This is one week of rebuilding Soccer Pinball Pro with Astra + Unity CLI. Day 1 vs Day 7. I see so many people on here one-shotting these incredible systems and games, and I’m constantly blown away by what people are building. But my approach with this has been a little different. This isn’t a new game or an experiment. It’s a rebuild of a game I originally made in 2019, and I’ve been trying to stay true to what made that game fun while finally building everything I wanted it to be back then. In seven days I’ve gone from getting the basic game working in a different engine to rebuilding the players, improving the AI, adding passing, tackles, bicycle kicks, better ball feedback, dynamic camera movement, new lighting and shadows, grass, a new scoreboard, goal effects, and an actual PvE match mode. And I’ve been able to iterate on all of it almost as quickly as I can think of things to change. But the important part is that this is my vision. It isn’t a screenshot or concept I pulled from somewhere and asked Astra/Codex to recreate. This is a game and an idea I’ve had sitting in the back of my mind for years. I executed on that idea in 2019, but what I was capable of making then was nowhere near what I had actually envisioned. Unity itself is still probably the slowest part of this workflow. Waiting on compiles, entering play mode, importing, building, and all those little interruptions add up. Unity 7 intends to address a lot of that, which makes me even more curious about where this workflow goes next. The part that excites me most isn’t just how much I can build in a week. It’s realizing I can go back to ideas I had years ago and finally build the games I saw in my head at the time. That has completely changed how I’m thinking about game development. There’s suddenly this massive backlog of ideas that no longer feels out of reach. @unity @OpenAI

I’ve seen enough of these Raptors, plan the parade

Apparently the referee in Soccer Pinball has had enough. I’ve been having some fun with the referee system using Codex + Unity CLI. I also used the Meshy plugin to create the referee character. Hit an opponent a little too aggressively and the ref comes running onto the field, blows the whistle, and pulls out a yellow card. I also added a little camera close-up so you can actually see him hand out the card. It’s probably a bit much for a pinball game, but that’s kind of why I love it. I’m also thinking about adding red cards, but I’m still figuring out how they should penalize the player.

20 years ago today, Rockstar released Bully. An absolute masterpiece. Shawn Lee’s soundtrack is still one of my favourite video game soundtracks of all time.

Just saw You Can See Everything. Nathan Fielder is winning an Oscar.

Who said the main menu couldn’t be fun? I’ve been working on the main menu for Soccer Pinball, and I wanted it to give you a pretty good idea of what you’re getting yourself into before you even start playing. I think it does a pretty good job of capturing what this game is all about. What else could I add? Maybe some targets in the net?

A closer look at the bicycle kick in Soccer Pinball, built with Astra + Unity CLI. I started by giving Astra a GIF of the movement I wanted, along with a prompt to have the camera spin around the player in slow motion, kind of like the bullet time effect from The Matrix. From there, I worked through the animation frame by frame until it looked and felt exactly how I wanted it. What’s really cool is that this is an actual in-game animation running inside Unity. I can get the camera as close as I want, change the angles, and even use these same assets to put together trailers or other promotional footage. Just actual in-game assets and effects that I can keep tweaking and improving.

Testing GPT-6 and Intelligent UI. Asked it to make me a low poly bicycle kick animation. Neat stuff!

What a pleasant surprise! Pizza Hero is game of the day on the US @AppStore

I’ve been making games professionally for almost eight years, and “build in public” has been a huge part of how I’ve been able to make a living doing this. Dangle Dash benefited massively from me showing the game before launch. People followed along, gave feedback, got excited about it, and it eventually went to #1 in Games on the App Store. That momentum helped me continue down this path. As an indie developer, you almost have to show what you’re making. You need to build interest, collect preorders, get feedback, and hopefully have an audience waiting when you launch. But lately, build in public has started to feel like a bit of a double-edged sword. The same gameplay you share to build that audience can now become a blueprint for someone else to recreate incredibly quickly. I’m not going to stop sharing. I still think the games with real iteration, testing, and care behind them will stand out. It’s just disappointing that sharing something you’re proud of now comes with a little more hesitation than it used to.

Added a Rainbow Flick to Soccer Pinball. In the past, adding something like this meant hunting through animation packs, finding something close enough, importing it, and then trying to make it actually work with the game. Now I can find a GIF of the exact movement I’m looking for, give it to Opus 5.5 or Astra as a visual reference, and work through the implementation from there. Here’s the process of taking that reference and turning it into an actual ability in the game. The player flicks the ball up and over, runs onto it, and if everything lines up, takes the shot at the net. This is the kind of stuff that still blows my mind about building games right now.

Now that iOS 27 is out and more people are using it, it felt like a good time to start bringing Apple’s Foundation Models into Evershift Daily. The first place I’m using it is the daily leaderboard. It analyzes the top 50 players and generates little insights about what’s happening around the world that day, which countries are showing up, who’s moving up, and anything interesting it finds in the results. But now that Foundation Models is integrated into Evershift, I’m already thinking about where else it could go. Daily recaps, spotting rivalries, personalized insights based on how you played, comparing your performance to previous days, there’s a lot to experiment with. apps.apple.com/ca/app/eversh…

In Soccer Pinball, the crowd actually reacts to what’s happening on the pitch. Fill up the Crowd Pulse meter and a random fan will throw something onto the field. This time it’s a Stink Bomb. Once it’s tossed onto the field, the players scatter and even the goalie falls over for a few seconds, leaving the net wide open. Probably a good time to score. @OpenAIDevs @unity