Alexander Ehrath

Today, because it’s Friday, I want to share a little video game with you 😊 It’s a classic 90s-style side-scrolling space shooter. Old school, including pixel art, phasers, torpedoes, enemy fleets, boss fights… and even some very cool retro MIDI music inspired by Star Trek. You pilot different starships inspired by the USS Enterprise and fight your way through waves of enemies across 3 different stages. Pretty fun little arcade experience, but honestly nothing really crazy... So, what’s different about this game? Well… I made it! Yep! And the best part is that I didn’t spend months building it in a game engine. I created it using Moonlake AI, a tool that can generate interactive worlds and game prototypes from prompts, that I got access to. As an experiment and part of some tests, I asked Moonlake to create a retro 2D space shooter inspired by classic arcade games, themed around a sci-fi universe similar to Star Trek. In a few minutes it generated a playable prototype with: • Horizontal scrolling shooter gameplay • Different player ships • Enemy fleets and bosses • Retro pixel-art style • The whole game logic • And yes… even the soundtrack To be clear: this is obviously not a licensed Star Trek game, and it’s not something that could ever be commercialized. It’s just a small creative experiment to test what these new AI tools can do and that’s precisely what makes it interesting. Tools like Moonlake dramatically reduce the friction between having an idea for a game and actually playing a prototype of it. Instead of spending days or weeks setting up a project, you can jump straight into experimenting with mechanics, themes and gameplay loops. That’s incredibly powerful for: • Early game design • Fast prototyping • Testing mechanics • Creative exploration I’ve attached a short video showing the gameplay so you can see how it looks like, but you can also test it just by clicking on the link in the first comment. For anyone working in gaming, AI or interactive media, this is incredibly powerful. We’re entering a very interesting moment where the distance between imagining a game and playing it is getting smaller and smaller. Curious to see how far these tools can go and, in the meantime, I'll continue bilding small prototypes just to have some fun 😁

16

1 Comment

Hellraiser is returning as a survival horror game from Saber Interactive. Is "Scornlike" the new (sub)genre for horror? Saber Interactive’s upcoming first-person survival horror game promises a return to the franchise’s roots, leaning into body horror, dark themes, and the Cenobite designs that made Barker’s 1987 film a cult classic. The content warnings alone (“consensual mutilation”) signal that this adaptation isn’t shying away from the provocative elements that defined the source material. As a horror fan, it's cool to see a faithful adaptation of Barker’s transgressive vision in single-player storytelling. I really enjoyed Scorn, and way before that, Condemned: Criminal Origins. There’s a bigger story here beyond Hellraiser. This trend of reviving well-known but affordable IPs for smaller, focused games is starting to make sense for developers and publishers alike. RoboCop: Rogue City proved how a modestly scoped single-player game, paired with a globally recognized license, could punch above its weight commercially and critically. Combine that with today’s ease of global digital distribution and the rising costs of original AAA development, and projects like Revival feel almost inevitable. They leverage nostalgia and brand recognition while avoiding the immense financial risks of tentpole blockbusters.

101

12 Comments

I want to demystify how ASGC tracks games industry job cuts so you understand what goes into the numbers The way we track industry reductions is far more rigorous than most people realize. I occasionally see comments wondering if we only use public announcements, WARN notices, or that we miss contractors, co dev teams, and non traditional roles. I understand why people might assume that, but that is not how our system works. Collecting jobs data is the most resource intensive process in our community because it shapes our support too. Step one is public information. We monitor news reports, company statements, WARN filings, and government notices. That is just the starting point. Step two is direct community reporting at scale. Every year I receive 5-10K+ messages, just related to job cuts, across LinkedIn, Discord, and email from people sharing what happened to them, their teammates, or their organizations. Much of this never appears in the press. It includes contractors, co dev partners, support studios, and indirect roles, not just FTEs at major publishers. Step three is individual signal tracking. I regularly review posts from professionals who are suddenly open to work or referencing team changes. These signals confirm patterns or reveal cuts that were not announced. All of this flows into a large internal tracking system that helps me understand not just how many roles were affected, but who was impacted, where, and when. That context allows our community to reach out and design support that matches reality rather than headlines. Is it perfect? No. I am still working to improve visibility in regions where transparency is lower. But I can say sincerely this process goes far beyond public records and is more comprehensive than any single external source. You may notice that, for a few years, I no longer publicly name organizations when cuts happen unless they request a Games Org support post. That is intentional. My goal is to avoid errors and avoid shaming, because I recognize that not every reduction comes from bad intent. Sometimes funding ends, contracts fall through, or projects conclude despite leaders trying to do right by their teams. Also, my approach is to build bridges and encourage quiet, meaningful accountability. I regularly hear that organizations know ASGC tracks layoff decisions and understand their actions will reach me, even with smaller or less visible cuts. That awareness, even without public callouts, can influence how situations are handled. Most importantly, workers know their experience is not invisible. Individual data is never shared publicly. People trust me with personal information, and I take that seriously. What I share are patterns, totals, and insights that help us mobilize support. So when we talk about industry cuts, please know this is not casual scorekeeping. It is the result of thousands of conversations and careful tracking to make sure every affected games person counts.

29

3 Comments

After 10 years working as a Unity developer, I’ve started diving into OpenUSD (Universal Scene Description), and honestly, it feels like opening a whole new door for the future of real-time 3D and pipelines. At first, I thought USD was “just another file format”. But the more I learn, the more I realize it’s more like a powerful ecosystem for collaboration between tools like Unity, Unreal, Blender, Maya, Houdini, and even AI/3D pipelines. What really impressed me: • 🔹 Non-destructive workflow: You can layer, override, and compose scenes without breaking the original data. This is huge for large teams. • 🔹 Scalability: Designed for massive scenes (think film, digital twin, metaverse, industrial simulation). • 🔹 Interoperability: A real chance to reduce the pain of moving assets between DCC tools and game engines. • 🔹 Future-ready: With AI, simulation, digital twin, and metaverse growing fast, USD feels like an infrastructure, not just a format. As someone building products with Unity (games, education, digital twin, real-time apps), I believe understanding OpenUSD early will be a big advantage in the next few years. Still learning, still experimenting — but definitely excited. Anyone else here exploring OpenUSD with Unity or Unreal? 👀

15

I'm late to the party but if you missed this podcast with Adam Boyes you should take some time today and listen/watch. The video game industry is at an inflexion point and things need to be done!! Gaming Decoded, Vivrato's new podcast hosted by Andrea Rene, just dropped its first episode featuring Adam Boyes. ThinkMasterclass meets Diary of a CEO, but built for the games business. Real conversations with the operators and leaders shaping the industry. Come take a listen!   vivrato.com/podcast

11

I've created a new project for students at the School of Video Game Audio Unreal Engine 5 course to practice and demonstrate both linear and technical sound design. For this project, students will redesign a bit of gameplay capture from Hollow Knight "in engine" or "in engine" + middleware (as opposed to in a DAW), depending on what the student is practicing. The project supports UE5 Metasounds, UE5 + Wwise, and UE5 + FMOD. A side note that the placeholder SFX were all made by me using synthesis + recording stuff in my studio. More info about the School at https://lnkd.in/ei9f2EiT Hope you're all well out there!

101

4 Comments

This isn't the matrix, it's Steam. Every single AppID since the beginning of time. In total, 25 years worth of PC games coming in at 253,105 unique entries to date. What's even more fascinating is being able to see which were the first ever games available, at the inception point of one of gaming's biggest platforms.

10

4 Comments

Wow - I had no idea you could do 3D like in ComfyUI! I have serious got to spend some quality time with it. “This is a custom ComfyUI node that embeds a fully interactive 3D viewport directly inside your workflow. Load Mixamo FBX animations, scrub through them in real time, and bake out seven simultaneous control passes - Pose, Depth, Canny, Normal, Shaded, Alpha, and Textured - ready to pipe straight into ControlNet. No Blender round-trips. No external renderers….The 3D pipeline and the diffusion pipeline are collapsing into the same node graph. And honestly, that's exactly where this was always heading.”

112

2 Comments

🎮 Razer unveiled physical hardware for Project Ava at CES 2026: an AI gaming assistant with animated characters that provide live tips via voice commands. The product: 🔹 Cylindrical desktop device with transparent exterior displaying full-body animated character beside your monitor 🔹 Customizable avatars including Kira and Zane, with pro gamer Faker partnered for character designs 🔹 Voice-activated coaching tested on Battlefield 6 weapon loadout optimization during CES demo The evolution: 🔹 CES 2025 showed abstract system diagrams, CES 2026 presents consumer hardware with personality 🔹 Expanding beyond gaming to general-purpose AI assistance while maintaining gaming-first positioning "Whether this makes having an AI evaluate your gameplay more beneficial or simply more irritating is another issue altogether." Razer is betting physical presence makes AI coaching more acceptable than screen overlays. The shift from backend experiment to desktop companion mirrors broader trend: AI tools adding personality and form factor to compete in consumer market. Launch timing "sometime this year" tests whether gamers want backseat drivers with faces. #AIForGaming #Gaming #Razer #CES2026 #AI Links in first comment 👇

It just KEEPS GETTING BETTER. 81KB this time. 176 → 150 → 100 → 97 → 81KB. This one's a Screw Puzzle playable. Full mechanics, 3D-looking bolts, tool box UI. Solve hints. A UA manager at a puzzle studio asked me this week: "Does file size even matter?" Fair question. So I looked it up properly. Claude says: "An 81KB playable loads near-instantly. 3.7MB is ~46x heavier, meaning slower load, higher bounce rates, dropped frames, and high abandonment rates, even if both look identical visually." The impression is already lost before the user decides anything. The Screw Puzzle category is blowing up right now. These studios are spending big on UA. Their playable ads are still sitting at 3-5MB. I built one at 81KB. Has anyone actually tested lightweight vs standard playables head-to-head on CTR?

3

1 Comment

You call it sound design? I call it music. In this scene from First Man, sound carries the story without a single note of music or a word of dialogue. No artifice. Just raw, pure storytelling. It instantly reminded me of a night in Laguna Beach, where my co-workers took me to a mandolin concert. The room was packed with 500 people, yet the stage held only one stool… and one man. He played in ways I didn’t know were possible. If the setup had been more elaborate, I might have missed the subtlety and emotion in every note. Sometimes, less really is more. Here’s the lesson: strip away the bells and whistles, and you open a new perspective. The nuances—otherwise buried—become impossible to ignore. You re-engage your audience. My favorite part? It sets low expectations. You under-promise… leaving yourself room to over-deliver. Chef Grant Achatz once served a plate with just a strawberry and a tomato to diners who paid $1,000 for the meal. Scandal, right? But then you bite in—the strawberry tastes like a tomato, and the tomato like a strawberry. Suddenly, you’re not just eating dinner… you’re part of a culinary performance. So remember: Set the bar low. It’s the simplest way to exceed expectations—and leave your audience surprised, delighted, and wanting more. #SoundDesign #Storytelling #Creativity #LessIsMore #GameAudio #FilmSound #CreativeProcess #SoundDesignTips #AudioStorytelling #Expectations #OverDeliver

133

5 Comments

If you’ve ever worked with smoke, fog, fire, or terrain in Houdini, you’ve used VDBs—whether you knew it or not. But VDBs aren't just "better volumes." They changed how we think about space. 🧬 Here is a quick breakdown of what you need to know about the VDB 🧬 Did VDB Came out of the blue? VDB comes from OpenVDB, which originally developed at DreamWorks Animation to handle massive volumetric data efficiently. The key idea behind it is simple 👉 Don’t store empty space. Only look into the parts that actually contains data. That’s why VDB scales so well. 🧊 The VDB Family members The most common VDB type is the SDF (Signed Distance Field): this type main concern is the distance to the nearest surface Positive = outside Negative = inside Zero = surface which make it gold mine for Mesh analysis, collisions, Boolean operations, and fluid surfaces. But there are some other important VDB types: • Fog VDB → and it focus on density value of 0 is empty while 1 is full opaque commonly used with (smoke, clouds, fire) • Velocity VDB → vector fields for motion usuly used for advection (moving smoke with wind), and guiding particles. • Color VDB → stores Cd / RGB values great for Shading, fire temperature (blackbody radiation), and texture projection. • Mask VDB → that is a "Logic" A specialized, lightweight grid (often Boolean or Integer) so the Values: Often just On/Off (1/0) great for controlling where smoothing happens, limiting a simulation to a specific area, or "culling" data to save memory. Think of VDBs as fields, not just shapes. 🎮 VDB in Real-Time: 2026 Story shortly They are Just friends 💔 for now. While it still doesn't render raw files like a path-tracer, But we have Heterogeneous Volumes system to bridge the gap. ⚡ The Modern Way (Sparse Volume Textures - SVT) In UE 5.4/5.5, you can drag and drop the file directly into the Content Browser and it will converted into a SVT and then use a Heterogeneous Volume Actor to render it in the viewport. ☂️ The Classic Way (Flipbooks/Pseudo-3D) For mobile or high-performance games, bake it into 2D textures this is much cheaper on the GPU. ☄️ The Niagara Way Lookup for particles, Niagara system can sample a VDB to know where to spawn particles or how to move (Velocity VDB). But from Cost POV: VDBs/SVTs are memory-hungry. A long animated sequence can easily eat up several gigabytes of VRAM. Rendering It uses Ray Marching, which is expensive. If you have 10 large VDBs on screen, your frame rate will tank. The Verdict Great for cinematics and hero effects; still "too heavy" for generic background smoke in a competitive shooter. "VDB is for the lab; Baked is for the field." 🎯 Final Thought VDB didn’t just improve volumes. It gave us a way to think in space, distance, and influence. What’s your golden tip on VDB #VDB #OpenVDB #Houdini #FX #Proceduralism #TechnicalArtist #PipelineTD #VFX #GameDev #RealtimeFX #Volumes #OpenToWork

5

I spent some time reverse-engineering Apple's Lossy texture format. It wasn't as simple as I originally thought, and some of the details surprised me. A few of the things I dug into: - How Metal heaps let you alias an MTLTexture and an MTLBuffer at the same offset, which is what makes reverse-engineering a closed format like this tractable in the first place. - The R8 block format: 8 modes, variable block sizes, compactly packed per tile within a cache line. - How the metadata enables random access by using a 16 element prefix-sum. - Open questions and more! https://lnkd.in/gWi63bFf

73

VR Archery, or: How I Learned to Stop Trusting Joints and Pose-Drive the Nocked Arrow By international VR Fantasy Bylaw 3.2, paragraph (a), every immersive medieval world must ship with a bow and arrow. The Realm is no exception, and honestly I am not mad about it. There is something genuinely satisfying about pulling back a string with your actual hand, aiming, and watching an arrow fly. I wanted to get it right. Unity had other plans. The setup was reasonable on paper: a joint holding the bow to your hand, another joint nocking the arrow to the string, and the string itself riding on the bow through spring-driven physics. This is how my VR package implemented the nock. The problem turned out to be deeply angle-sensitive. Nock the arrow with your draw hand misaligned, especially if parallel to the string, and the joint constraints could feed back on themselves, sending the arrow spinning through a new orientation every frame and never settling down. Get close to the correct angle and it was usually fine. Unfortunately, “usually fine” still means “sometimes broken.” I went through the obvious fixes without success. Refusing to nock when the angle was off still let the bug through occasionally and made the bow harder to use. Force-rotating the arrow to a known good pose, waiting a frame, and then attaching the joints felt like the kind of solution that asks for trouble: a visible snap at runtime, a fresh well of future bugs, and an architecture that depends on timing tricks. Nope. There was also a quieter inefficiency lurking in the background. Every nock was adding fresh joint components, and every release was destroying them again. In VR you have a hard 90 Hz goal, any GC hiccup is a visible stutter, and runtime component churn is not something I want in the hot path of the central interaction. Add in PhysX rebuilding constraints, and it started to feel like I was asking the physics solver to win an argument I did not need to have. The fix was to drop the joint dance entirely. On nock, the arrow goes kinematic and I pose-drive its transform directly each frame. On release, it flips back to dynamic, resets any stale velocity, and applies the shot impulse cleanly. No joints created, no joints destroyed, no constraint loop, no allocation churn, and no angle-sensitive feedback spiraling out of control. The arrow sits exactly where you put it, every time, at every angle, including ninety degrees off-axis. The clip shows the arrow nocking after the fix: no physics freakout, no theatrics. Just the small victory of a game mechanic going unnoticed. Tiny confession: the old-school programmer in me was quietly proud that the fix replaced all that joint-solving drama with one boring little transform update. It felt cheaper, and it was definitely kinder to the garbage collector. 😅

1

If your Unity project targets multiple platforms / SKUs, then you've probably had to wrangle separate package manifests at some point. I've just published Package Profiles - which helps to reduce some of the friction involved in swapping out package manifests for different build profiles - check it out! https://lnkd.in/dB7r2WSX

4