Unity AI has just entered into Open Beta, meaning anyone who wants to try it can, no need to request access, you can try it out here.

I'm currently researching Unity AI for a super detailed tutorial and so far in my research I am finding the tool is actually genuinely helpful! This is not mindless AI hype, and it's not even focused on AI generation, but rather is capable of building genuinely useful things like custom editor tools, helping you analyze the profiler, taking actions in your project, it can see your project visually, it can do basic level design, helps you organize your codebase, fix bugs (with context of your project) and a bunch more.

Like I said I'm still in the research phase but thankfully Unity actually invited me to be a guest of their Unity AI livestream showcase which was quite educational to me. They showed how they built a really nice demo and included a ton of useful hints for how to get the most out of these tools.

The demo is a vehicle combat game in an arena where the player controls a car and the NPC trucks spawn and try to destroy the player. The demo was built with a handful of the developers WITH AI, not replaced by it. Meaning in order for this AI to be useful it required actually developers who know how to get the most out of the AI.

You can watch the full livestream but here are the main useful takeaways that I got myself:

There's a lot more uses they showed in the livestream, like making a Hexagon shader to protect the robots, generating the UI and the code behind it, generating the statue and vehicles and more.

Some general best practices:

Again the main thing here is this is NOT "AI will make the game for you" but rather "your skills + AI will help you make better games faster". As always it's a tool meant to help you, not replace you. So give it a try here and see how it helps you in your workflow.

In terms of pricing, here is their page. On the Free Unity Personal plan you get 1000 free credits you can try out, and after that you can pay $10 per month. If you're on the Unity Pro tier you get 2000 credits per month. Then you can buy more separately if you need them. Different tasks require different credits, for example generating a sprite is 5-10 credits, and a quick query is 2-5 credits, so it feels like 1000 is actually a pretty decent amount. Example: This demo which had very heavy usage of AI (with lots of trial and error) was built with around 1800 credits.

At the end of the livestream I asked if this demo would be available for download so we could inspect all of it and they mentioned how they hadn't considered it but maybe.

Unity is running an surprising bundle! Surprising because I instantly spotted how it contains one of my most recommended assets of all time, that I definitely did not expect to be bundled!

It’s worth it for that asset alone (Asset Inventory) and on top of that getting all the other assets is just an awesome bonus. The whole thing has a huge discount and it’s mostly made up of new assets so you probably don’t have any yet. (I only had one asset myself)

Get it HERE!

The Publisher of the Week this time is Daniel Ilett, who makes a bunch of useful URP shaders.

Get the FREE Toon Shaders Pro for URP which is a really nice toon shader with a ton of rendering options.

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

Looking for Characters and Weapons in a realistic style to make your games? Check out this awesome HumbleBundle!

It’s made by Bugrimov Maksim which is one of the best realistic publishers. This pack has a mountain of characters in all styles, alongside a ton of weapons with first person animations.

It’s 98% OFF! Get it HERE!

Valve is such a weird company, but usually weird in the good way. (although I do wish they would lower their 30% cut for indie games)

They just released their latest piece of hardware, the Steam Controller, and pretty much instantly it went out of stock. You can't buy it on the official site for $99 (although there are already scalpers on ebay selling them for $300)

While you wait for more official stock, you can actually build one yourself! By that I mean that Valve has just released the CAD files for the Steam Controller and its Puck under a slightly restrictive Creative Commons license, which means people can now freely download the official shell files, modify them, 3D print accessories, and make all sorts of weird custom creations, as long as it is non-commercial.

They also included engineering drawings and "keep out" zones so people do not accidentally block things like the antenna or other critical areas.

Now technically you can't really build your own complete Steam Controller, these files are for the external shell and not the internals, but still this is pretty fun for them to do! Usually things like console shells are proprietary so it's nice to see a big company just put them out for anyone to build third party accessories for. There's a nice Valve-like message on the GitLab page: "Your Steam Controller is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you want."

Glue (or more technically, adhesives) is a fascinating thing. How do you connect one thing to another thing? It is also a surprisingly complex topic since you need different glue types to glue different objects. Gluing a Hat to a piece of Wood? You need something different than if you were gluing Metal to Plastic.

Here is a fun website that shows you what you need to glue THIS to THAT. You just pick the this and that from the dropdown menu and it tells you what works best, neat!

Plus there's a Trivia page! Did you know that "The Aztec Indians in Central America used animal blood mixed with cement as a mortar for their buildings"?