AI Game Coaches 🤖, Godot RTX 💡, Publisher Red Flags 🚩
👾 Horror, Psychology & Narrative Craft
Inside Haunting Humans: Crafting Research-Driven Psychological UFO Horror in UE5
Haunting Humans Studio reveals how they’re building “Who Are You!?”, a first-person psychological horror game rooted in real UFO investigations and emotional trauma. Playing as Ray Roswell in the 1980s, you confront grief, depression, and fractured memories rather than traditional combat or jumpscares. With psychologists shaping the mental health portrayal and researchers grounding the alien encounters, the team uses Unreal Engine 5.5 to subtly distort believable spaces into unsettling experiences. A public demo and constant player feedback drive ongoing refinement.
Publisher Red Flags: How Not to Lose Your Game (or Studio)
Before you sign that “dream” publishing offer, watch this. Two seasoned experts walk through real contract and relationship red flags that have stranded games in limbo and bankrupted teams. From recoup tricks and IP grabs to audit clauses, milestone abuse, and misaligned values, they show exactly what to question and how to renegotiate. It’s a rare, candid look at where publishing deals actually go wrong—and how to keep your studio alive.
🛠️ Tools, Workflows & Retro Code
Supercharge Unreal Editor Workflows with the Quick Menu Pie Plugin
Quick Menu introduces a highly customizable radial pie menu system for Unreal Engine, designed to slash editor friction for power users. You can visually wire up actions, submenus, and switches into menus that adapt to context like actor class or Blueprint type, then trigger them with a single key. The plugin comes packed with 250+ built-in actions for common tasks across 49+ editor types, plus support for console commands and custom Python actions. One purchase covers UE 5.0–5.7 with ongoing updates.
From Janky Unity Scripts to Stellar Asylum 2: A Retro Code Review
Two devs crack open a decade-old student project—Stellar Asylum, a chaotic local-multiplayer mobile game—and walk through its gloriously messy Unity C# code. Along the way they unpack circular movement math, double-tap input hacks, brittle quaternions, and surprisingly deep one-button character design. The conversation turns into a playful pre-production session for “Stellar Asylum 2,” debating Odin/Raylib vs. web tech and how AI agents could refactor the whole thing. It’s a funny, honest look at shipping your first real game and what you’d do differently today.
🎮 Discoverability & the Indie Business
Indie Pass: A Curated $6.99 Subscription Aiming to Fix Indie Discovery
Indie.io is launching Indie Pass, a $6.99/month, PC-first subscription that offers a rotating, tightly curated lineup of “distinctly indie” games instead of a giant all-in catalog. Launching April 13 with around 70 titles, it’s built to surface overlooked and back-catalog projects through strong recommendations and tagging. Developers are paid via an engagement-based revenue share and get detailed analytics on player behavior, with no exclusivity requirements. Backed by wiki.gg’s 10M MAUs, Indie Pass aims to keep smaller games from disappearing in today’s crowded marketplaces.
Building a ‘Friend Beside You’ AI Coach for Total War
Creative Assembly and NVIDIA team up at GDC 2026 to show how they built an AI “friend on the couch” advisor for Total War: PHARAOH. By mining the game’s own relational data, running a hybrid RAG pipeline fully on-device, and calling into classic AI analyzers, the assistant can reason about live strategy instead of parroting tooltips. The talk dives into model selection, latency and VRAM limits, context budgeting, and custom benchmarks. It’s rich, practical guidance for anyone planning in-game AI assistants.
🤖 AI, NPCs & Smarter Game Worlds
How One Engineer and an AI Copilot Added Path Tracing to Godot
Can an LLM actually help you add a path tracer to a complex engine? This GDC 2026 session answers “yes, if you treat it like a junior pair programmer with infinite references.” Using Cursor and Anthropic models, an NVIDIA engineer merged ray tracing into Godot’s Forward+ renderer, ported a DX12 HLSL path tracer to Vulkan GLSL, and wired up DLSS RR in weeks instead of months. The talk ends with performance numbers, lessons learned, and a fully MIT-licensed Godot path tracing branch you can study or reuse.
Bullying the LLM: How Authored AI NPCs Boost Player Engagement
Meaning Machine and the University of Bristol share rare, large-scale evidence that players genuinely enjoy talking to AI-powered characters—if those characters are bound by strong narrative design. Their study of Dead Meat and Blood Will Out shows high scores for enjoyment, freedom of expression, and engrossment, plus rich emergent interrogation strategies. The team details their shift from monolithic prompts to a “bully pipeline” that feeds finely targeted instructions to the model at runtime. They argue for a hybrid future where writers reclaim control in an AI-driven storytelling triangle of author, player, and machine.