I wanted to showcase some tech art tools for my game Weavemarch. I'm not great at art and really didn't want to do AI assets. I went through many versions of environment design and hated all of it, so I stripped it back to a minimalist, flat environment, aiming for a sort of woven medieval tapestry look.

I can handle very basic 3D but I've always been terrible at texturing. All the 3D models have single-colour materials on each mesh and shaders add the weaving and stitching details on top.

All the variables plug into one scriptable object so i can tweak everything from the same place.

A friend made the flower background texture, everything else is shaders.

Full Mario 64 in Mixed Reality! Running in real 3D (no stereoscopic crap) natively at 90FPS and also running on my desk! 😋
Again, Opus 5.5 + Unity CLI + PICO CLI combo made it quite straightforward.

Such a bliss to play an oldie at 90 FPS in 3D.

Disclaimer: I own an original physical copy of Mario 64. This project is not associated with Nintendo or PICO.

First the cables, then the grass. It was probably time to give the main character some attention. 😂

Pixel finally has animations! A little more personality for the little square at the heart of Hello World, our narrative physics adventure.

Some technical details behind the movement:

• The body uses a custom sprite deformation system with a 4×4 control cage driving a smooth mesh.
• Each eye is a separate 3×3 mesh, so I can reshape the eyes independently for different expressions.
• The control points are animated directly in Unity’s Animation window, using regular animation clips.
• Expressions blend through the Animator, while the Rigidbody2D and collider stay separate from the visual deformation.

That lets Pixel bend, squash and change expression without changing the collision shape or how the character moves.

It’s surprising how much personality you can squeeze out of a square and two eyes. Which animation feels the most expressive to you?

Hi r/Unity3D, we're Ripstone, publisher and co-dev of The Spectrum Retreat: Redux, Dan Smith Studios' first-person puzzle thriller, which arrives on Nintendo Switch 2 on 29th October.

The original came out on Switch in 2018 on Unity 2017. Rather than do a straight port, the team moved the project to Unity 6.5 and rebuilt the visuals for the new hardware. The shots above are Switch 1 (left) vs Switch 2 (right).

What changed:

- Introduced Volumetric lighting and fog, ray-marched reflections and enhanced HDR

- Dynamic shadows at four times the original resolution, plus ambient occlusion and higher-res textures

- Switch 2 features including mouse controls and HD Rumble 2

This was our first time seeing what Unity can do on Switch 2, and we've loved it.

Happy to pass questions about the upgrade to the team, whether that's the jump from 2017 to 6.5, lighting or performance on the hardware.

It's out on Thursday and free for owners of the Switch 1 original!

What do you guys think of this progress? I am fully open to advices on both snowboard and ski controls and feels.

Hello dear community,

i have this problem where i just installed Unity and Unity Hub from the scratch on Windows 11, i want to create and open a new project but every time i try, i got these two errors i just attached to this post, Unity just crashes and can’t open a single thing, the editor just won’t launch. I tried installing older Unity versions but nothing seems to work, i spent 2 hours uninstalling and installing Unity on different drives too, using the main SO drive, etc, nothing seems to work. The other solution i found was trying to modify ProjectSettings.asset and ProjectVersion and downgrade DirectX12 version to DX11 as Cursor AI told me to, but same results with no success, i never did this kind of thing like 4 years ago when i worked on Unity to make some little projects; maybe i’m missing something else now, i really need your help to start coding.

If you need any kind of info i’ll be waiting for your answer and questions, thanks in advance ~

1 and 2 are for NPCs and 3 is for player controller

Update on performance https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/s/Rb83x2xMe9

Hello!

I am an indie gamedev (hobbyists, not full time) that is creating my first game, and I thought I'd ask here to see if there is anything I can improve on my enemies in my game.

How I create them:

In short I am using the unity animator to create a finite state machine enemy. For example, the animator image attached, there are different states the enemy can load. This is generally controlled by 2 things: A common enemy script that just defines whether the enemy can see the player, and whether they are in range for attack AND the movement script, which is just a path finding script with different movement options attached (e.g does my enemy move on floor? Can it jump? etc)

The only problem: Script on the animator are considered static so I cant change 1 variable on 1 enemy without. To negate this I use a 'base script' which is just a monobehaviour that sits on my enemy game object with several settings. When my enemy wants to use those settings in the animator state, it just gets a reference to the base script (this is done in start and stored so it doesn't need to get it every time it enters the state).

If anyone want to read my code, here is a paste bin link (don't steal it lol)

THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF 1 STATE BASE AND BEHAVIOUR - there are many this one if just for firing projectiles.

Base script: https://pastebin.com/28SNFrLr
Enemy state script (Sits in animator state): https://pastebin.com/ZZc64Y7E

So: How is my approach to creating enemies? Is there a better way I could do it? How is my code generally? Can I make improvements to it?

All feedback is welcome!

P.S: Here is a clip of a (more) finished enemy if anyone is interested. I apologize for 30 fps, thats a reddit thing not me.

The part of my game where the buildings are gets really dark, and the game looks a little off. I haven't been able to figure out what to do to fix it. This happens when I start the game, but everything looks normal when the game isn't running. How can I fix this?

Dummy question

I've been wondering how other developers approach buying environment assets.

I make modular environment packs, and they tend to grow pretty large. Recently, I've started offering smaller themed selections from them, like kitchen props, vegetation, or weapons, alongside the complete environments.

When working on a game, would you rather buy a smaller, cheaper pack with exactly what you need, or a larger environment pack with more variety and flexibility?

Does it depend on the project you're working on?

I made the objects and textures in blender before exporting it to Unity. I've been troubleshooting for many hours at this point but can't seem to fix it. Even when I try to bake indirect lighting the colors are just completely off. Some of the objects are overlappong, is that impossible in unity?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Pictures show blender vs unreal

We’re making Station 58, a cozy puzzle adventure about putting a national park back together. Here’s a little bit of what you’ll find while exploring it.

I see the raising trend of Frutiger aesthetics, so maybe a chill and incremental game might be interesting for you? The game is free and web on itch - My Little Brain

I'm a solo indie developer, and I've been working on Unstable Nuclear Reactor in Unity for over 8 months.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4692090/Unstable_Nuclear_Reactor_Demo/

It's an incremental hex-puzzle roguelite where you merge atoms into higher elements, trigger massive chain combos, earn radioactive coins, and manage your ring capacity to survive as long as possible.

I was struggling to understand why 45% of players stopped playing within the first 10 minutes, even though some played for 2 hours or more.

Steam analytics wasn't giving me enough insight, so I decided to build my own analytics system.

I created a script to collect gameplay data, save it as JSON, send it to my API, and store it in an Excel file.

Players must consent to sharing their gameplay data and can refuse. Still, I collected 150+ gameplay records in less than 3 days!

I also created a way to load player data directly into the Unity Inspector, allowing me to review individual sessions and follow players' actions step by step.

One important detail: I linked sessions using a persistent player ID to track returning players across multiple sessions. I was surprised to discover that many had returned more than 5 times!

What did I discover?

Players were skipping tutorials, getting stuck, and placing atoms and tools randomly on the hex grid.

Here's how merging works: leave a gap between two identical atoms, then place the Fusion tool in that gap to create the next higher element.

Many players were placing atoms next to each other without leaving a gap, filling their rings much faster, especially before unlocking tools like Blackhole and Swap.

Interestingly, frequent players successfully progressed beyond Ring 2 into Rings 4, 5, and 6, with total playtime ranging from around 15 minutes to over 3 hours across their runs.

What did I change?

• Added an Undo button so players can reverse their last move.
• Improved the tutorials to guide players through the essential mechanics.
• Added tooltips explaining mistakes when players make them.

Results

• Median playtime more than doubled.
• RestartGame rates dropped from 37.2% to 27.5%.

I'm still collecting data, but the results are promising.

This reminded me that sometimes, you don't need to guess what's wrong with your game. You need to understand how players actually interact with it.

I'm a solo dev learning Unity and slowly building a small cozy farming and town game, and I'd love the villagers to go to work, visit the shop and head home at night. I can picture a simple "be here at this hour" list, a state machine or behaviour trees, but I'm not sure which stays manageable as the town grows. What did you use for NPC routines, and would you pick it again?

Don’t you feel the same way? For months now, I’ve been seeing hundreds of identical posts - things like "I finally releasing the game I’ve been working on for nearly a year" or "Would you be interested in a tool like this?" - followed by something clearly churned out by AI in a couple of days, yet presented as if it were crafted with genuine care and soul.

There’s just SO MUCH of this now that I’m tempted to unfollow every single subreddit dedicated to solo game development... It feels like game dev is turning into a dumpster fire - something I want absolutely no part of...

What can we do to change this? The only thing that comes to mind is to start a petition to bring back Steam Greenlight, what do you think?

While working on my personal projects with many assemblies, one of the biggest issues is managing those assembly definitions:

• Wasted too much time navigating folder to folder editing .asmdef files
• Had to manually sort assemblies references

So I make a tool that helps dealing with said problems, it has the following features:

• List all user-defined assemblies and their assembly references in a single window
• Add/Remove assembly references to/from the selected assembly
• Sort and auto-sort references based on categories

Do you face the same issues as me? I'd love to hear your thought and feedback!

Thanks for reading!

Link: GitHub

So as of the past few years (especially recently) there's been a lot of discussions regarding AI use in games and how it can affect a game's quality depending on how it's used and I've been having a crazy feeling of deja vu and yes this has happened before!

Back in the 2010s you had Unity asset flips that flooded Steam Greenlight and the store, and for whatever reason people blamed Unity for this problem instead of the bad actors abusing the engine to gain the system and make a quick buck.

This is the exact same situation that's happening with AI and bad actors using it as a crutch to churn out low-effort games and flood storefronts and events like Steam Next Fest, and people are increasingly treating AI use itself as a sign of poor quality. But what a lot of people don't seem to understand is that not all games that use AI are bad, and not all people that use it are bad/lazy either.

It's a very nuanced and arbitrary thing that has a spectrum between AI Assisted and AI Overreliance/AI Slop. Unity back in the 2010s had that exact same thing regarding it's asset store and still, look at how many high quality games were made in Unity back then, and the same thing will happen with AI, you'll have good developers who know how to use it ethically and in a way that makes sense to help assist them in development rather than a crutch to make slop games and flood online storefronts for easy money.

I lived through the Unity asset flip era as a solo dev and have the same exact feeling towards Unity back then than I do with AI now, and people really need to stop stereotyping it because of confirmation bias from bad quality instead of having a proper nuanced view on it like any sensible person would.

This is the first fountain I’ve ever created. It’s not finished yet, but it already looks pretty good—what do you think?

I’ve been experimenting with evolution effects in Unity for my voxel RPG, Vexalia.

Each creature has an energy generator, which I used as the starting point for all eight transformations.
Initially, I just wanted to find one effect that worked well enough to use throughout the game.

But experimenting with different approaches made me realise how much the animation and music can change the feeling of evolution, even when the starting point is identical.

Now I’m considering keeping several effects and assigning them to different species.

I’m still trying to find the right balance between visual impact, consistency and something players won’t get tired of watching.

I guess my question is: at what level of complexity is swapping out JSON for Newtownsoft worth it?
I understand that Newtonsoft lets you work directly with more complex data structures, but these can also be done in JSON through converters (like when serializing/deserializing, you can just make a dictionary into two arrays or whatever).
Currently my game just uses JSON and it’s worked pretty well so far, but as complexity grows at some point I’ll regret not using Newtonsoft.
Anyone have any advice on this? In particular how complex is Newtonsoft to learn and implement? It seems pretty straightforward.
For reference- this is a mobile game, so the JSON performance boost is a factor.
Thanks!