#120 — May 7, 2023
From news: in Steam on the game page now there are no more than 2 videos before screenshots, revenue from sales of Hogwarts Legacy in retail at the end of March exceeded a billion dollars, Unity announced the dismissal of 600 employees, Honkai: Star Rail from the authors of Genshin Impact was downloaded the day after the release over 20 million times and earned over 5 million.
Of interest: Ben Broad’s report on the development of MARVEL SNAP, co-author of Fallout about his failed projects, a good article from the composer Wizard With A Gun, 100k fish at 60 fps.
Updates/releases/news
In Steam, an update regarding the display of information on the game page
Main moments:
Previews now display no more than two trailers to the left of the screenshots in the feed.
You can customize the order of trailers. There is a dependence on the user’s language. If no settings are set, then the first two from the list of trailers will be on the left, and all the rest on the right of the screenshots.
The first video is recommended to put a video with gameplay, without any logo and other garbage that is useless for the players.
Added categories for trailers: main/cinematic, teaser, gameplay, interview/development diary.
Detailed documentation.
The developer of the Umka programming language has finally released version 1.0
In the article, he tells what it is, why and why. And at the same time about the main Tophat engine / framework on it.
David Gaider believes that over the years, BioWare has become less appreciative of its writers and asked for “less text” in games
According to him, many leaders counted on the fact that good stories would appear on their ownrather than as a result of support for writers.
Phil Spencer on the console race: “Xbox can’t overtake Sony and Nintendo, and great games won’t solve the problem”
According to him, people won’t start selling their PS5sif Starfield turns out to be an 11 out of 10 game. The market has changed a lot.
Hogwarts Legacy retail sales top $1 billion at the end of March
Game sales in the meantime exceeded 15 million copies.
Unity announced the layoff of 600 employees – this is the second wave of reductions for 2023
Third reduction per year. The vice president for architecture and DOTS environment also left the company.
GameMaker will add AI and expansion of mods
YoYo Games plans for 2023 for GameMaker include integration with artificial intelligence, full mod support and a redesigned version of the Code Editor.
Render Pipeline Shaders 1.1 with Linux support
WITH dynamic loading of Vulcan functions and other improvements.
Honkai: Star Rail from the creators of Genshin Impact has over 20 million downloads in a day after release
And in a day from the release, she earned 5 million on mobile phones alone.
Rust GameDev #44: March 2023
New release monthly digest growing communities.
Freebies/Giveaways/Bundles/Courses
Free content in the Unreal Marketplace for May 2023
Another a bunch of free assets.
RPG Asset Mega Bundle
New bundle for Humble with sprites, animations, FX for RPG Maker MV/MZ and more.
Interesting articles/videos
🇺🇸 Ben Broad’s report on the development of MARVEL SNAP
Lots of interesting moments and insights. The main points are highlighted in the form thread on twitter.
The Lord of the Rings RPG, Bloodlines multiplayer and Arcanum sequel: Fallout co-author on his failed projects
He even showed an old demo prototype of the game in the Tolkien universe – with Hobbiton and spiders.
About Atomic Heart level design
Mikhail Kadikov completed the game and told about interesting moments in terms of level design.
🇺🇸 Redfall brings the DNA of Arkane Austin to an immersive cooperative open world
But against the background of technical and other problems in Redfall, read in Unreal Engine blog article about how “the engine helped in the development of the game” is doubly amusing (¬‿¬ )
🇺🇸 Good article from composer Wizard With A Gun
Disassembled well there are examples, separate videos with how it works in special. software.
The game can add to wishlist.
🇺🇸 Blender 3D Proficiency Test: Are You Really Good?
A few tips and tricks to make your life easier.
Sudoku launch experience on Yandex Games and VK Play: data, audience, benchmarks
Experience in developing and launching a casual game on Russian web platforms with App2Top shared by Eduard Kumykovfounder and CEO of GOOO.GAMES.
🇺🇸 Render Pipeline Shaders Tutorial
Series AMD Blog Articles for working with the SDK.
🇺🇸 Recreating the Odradek terrain scanner from Death Stranding in Unity
Xichen Liu explainedhow they recreated the Odradek Terrain Scanner effect from Death Stranding Unity and showed how the visual components and icons were tweaked.
🇺🇸 What’s the difference between a wishlist and a subscriber on Steam?
We ask fans to “wishlist and subscribe”, but what do these buttons actually do after someone clicks on them?
Post-mortem Gone Rogue
interesting, statistics and conclusions.
Background for playing with a shader on Defold
As a background for your game the author decided to use a pattern of game characters, i.e. reuse textures. This allowed us to save on the size of the picture (yes, not much, but still), relieved us of the pain of drawing or licensing the image.
Mosaic inspiration (a story about the creation of two simple games)
The author has developed a love for mosaics since childhood. Those from childhood, in the style of socialist realism about astronauts, scientists, workers, are reminiscent of dreams of conquering space, and in general that “the grass is greener”. He decided to talk about the creation of a game based on the plot of a modern mosaic in a seafood restaurant.
🇺🇸 Is Clash Mini the next billion dollar Supercell game?
Deconstructor Of Fun trying to figure it out in question.
Game balance guide. Part 1
Described what is game balancewhy it matters and how we can keep the game balanced and the players happy (or at least not infuriating).
🇺🇸 Keep your store page active
Making changes to the page for someone is an exciting task, for someone it is a chore. Steam Data Suite took a look at the Steam store pagesto find out how much publishers are changing them and if this is related to success on the platform.
🇺🇸 Mesh cleaning
Thread from mesh improvement tips from an expert.
🇺🇸 80lv compilation made with videos with the creators of popular roguelikes/roguelites
As list:
Dead Cells. I had text transcript
🇺🇸 Work culture and hiring practices at Skyhook Games
Team Skyhook Games told about organizing her work and approach to hiring new professionals, and explained her strategies to prevent burnout and create a safe work environment.
🇺🇸 AI learns to walk
An example using deep reinforcement learning.
🇺🇸 Impact of unattended Steam forum posts on negative reviews
Chris Hanney wrote useful thread with key points from the speech.
🇺🇸 Dive into the UK gaming market
UK already has long been a major player in the global gaming industry and has built a reputation for high quality games and innovative technology. The country has a high level of consumer spending on games and related products, making it a lucrative market for game developers and service providers.
🇺🇸 Mipmap generation
In the article explainedhow to use WebGPU to work with compute shaders to compute mipmaps for textures.
🇺🇸 The golden rule of game promotion: no one cares about your game
In the GDC 2023 keynote, the speaker talks about the “no one cares about your game” mindset and shows how this simple marketing philosophy can help teams focus their social media messaging, make better trailers, write better emails, and build a successful PR campaign.
🇺🇸 How Everspace 2 made its space opera a hit on PC
In the first weeks of launch, there were seven times as many pilots as in its predecessor, reaching almost 10,000 CCUs. gamediscover understand success.
🇺🇸 About compilers
Fabien Sanglars wrote helpful series of articles about working with the cpp compiler.
🇺🇸 Four peaks for volume
The author learned this little trick from a former colleague and decided to write a short article about it.
Miscellaneous
100k fish at 60 fps. With a million it gives 20 fps. Uses DOTS Hybrid Renderer
Not Monobechi. Apparently, and Unity ECS system is used.
3D version of Bebop from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Character was created using Blender, ZBrush and Substance 3D Painter.
Eren Yeager’s house from Attack on Titan recreated in 3D
Author used Blender, Houdini, Substance 3D Painter/Designer, ZBrush and Unreal Engine 5 for environment customization.
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