Unity Roads 🛣️, Unity DLL Magic 🪄, Steam Demos Data 📊
🛣️ Smarter Worlds: Roads & Destruction
Indie Dev Builds Dynamic Unity Road System With Real Engineering Curves
Unity developer Edd996 has created a dynamic road system where roads can intersect anywhere, instead of snapping to fixed nodes. Built entirely from straight lines and true circular arcs, it mimics real civil-engineering layouts while keeping the math light enough for mobile. The goal is to release this as a free Unity asset to help solo and indie teams get AAA-style roads. A deeper technical breakdown and newsletter are available on the developer’s blog.
Building a Fully Destructible Neon 1950s America: Inside Deliver At All Cost
Deliver At All Cost lets players tear through a picture-perfect retro America, driving an unstoppable truck across fully destructible diners, motels, and suburbs. Swedish studio Far Out Games spent three years pushing large-scale destruction while crafting a semi-open world of increasingly wild, uniquely designed missions. With over 80 voice actors and a lush neon 1950s aesthetic, the game caught Konami’s eye after a GDC pitch. The article unpacks the technical, design, and business journey from school prototype to studio debut.
🧠 Deep Tech: Engines & Rendering
Inside Nanite Tessellation: Dynamic Displacement Comes to Unreal Engine 5.4
This article kicks off a series on Nanite Tessellation—Epic’s new system for dynamically tessellating and displacing meshes using material shaders in UE 5.4. The author contrasts simplification-based Nanite with amplification approaches, arguing Nanite was the right foundation but displacement offers huge wins in storage and authoring flexibility. From procedural texturing and reusable materials to film-style rigs that subdivide and displace, the post shows how artists gain power without ballooning data sizes. It also highlights a practical benefit: scalable pipelines where low/mid-poly assets can be amplified up for premium platforms.
Stop Guessing Your Native Calls: Unity Marshalling Explained from Scratch
Calling C++ from Unity doesn’t have to feel fragile or magical. In this deep-dive, the author builds a native “Vector2 math” DLL, then shows exactly how Unity marshals structs, floats, and byte arrays across the managed/native boundary. You’ll learn how to use `StructLayout`, `DllImport`, `ref`, and `Marshal.Copy` safely, plus how to handle native-allocated memory without leaks. The result is a clear mental model of ownership, lifetime, and patterns you can reuse in your own plugins and mods.
🕹️ Player Experience: UI & Interaction
Make 3D UI with Unity 6.2’s New World Space Mode
Unity 6.2’s new World Space Render Mode for UI Toolkit lets you move your UI off the flat screen and into your 3D world. This tutorial walks you through building in-world elements like enemy health bars and VR-style menus using the updated workflow. You’ll also implement a simple billboarding script so these UI panels always face the camera. Linked sample projects and docs help you go deeper into modern UI Toolkit design.
Should You Keep Your Steam Demo Up After Launch? 2025 Data Says…
Drawing on data from over 1,000 successful 2025 Steam games, this post tackles whether it’s worth keeping your demo up after launch—especially for short narrative and horror titles. Only 21% of hits still have a demo live, and post-launch demos barely affect follower/wishlist growth. Yet games with demos enjoy significantly higher average review scores. The verdict: demos are vital pre-launch, and post-launch you should keep them only if they’re good and low-maintenance.