Code Monkey

I'm about to publish my 10th Steam game! It's a small Tidy Up game I made as an example for my How to Publish on Steam course, and it turned out much better than I expected! If you're a fan of Tidy Up games and Automation you might like it. Demo is now live! store.steampowered.com/app/5… Steam Course: cmonkey.co/publishsteam

Hey everyone! I just published my *How to Publish your Game on Steam* course! cmonkey.co/publishsteam Learn how to take your game and put it up on Steam to (hopefully) sell millions of copies! It's in Early Access with about 90% of it done, I have to wait for Steam to finish reviewing the build and launch the game that I used as a demo in the course on November 12th, store.steampowered.com/app/5… but basically all of it is done. And it has a nice *bonus Early Access discount* running until then! (or if you're a member of my Game Dev Practice Lab on the Professional Tier you already have access to the course here gamedevpracticelab.circle.so… ) Intro Video: youtube.com/watch?v=vHRatDPU… It's a really nice course explaining how to publish your game on Steam and how to use all the tons of Steam features that they have. Hopefully this helps you put your games on Steam and get tons of players and (hopefully) sell millions of copies! Lots of people have asked me to cover this topic so hopefully this super detailed course will help you! And if you're not interested in a paid course, that's fine! Afterwards I will be doing a quick 10 minute video on how to publish on Steam, so if you want all the detail for the best odds of success for your games then get the course, otherwise just stay tuned for that upcoming FREE YouTube video. Thanks everyone! I hope you like it!

Q: How much money do you LOSE if your game is buggy? A: A HUGE amount! Constantly test your games to make them as bug free as possible, and use great tools to help you get notified when a player fins a bug so you can FIX it! youtube.com/watch?v=qWLxYU-j…

No one is going to STEAL your Game Idea, unless...

One AMAZING thing about today's world is how knowledge is easily accessible and FREE! Anything you want to learn, you can learn it for FREE on the Internet! That's awesome! When I was starting out YouTube did not exist and the web was much more limited, but nowadays you have access to High Quality education so you can learn anything you want to learn! As a kid I wanted to learn how to make games, but back then the tools were very tough to use with no educational content anywhere. I remember trying to learn something called "DarkBasic" and I couldn't even get a cube to show up on screen. Nowadays you have all kinds of game engines, Unity, Unreal, Godot, all of them completely FREE! Same thing for knowledge, if you want to learn you can find free tutorials and courses, all it takes is just a desire to learn. I'm happy that nowadays I have knowledge and I can contribute to what I wish had existed back when I was starting out, FREE knowledge to help anyone who wants to learn how to make games! Check out all my FREE courses HERE! cmonkey.co/freecourses I hope you learn a lot! Best of luck in your game dev journey!

PRO-TIP: Always test your game at low frame rates! Just do: Application.targetFrameRate = 10; and try to play through your whole game. You will quickly catch bugs that you won't notice at 60FPS. For example if you do a simple distance check to see if a Unit has reached a target position: transform.position += moveSpeed * Time.deltaTime; if (Vector3.Distance(transform.position, targetPosition) < reachedDistance) { } That code might work perfectly at 60FPS because the Time.deltaTime is tiny, but at 10FPS since the Time.deltaTime is huge it might break if the unit never gets close enough to the target position. So test your game at low frame rates to ensure it will work, even on low end machines. This simple tip will save you a lot of headaches after release! - Code Monkey

How to make a SELECTABLE World Map in a Strategy Game!

Unity is finally moving toward ONE render pipeline! One of the biggest benefits will be less confusion when you start a project. I see these questions all the time: Which template should I choose? Will this asset work? Can I follow this tutorial with my render pipeline? My answer has always been "just use URP and don't worry about it" but naturally even though the answer is simple beginners still have those questions. Although if there's only one option then there's much less confusion! BUT this transition is not here yet, it's happening in stages: - Built-in is removed in Unity 7.0. - HDRP is deprecated in Unity 7.0, but remains supported through the first Unity 7 LTS. Removal comes afterwards. - URP is the foundation Unity is continuing to expand. And URP is already getting some very interesting graphics updates. The Unity 6.7 beta includes Surface Cache Global Illumination, (Lumen for Unity) screen-space reflections, and GTAO Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion. Their goal is one scalable pipeline for different platforms and art styles. You choose the features that make sense for your project and target hardware. So one single pipeline that covers high end PCs and low end mobile devices.

How much is your time WORTH?

Steam's Update gives more indie devs MORE OPPORTUNITY! Steam Daily Deals are insanely valuable! Some games make literally tens of thousands of dollars in a single 24 hour period, but previously getting a Steam Daily Deal was only available to a handful of games through manual curation. But Steam ran a personalization experiment that showed over 10 TIMES as many games per day in its Discounts & Events section (mostly Daily Deals), and this change will be going live in the future! That could create more opportunities for indie games to get noticed, BUT it does NOT mean your game automatically gets 10X more views or sales. In order for the algorithm to find the RIGHT audience for your game, you need to make sure your Tags and Store page are set up correctly. So here are three things you can work on right now to benefit from this update: - Use accurate tags that describe the game you actually made. (check More Like This on your game to see if it is recommending similar games) - Make your store page show exactly why your target audience would enjoy it. (don't try to convert a Visual Novel player to play your hardcore survival game) - Plan your discounts in Steamworks to potentially get on the discounts section. More opportunities to be seen can help, BUT your game still needs to give a specific audience a reason to care. A generic clone does not become appealing just because more people see it. More details on the video in my YouTube titled: "Sell 25,000 copies in 24 HOURS? Steam's Update EXPLAINED!" This change is rolling out on Steam in early 2027. But it's yet another Steam change that looks to be a very positive for indie devs!