Game Dev

Unity AI is here! (and 6.2)

Unity 6.2 Beta has just come out and alongside it is Unity AI. I made a video on this topic, it is mostly a rebranding of their AI tools with a bunch of nice improvements.

Previously you had Muse and Sentis, and Muse was a external web page. Now it's all directly integrated into the engine with the various tools under separate sub menus.

You can use the Assistant (which is an AI chat) to help you take all kinds of actions in the Editor like placing objects on random positions in your world, or ask it any questions (better for Unity-specific queries than ChatGPT). It is also context aware, you can drag references to prefabs, errors, hierarchy game objects, assets, and ask it to do things with those references or ask it to explain errors/scripts.

Then you have the various Generators. Easily generate 2D Sprites, Textures, Materials, Sounds and Animations. Each tool also has lots of settings and bonus features to help you get the exact output you want.

And the Inference Engine (previously Sentis) is what allows you to run machine learning models on-device, without any cloud connection at all. There are sample models on Hugging Face that you can easily use to try out. I tried a Text-To-Speech model and it worked great!

The big question is pricing, during the Beta it is completely free and later on they will announce proper pricing, which will thankfully include credits for Unity Pro users. I really hope the pricing is accessible, I think these tools can be really great, especially for beginner indie devs who won't be able to afford something like $50 a month so I really hope they will have some sort of a free tier.

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Game Dev

Know your game's Anchor

By now you probably know that you need a really strong Hook if you want your game to find success. It cannot be just like every other game, it needs something unique and interesting to hook the player. However you also need some familiarity, if the game is too unique then players will likely be confused or just not understand what you're trying to do, so you need to find balance between making your game familiar and unique at the same time.

I just came across this excellent post by Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zukowski where he made up a really excellent term, Anchor. Games have Hooks and Anchors, the Hook is the unique selling point while the Anchor is the familiar part that gets the players to try out the game.

Chris mentions various types of Anchors:

• Friends / Word of Mouth

• Influencer

• Sequel / Spin-off

• Brand

• Awards

• Genre

• IP

Definitely read the full article for more detail on all of these, if you combine a great Anchor with a great Hook you will find massive success!

If you want to learn more about Steam Marketing go check out the videos I did with Chris. You have hours of excellent knowledge there and if you want to learn even further I recommend you follow his newsletter, I've been reading it myself for many years.

Gaming

Awesome GTA2-but-Police game is a huge hit!

One AWESOME new game has just come out, it's called The Precinct. It looks absolutely gorgeous and is already a huge hit with over 2500 very positive reviews in less than a week! That implies around 100,000 copies sold and around $2.5 million!

I've seen gifs of this one many times over the past few years, it looks super impressive, it looks like GTA2 with modern graphics which is excellent! Except instead of being an outlaw you play as a cop in 1983. Your goal is to clean up the city while engaging in vehicle chases (with destructible environments) and uncover clever mysteries.

There is an interesting interview with the developer if you want to learn more about the behind the scenes.

Bonus Fun Fact: This gorgeous game is actually made in Unity! So once again, you can absolutely make awesome-looking games in Unity (or any engine), it's really just up to the developer and this developer is clearly very skilled.

Fun

Fun Internet Artifacts!

Look at this awesome website that contains 57 artifacts from the internet.

It's fascinating to see the first smiley, first LOL, first mp3, first web cam.

The pages are also interactive, if you want to hear what dial-up sounds like just click on Sign On on the AOL page.

If you're around my age then you will probably feel a heavy dose of nostalgia on some of these pages, like the dancing baby, Y2K bug, You Wouldn't Steal a Car, Numa Numa, The Million Dollar Homepage, and many more fun ones!