Game Dev

Unity 6 is OUT!

Unity 6 is now fully released!

This is pretty big news since Unity recently talked about their new version scheme and how there will be longer gaps between major versions (no longer every year)

What does Unity 6 bring? Multiple improvements to Graphics, both in terms of quality and performance. The GPU Resident Drawer, GPU Occlusion Culling and Spatial Temporal Post-Processing (STP) all together give you a massive boost in performance by just enabling a checkbox. Adaptive Probe Volumes make it easier to have high quality indirect lighting along with Scenario Blending (Time of Day) and improvements to VFX Graph and Shader Graph.

Multiplayer is also continuously improving. The Multiplayer Center helps you figure out what tools work best for your game, and the Multiplayer Widgets help you quickly get started. Multiplayer Play Mode makes testing much much faster, and Distributed Authority helps you build larger client hosted games.

On Web there is increased performance, increasing the memory limit to 4GB, and finally bringing Web to Mobile devices.

Also their Muse AI toolset continues improving alongside Sentis, UI Toolkit, Memory Profiler, and more.

This also comes with a bunch of awesome samples! You can download the free Fantasy Kingdom demo, it includes the awesome Synty pack. Megacity Metro has also been updated to Unity 6, and the excellent Time Ghost Demo is also available for download (Character, Environment).

Unity will also be hosting Office Hours (previously Dev Blitz Days) to answer all your questions, with the first one on Graphics happening on October 23.

Definitely an exciting big release!

Affiliate

FREE Synty Asset and Bundle

Grab a FREE Synty asset, the Construction pack. Could be a great environment for a level in your game, or maybe for making a house building game like The Sims. Includes tons of awesome power tools and props.

Ends this week so get it for free HERE.

For more Synty stuff the HumbleBundle has recently been extended, it includes THOUSANDS of assets for just $25.

Modular Fantasy Characters (which you could use with this tutorial I made)

War packs for making WW1/2 games, Gang Warfare for making an interesting Simulator game, Battle Royale Pack for any kind of shooter or the Hearse Kit for something for Halloween.

Get it HERE!

Or Unity actually has an excellent MEGA bundle right now to celebrate Unity 6 with tons of tools and visuals.

It includes the All in 1 Sprite Shader for polishing your sprite effects, the entire bundle is worth it just for this one, I made a review video here.

Also includes UI packs, 2D tilesets, Modular Building System, Animation Tools, Magic Effects, Chat Bubbles, and more.

All for just $30, get it HERE!

Game Dev

How it started → How it's going

Lately there's been an interesting trend of devs posting How it started -> How it's going videos.

There's a Racing Destruction game, climbing system prototype vs final, an FPS that looks completely different, paper plane game with tons of effects, top down action game, and more.

If you want a nice fun challenge then go through all these videos and try to identify what exactly makes the "after" look so much better. There are obvious things like adding Textures or Animations, but pay attention to the more subtle things, the camera shake, the tiny particles, the decals on the floor, the lighting effects, the post processing, etc.

You should definitely spend some time doing that analysis so you have a better idea of how you can improve upon your own games.

Here's one that shows step by step how this awesome scene is composed.

Gaming

Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero is a HUGE hit!

Earlier this month one of the most anticipated games came out, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, and it immediately sold an insane 3 MILLION copies in the first 24 hours!

This is a sequel to Budokai Tenkaichi 3 (in Japan those games were named Sparking so that's why this is Sparking Zero) which came out in 2007, that was 17 years ago!

It features a giant roster of 182 characters, everything from DB, DBZ, GT and Super.

Clearly the people working on the game have a lot of love for the source material, visually the game is stunning, the controls are fluid and it's packed with content. People are loving it (myself included!) with 93% Very Positive reviews on Steam.

Another awesome recent game that has also found a ton of success is Space Marine 2, it has already sold 4.5 million copies! It's great to see such success on games that clearly have a lot of passion put in.

Fun

Aspiring billionaire looking for volunteers

Here's a fun satire post that takes the delusion some "ideas guys" have to the max. The comments are pretty fun too.

This is obvious satire but it's not uncommon to see these kinds of posts in a genuine manner, people saying "I have an awesome idea and if you build it for me I will give you a small %"

For these people (who I assume are mostly kids) my advice is to pick up some skills, maybe programming, maybe art, maybe sound, something so they can contribute other than just being an "ideas guy"

Ideas are very abundant, every developer has hundreds of ideas they'd love to make. However that does not mean all "ideas" are useless, if you have an idea with a very clear hook and validated market potential then it can indeed be quite valuable.

My latest video is all about this topic, how one game found quite a bit of success, in part because of a good game idea/hook.