game-development

Intro A high Rendering.UpdateBatches cost in Unity’s UGUI often signals excessive SyncTransform activity. This article breaks down how TransformDirty propagation happens, why frequent SetActive is a common trigger, and how separating dynamic and static Canvas structures can significantly reduce UI overhead in production projects. Q: In the main scene report from GameOptim GOT Online, we noticed t…

Lava Leap is an endless vertical climber: you scale procedurally generated platforms while lava rises from below, and your score is your height plus the coins you grab on the way up. I built it with Claude as a pair programmer over two release cycles, and it's now public on GitHub at v0.2.0. What it is The core loop is simple to describe and hard to put down. You run, jump, double jump, wall slid…

Play Chess Against the Machine – Learn by Winning I built an interactive chess game where you play against an AI that explains each move. The dashboard helps beginners understand why a move is good or bad. Game Link (password: 20082010) https://share.google/HjSmYsy7akZbMkiKC/ GitHub Repository https://github.com/Deslandes1/PlayChessAgainstTheMachineMarch2026 Features Three AI difficulties - Easy …

I’m building Feather Engine, an open-source agentic game engine powered by Three.js. The goal is to let developers control and build game systems through AI prompts instead of manually wiring everything. It’s still early, but I’m looking for feedback, contributors, and ideas. GitHub: https://github.com/mariojgt/featherEngine

Hi, my name is Ri. I'm a software developer, but I had never built a game before. No game dev experience, no Unity skills, nothing. Just curiosity and a decision to try. Three months later I have two games live on the App Store. Here's what I actually did. Why Not Unity? Everyone says "use Unity for games." I tried. I spent time learning Unity, went through tutorials, understood the basics. Then …

You can play Mini-Loot here. Don't worry, I wouldn't let Mini-Loot languish in the mire of Antigravity's failures. Using the exact same prompt as I had given to the various models I tried in Antigravity, I tasked GPT 5.5 in Codex with building Mini-Loot. The first iteration was up and running in just under five minutes; and it was fairly complete, although GPT 5.5 also decided to have a shop appe…

I’ve been working on AdaEngine, an open-source game engine and app framework written in Swift, and I’ve just released version 0.1.0. The idea behind AdaEngine is to explore what a modern game engine could look like if it was built around Swift from the start: strong types, a SwiftUI-like app entry point, macros, modular plugins, and a data-driven ECS architecture. Read more here: https://adaengin…

Have you ever played a game where the AI realizes it's losing, gets angry, and literally inverts your mouse controls in the DOM?* After having a blast creating GemMaster ( my previous AI-managed RPG project ), I wanted to push my experiments a little further. As a Web Architect with 15 years of experience and founder of Vibrisse Studio , I'm constantly exploring the boundary between high-precisio…

Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled I’m very pleased to announce that Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% decompiled! All of the game’s functions have now been implemented in C and compile to assembly that matches the original game. There’s still some occasional __asm__ hackery,1 and plenty of code needs better names and documentation, but every function now has a matching C implementation. That matters bec…

Every Unity developer has had the same sinking feeling: the game runs beautifully in the Editor on a development machine, but the moment it hits a real mobile device, frame rates crater, the phone overheats, and the battery drains in minutes. Mobile optimization is not something you bolt on at the end. It is a discipline that needs to run through every stage of development. But even with the best…

We’re working on an adventure game, Leonardo’s Moon Ship. The player character, Leo, has the usual pile of animations: idle left and right, walk in four directions, a couple of stair anims. Since implementing the basics of the character, Leo has had this slightly cursed behaviour where he’d grow about 3% taller the moment he started walking, then shrink back when he stopped. His feet would also l…

Introduction When creating a new game, one of the very first questions is choosing a game engine. The main candidates everyone knows about are Unity, Unreal Engine, and Godot. However, besides them, there are quite a few second-tier engines that few people know about. One of them is MonoGame, which is exactly what I want to talk about in this article. I will briefly go over its history, discuss w…

The first time I opened Unreal after years of living in Unity, I sat there for a full ten minutes trying to figure out where the play button was. Not because I couldn't see it. Because I didn't trust that pressing it would do what I expected. Every muscle memory I'd built up — drag a script onto a GameObject, hit play, see the thing wiggle — was suddenly worthless. The viewport looked similar eno…

Every phone in your pocket has a gyroscope, a touchscreen, speakers, a vibration motor, and a browser. That's a game controller. A pretty good one, actually, and every person in the room already has one. That thought is the entire premise behind Air Jam: an open-source framework for building multiplayer games where a computer or TV runs the game, and players join instantly from their phones by sc…

Digital creation has always felt like a frontier to me—a place where you can build worlds out of nothing but logic and willpower. But if I’m being honest, the road wasn't paved with clean code; it was paved with frustration, late nights, and a lot of "Why isn't this working?!" moments. The Godot Revelation: Breaking the Chains of Game Dev Struggle When I first started my journey into game develop…

This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Build with Gemma 4 What I Built I built a Snake game where the snake is driven entirely by Gemma 4. The model reads the board, reasons about the move, and the snake follows. The backend is a Quarkus application written in Java 26 with virtual threads. A scheduler fires every 200 ms, advances the snake one cell, checks for collisions and food, and br…

Currently, there is a subtle but real flaw in the controls for the game. If the player presses two keys in quick succession, only the last one is registered -- one, or more, are simply dropped. You can see the effect easily if you lower the framerate to something extreme, e.g. 1 (i.e. 1 frame per second) by changing the clock.tick(20) line to clock.tick(1) . If you quickly press down and then rig…

DOOM runs in ChatGPT and Claude Apr 17, 2026 AIGame developmentCreationMCPI made a playable DOOM MCP app that can launch inline inside compatible AI clients like ChatGPT and Claude, and falls back to a browser URL everywhere else. DOOM running on Claude web MCP apps are "interactive UI applications that render inside MCP hosts like Claude Desktop." The final version is intentionally lean: - one M…

Quick context I'm a solo dev building SQL Protocol, a browser game where you play a covert operative and every mission is a real SQL query against a real Postgres database. Three modes: 15-chapter story, timed interview drills, and 1v1 Arena PvP. It shipped, people played it, and the consistent feedback was: "the world feels empty." Even with PvP, between missions it played like a single-player t…

If you spend enough time building in Unity, you start to see the same visual bugs over and over again. Weird shadows, flickering textures, scenes that look washed out for no apparent reason — we've all been there. When you're trying to ship a game, spending hours debugging a shadow artifact is the last thing you want to do. Over time I've built up a mental cheat sheet for diagnosing these issues …