Valentin and Bobsi met contracting for the same multiplayer games platform, where a switch to Photon Quantum brought solid determinism and a workflow that took two hours to network a rolling ball. Almost two years after they started building PurrNet out of that frustration, their MIT-licensed Unity networking solution has passed 3,000 Discord members and around 20,000 GitHub clones a month. We talked about retrofitting multiplayer into ten-year-old single-player code, why no tutorial teaches server authority, a 100-player Unity server using 100–150 MB of RAM, player IDs that survive reconnects, 550 automated regression tests, and shipping CRACKED and Arctic Drive on their own stack. Every networking solution can make games, Bobsi says — two percent less bandwidth was never the point.

🔹 Links:

PurrNet on GitHub: https://github.com/PurrNet/PurrNet

Bobsi Tutorials on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BobsiTutorial

NowUI: https://github.com/BlenMiner/NowUI

CRACKED on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3917010/CRACKED/

Arctic Drive on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4009490/Arctic_Drive/

🔹 Chapters:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:18 What We've Been Playing
• 19:34 Voxels, C++ in Unity, and a UI Library Born From Hating UI
• 25:41 Ten-Year-Old Code Bases and Retrofitting Multiplayer
• 36:16 Arctic Drive, and Yes, You Can Pee on the Snow
• 41:33 Two Hours to Network a Rolling Ball in Photon Quantum
• 48:57 Server Authority, the Thing No Tutorial Teaches
• 53:48 A 100-Player Unity Server in 150 MB of RAM
• 57:51 Two Percent Less Bandwidth Doesn't Matter, Main Character Syndrome Does
• 01:02:30 Player IDs That Survive Reconnects, and Swapping In Your Own Systems
• 01:06:47 Dogfooding, Discord Growth, and Traffic From ChatGPT
• 01:15:50 550 Automated Tests and 45,000 Playtesters
• 01:20:45 CRACKED, Rollback Prediction, and Falling Sand With No State
• 01:24:55 One Book, One Movie, One Game, and WinRAR vs. OpenAI

Episode URL: https://tech-debt.club/episodes/9-tdc-09-from-photon-quantum-to-purrnet-with-valentin-and-bobsi

Rytis Jadzevičius came to games in 2019 from government work, commercials and digital marketing — not a programmer, but always surrounded by them. Seven years later his studio, Fluxo Games, has ten people, a submarine game still in early access, and Book Smugglers, a self-published game about Lithuania's 19th-century press ban that took three on-and-off years to finish. We talk about surviving on one in-house and one client project at a time, what happens when government and work-for-hire money dry up together, emailing 10,000–20,000 influencers after parting ways with a publisher, whether this downturn is AI or post-COVID overhiring, why a country of three million needs its own game awards on national TV, and porting to Switch with a dev kit you can no longer get. His lesson for everyone: kill more games before you release them.

🔹 Links:

Fluxo Games: https://fluxogames.com/

Book Smugglers on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2720940/Book_Smugglers/

Rytis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rytis-jadzevi%C4%8Dius-5696a451/

ASML EUV lithography: https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems

🔹 Chapters:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:29 What We've Been Playing
• 09:23 Not a Programmer, but Always Surrounded by Them
• 13:06 One In-House Game, One Client Game, and Why Not Mobile
• 21:57 Bigger Than the Post-COVID Crash, and Don't Blame AI for Overhiring
• 28:18 GTA 6, Crysis, and Why Hardware Never Gets Cheaper
• 37:55 Plasticalypse and "We Should Have Killed More Games"
• 45:48 Work-for-Hire Dries Up: Pivoting to QA, Porting, and Influencers
• 50:31 Book Smugglers: A Banned Language, a Lost Publisher, and Breaking Even
• 53:48 Free Marketing, Raid Shadow Legends, and Communities Paid in Coins
• 01:01:25 Playing the Patriotism Card (and Kevin Bacon)
• 01:09:31 Most Studios Would Have Killed It Three Times, and a Switch 1 Dev Kit
• 01:14:18 A Cooking App in the Game Accelerator, and What Poland Got Right
• 01:19:32 A Statistics Code for Game Dev, and Game Awards on National TV
• 01:29:12 Rytis's Advice: Think Twice, the Plates Have Shifted
• 01:31:04 One Book, One Movie, One Game, and Warcraft III Custom Maps

Episode URL: https://tech-debt.club/episodes/9-tdc-09-making-games-in-lithuania-with-rytis-jadzevicius

Mike Geig joined Unity thirteen years ago as a screencaster and is now a principal developer advocate — a job with no sales quota, no marketing targets, and a single KPI: how happy the community is. He'll have flown close to 100,000 miles this year to find out, and he calls himself a game developer first and a Unity employee second. So we brought him the arguments Unity developers actually have: Godot overtaking Unity at the GMTK Jam after nine years, an engine that only started paying for itself in the last two years, the open-source fight he's been losing internally, the DOTS animation system that got cut, whether HDRP is really dying, and whether Unity AI can compete with a $200 Claude subscription. He'll never lie to us, he says — but he reserves the right to be wrong.

🔹 Links:

Mike on X: https://x.com/mikegeig

Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikegeig/

GMTK Game Jam 2026 engine stats: https://bsky.app/profile/gamemakerstoolkit.com/post/3mrmx5mi3mk24

Yuri's Unity AI video: https://youtu.be/JsYYnVemozo

After Effects MCP: https://github.com/Engine-Room-Games/after-effects-mcp

🔹 Chapters:

00:00 Intro

02:23 What We've Been Playing

10:44 100,000 Miles and a KPI Called Happiness

24:18 Game Developer First, Unity Employee Second

31:15 Two of Everything, Addressables, and Why Nothing Is a Two-Week Fix

40:52 Engine Upgrades and the Lies We Tell Ourselves

47:28 Godot Dethroned Unity (at Game Jams, Anyway)

54:03 The Open Source Fight Mike Has Been Losing for Years

01:01:06 The Engine Only Just Started Paying for Itself

01:06:06 Digital Twins and Unity Studio: The Non-Game Side

01:19:07 The Hundreds of Games You Didn't Know Unity Made

01:31:43 DOTS Has No Animation System, So Don't Make a DOTS Game

01:40:37 Thousands of Empty GameObjects, GetComponent, and Git Blame

01:48:33 HDRP Isn't Dying, URP Is Becoming Universal

01:55:26 Unity AI vs. a $200 Claude Subscription

02:05:59 AI Witch Hunts, and Why Yuri Didn't Go Indie

02:15:30 Mike's Unity Tips

02:18:41 One Book, One Movie, One Game, and Pokémon Go

Episode URL: https://tech-debt.club/episodes/8-tdc-08-13-years-inside-unity-with-mike-geig