VR Storytelling 🎮, C vs C++ APIs 👨💻, 2025 Game Trends 📈
🎮 Narrative & Design Deep Dives
From Spectacle to Story: Crafting Narrative That Works in VR
VR turns players from observers into inhabitants, breaking many traditional storytelling assumptions. A veteran Coatsink writer explains how to separate the “gameplay agent” from the “story agent,” why spectacle is cheaper than drama in VR, and how to scope cutscenes without killing agency. The article also dives into environmental storytelling, VO tradeoffs, and handling big IPs like Jurassic World and MIB. It’s a practical, example-rich guide for anyone designing narrative in VR games.
Why Simple C-Style APIs Outlive Fancy C++: A Live Design Session
Using an image-registration problem from medical imaging, this live session walks through designing a C/C++ API that handles async work, memory, and failures without drowning callers in complexity. The conversation contrasts C-style out-parameters and enums with `std::optional`, futures, and exceptions, arguing that simple, wrap-friendly cores age better than “modern” abstractions. Along the way they show how to design from the call site backward, favor best-effort behavior over crashes, and keep error handling from infecting every line of code.
📈 Market Trends & Year-in-Review
Solitaire Surges, Switch 2 Shocks, and Pokémon Prints Money: 2025 in Review
Solitaire is “super hot” again, Switch 2 is breaking records, and a Pokémon card app just out-earned Pokémon Go’s first year. This year-end roundup tracks 2025’s standout stories: Playtika’s dominance in mobile solitaire, Nintendo’s wildly successful new hybrid console, and Metacore’s hyper-local marketing playbook for Japan. Add in Pokémon TCG Pocket’s $1.3B launch and Candy Crush’s deep code refactor for “Fish 3.0,” and you get a clear view of where casual and mobile are headed next.
Why Hit Indie Devs Play Everything (Plus 2025 Steam Picks)
Hit indie devs share one unglamorous habit: they grind through dozens of games in their niche, documenting every mechanic that works or fails. This article explains why you should treat Steam like a research lab—especially focusing on “on-the-cusp” games with 150–400 reviews that look good but never ignited. It then provides a genre-organized shopping list of discounted 2024–2025 titles ideal for design study, from idle and tower defense to cozy management and horror. Along the way, it challenges assumptions about cozy games and “low-status” job sims as overlooked opportunities.