Touch-First Godot 🎮, UX loss aversion đź§
📱 Mobile Game Dev & Tools
Xogot: Bringing a Native, Touch-First Godot Editor to iPhone and iPad
Xogot doesn’t just recompile Godot for iOS—it redesigns the editor as a touch-first, fully native iPhone and iPad app that follows Apple’s strict UX rules. To preserve Godot’s multi-process workflow on iPadOS, the team “virtualized” Godot’s global state so multiple editor and game instances can live in a single process. Xogot can’t run native-code plugins or .NET yet, but stays closely compatible with desktop Godot and offers a generous free tier. With LibGodot and the new Xogot Connect add-on, it also makes embedding Godot and deploying to iOS from desktop dramatically smoother.
Shipping Big Unity Games: 6 Lessons from Backyard Baseball
Mega Cat Studios lifts the curtain on how they took Backyard Baseball from a quick Unity prototype to a stable, shippable game. They share six concrete lessons on project structure, modular architecture, Assembly Definitions, and smarter automated testing. The post also covers asset import automation and practical Git workflows that prevent nasty scene and prefab conflicts in large teams. If your growing Unity project is starting to feel fragile, this guide offers a clear, production-tested roadmap.
🧠Design, UX & Technical Deep Dives
Ignacio Castaño on Spark, GPU Texture Encoding, and The Witness
Self-taught graphics veteran Ignacio Castaño (Crytek, Nvidia, The Witness) explains how he’s now pushing texture tech with Spark, a real-time GPU texture encoder. He dives into why JPEG-style formats fail on GPUs, what makes ASTC brutally hard to encode, and how Spark exploits the GPU itself to get near–offline quality at runtime. Along the way he shares stories from designing Nvidia’s tessellation hardware, building The Witness’s engine, and the harsh business reality of selling highly specialized dev tools.
Stop Punishing Players for Clicking Your Buttons: Loss Aversion 101
A solo dev unpacks why players hate losing things and what that means for your game. From fake “trap” buttons that just steal currency to fragile weapons that nobody wants to use, they show how loss aversion makes many “smart” risk–reward mechanics miserable in practice. They contrast roguelites, where short runs can tolerate harsh trade-offs, with incremental games, where negative modifiers poison long-term fun. The takeaway: design for positive progress and kinder framing, not “gotcha” moments.