Steam Dev Pay 💸, Diablo VFX Tricks ✨, Vulkan Engine 👨💻
🌱 Rendering & Visual Tricks
Realistic UE5 Grass Wind Using Stretched World-Space Perlin Noise
Alpago Göktenay’s latest Unreal Engine 5 demo nails the feeling of wind sweeping across fields of grass using a deceptively simple trick. He drives the motion with stretched Perlin noise in world space, stressing that stretching coordinates before the Perlin lookup is crucial for natural, slow-moving gusts. Göktenay shares more technical notes in his LinkedIn comments, and the article rounds up extra tutorials on Ghibli-style wind, SpeedTree + Nanite foliage, and hand-painted windy forests.
Endless Motion and Fake Volumes: Inside Diablo 3’s VFX Tricks
Using Diablo 3 as a case study, this article demonstrates how a few scrolling noise textures, smart value control, and the right blending can create endlessly mesmerizing motion with minimal particles. You’ll see exactly how to implement Julian Love’s noise-multiplication trick in Unreal, fix common issues like phasing and crushed blacks, and rebuild the Arcane Orb’s swirling nebula. The second half dives into D3-style gradient-based pseudo-volumetric smoke and experiments with dynamic lighting, from sun tracking to back-lit rims.
🧠 Game Design, Business & Publishing
Why Your $10 Steam Game Only Pays You About $4
Most new indie devs think Steam’s 30% cut is the main cost of selling a game—and are shocked when they see how little actually hits their bank account. This breakdown walks through VAT, refunds and chargebacks, Steam’s cut, US withholding tax, and your own local taxes. The result: a $10 game might only net you around $4, or even less. If you’re planning to live off your games, you need to understand this math before launch.
Kinetic Publishing: What Phasmophobia’s Devs Want in Your Pitch
After turning a solo horror project into a multimillion-selling hit, Kinetic Games is using that experience to help other indies. Kinetic Publishing aims to back creative projects where the devs’ excitement is obvious and the core idea feels fresh. The team stresses the value of demos, clear USPs, and basic business awareness in pitches. Rather than signing dozens of games, they plan to work deeply with a few studios, offering funding, production, and marketing support.
🕹️ Game Development & Tools
How Liminal Point Reinvents Classic Survival Horror from a Dollhouse View
HideWorks, a two-person indie team, breaks down how they’re building Liminal Point, a 90s-inspired, isometric survival-horror game about a rock band returning to a quarantined island. The unusual top-down “dollhouse” camera forced them to invent new tools to keep tension high, limit visibility, and make combat feel fluid. They discuss pushing visuals while targeting low-spec hardware, the grind of constant marketing that led to 100k+ Steam wishlists, and lessons learned from starting console work too early.
Unity Graph Toolkit: Visual Novels, Custom Nodes, and Designer-Friendly Workflows
Learn how to turn Unity’s experimental Graph Toolkit into a powerful, designer-facing workflow. The video starts with installing the package and building a visual novel graph with branching dialogue, reusable variables, and character/background sprites. It then dives deeper, showing how to implement custom editor and runtime nodes for audio and video, and briefly highlights an editor-only Texture Maker tool. If you want node-based tools tailored to your game, this walkthrough shows the full stack.
📐 Engines & 3D Math Deep Dives
Build a Modern Vulkan Game Engine: Forward+ Lighting, Ray Queries & More
Khronos’ Vulkan Working Group has launched “Building a Simple Game Engine,” an advanced tutorial series for developers who already know the Vulkan basics. It focuses on real engine architecture—ECS, scene management, render abstraction, input handling, and robust timing—rather than just more API calls. You’ll then dive into forward+ tiled lighting, shadow mapping, ray-query-powered hybrid rendering, compute-based physics, and HRTF spatial audio. The series also tackles CI/CD, crash dumps, profiling, and packaging for Windows, Linux, and Android.
Point-Based vs Plane-Based PGA: The Clearer 3D Math for Devs
Projective geometric algebra offers powerful tools for modeling 3D geometry and motion, but there’s a fork in the road: should vectors represent points or planes? This article compares point-based and plane-based PGA, showing that while they’re mathematically dual and compute the same results, their conceptual cost differs dramatically. Point-based PGA keeps distances, angles, and dimensionality changes aligned with how we already use vectors and matrices. Plane-based PGA flips many of those interpretations, making everyday reasoning and integration with existing math significantly harder.