// transmission.log

Data Feed

> Intercepted signals from across the network — tech, engineering, and dispatches from the void.

1695 transmissions indexed — page 27 of 85

[ 2025 ]

20 entries

521Jun 9, 2025|openai.com

Scaling security with responsible disclosure

OpenAI introduces its Outbound Coordinated Disclosure Policy to guide how it responsibly reports vulnerabilities in third-party software—emphasizing integrity, collaboration, and proactive security at scale.

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522Jun 8, 2025|blog.unity.com

Making a killing: The playful 2D terror of Psycasso®

A serial killer is stalking the streets, and his murders are a work of art. That’s more or less the premise behind Psycasso®, a tongue-in-cheek 2D pixel art game from Omni Digital Technologies that’s debuting a demo at Steam Next Fest this week, with plans to head into Early Access later this year. Playing as the killer, you get a job and build a life by day, then hunt the streets by night to find and torture victims, paint masterpieces with their blood, then sell them to fund operations.I sat down with lead developer Benjamin Lavender and Omni, designer and producer, to talk about this playfully gory game that gives a classic retro style and a fresh (if gruesome) twist.Let’s start with a bit of background about the game.Omni: We wanted to make something that stands out. We know a lot of indie studios are releasing games and the market is ever growing, so we wanted to make something that’s not just fun to play, but catches people’s attention when others tell them about it. We’ve created an open-world pixel art game about an artist who spends his day getting a job, trying to fit into society. Then at nighttime, things take a more sinister turn and he goes around and makes artwork out of his victim's blood.We didn’t want to make it creepy and gory. We kind of wanted it to be cutesy and fun, just to make it ironic. Making it was a big challenge. We basically had to create an entire city with functioning shops and NPCs who have their own lives, their own hobbies. It was a huge challenge.So what does the actual gameplay look like?Omni: There’s a day cycle and a night cycle that breaks up the gameplay. During the day, you can get a job, level up skills, buy properties and furniture upgrades. At nighttime, the lighting completely changes, the vibe completely changes, there’s police on the street and the flow of the game shifts. The idea is that you can kidnap NPCs using a whole bunch of different weapons – guns, throwable grenades, little traps and cool stuff that you can capture people with.Once captured on the street, you can either harvest their blood and body parts there, or buy a specialist room to keep them in a cage and put them in various equipment like hanging chains or torture chairs. The player gets better rewards for harvesting blood and body parts this way.On the flip side, there’s a whole other element to the game where the player is given missions each week from galleries around the city. They come up on your phone menu, and you can accept them and do either portrait or landscape paintings, with all of the painting being done using only shades of red. We've got some nice drip effects and splat sounds to make it feel like you’re painting with blood. Then you can give your creation a name, submit it to a gallery, then it goes into a fake auction, people will bid on the artwork and you get paid and large amount of in-game money so you can then buy upgrades for the home, upgrade painting tools like bigger paint brushes, more selection tools, stuff like that.Ben: There’s definitely nothing like it. And that was the aim, is when you are telling people about it, they’re like, “Oh, okay. Right. We’re not going to forget about this.” Let’s dig into the 2D tools you used to create this world.Ben: It’s using the 2D Renderer. The Happy Harvest 2D sample project that you guys made was kind of a big starting point, from a lighting perspective, and doing the normal maps of the 2D and getting the lighting to look nice. Our night system is a very stripped-down, then added-on version of the thing that you guys made. I was particularly interested by its shadows. The building’s shadows aren’t actually shadows – it’s a black light. We tried to recreate that with all of our buildings in the entire open world – so it does look beautiful for a 2D game, if I do say so myself.Can you say a bit about how you’re using AI or procedural generation in NPCs?Ben: I don’t know how many actually made it into the demo to be fair, number-wise. Every single NPC has a unique identity, as in they all have a place of work that they go to on a regular schedule. They have hobbies, they have spots where they prefer to loiter, a park bench or whatever. So you can get to know everyone’s individual lifestyle.So, the old man that lives in the same building as me might love to go to the casino at nighttime or go consistently on a Monday and a Friday, that kind of vibe.It uses the A* Pathfinding Project, because we knew we wanted to have a lot of AIs. We’ve locked off most of the city for the demo, but the actual size of the city is huge. The police mechanics are currently turned off, but there’s 80% police mechanics in there as well. If you punch someone or hurt someone, that’s a crime, and if anyone sees it, they can go and report to the police and then things happen. That’s a feature that’s there but not demo-ready yet.How close would you say you are to a full release?Omni: We should be scheduled for October for early access. By that point we’ll have the stealth mechanics and the policing systems polished and in and get some of the other upcoming features buttoned up. We’re fairly close.Ben: Lots of it’s already done, it’s just turned off for the demo. We don’t want to overwhelm people because there’s just so much for the player to do.Tell me a bit about the paint mechanics – how did you build that?Ben: It is custom. We built it ourselves completely from scratch. But I can't take responsibility for that one – someone else did the whole thing – that was their baby. It is really, really cool though.Omni: It’s got a variety of masking tools, the ability to change opacity and spacing, you can undo, redo. It’s a really fantastic feature that gives people the opportunity to express themselves and make some great art.Ben: And it's gamified, so it doesn’t feel like you’ve just opened up Paint in Windows.Omni: Best of all is when you make a painting, it gets turned into an inventory item so you physically carry it around with you and can sell it or treasure it.What’s the most exciting part of Psycasso for you?Omni: Stunning graphics. I think graphically, it looks really pretty.Ben: Visually, you could look at it and go, “Oh, that’s Psycasso.”Omni: What we’ve done is taken a cozy retro-style game, and we’ve brought modern design, logic, and technology into it. So you're playing what feels like a nostalgic game, but you're getting the experience of a much newer project.Check out the Psycasso demo on Steam, and stay tuned for more NextFest coverage.

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523Jun 5, 2025|openai.com

How we’re responding to The New York Times’ data demands in order to protect user privacy

OpenAI is fighting a court order at the demands of The New York Times and plaintiffs, which involves retention of consumer ChatGPT and API user data indefinitely. Learn how we’re working to uphold user privacy, address legal requirements, and stay true to our data protection commitments.

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524Jun 4, 2025|openai.com

Disrupting malicious uses of AI: June 2025

Our latest report featuring case studies of how we’re detecting and preventing malicious uses of AI.

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525Jun 1, 2025|blog.unity.com

The multiplayer stack behind MMORPG Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen

Finding your own path is at the core of gameplay in Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen – players can go anywhere, climb anything, forge new routes, and follow their curiosity to find adventure. It’s not that different from how its creators, Visionary Realms, approaches building this MMORPG – they’re doing it their own way.Transporting players to the fantasy world of Terminus, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen harkens back to classic MMOs, where accidental discovery wandering through an open world and social interactions with other players are at the heart of the game experience.Creating any multiplayer game is a challenge – but a highly social online game at this scale is an epic quest. We sat down with lead programmer Kyle Olsen about how the team is using Unity to connect players in this MMORPG fantasy world.So what makes Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen unique compared to other MMO games?It’s definitely the social aspect. You have to experience the world and move through it naturally. It can be a bit more of a grind in a way, but it I think connects you more to your character, to the game, and the world instead of just sort of teleporting everywhere and joining LFG systems or just being placed in a dungeon. You learn the land a bit better, you have to navigate and you use your eyes more than just bouncing around like a pinball from objective to objective, following quest markers and stuff. It’s more of a thought game.How are you managing synchronization between the player experience and specific world instances?We have our own network library we built for the socket transport layer called ViNL. That’s the bread and butter for all of the zone communications, between zones and player to zone. SQL server in the back end, kind of standard stuff there. But most of the transports are handled by our own network library.How do you approach asset loading for this giant world?We’ve got a step where we bake our continents out into these tiles, and we’ve got different backends that we can plug into that. We’ve got one that just outputs standard Prefabs, and we’ve got one that outputs subscenes that we were using before Unity 6, and then we’ve got actual full-on Unity scenes that you can load additively, so you can choose how you want to output your content. Before Unity 6, we had moved away from Prefabs and started loading the DOTS subscenes and using that, built on BRG.We also have an output that can render directly to our own custom batch render group as well, just using scriptable objects and managing our own data. So we’ve been able to experiment and test out the different ones, and see what yields the best client performance. Prior to Unity 6, we were outputting and rendering the entire continent with subscenes, but with Unity 6 we actually switched back to using Prefabs with Instantiate Async and Addressables to manage everything.We’re using the Resident Drawer and GPU occlusion culling, which ended up yielding even better performance than subscenes and our own batch render group – I’m assuming because GPU occlusion culling just isn’t supported by some of the other render paths at the moment. So we’ve bounced around quite a bit, and we landed on Addressables for managing all the memory and asset loading, and regular Instantiate Prefabs with the GPU Resident Drawer seems to be the best client-side performance at the moment.Did you upgrade to Unity 6 to take advantage of the GPU Resident Drawer, specifically?Actually, I really wanted it for the occlusion culling. I wasn’t aware that only certain render paths made use of the occlusion culling, so we were attempting to use it with the same subscene rendering that we were using prior to Unity 6 and realizing nothing’s actually being culled. So we opted to switch back to the Prefab output to see what that looked like with the Resident Drawer, and occlusion culling and FPS went up.We had some issues initially, because Instantiate Async wasn’t in before Unity 6, so we had some stalls when we would instantiate our tiles. There were quite a few things being instantiated, but switching that over to Instantiate Async after we fixed a couple of bugs we got rid of the stall on load and the overall frame rate was higher after load, so it was just a win-win.Were there any really remarkable productivity gains that came with the switch to Unity 6?Everything I've talked about so far was client-facing, so our players experienced those wins. For the developer side of things, the stability and performance of the Editor went up quite a bit. The Editor stability in Unity 6 has gone up pretty substantially – it’s very rare to actually crash now. That alone has been, at least for the coding side, a huge win. It feels more stable in its entirety for sure.How do you handle making changes and updates without breaking everything?We build with Addressables using the labels very heavily, and we do the Addressable packaging by labels. So if we edit a specific zone or an asset in a zone, or like a VFX that’s associated with a spell or something like that, only those bundles that touch that label get updated at all.And then, our own content delivery system, we have the game available on Steam and our own patcher, and those both handle the delta changes, where we’re just delivering small updates through those Addressable bundles. The netcode requires the same version to be connected in the first place, so the network library side of that is automatically handled in the handshake process.What guidance would you give someone who’s trying to tackle an MMO game or another ambitious multiplayer project?You kind of start small, I guess. It's a step-by-step process. If you’re a small team, you You start small. It's a step-by-step process. If you’re a small team, you can’t bite off too much. It’d be completely overwhelming – but that holds true with any larger-scale game, not just an MMO. Probably technology selection – making smart choices upfront and sticking to them. It’s going to be a lot of middleware and backend tech that you’re going to have to wrangle and get working well together, and swapping to the newest cool thing all the time is not going to bode well.What’s the most exciting technical achievement for your team with this game?I think that there aren’t many open world MMOs, period, that have been pulled off in Unity. We don’t have a huge team, and we're making a game that is genuinely massive, so we have to focus on little isolated areas, develop them as best we can, and then move on and get feedback.The whole package together is fairly new grounds – when there is an MMO, it needs to feel like an MMO in spirit, with lots of people all around, doing their own thing. And we’ve pulled that off – I think better than pretty much any Unity MMO ever has. I think we can pat ourselves on the back for that.Get more insights from developers on Unity’s Resources page and here on the blog. Check out Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen in Early Access on Steam.

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526May 31, 2025|blog.unity.com

Games made with Unity: May 2025 in review

A bunch of great games made with Unity dropped in May—across genres, budgets, and styles. Here’s a quick roundup of what shipped that anyone not still lost in Blue Prince should check out.IGF Awards Huge congrats to all the IGF finalists, especially the games made with Unity that dominated the awards this year — including Consume Me, which took home three wins! Fresh off their Audience Award win at the IGF Awards, The WereCleaner team joined us on stream. Check it out:Made with Unity Steam Curator Page Once again we sent out a clarion call for Unity staff to share which of your games they've been playing this past month. Be sure to see them all on our Steam Curator Page here:Working on a game in Unity? We’d love to help you spread the word. Be sure to submit your project.Without further ado, to the best of our abilities, here’s a non-exhaustive list of games made with Unity and launched in May 2025, either into early access or full release. Add to the list by sharing any that you think we missed.ActionShotgun Cop Man, DeadToast Entertainment (May 1)Deliver At All Costs, Studio Far Out Games (May 22)Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, Pocket Trap (May 28)Bullet HeavenBioprototype, Emprom Game (May 19)Broventure: The Wild Co-op, Alice Games (May 15)Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos, NANOO (May 19 – early access)Cards, dice, and deckbuildersMonster Train 2, Shiny Shoe (May 21)Into the Restless Ruins, Ant Workshop Ltd (May 15)Casual, rhythm, and partyAmong Us 3D, Schell Games, Innersloth (May 6)Dunk Dunk, Badgerhammer Limited (May 8)Ithya: Magic Studies, BlueTurtle (May 7)Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo, Galla (May 16)Bugtopia, Nocturnal Games (May 21)Kabuto Park, Doot, Zakku (May 28)City and colony builderPreserve, Bitmap Galaxy (May 15)MEMORIAPOLIS, 5PM Studio (April 30)Darfall, SquareNite (May 8)Worshippers of Cthulhu, Crazy Goat Games (May 22)City Tales - Medieval Era, Irregular Shapes (May 22 – early access)ComedyPick Me Pick Me, Optillusion (May 28 – early access)Experimental or surrealistENA: Dream BBQ, ENA Team (March 27)FPSBloodshed, com8com1 Software (May 22)GRIMWAR, BookWyrm (May 16)Noga, Ilan Manor (May 30)HorrorLiDAR Exploration Program, KenForest (April 2)White Knuckle, KenForest (April 17 – early access)The Boba Teashop, Mike Ten (April 21)Out of Hands, Game River (April 22)Darkwater, Targon Studios (April 22 – early access)Management and automationBlacksmith Master, Untitled Studio (May 15 – early access)Liquor Store Simulator, Tovarishch Games (May 2)Animal Spa, Sinkhole Studio, Moonlab Studio (May 13)Toy Shop Simulator, PaperPixel Games (May 16)Alien Market Simulator, Silly Sloth Studios, Kheddo Entertainment (May 25 – early access)MetroidvaniaOirbo, ImaginationOverflow (February 11 – early access)SteamDolls - Order Of Chaos, The Shady Gentlemen (February 11 – early access)Narrative and mysterydespelote, Julián Cordero, Sebastian Valbuena (May 1)Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping, Happy Broccoli Games (May 22)Beholder: Conductor, Alawar (April 23)PlatformerPaperKlay, WhyKev (March 27)Bionic Bay, Psychoflow Studio, Mureena Oy (April 17)Once Upon A Puppet, Flatter Than Earth (April 23)PEPPERED: an existential platformer, Mostly Games (April 7)Ninja Ming, 1 Poss Studio (April 10)Seafrog, OhMyMe Games (April 15)Puzzle adventurePup Champs, Afterburn (May 19)Strings Theory, Beautiful Bee (Console release)Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer, Clifftop Games (May 20)Poco, Whalefall (May 20)Axona, Onat Oke (May 28)Projected Dreams, Flawberry Studio (May 29)Elroy and the Aliens, Motiviti (April 2)Leila, Ubik Studios (April 7)Tempopo, Witch Beam (April 17)BOKURA: planet, ところにょり (April 24)Amerzone - The Explorer's Legacy, Microids Studio Paris (April 24)Roguelike/liteSavara, Doryah Games (May 6)Vellum, Alvios Games (May 2)Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade, 7QUARK (May 14)An Amazing Wizard, Tiny Goblins (May 22 – early access)Garden of Witches, Team Tapas (May 23 – early access)RPGTainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, Questline (May 23)The Monster Breeder, Fantasy Creations (May 6)Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall, Brave At Night (May 8)SandboxA Webbing Journey, Fire Totem Games (May 19 – early access)Islands & Trains, Akos Makovics (May 29)SimulationThe Precinct, Fallen Tree Games Ltd (May 13)Liquor Store Simulator, Tovarishch Games (May 2)Doloc Town, RedSaw Games Studio (May 7)Tales of Seikyu, ACE Entertainment (May 21 – early access)Trash Goblin, Spilt Milk Studios Ltd (May 28)Sports and drivingThe Last Golfer, Pixel Perfect Dude (May 28)Turbo Takedown, Hanging Draw (March 3)StrategyTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, Strange Scaffold (May 22)Tower Dominion, Parallel 45 Games (May 7)9 Kings, Sad Socket (May 23 – early access)SurvivalDino Path Trail, Void Pointer (May 9)Survival Machine, Grapes Pickers (May 7 – early access)Oppidum, EP Games® (April 25)That’s a wrap for May 2025. Want more Made with Unity and community news as it happens? Don’t forget to follow us on social media: Bluesky, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitch.

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527May 28, 2025|openai.com

Creating websites in minutes with AI Website Builder

Wix’s AI Website Builder, powered by OpenAI, lets anyone create a full website in minutes—just by describing their idea in a conversation.

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528May 22, 2025|openai.com

Addendum to OpenAI o3 and o4-mini system card: OpenAI o3 Operator

We are replacing the existing GPT-4o-based model for Operator with a version based on OpenAI o3. The API version will remain based on 4o.

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529May 22, 2025|openai.com

Shipping code faster with o3, o4-mini, and GPT-4.1

CodeRabbit uses OpenAI models to revolutionize code reviews—boosting accuracy, accelerating PR merges, and helping developers ship faster with fewer bugs and higher ROI.

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530May 21, 2025|openai.com

Introducing Stargate UAE

We’re launching Stargate UAE – the first international deployment of Stargate, OpenAI’s AI infrastructure platform.

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531May 21, 2025|blog.unity.com

5 tips & strategies for marketing indie games

Making a game is hard. Getting anyone to care about it might be harder. That’s why we launched the Indie Survival Guide — an evolving archive of Q&As, VODs, and live streams from developers and industry folks. There’s no guaranteed playbook for success, but hearing how others navigated design, business, and getting by can give you better odds. In this recent stream, we sat down with Chris Zukowski from HowToMarketAGame.com, who shared honest, actionable advice on standing out in a crowded Steam marketplace. Below are a few highlights from the conversation.1. Optimize your Steam pageA good Steam page does two things: it tells players exactly what kind of game they’re looking at, and it proves that it’s worth their time. According to Chris, clarity is king:“You wanna make your Steam page look like your type of game so that at an instant somebody shopping goes, ‘Ah, it's that type of game—I’m gonna buy it.”To build trust, you also need to look professional, and that starts with how your game is presented visually.“You wanna show quality. And another way to do quality is you should hire a capsule artist,” says Chris. “I’m telling you folks… don’t just use Unity, take a screenshot, and then use MS Paint to write the title of your game. Don’t do that.”Details matter, even in your thumbnail. Chris pointed out how players make fast visual associations when skimming through the store.“Every capsule always has a hammer. I don’t know why,” he says. “But if you just put a hammer in your thumbnail for your game—it’s called a capsule—people are gonna see that hammer and subconsciously go, ‘Oh, I bet I build a city with that.’”Why is all this important? Often, you have that first 5 seconds when someone lands on your Steam page or views your capsule browsing the platform to grab their attention. The competition is steep, and you need to find any way to rise above the noise.2. Choose the Right Genre on SteamYour first marketing decision isn’t the trailer, or the tweet — it’s the game you chose to make. Genre isn’t just a creative choice; it defines your market fit.“The moment you say ‘I’m gonna make this type of game,’ you’ve actually made the biggest marketing decision,” Chris explains. “People think like, ‘Oh, I’ve made my game and now I want to start thinking about marketing.’ It’s too late.”Chris emphasized that certain genres are better suited for Steam’s player base. Horror is a consistent favorite, as are systems-driven games.“Most of the games that do very well are genres that people don’t typically make. The big one is horror. The other ones I call crafty building strategy simulation-y games,” he says. “Crafty building strategy simulation-y games—these are games where they’re almost like a sandbox. It’s not like a linear story where you’re a dude with a sword and you run through an environment.”Things like crafting games, management and automation games, city builders, and simulation games do really well on Steam, even if they don’t become household names. This has held true for awhile. Trends on Steam aren’t as unpredictable as they seem. Chris has tracked genre performance over several years and found them surprisingly stable:“I’ve done this for the past three years to look at the big genres that are on there… and typically, it’s very consistent year over year. These trends aren’t running. These trends are staying the same.”3. Avoid Common Mistakes on SteamEven great games can stumble at launch because of simple oversights. One of the biggest? Not treating your Steam page launch as an announcement:“People have never announced their game,” he says. “I know this sounds weird… but a lot of people just throw their Steam page up and then their Steam page is live. No. When you put your Steam page up, you announced your game.”Another major one: forgetting to use Steam’s built-in tools to notify your audience.“You launch your game and… you didn’t push the ‘email wishlisters’ button? That’s a big one. That’s a new rule. That was instituted in about October. But that’s it—you have to push the button,” he says. “You have two weeks from when you launch your demo to push this button called ‘email wishlisters’… do not forget. A third of responses to my survey were like, ‘what’s an email button?’”Discovery on Steam is based on a lot of things, but don’t underestimate metadata and tags. Steam’s discovery algorithm relies heavily on tags, yet many devs ignore them or don’t maintain them.“Another stupid thing—check your tags. I’ve seen people that have like 10 tags. No—you wanna get all the tags."4. Prepare for Steam Next FestSteam Next Fest can offer a massive visibility spike — if you show up prepared. That means your demo needs to be in shape before the event begins.“You should not be debuting your demo during Next Fest,” he says, “Next Fest is the grand… it’s the quinceañera. It’s the grand debut of the final stage of yourself. You should have released your demo long before.”This is especially important because Steam gives all participants equal footing at first — but only boosts games that perform well early.“You want your demo bulletproof,” he says. “You’ve wanted it vetted by streamers before. You’ve wanted it in other festivals. Because if on that first day everybody fires it up and there’s some bug… you’re done.”Chris emphasized the importance of building wishlists before the event begins:“If you’re coming into Next Fest hot with more wishlists, you will do better. That’s why you want to get that demo out early and build some momentum before the fest begins.”5. Invest wisely when supplementing your Steam pageIf you're chasing visibility, you don’t need to buy a massive toolset or a stack of ads. In fact, most of this process can be done with strategy and timing.“There aren’t that many tools… you don’t need to buy a lot. Marketing is not pay-to-win that much,” he says about marketing a Steam game. “Marketing is actually much more strategic, and it’s about when you time certain activities and what you do.”The only thing Chris consistently recommends spending on? A pro-looking capsule image.“The only thing I really recommend spending money on is hiring a capsule artist. Other than that, most of this is free and DIY.”There are no magic formulas, but learning how others have done it can go a long way. If there’s one consistent takeaway from this chat with Chris, it’s that marketing is not just about shouting as loud as you can on social media. You need to make a game that the market on that platform is looking for, make it obvious that it’s that type of game, and let the game do the marketing work for you. Getting demos out early is key. You can follow more of Chris’s work at HowToMarketAGame.com, or dive deeper into the Indie Survival Guide for more hard-earned advice from devs who've been there.Keep making games, and don’t forget to push that e-mail button.

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532May 21, 2025|blog.unity.com

5 lessons to learn from a failed game

The Indie Survival Guide is your ongoing archive of real talk and hard-won insights from the devs and industry experts making games happen—often against the odds. Whatever tools you’re using, this growing library of Q&As, livestreams, and VODs is here to help. There’s no magic formula, but we believe shared experience—across design, business, and survival—can give you the best shot.We recently sat down with Emily Pitcher—a Forbes 30 Under 30 and Game Awards Future Class honoree, better known online as sonderingemily to her 350,000 followers across YouTube, Instagram, and beyond. Emily is the creator of lily’s world XD, a psychological horror game built on cringy teen nostalgia, fourth-wall breaks, and real photos from her own adolescence. Her work spans game dev and content creation, and she’s the first to admit: it hasn’t all been easy. But the journey has a lot to learn from.Here’s what she had to say.1. Failing as part of the processBefore the success of lily’s world XD, there was Gold Lining—a project that taught Emily the brutal, necessary lessons of creative failure. She poured her heart into the game, even secured early funding from Xbox, but ultimately it didn’t find traction. There was no publisher. No finish line. Just hard decisions and emotional fallout. But it was also the beginning of clarity.“Gold Lining was a project I started basically right out of college,” she says. “Instead of researching what might be popular with Steam players, I just thought, what would be a concept that seems cool to make?... We actually got some funding from that game from Xbox… but unfortunately, we were never able to secure a publisher with that game, and the game was ultimately cancelled.”Emily doesn’t romanticize this period. The dream faltered. Her confidence did too. And the weight of rejection nearly broke her.“The game could not be finished without money,” she said. “The scope was just way too big… and we kind of came at a crossroads of what should we do… I stopped having fun making the game… I was really sad every day with the rejections… I stopped believing in the game itself.”Still, she made the hardest—and wisest—move: she quit. And by walking away, she opened the door to her next act.“It was honestly really hard, very emotional—there was crying involved, of course—but now looking back, I am so happy I had the courage to step away,” she says. “I do not regret that failure at all because only because I went through that and learned the hard way, that lily’s world XD has been able to get grounding.”2. Turning Mistakes Into MomentumEmily didn’t just recover—she reflected. Every painful lesson from Gold Lining became a data point. And rather than rebuild in the same direction, she rebuilt smarter.“[Chris Zukowski] actually had this video that changed my life,” she says. “He did this interview with a popular game dev channel and he had this whole section about genre. And he said platformers—the worst genre—that hurt a little bit.”The first shift? She stopped building games no one could explain. She learned that clarity matters. Especially when talking to publishers or creating content, having a razor-sharp pitch can be the difference between intrigue and indifference.“You can summarize the hook of your game in one sentence,” she says. “That one sentence can guide you when you're talking to publishers, guide you when you're making content about your game.”She also interrogated her design logic more rigorously. Was every mechanic supporting the theme, or just convention?“I was just following the conventions of the genre and not asking myself, are we just doing this because it’s a platformer?” she said. “Or are we doing this because it helps the central theme of the game?”Most importantly, she dismantled the echo chamber. No more developing in isolation. Instead, she decided to involve the audience early—and often.“Another big thing I would do is to try to validate your game earlier,” she says. “With Gold Lining, it was just an echo chamber of me and my friends… with lily’s world XD, I made the videos from the very beginning.”3. Playing to your strengthsOne of Emily’s biggest unlocks wasn’t about tech or trends. It was about accepting who she is—and who she isn’t. She’s not a trained programmer. She’s not a pro artist. But she is a storyteller. A designer. A builder of weird, personal worlds. And when she embraced that, things clicked.“You gotta be a little objective about what you're good and bad at,” she said. “I suck at programming. I am a good writer. And I would say I'm passable with art… if someone told me, ‘I suck at programming, I'm mediocre at art, and I can only write,’ I’d be like, ‘You should not make an indie game’… but even though all of those things are true, when I get the feedback form for my game, for playtesters, people actually say that art direction is one of their favorite things.”Instead of pretending to be someone she wasn’t, Emily designed around her limits. And in doing so, she carved out a creative space that felt truly hers.“I worked around my weaknesses,” she says. “I suck at programming, so I decided to make a game that I thought would be easier to program… I used to work at Meta, so I’m familiar with tools like Figma… I use pictures of myself because I’m not that good at art… and it is a narrative detective game, so storytelling and writing is at the forefront.”Her lesson: don’t wait to be good at everything. Use what you’ve got.“Limitation is what makes you seem competent if you have a lower skill set,” she says. “If you're doing pixel art and you use a limited color palette, immediately your art is gonna seem more cohesive just because of that—even though you still suck.”4. Publicly validating conceptsIn contrast to the quiet, closed-door development of Gold Lining, Emily took a radically open approach with lily’s world XD. She didn’t just develop in public—she launched her audience journey before her Unity project even existed.“With Gold Lining, it was a secret right up until the end… I worked for about two years in private on the game,” she said. “And with lily’s world XD, I thought: in the first week of development, let’s make a video. And that video got 2 million views… I realized that I could use social media as a way to evaluate whether my ideas had strengths.”The result? Instant feedback. Viral traction. And a powerful way to gauge demand before sinking years into development.“I had started making videos here and there… eventually I grew a small audience,” she says. “I posted one of my TikTok videos to Instagram just to share with my family and friends. That video got over 2 million views, and now I do it as a career.”This approach wasn’t accidental—it was strategic. She tested multiple angles and found the hook that stuck.“When I had an idea, I came up with a few sentences of hooks,” she explained. “...and what led to the huge boom and rise of my game… was this thing I did to save time, that ended up being a cool developer story.”Emily’s story proves you don’t need a huge following to start. You just need to start.“I know that not everyone has a massive social media following,” she said. “But I don’t think you need a massive social media following to validate this idea through social media… Unpacking went viral at its first tweet… they weren’t famous people before that.”5. Using Social MediaSocial media was never Emily’s endgame—it was a bridge. A means of discovery, validation, and momentum. But not a silver bullet. She’s blunt about its limits.“Short-form video is not the best way to convert to wishlists,” she says. “That conversion has to happen when they see the name, they save the video, then they go on their computer and search it up… that is just too many steps.”What works? A multi-platform approach, repeated visibility, and content with a clear hook.“Post your video on all social media platforms,” she said. “This video that is literally 6 million views got 700 views on my TikTok. If I just posted on TikTok, I would think this is a bad video—but no, this video gave me like 10,000 wishlists.”Most impressive of all, she built momentum before she even touched code.“I started making videos when all I had were two screenshots,” she said. “When I made my video, I didn’t even open Unity. I didn’t know how to code yet. I just assumed I was going to learn on the way.”But Emily is crystal clear: none of this matters if the game itself doesn’t land.“Social media will not take you to the finish line,” she says. “Ultimately, you need to make a good game… you should leverage social media to give you opportunities in your game, rather than relying on it as the sole marketing method.”There’s no single path through indie game development, but Emily Pitcher’s story makes one thing clear: failure is not the opposite of progress; it is progress. From burnout to bounceback, her ability to interrogate her process, stay honest about her strengths, and meet the audience where they are has turned lily’s world XD into one of the most anticipated indie horror games on Steam.As Emily put it best:“We are stronger together and we should not look at each other as competition.”

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533May 21, 2025|blog.unity.com

Mobile shopping insights: Brand marketers' cheat sheet for back-to-school 2025

As the second largest retail event in the U.S. after the holiday season, back-to-school shopping represents a crucial opportunity for brand advertising. And this year, the path to reaching parents clearly leads to one place: their mobile devices.Between March and April 2025, Unity surveyed 1,234 parents in the U.S. with children under 18 through Qualtrics to uncover how they're using mobile apps and games during this critical shopping season*. Our research uncovers specific insights into their shopping behaviors, ad engagement patterns, and preferred retail channels that can help marketers create more effective mobile strategies. Let's take a closer look at the key data and takeaways from our survey.Mobile meets back-to-schoolParents are embracing mobile as a primary path to purchase, with the majority using apps to research and buy back-to-school items.68% of parents use mobile apps for back-to-school shopping48% download new apps specifically for the back-to-school shopping seasonDads are more app-curious with 55% downloading new apps vs. 44% of moms46% complete purchases directly through mobile appsNot only are parents using apps for shopping, generally, they are logging serious screen time:22% spend 1–2 hours/day33% spend 3–4 hours/day on their phones35% spend 5+ hours on their phones58% of parents say they’re likely or very likely to engage with rewarded ads offering back-to-school savingsDads (59.6%) are slightly more responsive than moms (58.4%)Only 11.9% of parents are unlikely or very unlikely to engageMost parents are deal-driven, with coupons and limited-time offers leading their purchase decisions:Coupons/deals: 32% overall (35% of moms, 28% of dads)Limited-time offers: 14% of parents overall, with dads more responsive (17.4%)Cost and variety matter while proximity, bundles/packages and customer service ranked lowestRecommendation: Prioritize in-app advertising with deal-focused creatives, combined with rewarded ad formats that highlight limited-time urgency.School’s in (early) sessionWhen looking at timelines – our survey data indicates that parents are early planners, with the majority of shopping activity kicking off in June (or earlier!), with dads being more likely to get an early jump on back-to-school shopping.Nearly 1 in 5 parents (21%) are early planners, starting their shopping before June.Dads are more likely to start early — 29% shop before June vs. 16% of moms.Nearly half of parents (46%) kick off shopping in June or July, with July alone driving the biggest surge (29.6%)—the peak of back-to-school season.24.8% wait until August, likely driven by last-minute needs or school start dates.Recommendation: Consider launching your awareness campaigns in mid-late Q2 to engage early planners while they’re still in research mode.Spend-ready parentsParents that we surveyed indicated they are ready to spend when it comes to back-to-school shopping, with moms being the primary purchasers. Advertising also plays a large role, with the majority of parents citing it as influential in the purchase-making process.42% of parents plan to spend over $150 on back-to-school clothing alone.Another 20% plan to spend between $100–$150, showing that back-to-school is a high-intent, high-investment moment for many families.63% say advertising somewhat or significantly influences their back-to-school purchase decisions.Moms drive the majority of back to school purchases, with 86% identifying as the primary household shopper.Recommendation: Target mobile ad placements that reach moms - who likely drive the majority of purchase decisions - especially through mobile gaming where women outpace men (73% vs. 65%). With 63% of parents somewhat or significantly influenced by advertising and most planning substantial budgets, mobile campaigns during this high-intent period can help you reach your target audience.What’s in their cartParents that we surveyed indicated they have distinct preferences when it comes to both what they're buying and where they're shopping for back-to-school items, with notable differences in shopping behavior between moms and dads.Classroom supplies (33%), clothing (24%), arts and crafts supplies (9%) and electronics (8%) top the shopping listParents surveyed shop, or would consider shopping, at familiar favorites for back-to-school supplies:Walmart (39%)Amazon (17%)Target (12%)Staples (8%)Retailers vary by parent: While both moms and dads shop at mass retailers, dads are more likely to favor tech and office supply stores than moms.Dads were 2x more likely to shop at Staples (12%) vs. moms (6%)Dads were 2.4x more likely to shop at Office Depot (12%) vs. moms (5%)Dads were 3.3x more likely to shop at Best Buy (10%) vs. moms (3%)Moms were 1.6x more likely to shop at Walmart (46%) vs. dads (28%)Recommendation: Align your messaging with top retail destinations and tailor creative and app lists by parent type.Turn these back-to-school insights into conversions: Launch awareness campaigns by mid-Q2 to capture early planners, meet parents where they spend significant time—in mobile apps and games—and craft messaging that emphasizes urgency and deals. By implementing these data-driven strategies, your brand can earn an A+ this back-to-school season while increasing your advertising ROI potential.Learn more about Unity’s Programmatic solutions.*Disclaimer: Findings are based on survey responses from groups of differing sizes (755 mothers, 441 fathers, 38 not specified). While each group was large enough to identify directional patterns, differences in sample size may affect comparability.Qualtrics. "Survey Data Collected Using Qualtrics Software." Qualtrics, March-April 2025, https://www.qualtrics.com.

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534May 16, 2025|openai.com

Addendum to o3 and o4-mini system card: Codex

Codex is a cloud-based coding agent. Codex is powered by codex-1, a version of OpenAI o3 optimized for software engineering. codex-1 was trained using reinforcement learning on real-world coding tasks in a variety of environments to generate code that closely mirrors human style and PR preferences, adheres precisely to instructions, and iteratively runs tests until passing results are achieved.

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535May 14, 2025|openai.com

AI powers Expedia’s marketing evolution

A conversation with Jochen Koedijk, Chief Marketing Officer of Expedia Group.

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536May 12, 2025|openai.com

Introducing HealthBench

HealthBench is a new evaluation benchmark for AI in healthcare which evaluates models in realistic scenarios. Built with input from 250+ physicians, it aims to provide a shared standard for model performance and safety in health.

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537May 7, 2025|openai.com