The Indie Golden Age is here, and doing a Game Jam!

Also GTA 6 delayed, and smallest CSS

Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

This week's newsletter is a bit shorter because I'm currently hard at work on the Unity 20 Year Game Jam, I've been working on a game during a bunch of livestreams. It's a Factory Automation game where you fight against time! So far it's coming along great, I hope I can finish it in time later today!

By the way I will be launching a Black Friday sale on my courses this Tuesday. It's a big bundle including all of them and I will be opening up more slots for my Problem Solving course. So don't buy anything right now, wait for Tuesday!

  • Game Dev: Indie Golden Age

  • Gaming: GTA 6 Delayed

  • Fun: Smallest CSS

Game Dev

The NEW Indie Golden age is here!

Making indie games is very difficult, it's difficult to build them and even more difficult to sell them. There are so many awesome games coming out every single day that sometimes it feels impossible to compete.

However, amidst all that pessimism there is actually reason to be hopeful and optimistic. Even though competition is at an all time high, so is the number of hit games.

Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zuwkoski wrote an excellent blog post on this topic, how even though there are obviously reasons to be down on the games industry, we are also going through something of a Golden Age.

His thesis is how we are at a crucial point where the games that Steam players want desperately to buy and play, are also the games that are easy to make as a developer.

A few years ago this happened with the Vampire Survivors genre. Those games were easy to make and players really wanted them, so a bunch of devs made them quickly and made millions with games like Deep Rock Galactic and 20 Minutes Till Dawn.

Nowadays there are a handful of genres that are currently experiencing a Golden Age:

  • Friendslop

  • Incremental Games

  • Shop Simulators

  • Rage Games

These are all relatively easy to make. Friendslop is hard but the excellent multiplayer tools that exist nowadays make it much easier than before. Incremental games can be just 2 hour experinces, Shop Simulator games are basically just interactions and a theme on top like I made in my prototype, and Rage games also don't need much content since you're constantly falling down.

The entire blog post has tons of graphs to justify this thesis and it is very compelling, I highly recommned you read the whole thing, and perhaps now might be the time for you to make a game in this genre. Perhaps it might be wise to pause your current multi-year project and do a quick mini-project that could find massive success.

I’ve been reading Chris’ blog since 2018 and most of my own Marketing knowledge came from him, check out the videos I did with him to learn more about this super valuable part of making games.

I am right now working on my Game jam game which happens to be an Incremental Factory game. I think that's a unique twist on the Incremental game that could perhaps find success. I'm not sure if I will keep working on it after the jam but perhaps I will just to test out this theory.

Affiliate

FREE Parkour, Environment 99% OFF!

There’s a MASSIVE HumbleBundle with thousands of Realistic and Stylized environments at 99% OFF!

Contains both Unity and Unreal assets.

Get it HERE!

The Publisher of the Week this time is Threepeat Games, publisher with a bunch of animation and movement controllers.

Get the FREE Parkour Animation Set which is a nice collection of tools for adding free-running to your games.

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

Gaming

GTA 6 delayed, November 2026

The most anticipated game of all time, GTA6, which has been 13 years since the last iteration, was initially meant to come out in Fall 2025, then slipped to May 2026 and now it's November 2026.

It's interesting to see CDProjektRed "comment" on this happening, they certainly know a thing or two about rushing a launch and wasting a ton of goodwill.

I am very curious to see what will happen when GTA6 comes out. Will it be the massive launch everyone is expecting? Perhaps even bigger than expectations? Or will the game have a tough time matching up with sky-high expectations and actually end up being disappointing? Whatever the result, it will definitely be a big event.

Fun

The smallest amount of CSS

Modern web development can be insanely complex, but it doesn't have to be. In order for a website to look decently good it just needs a handful of things, this nice guide covers about two dozen lines of CSS code that are enough to make a good looking website.

Importantly it also explains the WHY behind each decision. Improve the fonts and readability, make images not overflow, add support for light and dark mode, etc.

I definitely get overwhelmed when I see how much you can do with CSS, but then I remember how the basics work fine, and if you look at my website you will certainly see how I just use basic stuff that just works.

Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!

(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)

Thanks for reading!

Code Monkey

Reply

or to participate.