Unity 6.3 LTS is now, and Games to help you learn!

Also the origin of the smiley face!

Author

Code Monkey
December 07, 2025

Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

I hope you had a great first week of December! I was pretty productive this week, managed to record a few videos and catch up most of my work from the week of Unite. My one big project right now is updating all my Free Project Files to Unity 6.3, I want it to be super easy for people to download and use my tutorials without being confused about things that have changed since then.

The Unity Awards are this week on Tuesday! It should be a fun event, I will likely be doing a live watch-along, all the nominees are awesome so it should be a great time. And also The Game Awards are this Thursday!

  • Game Dev: Unity 6.3 LTS

  • Gaming: Learn with Games

  • Fun: Smiley Origins

Game Dev

Unity 6.3 LTS is out!

Unity recently changed how they organize their versions. You have Pre-release, Supported and LTS. The recommended version you should be using is the latest either LTS or Supported, so right now with 6.3 LTS being released that means it's the version you should be using for your projects going forward. However 6.0 is still also a valid LTS release, so if you want you can keep using that one, but for future projects you should probably use 6.3.

This version is very much focused on stability and quality of life improvements, things many developers have asked Unity to focus on for a very long time, so there aren't many flashy new features but rather just nice solid improvements on a stable build.

I made a video talking about what's in this version. There's the Platform Toolkit, this is a package to make it easier to port your game to any console by just implementing a single API. Render Graph is now common between URP and HDRP leading the way for the render pipelines to merge in the future. There's a new setting called Render 3D as 2D which lets you render 3D meshes alongside your 2D objects, and have them be affected by 2D systems like 2D lights. The new Building Blocks help you get started quickly. 2D Animation is more performant, Unity now attempts to use HTTP2 by default, the low-level 2D physics API lets you have more control over physics. You can now customize the toolbar. There's a new Hierarchy window, and a ton more stuff.

In terms of what's coming in the future, Unity recently had their Unite conference where they talked about that, I made a video covering the future of the engine, it involves things like merging the render pipelines, merging ECS and Game Objects, and CoreCLR!

I quite like the focus on stability and getting a solid foundation done. It's not "flashy" but it is very important work that needs doing. And of course I can't wait for everything they showcased for the future!

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Gaming

Games to help you learn!

Can games help you learn? I would say yes! Nowadays there's actually quite a lot of games to help you learn all kinds of things, personally I think this is an excellent use case that I hope continues to increase in the future

Just recently I saw this post on Reddit of a father who made a simple game to help his son learn math. The characters have an equation above them and you have to shoot the body part with the correct answer.

Another very good recent one is The Farmer Was Replaced, which lets you learn JavaScript code by playing a game, you can learn Assembly with SHENZHEN IO. There's also learning Electronics by playing CRUMB, And there's many like Wagotabi which helps you learn a language, in this case Japanese. Or even Car Mechanic Simulator which while not being a perfect simulation, it can definitely be educational for learning the basic elements that go inside a car (how an engine is built, how wheels connect to everything else, etc)

So if you want to learn something, maybe go play a game!

I always tell people who are trying to learn Game Development / Programming from my videos how you NEED to apply what you're learning, you can't just blindly watch the video tutorials. If you don't actively do something you won't really learn, that's why I put in so much effort into the Interactive Exercises on my C# course, so since videogames are interactive then I think that makes them great for education. I look forward to making some custom games to help my nephews learn some things as they grow older.

Fun

The origin of smiley face!

One of the hardest things to put down in text is sarcasm. There's no "tone" in text so it's up to how the reader interprets the text in their own mind.

This can sometimes cause problems and apparently in 1982 this was leading to a lot of misunderstandings until one person decided something needed to be done. That person was Scott E. Fahlman who apparently suggested that serious topic should be marked with a :-( and jokes marked with a :-)

The story is described here with the original thread posted here and it's pretty funny to read. The smiley definitely looks better than the other joke markers like & and #

It's fun to read these posts from back when the internet and computers were just in its infancy. It's hard to believe there was a time before smileys existed! Nowadays there are almost 4000 emojis!

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

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