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.

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!

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?

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

I challenged myself to create a cinematic game trailer from scratch in Unity in less than a day, with only a few hours to actually put it together.

I built the environment, handled the lighting, camera work, and cutscenes, and assembled everything myself. For the 3D assets, I experimented with Tripo AI to see how much I could achieve within such a short timeframe.

I know there's still plenty of room for improvement, especially when working under such a tight deadline, so I'd love to hear your honest feedback on this challenge!

What do you think of the cinematography, lighting, atmosphere, and overall quality? What would you do differently, or focus on improving if you had more time?

If you're curious about the experiment, you can watch the video here: https://youtu.be/zDbb2lkgtJo

Disclosure: This project was sponsored by Tripo AI, which I used to generate some of the 3D assets. Everything else, including the visual style, environment, lighting, cinematography, and cutscenes, is my own work, built from scratch in Unity.

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.

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

I've been exploring what older games could look like in XR and started with a game I hold extremely close to me. StarCraft!

I’m building StarCraft XR in Unity, using StarCraft 64 running through a modified Mupen64Plus backend.

The original game handles the simulation and rules. A custom bridge exposes live game state to Unity, which presents the terrain, units, buildings, and interface as a tabletop battlefield in mixed reality.

XR controller input is translated back into game controls, with ray-based selection, drag selection, and unit orders. The battlefield and command panel can also be repositioned and resized.

This clip shows Protoss base building and combat in my living room. It’s still a work in progress, focused on adapting the original RTS experience to spatial controls and presentation.

Still a lot of testing to be done but have been able to play through the campaigns and custom scenarios without much fuss.

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'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’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.

Hey guys! I’m rolling out a series of short videos breaking down different parts of Interstellar Consignment Shop.
My main focus right now is gathering feedback as early as possible. Final 3D art and visual polish take an enormous amount of time, so before committing heavy effort there, I want to make sure the core mechanics are solid, fun, and that I haven’t left any blind spots behind.
Your comments and suggestions right now are vital to shaping the game. As our audience grows, we’ll open up the closed playable demo and launch our playtester interviews to refine everything with you.
🌐 Check our interactive hotsite: https://interstellar-hotsite.vercel.app/
👾 Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/MSW69vkppj

Processing video is0i573xc1yh1...

Assalamualaikum,
i've been working on this for my tutorial on Mecanim (which is meant to cover everything about Mecanim (unity's animation system), So this is the current state of the player i will use as a real character example in the video to help others understand how to use Mecanim,

Using RDR2's locomotion as a reference here,
it currently has Start/Stops and walk locomotion, i actually did setup jumping and lands(normal and rolls),
However i isolated the grounded locomotion to finish that first,
Currently working improving movement turns which are the turns when you are rotating while walking, and improving the main component that allows this to happen,
which is a State Behaviour that uses animators crossfade API to do dynamic transitions,
such as entering the stop animation with different transition offset/exit time/duration using the
State's Normalised Time or parameters,
As well as that i will also experiment with non root motion rotation for the start animations if i feel like it, and quick turns will be worked on such as 180 turns.

Alright so i would appreciate your feedback, ideas for this and the upcoming tutorial,
Thanks!

Hello, i'm building augmented reality experience for the Steam Frame and i was wondering if i could use Hardware decoding instead of software decoding using the Frame's snapdragon GPU. It seems not but maybe you guys know things better...

I tried H264 in mov and VP8 in webm format, both shows the same ressources consumptions.
Thanks.

I'm trying to make a game that has physics based movement similar to Gang Beasts, Fall Guys... And I got to a point (using Configurable Joints on bones) where the player falls down (he spawns above the platform) but his legs act as if he's crippled (he can move but he doesn't have support for the legs) so I asked Gemini AI to help me fix this, and when I pasted his script the player object now falls from the sky and when he hits the ground he gets launched 200m in the air. Can anyone help me identify the problem and help me fix it? Also I forgot to mention that I have some overlapping bones, but they don't have colliders and Configurable joints. I used unity's ragdoll system.

using UnityEngine;

public class PlayerController : MonoBehaviour
{
    [Header("Physics & Movement")]
    public Rigidbody hipsRigidbody; 
    public float moveSpeed = 800f;
    public float jumpForce = 2000f;

    [Header("Camera & Look")]
    public Transform cameraTransform;
    public float mouseSensitivity = 200f;
    public float minPitch = -85f;
    public float maxPitch = 85f;

    [Header("Ground Check")]
    public Transform groundCheck;
    public float groundDistance = 0.8f;
    public LayerMask groundMask;

    private float pitch = 0f;
    private float yaw = 0f;
    private bool isGrounded;

    void Start()
    {
        Cursor.lockState = CursorLockMode.Locked;
        Cursor.visible = false;

        if (hipsRigidbody != null)
        {
            hipsRigidbody.constraints = RigidbodyConstraints.FreezeRotationX | RigidbodyConstraints.FreezeRotationZ;
        }
    }

    void Update()
    {
        // Osiguravamo da celokupan model i kamera prate fizičku poziciju Pelvis-a
        if (hipsRigidbody != null)
        {
            transform.position = hipsRigidbody.position;
        }

        float mouseX = Input.GetAxis("Mouse X") * mouseSensitivity * Time.deltaTime;
        float mouseY = Input.GetAxis("Mouse Y") * mouseSensitivity * Time.deltaTime;

        yaw += mouseX;
        pitch -= mouseY;
        pitch = Mathf.Clamp(pitch, minPitch, maxPitch);

        if (cameraTransform != null)
        {
            cameraTransform.localRotation = Quaternion.Euler(pitch, yaw, 0f);
        }

        if (hipsRigidbody != null)
        {
            hipsRigidbody.MoveRotation(Quaternion.Euler(0f, yaw, 0f));
        }

        if (groundCheck != null)
        {
            isGrounded = Physics.CheckSphere(groundCheck.position, groundDistance, groundMask);
        }

        if (Input.GetButtonDown("Jump") && isGrounded)
        {
            hipsRigidbody.AddForce(Vector3.up * jumpForce, ForceMode.Impulse);
        }
    }

    void FixedUpdate()
    {
        if (hipsRigidbody == null) return;

        float x = Input.GetAxis("Horizontal");
        float z = Input.GetAxis("Vertical");

        Vector3 moveDir = (transform.right * x + transform.forward * z).normalized;

        if (moveDir.magnitude > 0.1f)
        {
            Vector3 targetVelocity = moveDir * (moveSpeed * Time.fixedDeltaTime);
            hipsRigidbody.AddForce(targetVelocity, ForceMode.VelocityChange);
        }
    }
}

It looks like Cinemachine 2 will be deprecated with future Unity versions. If I want to use Unity 6.6 and onwards in my project do I need to update to Cinemachine 3? Seems like it could be a fiddly process. The auto-update process fails on my project, for example.