game-development

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…

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 …

I wrote recently about migrating from LayaAir to Cocos Creator. This post is the follow-up: what I actually built with Cocos after the migration settled. The game is Cosmic Summon, a gacha merge tower defense. Players summon heroes randomly, place them on a grid, and combine duplicates to evolve them through seven rarity tiers. Enemies spawn in 50 waves themed around real constellations. Bosses a…

The new new tools are designed to help creators throughout the entire development process.

Context I've been working on Pizza Legacy, an open-source reimplementation of the 1994 DOS game Pizza Tycoon. The game has a close-zoom street view of the cities, and when you scroll around it you can see a steady stream of cars driving through the streets. Maybe 20 or 30 tiny sprites at a time, but they navigate the road network, queue behind each other at intersections, and generally look like …

Bevy game development These guides were originally created for a group of friends to learn from. Over the years they have evolved into the Rails guides for Bevy. I am a programmer who has worked mostly with Ruby on the web over the last decade. This site was built with Staticky a static site generator I built with Ruby. If you like these guides, you might also like my Bevy Starter and Awesome Bev…

Last year I was using various AI coding assistants on a game project. They worked fine for generic tasks, but kept failing in ways that were specific to game dev: The AI would happily edit files inside our auto-generated config directory. Every time I had to explain: "that's generated from Excel, you need to edit the source and re-run the pipeline." It never remembered. It would write GetComponen…

You know that one game that made you fall in love with the idea of creating video games? Maybe it’s Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or the number-one-selling game worldwide: Minecraft. Perhaps it was something completely unique, such as the rarest indie treasure that speaks to your heart despite staying out of the mainstream. The point is, if you've researched ways to work in th…

This study explores the integration of generative AI into game development, focusing on its use during a university-led game jam involving undergraduate students. The research investigates whether generative AI holds significance for the future of game creation - highlighting its potential or otherwise to transform asset production, team dynamics, and creative workflows. It examines how AI-driven…

The paper addresses the evaluation of game engines by internationals, i.e. expatriates and remote workers, in 10 Czech studios that use custom and commercial game engines. The research employs longitudinal semi-structured interviews with internationals, to advance their (locally unexplored) perspectives on such tools. Some Czech studios use custom engines that internationals see as lagging behind…

Developers can use AI to generate code, dialog, playable environments and more. But at its heart, making video games remains a creative human endeavor.

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