#103 – January 8, 2023
From news: The developer of Vampire Survivors takes a new approach to monetization, the creator of the PS2 emulator for Android has put the project on hold due to community attitudes.
Of the interesting things: a look at the complex ecosystem of Rain World, Flappy Bird on nodes in Blender, the port of Doom right in the Unity inspector, the developer shared his story of unsuccessful success – 200k from sales, but the game still did not pay off.
Updates/releases/news
“People act like assholes”: the creator of the PS2 emulator for Android “froze” the project due to community attitudes
AetherSX2 decided to do this after began to receive death threats.
Developer Vampire Survivors takes a new approach to monetization
In the update on Steam, the developers of the popular roguelike action told about their difficulties porting the game to mobile devices.
“It’s your fault!”: The authors of Dwarf Fortress thanked the fans for almost 500 thousand copies of the game sold on Steam
And this less than a month.
Freebies/Giveaways/Bundles/Courses
UV Checker Map Maker
Convenient free web applicationcreated by designer and former Weta Workshop senior Jorge Valle, allows you to create your own test cards and download them for free in resolutions up to 8K.
Free content in the Unreal Marketplace for January 2023
New selection of assets.
Interesting articles/videos
The developer of Kainga: Seeds of Civilization shared his story of unsuccessful success – 200k from sales, but the game still did not pay off
Post with Reddit. The author demolished the acc (probably, this is somehow connected with the publisher), but a copy is available in archive. Moments:
The publisher threw money into development. The contract is such that the developer will not receive money until the publisher recaptures the investment.
Spent a lot of money on assets that were never added to the game.
All on blueprints.
Too smart with the complexity of the project. Lots of different elements that can influence each other. As a result, it was almost impossible to foresee everything, a lot of bugs.
Sold 6,000 when entering early access with 25,000 wishlists. But on release, with 50k wishlists, only 2000 copies were sold. You only have 1 chance to impress. Rarely is it otherwise.
It went into full release right before the Game Awards and on the same day as Dwarf Fortress. The marketing team from the publisher said that there would be no problem with this (kek).
“Our target audience has changed to producers and game designers,” Pavel Ignatov from Balancy
Interview with CEO at Balancy, specialized on gaming LiveOps.
Screen-space VRS in Unity with DirectX 12
AT article variable rate shading is discussed, a technique that can improve performance quite well. There are examples of code in Unity.
Creating a Slacker Movie-style novel by an indie developer
Drew Pan toldhow he came to the gaming industry at the age of 40, told what tools he used to bring the Gloom and Doom project to life, and also spoke about his approach to creating the game’s story.
A look at Rain World’s complex ecosystem
YouTube channel Curious Archive released a video essay that talks about Rain World and what they call “the most complex virtual ecosystem” they’ve ever seen in a video game.
How to make a minimum size build in Unity
Grigory Dyadichenko shared a checklist that is useful to go through before laying out a project.
A chance for a second life: how fans complete games instead of developers
Skillbox Media tell about the most interesting projects – from patches for Gothic 3 to restored content from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2.
Creating an old shipyard in Maya, Substance 3D Painter and Unreal Engine 5
Andrey Egorov told about the Old Shipyard project, explained how the props and character were modeled, and discussed using Unreal Engine’s Lumen to set up lighting.
Using AI bots as game development tools
As AI tools have quickly become a controversial topic in the gaming industry, modl.ai seeks build AI tools that support developers, not crowd them out.
Removal of loot boxes in Brawl Stars – a revolution or a mistake?
Deconstructor Of Fun decided to sort it out in the question.
Recreating old computer graphics with generative models
The author used Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, and Midjourney to see how these image generation tools can help improve an old visual story—an intro movie to an old video game (Nemesis 2 on MSX). The post describes the process and experience of using these models to improve graphics.
Tutorial on blueprints in UE5
The main function of the Blueprint scripting system is the ability to create code from blocks. AT article good introduction for beginners.
Who determines the future of video games? Ilya Eremeev is visiting. The House of the Dev Podcast S2E5
Rafael Colantonio and Petr Salnikov talk with Ilya Eremeev, co-founder of The Games Fund, a video game fund. Without boring talk about finances, we allow ourselves to fantasize about what the future of video games holds in itself, and what – or who – is having the greatest influence on it. Audience? Foundations and publishers? The developers themselves? Platforms?
Exploring the Bullet physics engine
Bullet Engine is a modern 3D physics engine. It is provided as open source, which makes it easy to parse and study. What the author did.
Top Grossing Steam Releases of 2022
GameDiscoverCo shared statistics and reflect on the topic.
Optimizing Unity Mobile Game Performance
Pro balance between graphics performance and GPU load.
Finite difference method – Laplacian, part 2
In AMD’s post introduced two general optimizationswhich can be applied to the kernel to reduce data movement and bring it closer to a new peak: a clear decrease in memory load and reordering of memory access to improve caching.
How an indie developer’s ‘gladiator sim’ made it big on PC
Understanding with GameDiscoverCo..
Miscellaneous
Flappy Bird on nodes in Blender
Found on Reddit.
Port of Doom that works right in the Unity Inspector
Sources on Github.
Arcane-inspired character created in Maya, ZBrush and 3DCoat
FROM ArtStation.
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