simple path, you just have to analyze your own skills and build things that are slightly more complex than your current skills.

You can attempt to make a very simple game by yourself. (while googling for help, that's normal) I've made a video with my Top 10 Beginner Projects that include things like Flappy Bird, Snake, Angry Birds, etc.

Alternatively you can also push through your technical skills by following more advanced courses, like for example my Turn Based Strategy course is excellent as a step-by-step guide for intermediate users, or for more Advanced users my DOTS Course is excellent for teaching you a pretty complex but insanely powerful toolset (100X better performance!).

Yet another option to push your technical skills is how you can just build individual systems rather than complete projects. For example you can make a Weapon Attachment System which will teach you a lot about how to manage data. Or make a House Building System which involves learning how to place objects in the world. Or a Tetris Inventory System that involves working with grids and objects.

And one final option is to learn Multiplayer which is definitely an Intermediate topic. This path really depends on whether you have any interest in Multiplayer games or not. If you're fine making just Singleplayer games then there's no need to force yourself into Multiplayer, but if you like that then I have two complete free courses that teach you how to make the simplest multiplayer game possible. One on using Netcode for Game Objects which is Unity's easiest multiplayer stack, it's meant for small scale co-op games like Among Us or PEAK. For making more complex games, like competitive First Person Shooters then you should be using Netcode for Entities which is inherently quite a bit more complex since it first requires knowledge of DOTS.

The important thing is how as an Intermediate you have tons of options available to you so I can't give you a single specific roadmap, there are many valid paths. The more skills you have the more opportunities open up for you, so at this level it is important to have a good level of self reflection to analyze your own skills, analyze your own specific personal shortcomings, and focus on improving those.

Game Marketing Roadmap 2026

If your goal is to find financial success with your games then you need to start to learn about Game Marketing and how games actually find success. Remember how marketing is just as much a skill as programming. Meaning it is something that you can learn. I am saying this because I used to think to myself "I suck at marketing, I don't have that skill" but any skill can be learned.

Personally I am not a game marketing expert, I've managed to learn a lot myself over the years and I think I'm very competent but I still recommend you follow other people more skilled than me in this area in order to truly learn.

The source where I've learned most of my Game Marketing knowledge is from Chris Zukowski, he has his blog howtomarketagame.com where he posts all sorts of analysis and what's working for indie devs right now. I've made a bunch of videos with Chris myself that you can watch here. If you watch all of those videos I guarantee you will massively level up your game marketing skills. Learn about what makes a good Steam page, what are the current hot Genres, and what makes a Marketable idea.

Another source I recommend you follow is GameDiscoverCo. This is a newsletter that focuses on the Steam market and all the specific ways how indie devs are finding success nowadays.

Yet another absolutely excellent source used to be the Clark Tank show which stopped a few years ago. It was by Ryan Clark who made many successful games like Crypt of the Necrodancer. I highly recommend you watch his videos on How to Make Video Game Hooks and then Part 2. Picking a good game idea is super crucial if you want to find success.

One of the best marketing skills you can acquire is simply getting a sense for what finds success nowadays. The way you get that skill is by simply paying attention to the industry and researching the games that do find success. That's part of the reason why I make my Top New Games lists videos every month, to force myself to check out the Steam New Releases list (where about 1500 games are published per month) to find what is the level of quality and the genres that are currently finding success. Because of that I now have the skill where I can look at a game or hear a game idea and immediately analyze just how much potential it has. It’s never guaranteed but the better you become the better your odds of finding success.

The most important thing when it comes to marketing is simply having a marketable idea, I just talked about this in a recent video. The idea acts as the base number, and all your marketing efforts are just multipliers on top of that. So if your idea is yet another 2D Puzzle Platformer, then I would say that has a base value of 0 since it's not a hot genre. And if you apply the best most clever marketing tricks to that idea, then lets say you have a marketing multiplier of 10. But 10 multiplied by 0 is still 0. Whereas if you're making a Simulator game (hot genre nowadays) and you choose a clever theme for the game, like laundering money (literally) then all your marketing efforts become infinitely more effective and you end up with something like Cash Cleaner Simulator which has grossed $5 MILLION.

Best of luck in 2026!

So as you can see you have several paths you can take depending on where you currently are in your game dev journey.

If you're a Beginner then focus on the basics.

If you're an Intermediate then push your skills to the next level.

And if you're looking to find financial success, then focus on learning Game Marketing.

I really hope these Roadmaps help you and that one year from now you can look back and be amazed at how much you've accomplished!

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Tech

CES 2026!

It's January which means it's time for CES! I'd still love to go there someday, it looks like such an interesting event full of interesting news that are coming in the future, and of course lots of wacky weird ideas that no one asked for but are worth a quick chuckle.

This year naturally there was tons of stuff about AI, also lots of Robots (humanoid and otherwise), drones, several AR glasses, Phones, TVs and tons more.

Boston Dynamics showcased more of their latest humanoid robot Atlas which is insanely impressive.

NVIDIA unveiled DLSS 4.5, the latest iteration of their upscaling tech and it has already reached a point where fake frames are indistinguishable from native frames.

The WEART TouchDIVER Pro is a glove that lets you actually FEEL things in VR like temperature and grab objects.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo is a Laptop that comes with 2 screens! As someone who uses 2 screens at home I always find myself limited when I'm on my single-display laptop, so this sounds great!

Then something fun is the new LEGO Smart Brick. It has circuits directly inside the brick, it can play lights and sounds and also interact with other bricks and objects. It uses NFC tags to identify nearby objects which means it can for example identify when it's placed on an X-Wing alongside Luke and R2D2. Right now it's only available in 3 Star Wars sets, maybe if this is a success they will expand it to other sets.

Also at CES was either the biggest battery breakthrough of all time, or a big scam. It's Donut Lab's Solid State Battery. It promises being literally better than current batteries at everything. More density, faster charging, cheaper cost, works in all temperatures, made with abundant materials etc. Not only that, they say how it's actually available NOW! So it's not just a lab experiment but something that supposedly already works in the real world. There is a motorcycle that uses these batteries coming out in Q1 2026.

This whole thing very much sounds too good to be true but I really hope it is true. A battery breakthrough like this has the potential to completely change the world. Imagine laptops with 1 week batteries, phones that last 1 month, EVs with more range and faster charging than ICE cars, easier battery rollout for the green revolution, all at a cheaper cost. I genuinely hope this is true, we have to wait for third party testing, hopefully in a few months we will know the results.

So yup who knows how many of these will turn out good or not, but it's always fun to look at CES! There's tons of roundup videos on YouTube if you want to see even more stuff that was on the show floor.