Game Dev

The Great Steam Demo Update, 2024

Having a good Demo is absolutely crucial nowadays, it can get you tens or hundreds of thousands of wishlists and massively help you find success with your game.

Because Demos have become more and more important, Steam has just announced a ton of interesting changes to how Demos work on Steam.

The main one being how Demos can now have their own Steam page. This helps developers clarify what is included in the demo vs the full game, while still being tightly integrated with the full game so you can keep gathering wishlists.

You can also now enable Reviews for your demo, this is an absolutely excellent change. Demos are all about feedback to make the final game as perfect as it can be, so having an easy way to get feedback is great.

Demos can now be installed even if you own the full game, as a dev this is an awesome small change, previously you needed to have a second dummy account to test the demo.

They can also now be removed from your account so it doesn't clutter your library. Another great change is how emails will be sent out to wishlisters when a demo becomes available.

However one change that might be negative is how demos will show up in New & Trending, meaning if you have a full game that manages to get to that list, you might be pushed off by some free demos coming out.

Game Dev

Unity's FREE e-book on Programming Patterns

Unity has just updated one of their massive FREE e-books all about leveling up your skills with programming patterns.

This is an excellent e-book, 147 pages full of awesome knowledge. This update includes additions that were requested from the previous version alongside making it all work with Unity 6.

There is a companion Unity project you can download for free from the Asset Store. It includes sample scenes to see all the design patterns in action.

Learn about SOLID, the Factory and Singleton patterns, how to create an Object Pool, what is the Command and Observer patterns, how does MVC, MVP and MVVM work.

This free e-book contains a truly massive amount of knowledge, I highly recommend you take some time to read through it to level up your programming skills.

Also by the way Unity's Unite conference is happening in September, Early Bird tickets have already sold out but if you're interested in going you can still pick up a regular ticket. It will hopefully be a fun time full of learning, I'll be there alongside other Unity content creators.

Tech

Meta's new model goes head to head with OpenAI

Meta has just unveiled their latest AI model, Llama 3.1 which has a massive 405 billion parameters. There's also smaller 70B and 8B models.

The big one seems insanely capable, it can go head to head with GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet while of course the big difference being those are closed source paid models whereas Llama 3.1 is free and open source.

The only limitation on the license is if you get over 700 million monthly active users you need to contact them to negotiate some licensing. Which means it's really free for most use cases.

If you have a capable GPU you can just download the model and run it locally on your machine.

Or you can just use the model from their many partners like AWS, NVidia, Google, Azure, etc, on day one.

And on top of the base model you can then fine tune it with your own data to perfectly match your needs. It will be very interesting to see what developers build on top of it.

The race between open source and closed source AI is really on.

Tech

Official Harvard knowledge for FREE!

Do you want to go to Harvard without having to go to Harvard? They have some excellent courses available completely for free!

There's an insane amount of knowledge available on all these courses, everything from general Computer Science, to making games with Unity and Love2D, learn all about JavaScript, AI, Cybersecurity, Python and tons more.

All of it super high quality taught by an excellent professor. It contains video lectures and also assignments.

At the end, if you complete everything you can even get an official certificate straight from Harvard, really excellent to put on your resume.

Thanks to @Prozzer Games on the Members Discord for this excellent link! I knew about CS50 but did not know there we others.