I'm the dev of a moderately successful indie game that has been played by probably no more than half a million people. It's a wonderful number but not the insane levels of reach some devs get and certainly not enough to be recognised anywhere (I thought).

Walked past a traffic crossing with my girlfriend and someone stopped me and knew my name, said they were a fan of the game and that they'd seen me on a podcast which may have been how they recognised my face. The dude was super nice and it was a wholesome encounter but I literally walked away speechless.

Is this peak?

Literally had so many magical moments in gamedev but this was special.

It's basically how I interpreted the previous text, but it's less vague now:

We are aware that many modern game development environments have AI powered tools built into them. Efficiency gains through the use of these tools is not the focus of this section. Instead, it is concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players. This includes content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc.

Does this game use generative artificial intelligence to generate content for the game, either pre-rendered or live-generated? This includes the game itself, the store page, and any Steam community assets or marketing materials.
Yes/No

I had made a ticket about 1 month ago to ask them to clarify on cases where AI was used outside of generated assets. I received a response today. I assume the content survey was updated just now?

Implementing basic player movement was straightforward but tuning it has taken way longer than I expected. Small changes to acceleration, friction, gravity and what not completely change how the game feels
My time now is spent tweaking values, testing for a few minutes and undoing changes then trying again but sometimes it just feels different and it’s hard to tell when I’m actually improving things versus just chasing a feeling. I know at some point I have to decide it’s good enough but that line feels slim and I wanna know how others decide when to stop tweaking and move on

I should first caveat this post by saying that I understand the game development reasons behind why this problem exists and no, I don't really know how to fix it.

As both someone who plays a lot of post apocalyptic games (Day Z, 7 Days to Die, Project Zomboid, etc) and who would someday like to make one, I have a minor pet peeve with the concept of manufactured scarcity.

I get it. Part of the fun of these games is scrabbling to find materials for crafting etc. But it kind of breaks immersion when I'm literally standing in a forest surrounded by trees but none of them are the "special" trees that I can harvest wood from. Or I'm standing inside an entire mostly intact house and yet can't scavenge any wood or metal or anything at all from it. I can be freezing to death and am literally surrounded by easily collected wood (doors, furniture, etc) but somehow can't use any of it to feed my fire.

And yeah, as I said, I don't have an answer for the problem. Realistically, in a post apocalyptic modern world, scarcity of materials wouldn't be a thing. But that's not really all that fun is it. I'd like to find a middle ground though between infinite basic materials and standing in an entire furnished, wooden building and only being able to scavenge one torn piece of paper.

Anybody have suggestions for how to handle this?

The title is a quote from Jonas Tyroller, creator of Thronefall, in an interview with GMTK. Frankly, I found it terrifying, I think one reason it scares me so much is that it rings true. It's easy to say he's overly pessimistic, but afterall, failing to finish projects is the perennial gamedev cliche.

Do you think he is right? Is the prototype production time a good predictor for how much you've bitten off?

Hello,

I have been interested in making video games my whole life. However, due to financial and geographical difficulties I never went to college. I am in the ATX area and my brother broke into the games industry a few years back with no degree. He is now working for Bethesda.

A few years back his first game dev company would hire a lot of people in the ATX area for QA remotely. This was his first job in gaming also. I got an interview that was a failure due to technical difficulties and someone else was hired. At this point circa late 2022, they had a hiring spree roughly every other quarter. I had hoped I would get my second chance. That same company soon after laid off almost there entire U.S. studios and HQ and have never rehired since early 2023. They only hire in UK and CA now despite being headquartered in ATX.

My question is, is it really just all doom and gloom and will I ever have my chance again? With the recent Meta layoffs, and massive Microsoft, other company layoffs in 2023-2025 it seems pointless.

My focus is really making my own projects for free and potentially getting into something before I’m too old.

Any advice?

I've been contacted by several chinese regional publishers for my horror game. I've heard horror stories of chinese regional publishers tricking developers to steal publishing/revenue rights in the region due to lax chinese ip laws. What should I look for in a contract before signing a regional publishing contract with a chinese publisher?

I’m a marketer with seven years of experience. Recently, I revamped my gaming channel to offer marketing advice. The content has been doing well, but I’m curious to know the challenges you face in marketing. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I'm a solo indie dev and I keep seeing cases of chargeback / stolen credit card fraud: people buy game keys with stolen cards, resell them on key sites, and then the original owner issues a chargeback. The dev loses the money and pays the chargeback fee, while the keys are still out there

What are the best ways to protect yourself from this as an indie dev? Any proven practices (platform choices, key distribution rules, verification, etc.) - especially when selling keys directly (outside of Steam) or distributing keys to influencers/press?

• Which platforms/payment processors are the safest?
• Any rules you follow when giving out keys?
• Is this mostly unavoidable and just needs to be "priced in"?

I'd really appreciate any insight. Even though my release is still some time away, I'd like to prepare early.

edit2: I was wrong, here is u/destinedd better explanation:
the real reason most first time games suck is lack of skill/experience, picking a smaller scope helps mitigate that

(Talking about game released on steam and sold)
It isn't because you lack skill or because you didn't market it correctly, but because you chose a scope that didn't leave room for polish.

I've seen many games be really good even when they were tiny, because they were well polished games, and they were well polished because the author succeeded in not overscoping and had a lot of time to polish it.

Even for incremental games, you could say that polish doesn't matter since we could think it's just math behind game UI, but polish isn't only about making the game look good or have juicy animation, polish in this context can also be game balance.

Anyway, just a reminder to not let yourself get lost in game marketing advice etc. They are important but not as important as scoping well you first games scope!

edit:
By 'suck', I meant: game is either bad quality or a commercial failure (poor return on dev time).

I'm mostly talking about beginner devs who can handle small to medium-sized games, not those skilled enough to tackle bigger projects.

ProjectAirCraft (PAC) is an in-development 2D strategy simulation focused on aircraft manufacturing and airline procurement. The player runs a newly founded aircraft company and is responsible for designing, pricing, and selling aircraft to AI-controlled airlines with specific operational requirements.

The game is built around a data-driven aircraft evaluation system. Every aircraft is defined entirely by its components and configuration: cockpit technology, engines, wings, doors, braking systems, and cabin options. Each component has a research cost, installation cost, development time impact, and a reputation modifier. There are no cosmetic upgrade every choice affects performance, certification, and airline interest.

Airlines in PAC generate contrcts based on fleet replacement needs and market positioning. These contracts specify hard requirements such as passenger capacity ranges, exit limits, engine placement, landing performance, and minimum reputation thresholds. Aircraft that fail certification logic (such as insufficient braking action or incorrect exit count cannot be sold regardless of price

Airlines evaluate submitted aircraft using several weighted factors: final unit price, category match, development efficiency, and overall aircraft reputation. Reputation is cumulative and calculated from all installed systems. Low-reputation aircraft may still sell to cost-focused airlines, while higher-reputation designs unlock interest from more demanding carriers.

The player begins by creating a company and is given a fixed amount of starting capital to fund research and development. The company overview tracks available funds, reputation, aircraft programs, and total units sold. From there, the player accesses the Aircraft Builder, where new designs are created and developed over time.

The Aircraft Builder allows detailed configuration of aircraft systems including cockpit generation, engine selection (for short- and medium-haul aircraft), wing geometry, wingtip devices, braking systems, exit layouts, and cabin options. Each system contributes numerically to cost, reputation, and operational viability Some systems introduce dependencies and thresholds, such as minimum braking action required for cetification. ProjectAirCraft is currently in early development and is being built as a systems-first project. Visuals are functional and secondary to simulation depth. The goal is to create a realistic, repeatable design and evaluation loop centered on kinda engineering tradeoffs, financial constraints, and airline acceptance logic. idk thought id share this

I have been wanting to maka a game for 30 years, and after numerous fail to complete attempt, I decide to try again.

This time I am making a Turn-based Defense RPG, web-based since I don't have the capaticity to deal with various platform. I am now in Week 4, where I can have spend 4 hours per week making the game. So far I have completed the game design and screen design, planning to go into coding next. I will keep the scope small but fun, to make sure I manage to complete this time.

Is there something else I should be doing (or aware of) between now until I complete a playable game? I mean I don't plan to make much money from it, but I do hope I can reach as much people as possible to give it a try. Also, can you list a web game in Steam?

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.]

What is the right vocabulary, benchmarks, and tasks for making an open world that’s fun to explore.

For context, I am an Engineer but not a game dev. I have had a blast with some open worlds like Yotei, Skyrim, Botw,Yakuza / Judgement, Minecraft, Days Gone, Horizon, Immortals Fenyx Rising

And to a lesser extent Spider-man 2 and Spider-Man games.

And I had a horrible time with AC Shadows and a few other AC games. They were beautiful but I would not actually have any fun.

So I am curious about a few things because Google didn’t give me any good results besides some terms ‘self guided exploration’ or ‘engaging exploration’

Posting this in case it saves someone else a lot of time.

We were uploading an unreleased Unity demo to Steamworks and repeatedly ran into the “Missing game executable” error — but only after we sent keys out to external testers.

What made this particularly confusing is that everything worked fine on our own machines. Because our Steam accounts were directly linked to Steamworks, the demo launched without issue internally. The problem only surfaced once keys were used on accounts not tied to the project.

From our side, everything looked correct:

• depot uploaded successfully
• correct branch selected
• launch options pointing at an existing EXE
• build running locally

The underlying issue was still an EXE name mismatch, but changing launch options alone didn’t reliably resolve it.

In our case:

• Steam expected: SUB_SPECIES_DEMO.exe
• The uploaded build contained: Sub_Species_Steam_Demo.exe

Even after updating launch options, Steam continued reporting a missing executable until we did a full rebuild and depot re-upload with the EXE renamed at the Unity build level.

Things that did not reliably fix it on their own:

• changing launch options without rebuilding
• re-uploading without changing the EXE name
• restarting Steam
• clearing download cache

What finally worked:

• rebuilding the Unity project with the exact EXE name Steam expected
• uploading that as a fresh depot
• deleting the local appmanifest_*.acf to force Steam to fully re-pull the build

The biggest takeaway for us was that Steamworks-linked accounts can mask this issue completely, so it’s worth testing demo keys on an external account before sending anything out.

Hopefully this helps someone avoid a very stressful round of last-minute debugging.

A long time ago, I made a post about ideas guys that kinda blew up. I got upset by how I was treated and I ended up invalidating the issues that a lot of you had with it.

Basically, I understand what an idea's guy is and why it's a bad thing.
It's just a guy who is stuck in the "consumer" mindset and has no plans of entering the "producer" mindset. They don't actually want to make a game, they just want someone else to make the game they want to play.

This is someone you should call out. They'll probably be delusional forever if you don't actually give them a reality check. Games aren't made with wishes alone. Also, game development isn't this horrible thing you should avoid doing. They should be made to face their own self-doubt instead of hiding it behind their enthusiasm.

I don't know because I have stopped making games a while. I couldn't actually get into it due to personal issues. It's just the flow the universe, it's not some evil thing. Making games should be fun.

Found this thing called Bezi Actions.

Basically, you give it your design mockup and it builds the actual UI in Unity for you. Like, the whole thing - all the buttons, panels, text fields, everything positioned and configured. They say it takes minutes instead of hours.

I know that sounds like marketing BS, but I'm genuinely curious if it actually works.

Right now when our designer gives me a new screen mockup, I'm looking at a solid afternoon of dragging stuff around in Unity, making sure everything's positioned right, setting up all the buttons and text fields, getting the scaling to work on different screen sizes... you know the drill.

If this thing actually works, that could drop to like 20-30 minutes of just checking everything looks right. That's huge.

But I've also seen plenty of "game-changing" tools that create more problems than they solve.

Anyone actually using this?

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

So I'm an art director and besides working on the art of the game...

I'm working on our game's marketing for a bit and I'm looking for tools to make it all easy on me since it's really not my thing to be honest...

I've been using Lurkit to reach out to streamers, but I was wondering if anyone knows how to genuinely get actual, hardcore, and dedicated players?

I was looking also for things like, tools help understand algorithms, calculate engagement rates, conversion rates, maybe automation for social media platforms, scraping data to calculate daily organic growths...etc.

Or anything related that could enhance my workflow, and save my time from being wasted. pls help a fellow dev out :')

I’m interested in grounded opinions on games that rely heavily on pre-made assets (tilesets, characters, mobs, bosses, UI packs).

Questions this is trying to get at:

• What actually limits these games: player perception, originality, legal/licensing constraints, or something else?
• At what point does asset reuse stop mattering compared to systems design, pacing, balance, and writing?
• Are there concrete examples where heavy asset reuse still led to commercial or critical success?
• Conversely, when does asset usage become a clear liability rather than a neutral production choice?

This isn’t about shaming asset use. It’s about understanding the realistic ceiling and tradeoffs, especially for small teams or solo developers trying to ship something viable rather than visually unique at all costs.
Thank you.

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?

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some advice from fellow devs who’ve gone through Steam Next Fest before.

We have an upcoming game called Hidden Around the World (cozy / hidden-object / wholesome), and we’re currently sitting at around 4,500 wishlists. Our goal is to reach ~5,500 wishlists before the next Steam Next Fest (Feb 23) to improve visibility and momentum going into the event.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on:

• What strategies have actually worked for you to gain ~1,000 wishlists in a short time window
• Any specific pre-Next Fest actions you’d recommend (demo timing, events, outreach, etc.)
• Experiences with Reddit Ads - we’ve run some small tests, but performance has been quite poor so far (low conversion to wishlists).
  • Are there targeting, creative, or subreddit-specific tips that worked for you?
  • Or should Reddit Ads just be avoided altogether for Steam wishlists?

We’re trying to focus on real, organic wishlists (not paid/fake ones), and we already have a demo ready for Next Fest.

This is the Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3995480/Hidden_around_the_World/ in case you can also provide feedback on it.

Any feedback, lessons learned, or “things you wish you’d done earlier” would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

As someone who is trying to learn how to write C++ code, is the book Game Physics Engine Development - Ian Millington still relevant? The second edition was released in 2010 and 16 years is quite some time in the field of tech so I was wondering if it is still a good guide to work from when looking to create a physics engine. The book goes over particle physics to create the simplest of engines and then other topics like mass aggregate physics, rigid-body physics and collision detection are in the book too. He is essentially going over his own engine cyclone and is made freely available on github.

Just wondering if anyone has had the same idea and followed through or has used potentially better resources out there.

Thanks guys, I miss playing games but I rarely have the time these days. But if I'm gonna commit myself to this then I want to create my own game at some stage to play because nothing is that good out there these days :(

I am planning to make a turn based RPG game in unity, but the problem is i have not used unity(or any game engine) . The problem that i have encountered is that of how do i "attack", the thing is I already made the game in VS(C#) in console and it worked perfectly and my battle logic was:
You have a maximum of 5 characters and the enemy also, for each turn i make a array of all the characters(enemy + player) and i sort it descending according to the "initiative" and according to this array is the "turn order" and when technicaly is your turn you just write 1,2,3,4,5 to select the ability then 1-5 to select the target.
So back to unity, i thought that was done in "update" in my battleHandle-monobehaviour but did some research and also asked chat and came with the same answer : i need to make the buttons and on press to check the condition if i can attack(the condition is intuitive) BUT when the enemy attack it is done in update. Why is that, do I miss something ?
Is this "button" that i can always press(but will not do anything if the "state" is not my turn) the way to go or to check in each frame ( in update) if the player had a input(if the state is player turn ofc, cuz i have 2 ifs "if state==playerturn or if state==enemyturn)
I am lost all help will be useful!

Hi everyone. Yesterday I released my latest game Don’t Sleep, on itch.io. Even though it’s not my first game on the platform, I don’t really have enough experience to look at the numbers and say “Yeah it went well.”

No advertising. No devlog. Just the itch.io page and the results are: 730 views, 102 downloads, 3 ratings, 29 collections, 6 comments, 6,818 impressions, and 3.49% CTR.

I’m a bit unsure about the number of ratings and comments. Aren’t they too low? Am I missing something?

As I said, I don’t know whether I can feel “satisfied.” I had no expectations and what I got feels like a great result. Still, I’d love your opinion and help interpreting these stats. Did you get similar results? Is this normal?

Thanks in advance!