Game Dev

The FUTURE of Unity!

GDC has just wrapped up, and with it as usual Unity talked about a bunch of stuff including their Roadmap talk that covers everything coming out this year and beyond.

I made a video sharing my thoughts on the Roadmap. The general idea is how they are focused on incremental improvements in performance, platforms, rendering and more. So nothing too bombastic, just solid improvements across the board.

It also appears that the new DOTS based Animation system is coming out earlier than expected! I thought it was going to be a Unity 7 feature out late next year but apparently it's on 6.x so it might come out this year.

On Monday they also published their Unity 2025 Gaming Report, this is something they do every year where they ask a ton of developers for their thoughts on the industry as a whole and put them all in one place. It always has lots of interesting insights and stats, I made a video going over it here.

And the CEO also answered a bunch of your questions on a Livestream.

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Game Dev

What makes an Indie Game look Low Effort?

Someone asked a very interesting (and very important!) question on Reddit, What makes an Indie Game Look Low Effort?

This lead to a really interesting discussion with a lot of answers. You should absolutely learn from all of these so you know what NOT to do.

The obvious ones are things like bad graphics, bad voice acting and bugs. To counter bad graphics, always remember how consistency is the most important thing. You don't need AAA quality meshes, they just need to look like they all fit together. No voice acting is better than bad voice acting, and of course you should test your game as much as possible to ensure a bug-free experience. Playtesting is your friend.

More things to avoid:

• Empty Spaces: Better to have tightly packed interesting spaces than vast worlds with nothing in them.

• Bad uninteresting content: Remove it. Whether it be levels, weapons, characters, etc. It's better to have a shorter but more compelling game.

• Not polishing: Low effort games have no animations, things just appear. They have no sound effects or VFX, things just happen.

• Wall of Text Tutorial: Show, don't tell is a classic rule. Many beginner devs just explain the whole game with a giant wall of text.

• Bad Steam Page: Invest in a good high quality capsule image, gifs in description, pick 5 high quality screenshots and a good short trailer. Learn more here.

There's a ton more in the comments of that thread, definitely give it a read.

And in the post someone mentioned "so does that make GameFreak (Pokemon) an indie low effort studio?", (due to how basic the recent 3D Pokemon games look) to which someone perfectly replied "No, they simply have an audience that will buy their games no matter what they do".

But if YOU don't have a cult-like audience yourself, then definitely pay attention to all these points to ensure your game does not look low effort.

Gaming

Assassin's Creed finally goes to Japan!

After literally decades of people asking for it, (myself included) Assassin's Creed finally went to Japan! AC: Shadows is now out.

The reviews are decent, 82 on Open Critic and 81% Very Positive on Steam. Consensus seems to be "it's yet another AC game", so if you enjoyed AC: Odyssey (I loved it!) or AC: Valhalla then you will likely enjoy this one. If you were looking for a drastic departure from the formula then you're likely not going to love it.

One very positive thing is how it seems like the extra time they delayed the game did help, in general the game seems well made without many complaints of technical issues. It was meant to come out in November of last year and the extra 3 months were apparently very helpful.

This is also an important game for the industry as a whole, the existence of Ubisoft itself is somewhat dependent on this game doing well, financially they have been doing badly for the past few years. I hope they stay alive and keep making better games. AC:2 is one of my favorite games, as was Far Cry 3, I also really enjoyed Watch Dogs, the Anno games are awesome, and many people thought Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was game of the year, so I think it would suck for the industry to lose all of those.

Fun

Trippy AI on your AR!

Here is a really fascinating, trippy demo. It's passthrough footage from a Quest 3 device and it's connected to Stable Diffusion to automatically draw what the camera is seeing.

I love the beginning of the video where it basically draws the hands and screen in a Simpsons style, it looks simultaneously super cool and super strange!

Meta has just enabled Passthrough Camera Access thus making this finally possible, I wonder what other things people will use it for.