Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!
May is coming to a close today, did you have a good month? I hope so!
For me, the past few days I've been working on something completely new and very exciting as a personal challenge, I've been preparing to give my very first talk! I've been recording videos for several years now, but I've never attempted to present something to a live audience. This will be my first time and it's already been an interesting challenge since I had to learn how to structure a talk, how to make some slides, how to make good presenter notes, and have enough content to talk for 1 hour.
The topic of the talk is on how to write high quality clean code. I'm very happy with how the slides came out and I hope the actual presentation goes well! I'm planning to do a video version as well so stay tuned for that next week.
Have you achieved any personal challenges recently?
Game Dev
Why games cost so much to make?
We've all heard how AAA game budgets are ballooning, how games nowadays are considered a failure if they don't sell 5M+ copies. Here is a really interesting breakdown on why games are so expensive to make.
It's a very interesting blog post with a ton of data. And it has a very very interesting takeaway. Games are not necessarily more expensive because making the same game costs way more than before (in fact tanks to the awesome tools that exist nowadays game developers are massively more efficient than in the 90s) The bigger issue is that we keep making bigger and bigger games. More features, more platforms, more content, more complexity, more everything. In other words: scope!
Thankfully on the indie side this is not exactly the case, recently the games that have found most success on Steam actually have pretty small scope. Incremental games, Co-op games, Horror games, many of those are finding success with just 3-6 hours of gameplay. But on AAA they are still chasing absolutely massive 100 hour games with giant worlds.
The post also breaks down what actually costs all that money. According to their analysis, 2D games tend to be much cheaper than comparable 3D games, multiplayer adds a serious cost, longer playtime also adds cost, and voiced audio is a huge multiplier.
Team size is still the strongest predictor of budget, but the bigger hidden cost is actually coordination. One of the most interesting graphs is on how amount of job types required to make a game nowadays. 10 years ago AAA studios mostly only had 11-30 job titles, nowadays 35% of studios have over 50! And of course with all those different people doing different jobs you need to coordinate somehow, which means lots more managers.
One piece of good news is apparently crunch has been going down, or at least part of the reason for the increased cost is people are no longer crunching for free. So crunch isn't solved but at least now it's being paid appropriately.
The lesson for indie devs is don't fall into the trap of massively expanding scope and team size. Remember how your cost directly impacts your ability to make successful games. The more you spend on your game the harder it is to turn a profit.
Also remember how the cost of a feature is not just "how long does it take to make this one thing?" It is also how that feature interacts with every other system, how much testing it needs, how much UI it needs, how many edge cases it creates, and how much complexity it adds to the whole project.
So the takeaway is very simple: if you want to actually finish your game, control your scope! Every extra feature sounds small in isolation, but complexity stacks up fast. That is true for AAA, but it is just as true for indie devs.
| I have always been advising people to make small games and this is just yet another study emphasizing that same point. Smaller games are cheaper which makes them easier to find success. AAA now has the problem where even 5 million copies sold isn't enough to be considered a success, I don't want you, an indie dev, to fall into that same trap. |
Affiliate
FREE Treasure, FREE Unity AI Trial!
I’ve been researching Unity AI for the past few weeks, and it is genuinely very useful!
Importantly, it’s very useful in many use cases OTHER than generating visuals, in fact I think these other use cases are the most useful ones:
Build Editor Tools, Analyze Profiler, Fix bugs, do Level Design, learn Assets/Documentation fast, analyze your own code, analyze entire sample projects, build UI, and more!
MASSIVE tutorial (1h30m) coming out this Monday!
There is a completely FREE 14 day trial so you can try it risk free and see just how much it can help you in your workflow. Get the FREE Trial HERE!
The Publisher of the Week this time is POLYBOX, who makes a lot of environments and characters.
Get the FREE Polyquest Treasures which is a gorgeous looking treasure chest! This could be some fun reward in your game.
Get it HERE and use coupon POLYBOX2026 at checkout to get it for FREE!
Are you making a 2D game? Check out this awesome HumbleBundle!
It features thousands of tiles to help you build any 2D game level you want, any theme, any perspective, it’s all up to you!
It’s 96% OFF! Get it HERE!
Game Dev
Unreal Engine 6 revealed!
Epic has just teased Unreal Engine 6! And surprisingly the first game shown running on it is Rocket League.
The teaser was very very short, basically a "new era, new engine" reveal with a first look at Rocket League upgraded to UE6. It does look absolutely gorgeous. The lighting and reflections look insane, the cars are super shiny and extremely high poly, very impressive stuff!
There are not many technical details yet, and there is no public release date for the engine, so this is more of a teaser than a full announcement. But still, seeing the Unreal Engine 6 logo officially appear is a pretty big moment.
GameFromScratch gathered some more info on it from various sources, in terms of release date maybe 1-2 years out, and based on a Tim Sweeney tweet it is meant to be sort of a merger between UE5 and UEFN (Fortnite version) with Verse (their programming language for UEFN).
The comments on the video announcement are full of jokes/concern related to how UE5 seems unoptimized and unfinished. Compared to UE4, which basically took over the entire industry, it does seem that UE5 has been lacking somewhat. Hopefully they are learning some big lessons so UE6 will be easier for developers to work with.
Either way, this is clearly the start of the next Unreal cycle. We don't know when developers will get access to it, but Epic has officially started saying the words "Unreal Engine 6", so now everyone is going to be watching very closely.
| I am always on the side of how competition improves things for developers of all kinds, so even though I'm a Unity developer I'm always interested in seeing what Unreal does, and how Unity will compete with it. |
Gaming
The Witcher 3 expansion after 11 years!
Here's some completely unexpected news, The Witcher 3 is getting a brand new expansion!
CD Projekt Red officially announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Songs of the Past, a third major expansion coming in 2027. It is being co-developed with Fool's Theory, the studio also working on The Witcher 1 remake and made up of several developers who worked on The Witcher series before.
And honestly, that is crazy! The Witcher 3 launched in 2015, Hearts of Stone in 2015, Blood and Wine released in 2016, and now over a decade later we are somehow getting another full expansion. And it's a full expansion with Geralt! They have already said how Geralt's story is over and Witcher 4 will have another protagonist so it's awesome to play as him one last time. CDPR is calling it a new adventure, not just some tiny update, they specifically say it's an Expansion and not DLC, although we still do not know much about the story or scale yet.
They have also recently unveiled how The Witcher 3 has surpassed 65 MILLION copies sold! That's insane!
Now the big question is whether it can live up to Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, because those are some very big shoes to fill!
Summer Game Fest is happening next week, I wonder if we will see more then. The Witcher has some of the best trailers, the very first one Killing Monsters is still one of my favorite game trailers of all time.
| I was definitely not expecting this! I love The Witcher 3, it's undoubtedly one of the best games of all time, getting a new expansion 11 years after release is certainly a fun surprise! |
Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!
(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)
Thanks for reading!
Code Monkey
Log in
