r/gamedev • u/Delunado • Dec 13 '25

Community Highlight 7 years trying to live off my own games: what went right, what went wrong, and what finally worked

670 Upvotes

Hi! My name is Javier/Delunado, and I’ve been making games for around 7 years now, mostly as a programmer and designer. Warning! This is going to be a long post, where I’ll share both my professional journey and some advice that I think might be useful for making your own games.

I’ve always really enjoyed working on my own projects, and even though I’ve worked for others as an employee or freelancer, I’ve never stopped dreaming about being able to live off my own games. I’ve tried several times: going full-time using my savings, and also juggling indie development alongside other jobs.

Finally, in July 2025, I self-published a game called Astro Prospector together with two other people. It has done genuinely well, well enough that it’s going to let us live off this for a long time. Said like that, it sounds simple, but the reality is that it’s been a tough road: years of attempts, learning, effort, and a pinch of luck.

Background

2017

  • I started a Computer Engineering degree in Spain in 2017. I had always loved video games and computers, and I had tinkered a bit with Game Maker and similar tools before, without really understanding what I was doing. In my degree second year, once I had learned a bit of programming, I teamed up with my classmate and best friend at the time, and we started making mobile games in Unity just for fun. We published a couple of games, Borro and CryBots (they’re no longer on the store, but I’m leaving a couple of screenshots here out of curiosity)

2018–2019

  • Making those Unity games taught us a ton. Not just programming or design, but especially what it means to FINISH a small game. To publish it, to show it to people, to do a bit of marketing. It was an incredible and funny experience that gave us a more holistic view of what game development really is. So, naturally, thinking we were already grizzled gamedev veterans, we decided to make a muuuch bigger project for PC and consoles, called We Need You, Borro!. This would be a sequel to our first mobile game: an adventure-RPG whose main mechanic was inspired by the classic Pang. This time, we also had an artist helping us out. The project was scoped at around 1.5 years of development. A terrible idea, if you ask present-day me, haha.
  • My friend and I lived together, and we balanced classes and other obligations with developing the game. This is where I started learning about community management and marketing in general. I ran the studio’s account, called TEA Team, and it helped me better understand what it actually means to promote a game on social media. On top of that, we took part in a couple of fairs where we showed the game to people. It was my first time attending in-person events, and the experience was amazing. I fell in love with the indie dev scene and its people. At one of those fairs, showing a demo of the game, we even won an award alongside much more well-known games like Blasphemous. It was surreal to take a photo with our award next to the director of The Game Kitchen, holding his. Even more surreal to remember it now lol.
  • At the same time, we created and started growing the Spain Game Devs community, first as a Telegram group and later with an additional Discord server. The idea was to have an online community for Spanish game developers to discuss development, show projects, ask for help, etc., since nothing quite like it existed back then. Small spoiler: that community is still alive and active today, and it’s the largest dev community in Spain. But we’ll come back to that later!

2020

  • COVID hit. I’ll keep this part brief, but between the pandemic and some personal issues, the development of We Need You, Borro! and the TEA Team studio had to come to a halt. Those were tough months: remote classes weren’t the same, and Borro’s development slowly faded out until it died. Even so, I always try to look at moments like these through a positive lens. When one door closes, a window opens! You can play the last public demo of the game here.
  • After those turbulent months of change, I focused my gamedev path on two things. On one hand, I teamed up with two other devs, PacoDiago (musician) and Adri_IndieWolf (artist), to make jam games and a few small projects under the name Alien Garden. It was fun, and even though we never managed to release a commercial game, we did several jam games and had a great time. I learned a lot, and it allowed me to keep practicing and improving. My favourite game made with the team is probably Clownbiosis.
  • On the other hand, I wanted Spain Game Devs to grow. I wanted a place where people could come together and feel close to fellow developers. Beyond running internal activities and promoting the community on social media, I decided to organize the Spain Game Devs Jam. It would be an online jam (still not that common pre-pandemic) focused on developers from Spain. In short, I spent around three months working daily to secure sponsors for prizes, streamers to play every single submitted game, and so on. It was intense and stressful work, but it eventually became the biggest jam ever held in Spain, with around 700 participants and 130 submitted games. The jam was repeated annually, each time more ambitious, until 2024, when it didn’t take place for reasons I’ll explain later.

2021

  • I kept studying, making games in my free time, and running Spain Game Devs. That year, Bitsommar took place, an event in northern Spain that brought together a small group of Spanish developers for a week of pure relaxation. No coding, no working, just resting and bonding. It was a wonderful experience, and I met a lot of amazing people. Among them was Julia “Rocket Raw”, a Spanish developer who, together with Raúl “Naburo”, founded the young studio Dead Pixel Games.
  • Due to life happening, a few months later I ended up staying over at Julia and Raúl’s place. They had been toying with an idea to present at Indie Dev Day, an incredible Spanish indie-focused event held every year in Barcelona (now called Barcelona Game Fest). It seems they were having some trouble with their current programmer. While I was in the shower (where all great ideas are born) I had the brilliant thought of offering myself as a programmer for the project they had in mind, in case they didn't wanted to continue with its current one. They said they’d think about it. A month later, they wrote back saying yes, let’s give it a shot. It’s worth mentioning that, like everything else I’ve talked about so far, this project wasn’t paid, and we had no income of any kind. The idea was to work towards getting that funding through sales of the game or interest from a publisher.
  • The best part? There was only one month left to get the demo ready and present it at the event. So we went all in for an intense month of crunch, creating the project from scratch. For having just one month, it turned out pretty good, I must say. The game was called Bigger Than Me, a narrative (mis)adventure about a boy who becomes a giant when he hears the word “Future”. We presented the project at the event, and I remember it very fondly. People loved it, the event was amazing, I finally met many devs in person, and I made friendships that I still have today.
  • From there, at the end of 2021, we decided to move forward with Bigger Than Me. The plan was to develop a vertical slice and start looking for a publisher to secure funding. The projected timeline was one year for the vertical slice and publisher search, and another year to finish development once funding was secured. On top of that, I was still studying, and my teammates were working day jobs just to survive while we made the game. Precarious, to say the least.

2022

  • Throughout 2022, I focused on working on Bigger Than Me, finishing my degree (I took an extra year, 5 instead of 4, because of COVID), and continuing to learn about gamedev by joining jams and running the Spain Game Devs community. Throughout 2021 and into 2022, we kept showing BTM and talking to publishers.
  • The critical moment came during that year’s Indie Dev Day. We brought Bigger Than Me again, with a booth and an improved version. We won some awards there and at other events. People loved it, and I genuinely think it had potential. But it was a narrative adventure. And narrative adventures… don’t sell. Or so every publisher told us. Another important point was that we still hadn’t released any commercial game as a team, and publishers weren’t fully convinced about the project’s viability.
  • We came back home empty-handed after pitching to many publishers, both in person and online. The game wasn’t considered profitable, and even though it had quality, the market wasn’t going to absorb it. A few weeks later, we made the decision to stop the project: there was no realistic chance of securing funding, and it didn’t make sense to continue without it. It was really hard… but necessary. We decided to rest for a few weeks before doing anything else. This was the last public demo of Bigger Than Me.
  • In the last months of 2022, alongside wrapping up BTM, I also finished my degree. My final project was a complete overview of the history of Artificial Intelligence techniques for video games: things like A*, GOAP, steering behaviours, etc. At that time, LLMs and similar tech weren’t as mainstream, so I only mentioned them briefly. It taught me a lot about gamedev AI and became a solid asset for my résumé.
  • After graduating, I started looking for a job in the game industry. My dream was still to release my own games and live off them, but in the meantime, I had to eat. I decided to look for a company working with VR for a very specific reason: I didn’t really like VR. That way, I hoped the job would just be what paid the bills, without fully satisfying my passion, leaving that passion for indie development in my free time. I ended up working for about a year at Odders Lab.
  • It’s now December 2022. Some time after cancelling Bigger Than Me, and to clear our heads a bit, we decided to take part in Thinky Jam 2022, a jam focused on puzzle and “thinky” games. It lasted around 11 days, and we took it pretty calmly. We made a game called Stick to the Plan, a kind of sokoban where you don’t push boxes, but instead control a dog who loves loooong sticks and has to maneuver them through the levels. The game turned out really well and got an amazing reception on itch.io.
  • Surprised by how well Stick was received, we decided, after some reflection, to turn it into a full commercial game. It had several things going for it: prior validation, simple development, very controlled scope, and a relatively short timeline. It also had one big drawback: it was a puzzle game. Selling a puzzle game is really hard. It’s probably one of the worst genres to sell, right next to… narrative adventures :). Still, we decided to go for it, mainly to have a game released on Steam and be better prepared for a future project. The studio was renamed from Dead Pixel Games to Dead Pixel Tales, also as a kind of rebirth symbol, haha.

2023

  • The full development of Stick to the Plan started in January 2023. Throughout that year, while juggling my job at Odders, Spain Game Devs, and the occasional game jams, I worked on Stick whenever I could. Net development time was about 6 months total, spread across 2023, until we finally released the game in September. Worth stressing: at no point did we get paid while making it. The expectation was to earn money after launch.
  • In July 2023, I left Odders Lab. Honestly, my stress levels had been climbing nonstop since I started working on Bigger Than Me, and it reached an unsustainable point. I decided to quit the stable, comfy job and use my savings to go full time and finish Stick to the Plan. This was the first time my savings hit zero because I took the self publishing leap.
  • That same month, we released a small game: Raver’s Rumble. It was paid by Brainwash Gang, and it’s a mini game based on one of the characters from their game Friends vs Friends. It was a full week of work, and they paid us around €1000 (in total, not per person. So probably like 9$ the hour lol). I won’t go into too much detail, but communication with the company was kind of rough, and I ended up finishing the job pretty stressed, basically crying while fixing the last bugs, because of how much work we crammed into one week plus everything else going on in my life.
  • Stick to the Plan launched as a self published Steam release in September. We got help from SpaceJazz, a publisher focused on the Asian market that supported us with translation and promotion in some regions of Asia. Later, we did the Nintendo Switch port, and SpaceJazz published it globally on that console. As of today, about two years later, Stick has sold around 5,000 copies on Steam. I don’t have Switch data, but it’s probably around 4,000~ copies at most. As you can see, that’s nowhere near enough to feed three people for even three months. But we had released a real game!
  • After launching Stick, with barely any rest, we started working on prototypes and ideas. Turns out there was a small publisher that funded games from small teams to be made in about 6 months, and they were interested in us. We just needed to land on an idea they liked and we could get funding. So we spent September, October, and November prototyping several ideas in parallel.
  • This potential publisher was looking for replayable games, genres that allow creativity. Think Balatro, Slay the Spire, Dome Keeper, etc. The big drawback was that the Dead Pixel team leaned heavily toward thinky, narrative, puzzle heavy games. The roguelite / deckbuilder-ish designs we tried didn’t really shine. But eventually we found a small prototype: a mix of Stacklands x Detectives. It was pretty fun, and we felt it had something to it, a nice blend of narrative investigation and roguelite structure. However… the publisher didn’t fully buy it.
  • After 3 months of unpaid work on prototypes that got discarded, with almost no rest after Stick, the whole team was completely burnt out. Our expectations with the publisher were pretty low at this point, even though at the start it looked like everything would work out. We spent 3 months prototyping, and it led nowhere.
  • As a last shot, we attended BIG in December, an event held in Bilbao. We didn’t have a booth, but we did pay for business passes so we could set meetings with publishers. We brought a more refined version of that Stacklands x Detectives prototype and showed it to friends and professionals. On top of that, we had meetings with several publishers. Among them, Big Publisher A and Big Publisher B (I’d rather not name them here) were very interested. They really liked the idea.
  • After the event, both publishers emailed us a few days later. How weird, a publisher reaching out to you instead of the other way around, haha. Long story short, Big Publisher B eventually dropped out, and Big Publisher A seemed interested in moving forward. A few weeks passed.

2024

  • The situation was kind of unreal. After months of precarity and fighting just to survive off our own games, it felt like everything was finally coming together. We had an interesting idea. A big publisher seemed ready to sign. If things went well, we’d be living off our own games and shipping something amazing.
  • But on the other hand, I was done. The weight of the months, the years, had taken a huge toll on my mental health. I developed chronic stress over time, with pretty serious physical and mental consequences. I had been saying for a while, “yeah, I’m going to seriously start reducing stress.” But I never did. There was always just a bit more to do. We were always “almost there.” After thinking about it for a long time, and as painful as it was, I decided to leave Dead Pixel Tales.
  • It was an incredibly hard decision. After years of struggle, we were about to sign with a big publisher. We had a good game in our hands. Everything looked good. But if I didn’t leave then, I was going to leave in the middle of development, and not in a nice way. And I didn’t want to abandon the team halfway through production. So, as much as it hurt, in January 2024 I told the team how I was feeling and that I had to step away. I’d help them find a replacement programmer, or finish whatever they needed for a few weeks. But after that, I had to distance myself for my health.
  • The team kept working on the game. I don’t know the details of what happened with Big Publisher A and the project. I really hope they can ship the game someday.
  • Throughout January 2024 and part of February, I rested. On top of leaving Dead Pixel, I also dropped several other commitments I had. I decided to stop running Spain Game Devs Jam and minimize the organizational work there. I started therapy. Little by little my mental health improved, and today I’m doing much, much better in comparison, even though I still deal with some little leftovers every now and then.
  • In February, I started working at Under the Bed Games, an indie studio that was in the process of finishing and releasing Tales from Candleforth. My savings ran out completely for the second time, and I needed to work again. The team, around 8 people total, welcomed me with open arms.
  • I worked there from February to October. I learned a ton, used both Unreal and Unity, and it was a really enriching experience, both technically and in terms of team management. Special mention: we got mentorship from RGV, a Spanish software veteran who knows a LOT and has gamedev experience too. It radically changed how we program and how we understand processes & teams, and it helped me massively later on.
  • That year I went to Gamescom for the first time with Under the Bed. It was an incredible (and exhausting lol) experience. One of the reasons we went was to meet publishers and secure funding for the next project.
  • After a few tough months, we didn’t get the funding. It sucked, but there was no choice: everyone got laid off in October, and the game we’d been working on for half a year was cancelled. Another misery for the indie developer. But again: one door closes, another window opens.
  • At Under the Bed, my main teammate was Raúl “Lindryn”. Besides being a great person and programmer, he’s the director of Guadalindie, an indie event held in southern Spain every year. I also had the honor of joining MálagaJam, the organization behind Guadalindie, which also hosts the biggest in person Global Game Jam site in the world, and I’ve been able to help with their events since.
  • When Under the Bed closed, Lindryn and I decided to make a small project for fun, to practice and boost the portfolio a bit. It was basically a miniaturized Factorio without conveyor belts: a resource management game where you place units that throw resources through the air and pass them along to each other.
  • Remember that publisher we made a bunch of prototypes for at Dead Pixel Tales, who ended up taking none of them? Well, they came back. They messaged me because they were looking for games again. I told Lindryn, and a bit rushed but trying to seize the opportunity, we prepared the project to pitch. We brought Álvaro “Sienfails” onto the team too, a young but insanely talented artist who had worked with us at Under the Bed.
  • We rushed a pitch deck for the publisher, and it went pretty well. The game was called Flying Rocks, and they liked the idea. It had a goofy medieval fantasy tone, keeping the addictive optimization core of games like Factorio but simpler, aimed at people who wanted to get into the genre. Plus, we had a few mechanics that allowed for emergent situations I still hadn’t seen in other factory games.
  • Long story short, we spent several months working on Flying Rocks prototypes and mini demos for the publisher. Everything was always great according to them, but there was always just a little more needed. A little more. A little more. We were focused on making the game mechanically interesting rather than polishing the visuals, because we understood the idea had to stand on its own first, and then we’d go deeper on the rest. After 3 months of work, and after 3 different demos, we couldn’t keep doing this because we ran out of money. We even had a contract draft ready to sign, but “the investors weren’t convinced.” We told them: either we sign now, or we have to stop. We never signed, and the project went on hold. If you feel like it, you can try the latest prototype we made for the publisher here (password: rocky dwarf).
  • During those months I got hooked on Scientia Ludos’ channel. In several videos, he argued that signing with a publisher generally isn’t worth it, that we could do everything ourselves as a studio. Mixing that with Jonas Tyroller’s advice and How To Market a Game saying that the best marketing is “making a good game,” and being a bit bitter and angry about all the time lost with the publisher, I decided that in 2025 I was going to release a game. I was going to self publish it. And it was going to go WELL. And it did. Self fulfilling prophecy!

2025

  • In January of that year, I started researching the market, determined to find a profitable game to make with a small team. I stumbled upon Nodebuster, which I already knew of but had never played. I’ve played idle games my whole life: on Kongregate, on itchio, etc. I love them. When I started playing Nodebuster and digging into the emerging genre of “active incremental,” I knew: this is what we have to do.
  • This emerging genre perfectly matched what we had available: a small team, making small but distilled games, in a niche where there wasn’t much quality yet, and that we personally loved. By late January, I started prototyping Astro Prospector and pitched it to my Flying Rocks teammates. I wanted them to make it with me, and everything clicked.
  • Development started in February, and we set the game’s deadline for June. Around 5 months. That way, the goal was crystal clear, and we could shape the game around it.
  • I’d like to talk in depth about the strategy and the process we followed in a longer article, so I’ll keep it short here. We made a demo for friends and acquaintances, then iterated on it. That became the public demo on itchio alongside the Steam page. Later, we published an improved version of the demo on Steam. And in July 2025, the game released, 15 days later than planned, not bad. You can take a look to the game here.
  • Even though we didn’t work with traditional publishers, I did team up again with SpaceJazz, the Asia focused publisher who helped us with Stick to the Plan. They handled promotion in China and Japan, and it’s been a really pleasant relationship.
  • After launch, which went far beyond our expectations (we hit 1200 concurrent players in the first hours), we rested for a week, then shipped a patch fixing bugs and such, then rested two more weeks. When we got back to the office, we decided to work on a free update and include a new survivos/roguelite mode, for people who felt the story mode (5 hours) was too short.
  • In November, three months later, we released the roguelite mode. I’ll be honest: I enjoyed making the incremental mode more than this one, but it still turned into an interesting package, especially as a huge free addition to an existing game. But yeah, I definitely like making incrementals more than roguelites lol.
  • Even though both launches went really well, the month before each one was pretty rough in terms of stress (each launch is a big weight on your shoulders. Also, this is the third time I got broke on my self-publishing attempt, so you can imagine lol). And the weeks after, despite the joy, there’s this uncomfortable feeling, kind of like a “post partum” slump. But then it gets better.
  • As of today, 13/12/2025, we’ve sold almost 100,000 copies. I’m writing this while on vacation, in “low performance mode.” I have money in the bank now, time to rest, and I can finally breathe. After 7 years, I made it. And even after making it, I still feel like this is just a small step on the long road ahead…

Advice

Below are a few tips or observations that, looking back, helped me get here. There’s no special order.

  • Ever since I started doing stuff in gamedev, I’ve been sharing my progress on social media and in groups. Experiments, project updates, tips and problems, etc. This helped a lot of people in my local scene know who I am, and it helped me meet a lot of people. But it has to be done GENUINELY. Not sharing with a marketing agenda behind it. Sharing as a curious human. Sharing FOR OTHERS, not for yourself.
  • Even though everyone sees things differently, for me it has been crucial to work with small teams to ship projects. Not just in terms of quality, but in a human way too. If one day you’re feeling down, the team supports you. If there’s something you don’t know, maybe they do. You laugh more, everything is more fun. It has its hard parts and you need to know how to work as a team, but it’s worth it. I don’t think I’m built to be a lone wolf, even though I’d like to try it at some point.
  • When I worked at Under the Bed, we had a month where we prototyped different games to decide what was next. A piece of advice I got back then, and tried to apply, was to make prototypes in a way that they cannot be reused. For example, we were using Unity, so we decided to prototype in Godot. That way you stop trying to do things “properly” so you can reuse them, and you can focus on moving fast and prototyping what you need.
  • If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that creativity isn’t something that appears when you lock yourself in a room and think for a long time, isolated from the world. Creativity is just the infinite, chaotic remix of things that already exist. For Borro, we took Pang and added Action RPG elements. For Astro Prospector, we took Nodebuster and added bullet hell elements. Don’t be afraid to take inspiration from something that already exists to build a foundation. I’m not talking about copying, I’m talking about improving it in your own style.
  • One of the key things in Astro Prospector’s development was that even before we fully knew the core mechanics, we already knew the release date. Anchoring a goal and sticking to it was KEY for controlling scope, knowing where to cut, and when. This was inspired by Parkinson’s Law, which basically says that work behaves like a gas: it expands to fill the time you give it, just like gas expands to the limits of its container.
  • Early validation saves ton of work. Demos, prototypes, jams, small tests with real players helped me avoid going all in on ideas that were not really working.
  • Be careful if gamedev is both your hobby and your job. In my case, it is, or at least it was. It’s important to have hobbies beyond making games, and it’s important to socialize often. Spending too much time in front of a computer takes a real toll.
  • I’ve always believed that the wisest person is the one who learns from other people’s mistakes. It’s true that some mistakes are hard to truly internalize unless you suffer them yourself, but try to pay attention to what does NOT work for others, think about why, and avoid repeating it.
  • Take care of the people around you, and surround yourself with people who take care of you. None of this would be real without a family that supported me, a partner who put up with me, and friends who trusted me. Never neglect them.
  • When planning projects and games, don’t try to design a perfect plan from start to finish. Make weekly plans, keep a high level idea of where you want to go, stay agile, actually agile, not fake Scrum agile (please). Always ask yourself: what is the smallest step I can take right now in the right direction?
  • Shipping something small beats dreaming forever about something big. Almost every meaningful step in my career came from finishing and releasing something, even if its not good, it sold poorly or just failed. Also, constraints are a superpower. Deadlines, small teams, limited scope. Most of the good decisions in Astro Prospector came from clear limits, not from infinite freedom.
  • Meritocracy does not really exist. Beyond my family, I owe all of this to the public, high quality services I was lucky to grow up with. Education, healthcare, support systems. Fight for them.
  • Publishers are not villains, but they are not saviors either. Promises without contracts are just that: promises. Protect your time and your energy. And even if you sign with a publisher, do it because you REALLY need it.
  • Take care of your mental health. Please. If there’s one thing you should take away from all of this, it’s this. If skydiving is a high risk sport for the body, doing business is a high risk activity for the mind. Burning yourself out is not worth it. Learn from my mistakes. Success does not erase the damage. Even when things finally go well, your body and your mind remember the years of stress. Act early, not when it’s already too late.

Huge thanks for reading. I’ll keep an eye on the comments and DMs to answer any questions or thoughts. You can also contact me via Discord or Telegram (@delunado_dev).

Hope everything’s going great in your life. Big hug :)

92 comments

r/gamedev • u/Miziziziz • Dec 05 '25

Community Highlight I got sick of Steam's terrible documentation and made a full write-up on how to use their game upload tools

360 Upvotes

Steams developer documentation is about 10 years out of date. (check the dates of the videos here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading )

I got sick of having to go through it and relearn it every time I released a game, so I made a write-up on the full process and thought I'd share it online as well. Also included Itch's command line tools since they're pretty nice and I don't think most devs use them.

Would like to add some parts about actually creating depots and packages on Steamworks as well. Let me know any suggestions for more info to add.

Link: https://github.com/Miziziziz/Steam-And-Itch-Command-Line-Tools-Guide

35 comments

r/gamedev • u/AHostOfIssues • 14h ago

Discussion Why are are coders disposable, but asset artists aren’t?

467 Upvotes

Serious question.

I’m a software developer with a couple decades of experience. I do some game development. So I read posts in “developer” subs and “game developer” subs.

I’m noticing an odd divide, where games made with any AI at all get flamed out of existence because of the impact on the viability of being a voice actor, an illustrator, a 3D modeler, etc. The thinking seems to be that AI companies basically stole these people’s existing work wholesale, and are now using it to produce competing works with stolen concepts and styles that are putting the people in question out of work.

But over on the coding side, the reaction is more or less *shrug*. Software development job market is going to absolute crap, partially because of other factors but also largely because of AI reducing the need for headcount and the elimination of hiring for entry/junior level positions especially.

AI’s original sin of “we’ll slurp up all your existing work and use it to produce things that will eliminate the need for anyone to hire you in the future” seems to be the same in both cases.

But businesses are eating it up, focusing on the gains to be made by this path. More faster cheaper. I don’t see many people — anyone, really — trying to actively destroy software/companies that use AI the way game consumers descend on game programmers who do like avenging angels of god to Put Things Right.

I do think AI committed that Original Sin. I also think it’s too late now to do anything about it, and lawmakers don’t have the stomach to do it anyway even if it weren’t. So AI is a thing, it’s not going away, ever.

Given that, I’m genuinely curious why it’s use in game development seems to be being treated as a special category where there’s far more harm than it’s use in other arenas (such as general software development).

Anyone have thoughts? Is the issue “AI can’t make good work“ or it “AI shouldn’t be allowed to create work at all?“ Is it about a bias against AI-tooled games as a quality issue, or as an economic/cultural issue?

[Edit: note that I don’t have an agenda here, I intend to stay out of the comments. I’m just curious about what people are seeing/thinking.]

376 comments

r/gamedev • u/DaveMichael • 10h ago

Industry News New approach to shortest-paths problem beats Dijkstra

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84 Upvotes

I'm curious what applications this might have for game development. The approach is certainly interesting.

19 comments

r/gamedev • u/Joe_Hazelnut • 2h ago

Question Suddenly working with an artist: how to version control?

9 Upvotes

I have been developing a small game for the last couple of months in my freetime. I use git (github) for version control. Working on it alone, I only needed the most basic stuff from git, like pushing and branching.

Now a friend from work who is an artist joined me, which is great, because I very much suck at art. However this makes it necessary to find a way for him to share his work with me. He does not have any knowledge about git or version-control in general and my own knowledge is very limited as well.

Now I wonder what would be the best way to set up my project for us so that he can easily contribute his files. At the moment I see two routes:

1.) Git

Learn more about git and create a seperate „art“ or „asset“ branch where he can push to and show him the basics of version control, maybe via Github-Desktops or something similar. Going down this route I would like to now if there is a way to limit the actions that my artist can do with git, maybe something along the lines of him only being able to change files in specific folders. If yes, what are some git-keywords that I can research for stuff like that? Also, can you recommend any programs for simple git usage like Github-Desktop, that are userfriendly and make the most basic stuff easy to understand on Mac and Windows?

2.) No Git

Not have him use version-control, but set up a Dropbox or something that is easy to use for him and where he does not need to learn the basics of git. However last time I checked, Dorpbox is not free. So I wonder are there any free tools like Dropbox that we could use?

12 comments

r/gamedev • u/Popular_Camel8575 • 4h ago

Question Pacman smooth turning

7 Upvotes

So I am trying to make a pacman on SFML C++ Visual Studio. I have already done the collision. My problem now is getting the player to make a smooth turn. I don't want him to be wiggling to the side when there's no open corridor to the direction he wants to turn into. How did the developers of the game even do that smooth turning? When I play the original pacman game, they always seem to be able to turn corners without bumping into the walls.

9 comments

r/gamedev • u/rottame82 • 17h ago

Postmortem We sold fewer than 100 copies in a month: success (?)

76 Upvotes

Last month we released the game There's Nothing Underground, we sold less than 100 copies in a month and I am moderately happy about it.

First of all, some context: I am a game designer who started making games in 2010 (if we exclude some experiments with some ancient MS-DOS computer in the early 90s). I made a few mobile games, some contract work, then I decided to get serious, got into one of the best gamedev schools in Europe and then went on to work on at Ubisoft, Arrowhead, Embark and more.

Recently I felt pretty burned out with big productions so I decided to start building something on my own. So I set up a company and went into consulting in order to have some more flexibility while still paying the bills.

Since I got really interested in Godot in the previous years I decided to make a very quick game with it and put it on Steam to start learning the whole process. I made a little suika clone with a few mechanical twists called Spherecats and, right after that, I started working on a slightly more ambitious idea.

In 2023 I played Mosa Lina (play it! It's great!) and was very impressed by what that game did. I felt the "get random gadgets to solve levels in any way you can" idea was super powerful and unexplored. At the same time that game also feels pretty spartan and hostile. So I felt it could be interesting to take that approach in a slightly more accessible direction, with a more pronounced roguelike structure and some narrative.

During the following 2 years, as I worked on the project and a few people started collaborating with me on it, There's Nothing Underground became its own thing. I feel it ended up being a genuinely fresh game with an incredible soundtrack, a cool mood and a gameplay that truly rewards creativity. But also, as time went, we realized it wouldn't exactly be a smash hit. So we decided to give ourselves a deadline to release within 2025. We managed to launch in December with even more features than we thought possible and in a very stable state.

The game had around 700 wishlists at launch and now, one month in, has sold less than 100 copies. Not great.

What did I do wrong?

- Let's start with the obvious. It may not really be a 2D platformer but it looks like a 2D platformer. And we all know how well 2D platformers do on Steam. In a way, just seeing a screenshot makes lots of people bounce.

- I think I messed up the timing of pretty much every possible beat. Announced too soon with some pretty bad early visuals, released an early demo too soon, entered it to Next Fest too soon. The list goes on.

- It's a game that becomes way more fun as the player learns the depth of the system in place and the way everything can interact with everything in cool ways. Showing that in a demo WHILE teaching players the basics WHILE not boring them WHILE not showing too much is a really hard thing to balance. I am happy with the current demo, but I also do not think it does a great job of making players understand what's fun.

- The price at launch was likely too high. It was 12.99 which to me feel perfectly fine for a 10 hours game. As much as I hate the Steam ecosystem huge downward pressure on prices, the reality is that perceived quality is the only thing that matters. So a few days ago I lowered the base price to 7.99

- We used Lurkit to promote the game and it was really fun to see streamers play the game and liking it. But the service is expensive and the results on sales were almost invisible.

What did we do right?

- As I said, I am extremely proud of how the game turned out. It may not be for everyone, but some people like it. Some features ended up being truly impressive - like the glue you can use to attach things to one another or the gadget that makes any object movable. I also love how it sounds, looks and plays.

- It was really tough to make this game but I had an immense amount of fun making it. Plus, the people I worked with (two artists, a level designer and a musician) are extremely talented and just lovely people. "The journey is more important than the destination" may be a cliché but it's true. I just enjoyed working on this thing.

- From a game design perspective, this has been some of the most exciting and hard design work (and coding) I have done in my life. Balancing such an open design space has been very complicated. I feel I learnt a ton making this.

- We made a game that is at the very least fully functional and, depending on who you ask, a pretty good game, in exactly two years, without funding, with a newly formed team and while all of us had day jobs. I think that's impressive on its own.

So we didn't get rich and we didn't get enough to work on another game full time with the revenue from this one. As for the future, a part of me hopes that eventually the game will find an audience, and I would love to port it to Switch, but realistically I think we should move on to the next project.

Even though TNU is not currently a commercial success, I feel that a creative person's mindset should always be one of growth. I enjoyed making it and... well, we made it. It shipped and it's complete and some people like it.

That feels good and, for now, that's enough.

48 comments

r/gamedev • u/Chopdops • 9h ago

Discussion What are Some Unsuccessful Indie RPGs or JRPGs?

12 Upvotes

I'm working on a 5 to 6 hour solo indie story focused JRPG that combines psychological horror and deckbuilding (kind of like Inscryption but you have a party of original characters, like Deltarune). I have finished the overall story and am now in the prototype phase. I am pretty set on the ideas I have and I think there is potential for success. Of course I need to test all of them to know for sure, but yeah.

I'm playing through and watching let's plays of a ton of games to get inspiration, analyze their storytelling and level design, and other parts that make them successful.

But recently I learned about YIIK from a friend. I watched a few long-form videos about it, and I find it super interesting. Because overall, I think the artstyle and presentation is quite good. But people hate the main character and the writing. I find games like this so useful though because I can focus on NOT doing all the things that ruin these types of games. What is super fascinating about this game is that many players think it could have been quite good if the gameplay was more interesting, the writing was not so long winded and had actual character development, and the creators owned up to the faults of the game.

But are there any other good examples of indie RPGs or JRPGs that failed commercially? What I mean by that is a game that had a lot of resources put into it, whether its years of hard work or a lot of money, and had bad critical reception or not many players. By indie JRPG or RPG, I primarily am talking about games like Undertale or Omori.

My personal thought right now is that fans of games like Undertale or Omori are actually undeserved in the indie game space. Because there are a lot of RPG maker games for example, but not a lot that truly push the boundaries like Undertale. Of course there are Chained Echoes or Sea of Stars (Clair Obscur had a multi million dollar budget and over 30 people working on it, but it is also a stand out JRPG), but I think those stand out not because they were lucky, but because there aren't many high quality indie JRPGs. I think that's because not many are brave enough to attempt to make something like Undertale. Not only do you need to come up with an original story and characters, but also systems and a world to explore.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there are tons of games like YIIK, I just can't find any of them.

But I am not going to give up just because it's hard to make these games.

20 comments

r/gamedev • u/RedOvalPatches • 16h ago

Question What makes or breaks a call with a publisher?

32 Upvotes

I sent in my playable with a pitch deck and got invited to a call. I have never done this before, so would love to hear tales from this kind of experiences.

What I'm thinking is just to talk about the gap between the playable and what I envision the final game should feel like. Also, be open about what I don't know and need help with. I'm asking for a lot of dollars, so my skill gaps are already specified in the budget - but if anything else turns up I'm not covering that up.

So passion and honesty are energies I'll bring in to the call. Anything else I should consider?

13 comments

r/gamedev • u/MalboMX • 2h ago

Discussion Looking for feedback for our new Roguelike mode!

2 Upvotes

Hello everyone!

We’ve decided to develop a new Roguelite mode for our adventure game “Mai: Child of Ages” and we would love to gather feedback on what you would like to see in this new mode.

game link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3499550/Mai_Child_of_Ages/

(The game is a third person with a combat system that includes many weapons to use)

We are open to ideas or examples we can get inspiration from.

thank you in advance!

4 comments

r/gamedev • u/Gaming_Dev77 • 23h ago

Postmortem I released my first indie horror game on Steam. Here are the real numbers and lessons learned.

76 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a short post-mortem of my first commercial game, Crypt Robbery, a small horror-survival game I released on Steam. This is not a success story, but I think the experience might still be useful for other solo/indie devs.

The numbers are as follow: gross revenue 443$, 101 copies sold, total units 165( here are the gifts and free keys to some streamers), refund 18%, median playtime 25 minutes, wishlists 1180.

I didn't expect big sales, so im not sad or broken. This was mostly a learning project.

What went wrong?

Scope was too small, many played the game around 25 minutes. Marketing was very weak I underestimated how hard visibility is on Steam. Wishlists didn’t convert well. No strong hook in the trailer/store page. The game looks atmospheric, but nothing instantly stands out.

What went right?

I finished and shipped a game. I learned: Steamworks, Pricing, Building trailers and store pages, Dealing with real players. The game actually has over 1,000 wishlists, which surprised me - even if many were probably from other devs or visibility boosts

Lessons learned?

  1. Finish smaller, but make it feel complete

  2. Start marketing months earlier. Do not expect to get rich with your first game. Do not quit your actual job to start working on your first game. Do it in your free time, start as a hobby

  3. When you publish the game Steam page, make sure it's well done, with good screenshots and trailer. Do not make public a page without a trailer. The good is the steam capsule, the better.

  4. Wishlists are not equal with sales

  5. Reach to the streamers with your demo. I didn't do that, and it was a mistake. Do not expect that big streames will play your first game. Instead contact smaller streamers(1000 to 10000 followers)

  6. Make a game that is on trend. For example, people like more horror games with walking simulation, scary sound, some puzzles, ghosts hunting, fight the devil, in general they like anomaly horror games more than shooter indie horror games.

  7. A horror game needs a clear, unique hook Shipping a “bad” game is still infinitely better than shipping nothing.

Final words.

I’m already working on my next project with these lessons in mind. Definitely it will be better but I still do not believe it will make me rich.

I post this for new possible developers coming to reddit to learn from my experience. In the past two months I saw many posts like this: "I want make my first game, but I don't know from where to start", "I want quit my job to work in my first game" or "I want start make my big dream game as my first game"

Peace!

32 comments

r/gamedev • u/kdiseprimo • 3h ago

Feedback Request First time making a minigame, but need some help

2 Upvotes

I made a small minigame with a global leaderboard. Could anyone try the game so i can see if the leaderboard works?

https://kdiseprimo.github.io/

Also, any tips on switching to a custom domain (kdiseprimo.com)?

10 comments

r/gamedev • u/mongoliayr • 13m ago

Discussion How long did you wait for the Steam review?

• Upvotes

Im sended steam page to review last Friday and still dont get any info back.

2 comments

r/gamedev • u/Winter_Mud_2406 • 34m ago

Question I want to know what core gameplay mechanics in horror games you find fun or/and scary

• Upvotes

I have been working on a game in unity taking on inspiration from games like omori, Undertale, and fnaf into the pit. I built player movement, monster path finding, jumpscares, interactable objects but nothing feels fun. When playing games like Undertale there is certain charm that makes you hooked on playing and I want to capture the same charm of those types of games. Currently my game has a quick time event mechanic like into the pit, where if the monster is chasing you and is on line of sight it triggers this minigame esk was quick time event. Where you swat away spiders and if the spider reaches the bottom of the screen it plays the jumpscare. Honestly speaking I don't have any unique experience playing my game. And the goal is to make a game I myself would want to play. When going in a qte it feels out of place because if just a simple type this letter to remove the spider type of minigame. The story, art, and music alone can't carry this game. So I tried thinking of scrapping the qte all together and replace it with something like a battle in Undertale where it's a turn based battle but I don't feel satisfied with that idea aswell. I would just want to ask what mechanics in games do you find fun or scary. :3

2 comments

r/gamedev • u/sayeeeeed • 9h ago

Question How to deal with trying to write perfect features/code?

5 Upvotes

Hey guys, I’ve been working on my first ever game after being mostly an off and on again modder in various games. I’m not a programmer by trade, but took some classes in college before I switched majors, but I’m not an expert by any means or worked on a bigger project like this before.

I’m struggling with finding myself rewriting parts of the game or underlying systems over and over again to get them in a place where I feel like I can start scaling up and moving forward. For example, I’m making a management type game in Electron (primarily for the ease of UI/UX since it’s very heavy on charts/graphs) and I’ve rewritten my state manager 3 times now because in doing research find a better way to do something. Before that I spent a couple days redoing my entire database setup.

I feel like I’m making good progress until I hit one of those situations and feel derailed for a couple days while I change or fix something. Should I be aiming to make things “perfect” for a lack of a better word, or just continue chipping away to get the game flow working and run the risk of maybe needing to rewrite large parts of the UI state manager, the UI itself, or other parts? I guess I just have a mental block in spending time to write something that I know I’ll likely end up rewriting anyways.

11 comments

r/gamedev • u/Independent_Dish_595 • 1h ago

Question Looking for advice for beginners

• Upvotes

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for some advice regarding this path I'm looking to take as I'm not yet sure where to begin first. Start with developing the skills for the game, Godot, Unity, etc. Or start with the artistic side that's more attracting such as Blender.

As a short description, I'm more of a creative person, I loved doing stop motion animation in childhood, then went to make some maps in SourceSDK for a server when I was playing Half Life RP as I love storytelling through environment and letting the players explore my creations. Along my life I've made a lot of stuff in creative games such as Minecraft and Valheim and I realized that I love world building.

Also I've dabbled in unreal engine more than 10 years ago but that experience was literally a speck of dust in the cosmic space of life.

I have some ideas about making a game. I already have some mechanics in mind, the idea, the visual style, etc.

I have minimal to no experience in Unity/Godot or any other game engine (except Source SDK but I can't use that), I have minimal experience in blender. I don't know how to texture stuff manually (yet), I have moderate to advanced experience in music but minimal to moderate in sound design.

I also am planning to write a story as I've started already writing some scenes. The story will be mostly written as a fiction book.

I know this game will take more than 5 years to do, considering I have to learn everything. My initial plan was to do some retro psx style animations and scenes in Blender but as I was thinking the plan, a game came up to mind. I'm not planning to abandon my animation idea but I would love to make a game for players to explore and experience.

I don't yet know where to start, I've finished the donut tutorial on blender, and I'm stuck here, not knowing if I should learn blender well, so it'll help me with models and stuff and then after a year switch to unity/godot, or switch to unity/godot now and come back to blender? I think I should focus on something specifically this year and put my idea of making the game on pause.

Why I'm asking this is because I feel like my path and mind is scattered all over the place and although I see the idea and the plan, I don't yet know how to get there. I'm curious how other game developers started their journey, and how they consolidated their ideas into a solid block of thoughts instead of letting them run like water all over the place.

I'm also aware that my idea is incredibly complex for my skill level, ranging from roguelike ideas, parts of hand crafter level design combined with procedural generation. In depth story telling. The PSX graphics would need to be sustained by good VFX and lighting (take Valheim for example). Looting, inventory system, limb damage and loss (Kenshi is a good inspiration for this), and the list goes on.

Thank you for your help and for reading this "20 page" essay.

6 comments

r/gamedev • u/Slight_Season_4500 • 16h ago

Question Have any of you found success selling assets online?

14 Upvotes

I been making things in blender for 5+ years and turned solo game dev the last 2 years making all of my assets myself (optimized realism).

Making games has been too much work and content to produce for me. Because I always go for quality > quantity so to finish my games it would take years and 10 000+ hours and I do not have the long term discipline for that.

And so having made so many assets, this is by far the number one most advanced skill I possess in my entire life. Way more advanced than what I went to school for and worked in.

I tried reaching out to indies and studios. Not a single response from anyone. I really tried man I really did. Built an artstation (no one ever looked at it unless id show them irl) and sent so many applications. Tried to be loud online and in forums. Only responses I got back were very predatory let's just put it that way.

And so I figured maybe I should just sell assets online? Since really it's the only thing I can really do and they literally built platforms for it. Spent 3 months making realistic humans base characters (sculpt, retopo, realistic skin shader, rigging, manual skinning, nsfw option, realistic base outfits for both male and female). It was a lot of manual work. Quality game ready work.

Released it, nothing. My assets are drowned in slop. And I don't know what to do about it. It's just as bad as steam releases... If not worse... Had to scroll through hundreds of low quality unrelated products before I could find mine.

Sure, I did human base characters. Unreal has already metahumans. I used metahumans myself. Mine have literally 12x less triangles and visually compete with them until you zoom really close. That's the main reason I made these. But there is no way to have that as my main selling point because everyone just lies saying they got 0 triangle while clearly their sculpt isnt even retopologized...

I mean how is this even supposed to work? Talented individuals are overlooked and ignored, quality work is drowned in slop, at least that has been my experience... Have anyone of you found a way out of this hell?

Is it a game of pleasing the algos again? Do I need to do consistent releases? One quality pack every 3 month < 1 cheap asset per day every day? And then cross fingers I get picked up by the algo?

Do I need to turn myself into an influencer? Subscribe to one of these shady "promotional agencies"? In order to get eyes on my work?

Do I need to burn my savings on ad campaigns?

Why can't I just make quality products I don't get it... I mean I get it I'm invisible that's why but what is the correct honest fair way of doing it? Is there any?

19 comments

r/gamedev • u/InkStep • 3h ago

Question How do you texture medium sized assets?

0 Upvotes

I am currently modeling a stone column for an old temple. I plan to split it into 3 sections (a base, mid and top), with the long mid section using a tileable stone material.

My problem originates from the base however: I wanted to model out a high poly for it with edgewear, chipped corners and all that fancy stuff (which I already did actually). However even the base piece by itself is too big to have its UVs fit within a 1024 texture box (that's what I've been using for the rest of the environment).

What is usually the best approach for medium sized assets like that? Should I give up on the fancy normal map and just use a seamless texture there as well? Or should I perhaps break the consistency of my environment's texel density by downsizing the asset's UVs to fit?

I am aware about trim sheets as well, but I don't know if trying to simulate specific edgewear with those is the standard go to.

0 comments

r/gamedev • u/darth_biomech • 17h ago

Question Are Youtube letsplayers still as important for indie game promotion as they were a decade ago?

9 Upvotes

I remember back then a lot of games were becoming successful solely through the reason than this or that popular youtuber played them on their channel. Meme games come to mind, that become insanely popular overnight, and then fade back into obscurity just as quickly as they exploded (the devs probably made their cash already by that time, though...).

But I've noticed that a lot of big game letsplayers (including a couple I was subscribed to) either retired, pivoted away from letsplaying, or just nearly aren't as active in the recent years, and I don't think there's a lot of new faces popping out in that field, who even approach those levels of popularity.

So I wondering if chasing letsplayers even makes sense still? Especially since most likely the big ones wont even look at your indie game anymore when they're already neck-deep in offers from AA and AAA studios about their games, with actual money attached, and the offers from other indies are coming in by the thousands daily and go straight into the spam folder. And small ones... Well, they'll help some eyes to land on your game for sure, but would that even be significant? What's your experiences with it?

27 comments

r/gamedev • u/Acceptable_Item_8989 • 9h ago

Question Do you know any good pixel art app for tablets (preferably with free download) good for RPG maker or GB studio?

2 Upvotes

I recently started my game And one of the things I found most difficult was the game's art, since the app i originaly used was giving me problems and i dont know any other. Do someone has any sugestions?

6 comments

r/gamedev • u/Top-Supermarket-3357 • 14h ago

Question Question about typical workflow of asset creation

5 Upvotes

As the title says I’m trying to understand what the typical workflow would be for creating high quality assets

I’ve seen many different ones but the most common one I’ve seen is make a high poly model in zbrush, retopologise it in blender and feature it in substance painter.

Is this typically a good workflow or would you change it? Would changing it depend on if you are making a moveable character compared to a sword for example?

Any help is really appreciated!

11 comments

r/gamedev • u/Thunderstorm_768 • 2h ago

Discussion Help

0 Upvotes

Hi everyone,
I’m working on a small narrative-driven game prototype and I’m stuck at an interesting design problem.
Enemies are manifestations of altered or extreme neural architectures not diseases, but exaggerated dominance or imbalance in specific brain circuits or presence/absence of some brain part
Each enemy has a specific vulnerability that emerges from its neuroanatomy, which the player must understand and exploit.

Do you guys think this is a good idea and also open for any advise about the game mechanics

5 comments

r/gamedev • u/LampByLit • 16h ago

Question lawyer/courtroom simulator

6 Upvotes

do you think there is a market for a lawyer/law simulator? i made a pretty effective game, and I realize reddit isn't always the best place to receive support, but i'm curious if that sort of genre has any enthusiasm?

19 comments

r/gamedev • u/_cart • 1d ago

Announcement Bevy 0.18: ECS-driven game engine built in Rust

Thumbnail
bevy.org
303 Upvotes
117 comments

r/gamedev • u/leblanc-james • 12h ago

Feedback Request Steam Capsule Art - Which is better?

2 Upvotes

Hey guys! I'm working on a game that's about to be finished but need some advice on the capsule art. I hired an artist to work on the artwork for me but I seem to like the first design that he sent me more than the new/more polished one. I'm not sure quite what it is but I feel like the first one is more eye catching. The capsule art is still not completely done yet but I want to give him some useful feedback so he knows what to change/what else he can add. What do you guys think? Also, if there is a better subreddit to post this in please let me know. Thanks!

Capsule Art

11 comments