Unity AI Games 🤖, Async Awaitable 👨💻, UE5 Substrate 🎨
🎨 Design & Genre Trends
Why Indie and AA Studios Are Reviving ‘Abandoned’ Genres
Knights Peak VP of Publishing Eugenio Vitale explains how the label selects and supports “Premium Indie to AA” games built on personality, familiarity, and quality. He breaks down why designing for a universal audience no longer works as Steam shifts toward APAC, and how discoverability and price sensitivity are reshaping indie strategy. Vitale also shares nuanced views on monetization, subscription deals, and early access, and highlights how small teams are reviving genres like RTS that big publishers abandoned.
A Game Dev’s Starter Guide to Mobile Ad Monetisation
If you’re planning to fund your mobile game with ads, this article shows why you must design for monetisation from the start. It breaks down best practices for placing banners, interstitials, and rewarded videos without wrecking your gameplay loop. You’ll get a clear, jargon-free overview of mediation platforms, ad networks, and the closed loop between ads and user acquisition. The piece closes with a concise KPI glossary so you can actually read your monetisation dashboards.
🛠️ Tools, Tech & Engine Deep Dives
Unity AI Promises ‘No-Code’ Casual Games from Natural Language
Unity is gearing up to unveil an upgraded Unity AI beta at GDC that it claims can generate full casual games from natural-language prompts, no coding required. CEO Matthew Bromberg says the assistant will combine Unity’s deep understanding of project context with frontier models like GPT and Llama. Unity pitches this as a way to “democratise” game development and unlock tens of millions of new creators. Behind the scenes, partner tools like Scenario and Layer AI power asset generation.
Beyond Coroutines: How Awaitable Fixes Async Programming in Unity
This video explains why your Unity game hitches during loads and how to fix it with modern async patterns. It contrasts coroutines, C# Tasks, and Unity’s Awaitable API, showing where each fits and why Tasks alone don’t map cleanly onto the player loop. You’ll learn to write clean async/await code that keeps frames responsive, uses timeScale-aware delays, and safely hops to background threads for heavy work. The talk also covers key gotchas like pooled awaitables, cancellation, and minimizing thread switches.
🚀 Launch, PR & Visibility
How to Not Suck at PR for Steam Next Fest
Indie PR pro Robbie Bisschop (Pirate PR) breaks down exactly how to handle press, creators, and social media around Steam Next Fest. He explains how to write effective press releases, build creator-friendly press kits, and use embargoes and exclusives without annoying anyone. You’ll learn when to launch your demo, how to exploit Steam’s tagging and Next Fest layout, and why “lazy” authentic social posts and smart ads can dramatically boost wishlists. If you’re relying on Next Fest, this is essential homework.
Mastering Substrate: Unreal Engine 5.7’s Next-Gen Material System
Unreal Engine 5.7’s Substrate system completely overhauls material authoring, and this video shows how to use it in practice. You’ll learn how Substrate slabs define reflectivity, roughness, and light transport using MFP and thickness, then see how operators stack and blend layers physically. The tutorial walks through building tinted carbon fiber and realistic automotive paint with metallic flakes and rust using Adaptive GBuffer. It’s a must-watch for artists chasing higher fidelity and control in UE5 materials.