Indie Game Design 🎮, Unity 6.3 LTS 🚀, Memory Allocators 💾
🎮 Crafting Stronger Indie Games
Subtractive Design: How Smart Constraints Make Better Indie Games
Many indies hear “make a small game” and wrongly just shrink their dream open world or MMO. This essay reframes that advice as “make a focused game with fewer moving parts” and lays out three concrete strategies: cut or simplify characters, avoid heavy level design, and build around one strong mechanic. Using examples like Dredge, Papers, Please, and Backpack Hero, it shows how constraints can add mood and focus while slashing workload. A must-read for anyone who wants to actually ship.
Still Here: Mike Rose & Rami Ismail on Surviving Indie’s Evolution
Indie veterans Mike Rose (No More Robots) and Rami Ismail (Vlambeer) kick off their new podcast by unpacking how they somehow survived 15+ years in games. They reminisce about tiny early GDCs, Flash-era successes, and the birth of Devolver-style indie publishing. Then they contrast that with today’s brutal discoverability landscape, where money and randomness dominate. It’s equal parts funny, nostalgic, and painfully honest about what indie looks like now.
🛠️ Engine Tech & Performance
A Tech Artist’s Guide to Automated Performance Testing in Unreal Engine
Tech artist Matt Oel shows how Unreal teams can stop doing one-off perf passes and start treating performance like any other shippable feature. The session covers the evolution from fully manual QA workflows to a standardized, Epic-built automation framework that builds the game, deploys to devices, runs tests, collects metrics, and generates HTML reports. You’ll see how static cameras, Sequencer flythroughs, replay runs, and material tests plug into CSV profiler and PerfReport. With new setup scripts and Project Launcher UI in UE 5.6/5.7, tech artists can finally own automated performance testing without becoming build engineers.
Beyond RGB: Measurement-Based Spectral Rendering in Unreal Engine
UVR is bringing high-end spectral rendering into Unreal Engine with its new Predict Engine plugin, announced in beta at Unreal Fest Stockholm. The system couples Unreal’s existing workflows with measured spectral data for lights, environments, cameras, and AXF materials to deliver “iso-photography” – renders that match physical photos, spectrally and photometrically. It simulates metamerism, polarization, wavelength-dependent refraction, and complex volumetric effects via a GPU-accelerated path tracer. UVR plans Omniverse and Blender integrations next, and is actively seeking Unreal users to test and shape the tool.
🚀 Tools, Pipelines & Memory
Unity 6.3 LTS: Cross‑Platform Toolkit, XR Upgrades, and No‑Code Terrain
Unity 6.3 LTS, the first major LTS since 6.0, focuses on stability and real-world production performance while adding powerful new workflows. Platform Toolkit unifies cross-platform services and lets teams test certification flows directly in the Editor. Artists and tech artists get no-code terrain shaders, 8-texture-coordinate materials, a rich shader template browser, and improved SubGraphs. Android XR gains face and object tracking, UI Toolkit gets custom shaders and SVG, and new Building Blocks jump-start common gameplay systems.
Stop Fighting the Heap: When Custom Allocators Win
Instead of treating custom memory allocators as over-engineering or NIH syndrome, this piece shows how they can dramatically improve performance when used surgically. By constraining size, order, or count of allocations, you can build simple LIFO/FIFO stacks, pools, buddy allocators, and linked-list schemes that outperform general-purpose heaps in specific scenarios. The article explores trade-offs around fragmentation, cache usage, and multithreading. It also warns to only introduce such complexity after profiling proves allocations are the bottleneck.