Joe Bauer 🔜 UEFest 2026

If you'll be at Unreal Fest, hit me up and lets chat! Excited to see everyone and hang out in Chicago.

@jnvcia Unreal Engine 5 itself isn't some un-optimized engine that inherently means you'll have bad performance etc. But it does lack in real learning resources around this area. They've been getting better (The Great Hitch Hunt for example) but more could be done on an engine level.

@jnvcia I think Epic could do a lot of good for the engine by having some maintenance version updates. I think they've been so forward focused on getting features in that they've missed a lot of great opportunities to optimize and maintain current features.

Saw this video pop up in my feed. Not going to make any value judgements on Philip himself, since I know he means well. However, game engines aren't just a black box you plug GFX into and a game comes out. UE's issue is that it's being used for games that don't require it. cont.

@jadel4w Reminds me of the quote: "If you're the smartest person in the room, you may be in the wrong room"

Don’t take advice from people who don’t have what you want

@UnrealEngine Working on getting RTX Shadows, Lumen and Nanite playing nicely together! x.com/JoeBauerDev/st…

Summer scenes this #ScreenshotSaturday ☀️ Brighten up our feed with your projects by sharing them below! 📷: Nikita Kabral

@NVIDIAGeForce @UnrealEngine And not to worry! I am trying to ensure the best graphical stability across Rasterized, Lumen and Ray Traced shadows so that anybody can enjoy the beauty of the forest! Screenshots below, do you know which is which? =)

It's #ScreenshotSaturday ! Have been working on the lighting in my scenes for a bit now. Getting RTX Shadows, Lumen and Nanite playing nicely together while not burning my PC down 🫠Using @NVIDIAGeForce NVRTX 5.7.4 branch of @UnrealEngine

@GameDevMicah This is awesome! Have so many game/story ideas I've wanted to explore worlds falling apart or changing shapes/manipulated at runtime.

More cool stuff dropped, literally lol

@NVIDIAGeForce @UnrealEngine Also added some Penumbra to my shadows, tweaking the shader found here: chosker.github.io/blog/colored-s…

@Mystikart_ Keep going! As for advice, I'd spice up the Steam page a bit. Use some gifs to show off gameplay, Images for title text. Industria 2 page as a good example for gifs showing gameplay: store.steampowered.com/app/2154070/IN… And of course my game: store.steampowered.com/app/1299480/Th…

So my game flopped after 3 years of work...😢 Since its release on May 26th, I've sold 77 copies... Streamers and curious gamers loved it. I have 2800 wishlists, 800 of which are from the release date.... What do you think? Be honest.🙏 store.steampowered.com/app/3239940/Me…

@ThatBShar Hope to see you there!

Unreal Fest Chicago next week - who's going? Would love to say hi.

@GameDevMicah @UnrealEngine Awesome! I'll make sure to give it a view. Have been checking out NeoStack AI. Not local, but still incredible to test its limits.

@JoeBauerDev @UnrealEngine Thank you Joe! I have a simplified project for it, and I’ll be uploading it to git and also chopping up this live-stream run of it into a more progressional one … but ya, the hate aspect slows that motivation down m.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9s_3…

If you were giving a talk at Unreal Fest Chicago about your current development project, what would your talk be about?🗣️

@Chavenham Build it, yes. Post launch? Super tough, would probably need to at least double or triple for content creation speeds. Especially in todays world where even WoW has 8 week content drops.

You think it's technically possible for an indie studio to release a really successful MMORPG? World of Warcraft was built by a core of 40 devs in the 00s, could be done by 20 devs today?

@UnrealEngine Nanite, Lumen and Ray-tracing optimizations and how to get performant, dynamic shadows in a dense forest.

@GameDevMicah @UnrealEngine I would love to hear about this, but believe you're right here. This is *perfect* use of AI.

@UnrealEngine Converting Blueprint project to C++ with LLMs for free- but the hate against AI makes that account kryptonite. Odd time for innovators

Feels surreal, feels like the game took eternity to make but suddenly its already out 🥹 store.steampowered.com/app/3375890/Og…

@jogamedev My first game took ~3 years to make, my second game will take ~6 years to make... To be fair, it took 3 years to land on the right idea =D

My first game took me 5 years to make. My second game took me 10 months to make (and it's more fun than my first). I predict my third will take 3 months. It's painfully easy to waste time working on things that feel productive but don't matter, and the longer I do this the more clear it becomes where the points of highest leverage are: 1. For a game to be successful it needs to have "the magic". It needs to do something that grabs people, it has to offer something special or have fantastic execution - this is very hard for a dev to judge on their own. You know if your game has "the magic" when you see how people respond to it (both by playing it and seeing it for the first time) - especially non-friends and family. 2. For a game to be successful you must get it in front of people's eyeballs. This sounds obvious but there's a part of it that's unintuitive: if you look out at the world's biggest brands and see how much they spend on advertising you'll realize that it doesn't matter how much people love McDonalds, they still have to be constantly reminded that it exists. Do not count on your game just being "good and spreading by word of mouth". Word of mouth has a short half-life. So my new strategy for my 3rd and future games will be: > Make something cool and get it into the world as soon as possible. If it resonates, I double down, if not, I move on. I kinda tried to do this with "Some of You May Die" and I did have a playable multiplayer prototype in like a week which was fun but it took me months to externally validate with folks beyond friends and family. And I keep seeing low fidelity games crush it which tells me I'm holding back for too long - trying to polish too much and tie up all the loose ends. I just have to find out if it has the magic as soon as possible.

Here we go. Time to see how people like 🥹

One week until Unreal Fest! Who's all going? Hit me up and lets meet-up and chat!

@GameDevMicah @RachelVT42 I wish there was a 😂 react and not just "like"

@RachelVT42 You want to subscribe to more mid tier streamers? Well that’s nice of you

Unpopular opinion: if you spend so much time gaming every week that it takes as much time as your day job, at least you should figure out how to monetize your addiction. But the truth is, most gamers are just mid and not even good enough to get this right.