Unity Prefabs 👨💻, Vulkan Pipelines 🧵, VR Optimization 🥽
🎮 Big Bets & Smarter Strategies
Building Shoulders of Giants: An Indie Studio’s Big-Scope Bet
Patrick McAvena of Moving Pieces Interactive breaks down how his three-person Brooklyn studio turned a VFX background and Unreal tinkering into full-time game development. He shares the iterative journey behind Shoulders of Giants, from RTS experiments to a co-op roguelike with a striking “pilot on a mech” hook. The conversation digs into first-time multiplayer challenges, platform pivots away from mobile, and landing support from Xbox and Epic. McAvena closes with candid thoughts on rising competition and the shift toward tightly scoped indie games.
From Playable to Scalable: Using AI Speed Without Wasting It
AI now makes it easy to get a playable prototype, but that same speed can cement bad assumptions and make pivots expensive. This piece argues that the real constraint is no longer build speed, but decision quality around audience, core loop, and differentiation. Through examples like Pixel Flow, it shows how treating each prototype as a focused experiment turns AI into leverage, not a crutch. A new TXG x Mind Studios collaboration illustrates how to pair AI speed with experienced execution to reach scalable games.
🧱 Unity & Vulkan Fundamentals
Mastering Unity Prefab Variants: Faster, Cleaner Game Production
This Unity tutorial dives deep into prefabs, prefab variants, and nested prefabs, showing how they can massively speed up your game production. Using a tanks demo, it demonstrates how to share logic, swap visuals, and create player/AI variations without duplicating work. You’ll learn how to organize base prefabs vs variants, manage overrides, and use nested prefabs for shared meshes. It also covers smart grayboxing workflows so you can replace placeholder geometry with final art in seconds.
Frames in Flight Demystified: Practical Vulkan Pipelining for Game Engines
If “frames in flight” in Vulkan still feels mysterious, this talk offers a concrete mental model and code-level blueprint. It explains how duplicating per-frame resources lets the CPU and GPU run in parallel without data races, and why more than two frames often just add latency and memory pressure. You’ll also learn how to classify your buffers and images by update frequency and handle on-demand duplication safely. Finally, it clarifies the tricky relationship between frames in flight, swapchain images, and binary vs. timeline semaphores.
🚀 VR & Mobile Rendering
Squeezing VR Performance from Quest 2/3: A GPU-Driven Culling Deep Dive
Lucas walked through how they built a custom GPU-driven occlusion culling system for their voxel VR game Factions on Meta Quest 2 and 3, working around tile-based Adreno GPU behavior, limited Vulkan features, and tight bandwidth by using a low-resolution depth buffer, inflated occluder meshes, and subgroup-optimized histogram logic to cull hidden geometry without expensive extra passes—delivering measurable performance gains on Quest 3, enabling more complex future content, and ending with a clear wishlist for next-gen mobile VR GPUs.
Optimizing Mobile Ray Tracing: Glossy Reflections on Mali G1
ARM’s latest Mali GPUs dramatically change what’s possible with ray tracing on mobile, and this session shows how to capitalize on it. The talk covers BLAS/TLAS best practices, choosing between ray query and ray tracing pipelines, and implementing glossy reflections with hybrid SSR and directional ray binning. It also tackles the “material explosion” problem with uber-shaders and a ray visibility buffer approach. If you’re targeting high-end phones with Vulkan, this is a roadmap to real-time RT effects.