Blueprint to C++ 📝, GMTK Jam 2025 🎮, HSM in Unity 🧩
Monetization & Hard Lessons đź’¸
€4M Gross, Still Broke: The Rise of Industry Deal Gone Wrong
Rise of Industry’s creator says his chart-topping game grossed €4M—but he ended up broke, citing platform cuts, refunds, regional pricing, and a damaging publishing deal. Publisher Kasedo/Kalypso disputes his figures and says funding was the developer’s responsibility. A dispute over involvement in Rise of Industry 2 deepened the rift. Mochi ultimately owns his missteps, offering a stark cautionary tale for indie devs about contracts and cash flow.
Win Day 30: Unite UA and Retention for Lasting LTV
Supersonic (Unity) says D30 success starts on day one by unifying UA and retention. Use honest, deeper playables, extend optimisation windows to D7–D28, and mix incentivised and hybrid (IAP + ads) campaigns to acquire truly engaged users. Then lock in habits with consistent live ops—daily bonuses, 48–72h tournaments, and weekly quests—guided by analytics to evolve mechanics and prevent churn. Strong D1–D14 retention is the foundation for better D30 and ROAS.
Meetups & Jams 📆
Devcom x Gamescom 2025: Must-See Mobile Sessions and Key Meetups
Gamescom week kicks off with Devcom (Aug 18–19) and a stacked Mobile Track on community strategy, pre-registration wins, anti-cheat, shooter netcode, D2C monetization, and bringing next-gen RPGs West. Day 2 covers live ops decision traps, US growth via direct monetization, seven shifts reshaping live service by 2030, a porting Q&A, and a FLINTA meetup. PocketGamer.biz is on-site all week—plus hosting the Mobile Games Awards (Aug 19), a party (Aug 20), and sharing a party guide for networking.
GMTK Jam 2025: The Best Loop-Powered Game Ideas
GMTK’s 2025 jam drew 37,000 participants and 9,600 games around one theme: loops. This roundup showcases 20 standout entries—from rhythm-sequenced combat and time-loop mysteries to Rubik’s Cube alchemy and self-versus-past-you shootouts. Winners are now community-picked, while this video highlights personal favorites and smart design lessons on constraint-driven creativity. Try the games on itch.io and register interest for GMTK Jam 2026.
Engine Craft: Rendering & State Machines 🛠️
Realistic Godot Environments: Sky, GI, Tonemaps, and Post FX
Turn Godot’s default preview into a production-ready, photoreal baseline. This step-by-step guide covers PhysicalSky, sun intensity, AgX tonemapping, and layering ambient/indirect light with SSAO, SSIL, SDFGI, or baked GI. Finish with glow, fog, and LUT color grading—or switch to physical light and camera units for real-world consistency. Includes a reusable environment.tres and demo project.
Build a Production-Ready HSM in Unity with Async Transition Sequencing
This advanced Unity tutorial builds a hierarchical state machine from scratch and adds a transition sequencer to orchestrate animations, delays, and effects during state changes. Learn LCA-based transitions, sequential/parallel phases, cancellable activities, and a reflection-built hierarchy. A Player example (Grounded/Idle/Move/Airborne) shows clean, testable logic in action. Perfect for devs who want precise, composable control over gameplay flow.
Deep Tech: Determinism & Tooling 🔬
Beating Desyncs: Reproducible Floating-Point for Games Across Platforms
Crossplay and lockstep sims collapse when floating-point math differs across compilers, CPUs, and drivers. This talk explains why C++ leaves key float behavior implementation-defined, how FMA, reordering, and fast-math cause divergences, and what flags and coding patterns help. It then proposes standard changes—like a strict_float type and reproducibility attributes—to deliver portable, deterministic performance for modern games.
How We Auto-Converted Blueprints to C++ Without Breaking Anything
Two veteran engineers share a one-click Blueprint-to-C++ pipeline that keeps projects runnable and designers unblocked. The talk tackles the real pain: reparenting, cast fixes, component/event rebinding, data table/INI updates, and restoring pin links. A live demo shows a seven-step workflow using live coding and “_deprecated” BP shims so engineers can swap in native code incrementally. No engine modifications required—and your levels and defaults stay intact.