Dev Log 13 - 2026 is Underway

Well, 2026 is in full effect, and I hope everyone got through the holidays safely. I’m getting content created and scheduled for this year, and things are moving right along.

State Tree has begun, and the first four lectures are up, mostly containing theory (and the project creation lecture) – these are a bit of a ramp up to the actual State Tree hands-on coming up. I spent a good amount of time on the animated slides for the theory, and there will be a little more of that later in the course, but now it’s all in-engine State Tree, so it will be a blast!

One of the cool things about State Tree is that it can be applied to non-NPC AI. I’ll be showing both NPC and non-NPC applications of State Tree in the course, and for non-NPC I had to do a bit of brainstorming before I decided on what I thought was a good-sized project.

What I decided on was a color-coded lock-and-key system with doors and keycards. This turned out to be a great example of when you would want a state machine to drive non-NPC behavior, and it’s a great way to showcase the more performant aspects of State Tree. In particular, I wanted something that would require zero ticking in the State Tree’s states and transitions. With Pawn-driven AI, there’s usually something in there that needs to tick, but with a locked door and key system, it can be purely event-driven. This is actually a very valuable lesson because you can find ways to apply these techniques to any state machine you wish, even NPC AI.

I also have new assets for this section of the course, for those who want to apply this knowledge using high-quality assets with animations and sounds. It’s available on my shop, but of course you can use cubes for your door and key if you don’t want to make that additional purchase.

State Tree is quite nice, and I see myself opting for its use a lot in the future, especially for AI, but for other things as well. This course will prove to be a valuable prerequisite for future courses in which State Tree will play an integral part.

Stephen At Home was well received! I have decided to continue with this new series, so expect a new episode on the first of February. These are Silver Tier videos, so of course Gold Tier members get them as well. Episode one, on Tutorial Hell, appeared to be quite popular, so I’ll be visiting more topics that I feel could be valuable to talk about!

As far as YouTube, I’m focusing mostly on shorts, as they take less of my time and pull me away from the Patreon content less than long-form videos. I would like to focus mainly on Patreon, so spending days on YouTube long-form content started feeling more like a distraction, whereas shorts can be made more quickly. That’s the trend I’m going to continue following in 2026 for the most part, with my main focus being a consistent stream of content for Patrons.

I’m planning the next courses, but it’s a bit early to talk about them now, so I’ll save those for a future dev log. That’s about it for this dev log!

Happy Dev’ing,  

Stephen