#127 - June 25, 2023

From news: RealityScan is now available not only on iOS, but also on Android, EVE Online has implemented support for Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Epic Games has released a sample project Electric Dreams Environment, Defold has support for Sony PlayStation 4.

Of the interesting things: a documentary about Blasphemous, level boosters suck, about the development of an open world design in Zelda, modern mobile rendering, the Far Cry Dunia Engine shader pipeline.

Updates/releases/news

RealityScan is now available not only on iOS, but also on Android

Allows create high quality 3D models of objects several pictures from the phone.

EVE Online introduces support for Microsoft Excel spreadsheets

Assistance in implementing the extension in the space simulator provided by Microsoft.

Online BattleBit Remastered on Steam exceeded 60 thousand people

amazing as an indie project was able to attract so much attention from the players. And, judging by the reviews, the game really came out worthy.

Epic Games has released a sample project Electric Dreams Environment

Earlier this year, Epic Games showed a demo and new engine features at GDC, and now everyone can poke project.

Defold now supports Sony PlayStation 4

Basic access to essential tools and documentation will be provided free of chargewhile full access to the source code is available at the paid membership level.

WN Media Group is preparing a marketplace for educational courses — WN Academy

In July the company Launches a new educational service — a marketplace of courses, webinars and tutorials for gaming professionals. At the start, the service will offer a course by Evgeny Sudak.

Results of the Open Source Contest with Gamedev.js Jam 2023

The article mentions 13 games. Sources of all attached.

Freebies/Giveaways/Bundles/Courses

14 ZBrush brushes by Pablo Munoz Gomez

Concept artist Pablo Muñoz Gomez (pablander) shared new pack of brushes.

Unreal Essentials Humble Bundle

New a large set of assets for UE. Some of them, in principle, can be used in other engines.

Interesting articles/videos

🇺🇸 Documentary about Blasphemous

Recently posted to the public. I always read / watch such things with interest, because they are about people and relationships + there are interesting details.

For example, I did not know that the studio as a whole was not so smooth. Initially, they were somehow interrupted by small orders. And even when they came out with this game on KS, the problems did not disappear.

They began to run out of money, asked the publisher to finance. Team17 agreed, but asked for a higher percentage in return. The team refused, as a result, the producer took out a loan.

Well, in general, there are a lot of such everyday and interpersonal things with raids on each other, etc. Under stress, this really intensifies very much (I remember from the last startup). One member of the team had panic attacks in general.

🇺🇸 Recreating the Phoenix from Harry Potter in ZBrush, Ornatrix and Substance 3D Painter

Ramon Tapia spoke about the Phoenix project, explainedhow grooming is done in Ornatrix and showed the texturing process.

5 free Blender addons – for modeling and generating objects

An overview of the tools that save time for 3D artists.

Denis Pozdnyakov – I bring history to games

CPO of the IThub games studio, teacher and one of the lucky ones who managed to work on the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Denis spoke about his path in the gaming industry, his love for Diablo and board games, and the influence of foreign corporations on Russian game development.

🇺🇸 Creating a stylized scene in Maya, Substance 3D Painter and UE5

Zaldom told about the creation of a new Crossroads project and talked about the stages of creating a stylized scene in Maya, Substance 3D and Unreal Engine 5.

🇺🇸 How to promote console and PC games in the mobile world

AppsFlyer spoke about the growth in the number of cross-platform games and why it’s adding console and desktop support to its marketing tools.

🇺🇸 Indie developer ansdor on creative control

Brazilian game developer shares his experience entering the industry and about not being able to work for someone.

Evolution from 2D to 3D. Path to release

Sometimes it seems that the finished game project is some kind of miracle, an accidental coincidence at a time when everything was against it. Everything that could go wrong went wrong: deadlines were missed and delayed, people disappeared and failed, there was simply no time left for key ideas and polishing.

indie developer tellshow it all started.

🇺🇸 Level boosters suck

Developers with such boosters break the progression of many players. In some games that are designed for the endgame, similar inaps are hindered, among other things, by some players, because they are slipped into the party by newcomers who just bought the level, but at the same time do not understand the game and its mechanics.

🇺🇸 Why is the coefficient between the number of followers and those who added the game to the wishlist important

You can get a general idea of the popularity of an unreleased Steam game from its top wishlist ranking, you can see the exact number of subscribers for each game, and sites like SteamDB have good historical subscriber charts. Not all games convert equally. But in gamediscover.co still thinkthat subscribers are very “indicative” of the general interest.

🇺🇸 Work culture and recruitment practices at ROCKFISH Games

Michael Schade, studio CEO, told about the organization of the company’s work and approaches to hiring, discussed the role of independence in culture and spoke about the peculiarities of the game development market in Hamburg.

🇺🇸 Model stylized characters for games with Ziva VFX and machine learning

The workflow demo shows how these tools can be used for simulation. These methods are also can be applied to any kind of character deformation, including photorealistic ones, and to linear content.

🇺🇸 3 hyper casual tips from an expert

Carlton Forrester, whose recent hit Tall Man Run ranked #1 on Android in the US and won the Supersonic Superstars contest, shares his three top tipshow to consistently come up with commercial concepts for hyper-casual games.

🇺🇸 About Diablo IV graphics

The developers wrote high level overview topics related to the graphical techniques of Diablo IV.

How and why to write a design document for a game

Although the video is from April, but why not publish it, given that I somehow managed to miss it.

🇺🇸 A look at game localization by Ark One Studios

Studio General Manager Christian Modesto told about the organization of work, explained how they hire new employees, and discussed the challenges of the video game localization industry.

🇺🇸 Modernization of rendering in Supercell

In a GDC 2023 talk, Timo Heinapurola talked about the process of implementing a new rendering framework at Supercell and walked through the stages of modifying their existing games.