Godot Bans AI PRs 🤖, Steam Demos Strategy 🎮
đź“° Industry Shifts & Policies
Drowning in PRs: Why Godot Is Cracking Down on AI Contributions
Facing an exploding PR backlog and a rise in AI-generated code, the Godot project is reshaping how people contribute. The new policy focuses on growing human maintainers, banning autonomous AI agents, forbidding substantial AI-generated code, and disallowing AI-written replies in issues and PRs. First-time contributors will be funneled toward bugfixes and docs before attempting major features. The goal is to make PR review feel worthwhile again and ensure every line of engine code has a responsible human behind it.
Your Steam Demo Isn’t for Fans: It’s for Sickos
Steam Next Fest data shows that most players who try your demo will never wishlist your game—and that’s normal. Demo→wishlist conversion hovers around 20% and isn’t strongly tied to total wishlist success, so obsessing over that percentage is a trap. Demos really exist to reach a tiny group of “Sickos”: hyper-engaged players and creators who sample everything and drive word of mouth. As an indie on Steam, you market to them—and they market your game to everyone else.
🎮 Tools, Tech & Training
From Splashes to Oceans: New 14-Hour Unity Water FX Course
A new in-depth Unity course from The Unity Shaders Bible author Fabrizio Espindola aims to teach you how to build custom water systems from scratch. “Real-Time Water in Unity: From Splashes to Oceans” covers everything from splash VFX and waterfalls to compute shader-driven interactive surfaces and full ocean simulations. The curriculum blends Shader Graph, HLSL, flowmaps, depth textures, and C# integration, with a focus on both visuals and performance. Interested devs can join the wishlist and request extra topics for the final 4 hours.
Fix Skirt Clipping Fast: Kawaii Physics v1.21 for Unreal 5.8
Kawaii Physics v1.21 is out, bringing one of Unreal’s most widely adopted secondary motion plugins up to UE5.8. This update tackles common character animation headaches with BoneConstraint Subdivision for better skirt and limb collisions, Fixed Substepping for low-FPS stability, and Shared Collision support across Kawaii nodes and Animation Blueprints. The release also ships performance improvements, bug fixes, and a new bilingual documentation site. Feedback, feature requests, and contributions are welcomed through GitHub.