Stan's Assets

12/13/2022

8 new Unity features to support game backend development

Unity Blog is a constant source of incredible news; this time, it's no exception. After the general availability launch earlier this year, their team continuously updates solutions like Remote Config, Authentication, Player Management, Cloud Code, Economy, and more.

Now they have shared various updates made over the past few months to provide you with a high-level overview. For more information, check out this one 👉 https://blog.unity.com/technology/8-new-features-support-game-backend-development.

We’ve gathered various updates made to Game Backend over the past few months to provide you with a high-level overview.

12/05/2022

What does this word mean?

For those of you, who dived a bit into not just coding using Unity, but developing a marketing strategy for your products, this might be already familiar. But at the start, this whole bunch of new terminology (like ARPDAU, IAA, ROAS etc) can seem like an alphabet soup of acronyms and formulas.

But it is true that if Unity comes up with something in this industry, they try to make it as straightforward as possible. That's why today we want to introduce you to one of the instrumental libraries Unity has compiled and, again, made our lives easier.
Remember to always expand your knowledge, wasn't it on the list of your new year's resolutions last December?

Bookmark this useful glossary as a resource to keep handy when you need a quick reference. And remember it is still a whole month to work on your last-year goals and write the new ones 😁

Common terms used for user acquisition and monetization in mobile advertising.

11/30/2022

Knowing where to find Unity hacks and trends is extremely important. And Twitter can be a great solution. Today we want to show you the trendy hacks our colleagues spotted during last month:

1. How to use Random.insideUnitSphere to create a simple random movement for your game
https://twitter.com/SunnyVStudio/status/1595033698390384640

2. How to use Physics Debugger when trying to find triggers and colliders that are overlapping each other https://twitter.com/elvismdd/status/1595050969280258048

3. How to use an empty game object to act as an anchor to rotate a model around a different pivot https://twitter.com/PixelShenanigan/status/1595507973623025664

4. What are helpful UTF8 hacks in Unity you can check here https://twitter.com/hybridherbst/status/1595387134659239936

5. How to see element numbers in brackets https://twitter.com/looqmaan_GTGD/status/1594255159806271490

Which one did you find most useful? Don't forget to comment below!

11/21/2022

Medieval Empires: Ertugrul is one of the projects we were heavily involved working on.

The cryptocurrency market is not going through the best of times, but this does not mean that interest in projects built on the basis of NFT is fading. Our company specialists are engaged in the development of a such project which is called Medieval Empires: Ertugrul https://www.medievalempires.com/.

The basis of the project is the conquest and maintenance of territories, which is a NFT Land. Currently, only the territory of Turkey is available to maintain, but in the future the whole continent will be available. Each piece of land has its own value and can be bought or sold on the OpenSea market. Visually, the game resembles Civilization or the Total War series.

On the main page of the project, you can already see an early demo that works directly in the browser and agree, it looks impressive. Share your comments what do you think of the future of NFT-based projects and how do you like the look of Medieval Empires?

Medieval Empires is a blockchain powered multiplayer online strategy game, featuring Engin Altan Düzyatan as Ertugrul, offering an exciting and intriguing Play and Own gameplay with Smart NFTs and more in a historical game universe!

11/14/2022

Midjourney Neural Network: Image-by-Text Request

New neural networks are increasingly entering our lives. Midjourney has become one of the most interesting in recent months and has generated severe interest among users. It creates art and images from any text of different languages, English included. The visuals you get have excellent quality and great detail.

The potential of this neural network is amazing. In addition to just entertainment, Midjourney can significantly facilitate the work of designers, as well as other specialists who are engaged in the creation of digital content (for example, concept artists).

Midjourney is not the first and not only service that allows you to generate images based on text requests. However, it is so simple that any user with a smartphone can handle it. This is the secret of its success.

To check it out, we have decided to see how Midjourney imagines modern Unity developers. At our request "Modern unity developer ", it has offered an interesting visual you can see below. And of course, we couldn't help but check what Midjourney will show us at the request of "Stan's Assets from KAPPS team", which is the second visual.

And do you use neural networks in your work or everyday life? Tell us about your interesting experience in the comments!

11/07/2022

We feel like this is the time to share some exciting news about our company. This year has been the toughest in the lives of our country, our team, and each one of us. But it didn't stop us from growing and fighting our frontline, making sure we give jobs to more people and support our country in the best way we can.

That's how for now our team has grown twice! Now we have 22 developers, 6 incredible people in the QA department, a very talented game designer, technical and UX/UI artists. Also, our HR, PM, and Sales departments have doubled in size.

A lot of factors encouraged this incredible result we're so proud of. But the main is that we haven't stopped when it seemed like our whole world was crushing, and went on looking for new projects, and opportunities and worked as hard as we could to achieve our goals and make our professional dreams come true.

Hope this will inspire others and will become one more example of the resilience and constant growth Ukrainian teams are known for in the world!

10/31/2022

Sharing the same sense of humor also inspires our team and eases up all difficulties. And who doesn't love a good meme? Sharing with you some of our latest faves, feel free to add yours in the comments 👇

10/18/2022

The interview process with a new person in our company is always different: sometimes it is difficult, sometimes it is easy, but there are situations we can never forget. And today we want to share with you some of the most interesting ones:

🔴 A typical situation is when candidates say that they have read the company's website and understand what we do, but when push comes to shove, it seems like they really haven't. Once there was a moment when the candidate at the second stage of the interview said that he had already forgotten what we do, because we talked a long time ago, like a month or something, although in fact, it was the day before 🤦🏻‍♀️

🟡 Once the girl sent a CV, which consisted only of a link to YouTube. It was a wrestling competition video with the participation of two girls, one of which, as we understood by the last name, sent the CV. She won that fight. But to receive the job, of course, it was not enough 😅

🟠 Sometimes it seems that different people come to the general and technical interviews. Once, a candidate who successfully passed the first stage of the interview appeared at the second in an interesting hat and had to mention that it was because he didn't wash his hair 😆

Share in the comments if you do remember your personal awkward interview situations, or if you've heard of some others?

10/10/2022

Meta has recently announced a NFT integration on Facebook and Instagram: users will be able to buy and share their tokens.

Creators and non-fungible tokens owners will now be able to showcase, share and sell digital collectibles directly on their Facebook and Instagram pages.

Representatives of Meta said that they plan to make NFT available to as many people as possible and help promising content creators monetize their work. To do this, you just need to connect the electronic wallet to one of the two Meta applications.

The feature will use publicly available data from open blockchains such as Ethereum and Polygon. You can already link Coinbase, MetaMask, Phantom, Trust Wallet wallets, and the ability to use the Flow and Solana blockchains will be added in the future.

As we can see, the interest of large corporations and users in NFT does not plan to slow down. Given the number of active Facebook and Instagram users, we can safely predict that this will attract many new investors to digital assets. However, there are certain doubts that such innovations will be useful and profitable for content creators.

What do you think of such changes? Share your opinion in the comments!

10/03/2022

Games are not only a way to relax and have a good time, but also an opportunity to gain useful knowledge. Nowadays, there are many games related to programming. They can be used to learn and achieve new skills in a fun way. We created a short selection of useful educational games for both beginners and experienced programmers:

🔴 CodinGame
CodinGame is a collection of free games that will help you learn and master more than 25 different programming languages, including Java, C #, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, and more. Users can perform practical game tasks or familiarize themselves with examples that explain the operation of various language structures. Their website regularly hosts competitions between programmers in real-time. Note that CodinGame is used by many foreign companies to search for and recruit developers, so we recommend that you pay attention to this resource.

🟠 CodeCombat
CodeCombat is a good choice for those with little or no programming experience. Players have to develop their character (warrior or mage), fight with opponents, and complete all kinds of quests. The game starts with solving simple puzzles and tasks. As you progress, the level of difficulty will increase. With the help of CodeCombat, you can learn such programming languages ​​as JavaScript, Python, C++, CoffeeScript, Lua, etc.

🟡 CheckIO
CheckIO is a programming game that will help you brush up on your TypeScript and Python skills. It is distinguished by a selection of tasks of various levels of complexity, from elementary to pretty difficult. Each set of tasks is located on different islands, in order to move from one location to another, users will have to solve several puzzles.

And how do you feel about learning programming in a form of a game? Share your favorite games in the comments down below 👇

09/26/2022

Cybersports tournaments in Dota 2, Valorant, or CS:GO are not surprising anymore. But the more digital we become, the more exotic competitions are being invented. For example, since 2020, the FMWC (Financial Modeling World Cup) has been held, where participants solve complex tasks using Excel live.

The tournament has already found its viewers and fans. This year, the FMWC went to television – the finals were broadcast by ESPN 3, and on YouTube, it gained more than 650,000 views.

If you consider yourself an advanced Excel user, then get acquainted with the tasks presented at the last tournament. The participants were given up to 30 minutes to find a solution for each of them:

"Regatta" – creating a board game simulator in Excel, where players have to control a ship – it needs to "sail" through 100 cells, taking into account additional conditions, such as the strength and direction of the wind.

"Modelario" – creating a platform game similar to the classic Mario games, collecting bonuses and destroying monsters.

"A Story About the Reels" – is a simulation of the operation of classic gambling machines (like "one-armed bandit").

Maybe tournaments with Microsoft Excel will not reach the top of the Twitch rating, but it is exciting to watch them. And if the given tasks do not seem very difficult for you, why don't you try to take part too? Open qualifications (FMWC Open) will start on October 6, when everyone can register and take part. Follow the link to know more – https://www.fmworldcup.com/excel-esports/microsoft-excel-world-championship/.

09/20/2022

Recently, Unity presented a short video called "Lion", which showed new features of the latest version of the engine. In particular, they have applied Adaptive Probe Volumes for global illumination (GI) and High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) technologies.

The animal fur for the demo was created using Wētā Digital, which Unity claims is the most user-friendly and fastest realistic hair simulation tool they've ever used. The lion models were further enhanced by ZivaRT technology, and SpeedTree assets optimized for real-time rendering were chosen to create the vegetation. You can watch it here - https://youtu.be/KpPx_lvthBQ.

This demo is an excellent and high-quality example of combining the results of the work of great specialists who used different technologies inside Unity. But we, as developers, find the question of the effectiveness of such work confusing, because no information about the budget, size, and composition of the team, or time - was actually released. Although watching how Unity moves and develops in different directions, competing with Unreal Engine, is nice and exciting.

But as techies, we'd rather see stuff and updates that solve everyday needs/problems, not just pure marketing. So, for example, we are very much looking forward to the production release of Entities 1.0. And did you like the new demo? Share your opinion in the comments, what steps/actions from Unity would you like to see in the near future?