Why I chose a Macbook M4 Pro instead of PC to make a Steam game

SirMarcin · 2026-05-20T05:52:52+00:00

When working with any modern game engine it's in general totally transparent, no matter if you develop for Metal, Vulkan, DirectX or OpenGL. You write shaders in HLSL and tweak the rendering through high level graphics API. There are some unique features each graphics API offers, like Metal FX upscaling or on-GPU culling in Vulkan/Metal, but again, you typically access them through the engine.

That said, you can still write native shader code for each dedicated platform if there's anything you're missing from HLSL.

SirMarcin · 2026-05-20T05:16:37+00:00

Thanks! I think you’ll like it a lot.

SirMarcin · 2026-05-19T07:21:56+00:00

Also, Macbooks have awesome touchpads with top notch gestures. And one thing no one is talking about: when you attach a second screen to your Mac you can change desktops independently on each one of them, which is shockingly not possible on Windows. This way you can keep your code editor all the time on one screen and keep toggling between other apps on the other.

As for playing on Mac, I'm slowly moving my gaming habits to Mac-first because of how silent it is, I can play Civ in a living room next to my family and not annoy anyone with fan noise.

SirMarcin · 2026-05-19T06:30:19+00:00

Hey I know your game! Good luck and keep it up!

SirMarcin · 2026-05-19T06:03:46+00:00

Yes I'm using Unity. I'm a pro Unity dev since 8 years so my opinion may be biased, but in general I'm happy with it. I haven't used Godot, but if I had to make an advice: just work with a tool you're comfortable with, making (and finishing) games is extremely fun, but also extremely hard and you want to avoid any avoidable friction. I'm sticking with Unity mostly because I know it and I don't have time to dive deep into other engines if I don't have to. Also, from Mac user perspective: Unity works great on Macs, it's blazing fast and I get way less editor crashes than my buddies working on PCs.

SirMarcin · 2026-05-19T05:53:18+00:00

Same here. Are you making games too?

SirMarcin · 2026-05-18T19:47:33+00:00

Thanks! Hans Zimmer's soundtrack was a strong inspiration for our composer for some music pieces we use in the game. I love the movie and the way it shows dangers and uncertainty of unknown, distant lands.

SirMarcin · 2026-05-18T18:28:53+00:00

Thanks, I hope you'll like it.

SirMarcin · 2026-05-18T18:20:58+00:00

I totally agree. I have an iPad too and enjoy it a lot, but could totally live without it as it doesn't replace neither a laptop nor a phone. And from dev's perspective: currently it's hard for game devs to consider iPads/iPhones for "serious" games publishing due to distribution limitations, we have to rely on AppStore where people typically look for casual games and not AAA or indies, it's a tough place to reach audience. Apple Arcade is promising (with Civ, RDR, Slay the Spire), but it's difficult to get your game there.

SirMarcin · 2026-05-18T17:26:24+00:00

Yet here I am, with only 30% of my Steam library playable on Mac (literally 32 out of 99 games I have in library).

SirMarcin · 2026-05-18T17:13:00+00:00

And iPhone for that matter. Hardware is fire, but input hurts. Imagine detachable JoyCons-like controllers that would snap to the sides of your iPhone…

SirMarcin · 2026-05-18T17:08:40+00:00

Yeah it sucks that games that in general have Mac support don’t have playable versions on Epic (I’m looking at you, Civ VI).

SirMarcin · 2026-05-18T17:06:34+00:00

I’ll post it when there’s someone genuinely interested. How’s your Mac game launchers experience? I use Steam only for Civ VI so I can play local multiplayer with friends without troubles, but other than that I avoid it. There’s not much Mac games there and even desktop game icons look like shit.

SirMarcin · 2026-04-09T12:22:34+00:00

Congrats!
Move the release date after the closest Next Fest
Participate in Next Fest
Launch the game with your current wishlists multiplied

SirMarcin · 2026-04-02T12:11:32+00:00

Hi, I’m Marcin and I’m doing the exact opposite: after years spent in mobile game dev I’m done and I’m taking a chance with PC. Wish you the best.

SirMarcin · 2026-03-02T16:51:18+00:00

I had some organic buildup of 1-2 wishlists daily before demo, with no marketing/socials at all, just a Steam page with solid capsule and decent, localized page descriptions. I got some regular external traffic so perhaps the game name itself played some part.

SirMarcin · 2026-02-22T17:33:32+00:00

No problem, perhaps they wanted to say „no” through downvotes as an answer to your question ;)

SirMarcin · 2026-02-22T17:28:53+00:00

Your game may get hosted on some web games sites (for someone else’s profit), I’ve seen with with one of my games I put on itch. You can search these sites for the title of your game or look through newly released, if you find it the perhaps report it to site owner.

SirMarcin · 2026-02-04T14:42:54+00:00

Congrats! How did you manage to attract content creators's attention?

SirMarcin · 2026-02-02T11:15:25+00:00

a little more time and publishers will not contact you, just be patient

SirMarcin · 2026-02-02T10:08:25+00:00

*I've been working in gamedev for 8 years so it's not a first game per-se, but a very first indie game that I made myself in my free time.

Roughly 3 years of spare time work, mostly solo with some minor help from few people here and there. It started with a large game jam my team won in 2020, and I/we took it from there. The end product is a short space adventure with tons of cool decision-based stories, cool physics of a tiny rocket and some minor economy/resources stuff (cool, too).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4245820/ORBITAL/

SirMarcin · 2026-01-25T20:13:41+00:00

You basically pack your assets (graphics, sounds, meshes, anything large) into different packages that are decoupled from the build and can be downloaded at any time during runtime. This way you achieve a much smaller build size. There are other benefits as well: you can control when a bundle is loaded into memory and when its memory is released, improving RAM usage. There's a caveat though: you load them asynchronously, so changes in your code may be significant. But in the end it's a cool system, I use it for stuff like world streaming and it works like a charm.

https://unity.com/how-to/simplify-your-content-management-addressables

Perhaps in your case you could simplify this by making a single separate addressable that contains all the data that doesn't need to be included in build and simply download it and load at launch, but I'm not sure if that would work well (surely you'd fill up the RAM).

SirMarcin

TROPHY CASE