Ivan Murzak spent the early 2010s shipping Evil Cogs, a Limbo-style mobile platformer that hit 5 million downloads on Android by squeezing performance out of phones that had no business running it. A decade later, he's a Microsoft MVP maintaining what's become the most-downloaded open-source Unity MCP server - the one anyone trying to get Claude, Cursor, or Copilot to actually do useful work inside the Unity editor probably ends up using.

🔹 Links:

Unity MCP: https://github.com/IvanMurzak/Unity-MCP

Ivan's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Ivan_Murzak_Dev

🔹 Chapters:

• 00:00 Intro
• 03:22 What We've Been Playing
• 13:49 Evil Cogs: 5M Downloads and Limbo by Accident
• 44:09 Why You Shouldn't Give Your Game to Your Mom
• 01:06:17 Building the Most-Downloaded Unity MCP
• 01:20:05 The MCP Zoo and Why CLI Is Winning
• 01:48:46 Reflection All the Way Down
• 02:04:11 Does the CS Degree Still Make Sense?

Episode URL: https://tech-debt.club/episodes/6-tdc-06-from-indie-game-dev-to-top-unity-mcp-with-ivan-murzak

Andreas Gielov spent three years helping run Brackeys, one of the most influential Unity YouTube channels of all time. After Brackeys stopped producing Unity content, he went on to manage a string of game development YouTubers before joining Sirenix — the team behind Odin Inspector and the upcoming UI library Pangui — as VP of Marketing.

We talk about what actually makes a game dev YouTube channel work, why advocate-driven marketing beats paid ads in niche markets, and why Sirenix has been quietly building Pangui for five years before letting anyone see it. Along the way: the tech stack is bloated, your in-house Unity UI framework probably shouldn't exist, and Jonathan Blow gets brought up (again).

Chapters

• 00:00 Inside Brackeys and the Reality of Game Dev YouTube
• 48:18 Buying 70 Odin Licenses (And What Happened Next)
• 54:23 Why Odin Worked, and What Pangui Actually Is
• 01:02:51 Five Years of Silence on Pangui
• 01:08:21 Rebuilding UI From Zero
• 01:14:36 Open Source, AI, and Why You Shouldn't Build Your Own UI

Episode URL: https://tech-debt.club/episodes/5-tdc-05-from-brackeys-to-pangui-with-andreas-gielov

Lior Hadashian, co-founder and CTO of Gavra Games, joins Yuri and Amit to talk about building and shipping Warriors Rise to Glory — a turn-based gladiator fighting game inspired by a goofy Flash game from the internet's ugly years. What followed was five years of bootstrap chaos: a Bilibili influencer blowing up the game overnight, a Chinese localization done in one week, a main font that turned out to be stolen, two appearances on Israeli Shark Tank, and a mobile pivot that never happened.

They also go deep on the realities of indie investment — what it actually means to raise money, why turning down $130k on live television was the right call, and what "alive but not kicking" looks like for a studio winding down.

The back half gets technical: Unity version upgrades and why they break in exactly three places every time, Google's ongoing war with Unity Package Manager, and Amit's experience upgrading a 4-year production project to Unity 6.3.

Lior is working on something new. He won't say what it is. He's on Unity 6.4.

Topics covered:

• Warriors Rise to Glory — the game, the inspiration, the Venn diagram problem of turn-based fighting games
• Launching on Steam without localization infrastructure, then scrambling to add 10 languages
• How a BiliBili influencer caused a Chinese localization crisis in week one of early access
• The font that was illegal (and why you can't just pay for it)
• Israeli Shark Tank — declining the first deal, coming back with receipts, and closing the second
• What $40k of initial investment and $257k in gross revenue actually gets you
• Why going mobile fell apart (the chicken-and-egg problem of mobile talent and capital)
• Unity upgrade pain: asset bundles, TextMesh Pro, shaders, and Google's UPM situation
• Swap Heroes — Amit's game, go download it, leave a review (constructive preferred)
• "Your brain is the product"

Time Codes:

• 00:17 – Cold open: what are you playing
• 08:32 – Meet Lior / Warriors Rise to Glory
• 14:33 – The Venn diagram problem
• 15:13 – Localization: the full saga (BiliBili, 20% refunds, one week, illegal font)
• 37:36 – Shark Tank: twice, one rejection, one deal
• 47:52 – The numbers, the aftermath, the pizza
• 1:00:00 – Mobile, burnout, and the end of Gavra Games
• 1:05:37 – Unity upgrades: what always breaks
• 1:15:23 – What's next

Guest: Lior Hadashian

Episode URL: https://tech-debt.club/episodes/4-tdc-04-from-shark-tank-to-steam-with-lior-hadashian