Hey everyone,

My friend and I recently released our first game on Nintendo Switch after about 7 years of development.

Players who discover it seem to really enjoy it, but we're now in that phase where awareness is the big challenge. Marketing has honestly been the hardest part for us.

We've been doing the usual things:
• posting on social
• sharing dev content
• offering access keys to content creators
• planning sales and maybe an update

But I'm curious from other devs who’ve been through this:

What actually helped your game get a second wave of visibility after launch? And what actually translated into a noticeable spike in sales?

Things like:
• sales events
• updates with new content
• influencers/streamers
• platform featuring
• press coverage
• something else

Curious what actually worked for other devs post-launch.
Thanks!

Hey guys! Hope you are well.

It's that time of the year again - GDC 2026 is here, and in celebration, we're continuing our tradition for the 10th year by giving away 7.47GB+ of high-quality sound effects for use in your game development projects.

Everything is royalty-free and commercially usable. No attribution is required and you can use them on an unlimited number of projects for the rest of your lifetime.

Visit the website:

View the license:

If you missed the previous years, you can view the archives below...

A special thanks goes out to the following people for making this possible:

344 Audio, Alexander Kopeikin, CB Sounddesign, Cinematic Sound Design, David Dumais Audio, Epic Stock Media, Federico Soler, InMotionAudio, Ivo Vicic, Jake Fielding, Just Sound Effects, Sonic Bat, Sonik Sound Library, SoundBits, The Noisery, TheWorkRoom, Victor Ermakov.

This is Midwest 90: Rapid City - 

Just want to point out that I do know that I made a VERY niche game.
But I'm kind of an old school guy - back in the late 90s and early 2000s ( the "golden age" of gaming ) everything felt unique and niche. Genre's were just being determined.

When I started of I wanted to make a game that felt like it was from that period - something fresh and explorative.

I even wanted my game's visuals to feel like it was from that period - the isometric perspective, colors, UI and audio.

Seemed like a great strategy back in 2020 but things are different now that am finally getting close to finishing the game.

There are so many games these days, people need genre tags and genre communities to find out what is new, fun and most importantly - worth their time n money.

So I have a genuine concern about the fate of my game.

"Just make a good game" - that has been my focus all this while, the demo isn't without its faults but that's been my mantra for so long.

However because I've made something different/unique as well, I'm finding it really hard reaching people who would be excited about Midwest 90 - because it doesn't fit comfortably in any one genre.

I apologize for whining, but after working on this for so long, its a very big concern.

So does anyone have any insights and suggestions for me? I would really appreciate the help.

I need some outside perspective because I'm really torn and feel terrible right now.

I've been friends with this guy for over ten years. About three years ago, he started working on a computer game and asked me to help with the programming/logic side. His expertise is design, mine is coding. At the time, I didn't think about signing contracts or anything formal. I just wanted to help a friend make a cool game.

So, for the last two years, I've been working on this project in my free time. I built a lot of core systems: weapon mechanics, survival elements based on temperature, the general game framework (saves, quests, dialogue system), and simple AI for enemies. Besides coding, I was also actively involved in the creative side - discussing story ideas, quests, and locations with him. After two years of continuous work, I honestly felt like this was our game.

Yesterday, he sent me a message asking me to "sign a simple document, just a formality, to protect the project just in case." He said it was a standard thing.

My gut instinct immediately felt off. When I read the document, my heart sank. It basically says the following:

-I am a volunteer. Not a co-owner, not a partner, not even a paid contractor.

-I have no right to any compensation whatsoever, even if the game makes money.

-I have to assign him full, exclusive, perpetual rights to every line of code and every idea I've contributed. I can never take it back.

-He can terminate my involvement at any time for any reason, and all my work stays with him.

-As a final touch, if I get any credit at all, it will be "in a form and place to be determined by the Project Owner" (him).

He’s a good friend (or so I thought), and he said we can "adjust the document if I don't like something." He even mentioned at the end of our chat that we could potentially add a 50/50 profit-share clause after the game covers its costs. He then added: "If you have no ill will, you'll have no problems signing it."

Right now, I'm sitting here with three options: agree and work pretending like nothing happened, try to negotiate for that 50/50 profit-share and better credit terms or refuse to sign.

I feel used, and I'm not sure if our friendship can survive this. Has anyone been through something similar? What would you do?

UPD: I think it's time to share how it all ended. First of all, I want to thank every single one of you for your comments and support. Without you, this story could have ended much worse.

A couple of days ago, my friend and I finally discussed the future of the project. I tried to stay calm and unemotional. I started by asking him if the contract he gave me was fair. He dodged the question twice. Then, when he finally claimed it was fair, I asked him what I would get in return.

He sent me a long message about how we would both get the project in our portfolios, and maybe we would even make some money. But he immediately clarified - there needs to be a single owner. Period.

I latched onto that phrase and tried to ask if there were any alternatives to sole ownership. In response, he gave me a list of points: 1. You need one person to negotiate with publishers. 2. Without a single owner, any legal decision would be bogged down by the need for negotiations. 3. Without a single owner, anyone who participated in the project could cancel it, file a copyright complaint, and so on.
In the end, he emphasized that a single owner was only necessary to protect the project and ensure its success.

That's when I started doubting his words and suggested his goals might be entirely different. There are plenty of projects with two owners that work for the common good. Is one owner really that necessary specifically for the project's protection?

This infuriated him. Here's a quote: "If you don't like my offer and you decide to leave – will you be ready to waive your rights to the content in the game? Something tells me no, and that when push comes to shove, you'd rather just shut the whole thing down. I absolutely do not like the prospect of being in such a state of limbo. And conflicts like this one will pop up again and again, at even more critical stages."

The breaking point in the discussion was my question: "Did it ever occur to you that we both should have protection in case something like this happens, not just you?"

He didn't answer my question. Then he declared that since I didn't want to give up the rights, I should make a list of what I wanted him to delete, because he doesn't want anything that belongs to someone else.

After thinking it over, I proposed a counter-offer. A 55% share of the revenue with income verification, a license for my code (so he wouldn't have to delete it from the game), and that any release would require my written consent. It seemed fair – he gets motivation to finish the game and my code, and I wouldn't revoke the license because I'd want to get paid.

Do I even need to say that he refused to even discuss my proposal, saying, "Your contract is exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to avoid"?

So then I wrote to him, stating that I forbid him from using my code and systems. He replied, "Don't forget to write that list. Just in case you think you own more than you actually do." We haven't spoken since.

Went through the GDC State of the Game Industry reports from 2024, 2025, and 2026 and pulled out all the generative AI data.

Sentiment is cratering but usage hasn't dropped.

Personal usage held steady at 31% → 36% → 36%. The people using it didn't stop.

What they actually use it for (2026, first year this was broken down):

Productivity tasks:

• Research / Brainstorming: 81%

• Code assistance: 47%

• Daily tasks (emails, scheduling): 47%

• Prototyping: 35%

Then a massive drop:

• Asset generation: 19%

• Procedural generation: 10%

• Player-facing features: 5%

Only 5% put AI output in front of players. Productivity dominates. Creative replacement doesn't.

Who uses it vs. who doesn't:

Business & finance roles went from 44% usage in 2024 to 58% in 2026. Visual artists (64% negative sentiment) and game designers (63% negative) are the most opposed. Upper management uses AI at 47%, individual contributors at 29%.

Some quotes from the 2026 report:

A solo dev said they can't compete without AI on a limited runway but refuse to use any AI output as in-game assets. An audio director said none of the gen AI at their studio survives to a stage where players experience it. A small studio exec said AI makes their team capable of achieving more than they would without it.

Company policies are shifting. 78% now have some AI policy (up from 51% in 2024). The fastest growing category is "select tools allowed" (7% → 22%), meaning studios are curating specific productivity tools, not broadly endorsing AI.

Takeaway: The divide between productivity AI and creative replacement AI is the most important distinction in this data, and one the conversation around AI in game dev has largely failed to make.

Methodology note: 2024/2025 surveyed 3,000+ devs, 2026 surveyed 2,300+ with redesigned methodology. YoY comparisons are directional.

What's your experience? Drawing the line somewhere, or all in / completely opted out?

** I will continue this analysis every year from, and see how the trend changes over time.

Hola everyone,

I’m aware of the reputation that “idea guys” have in game development communities, so I want to start by saying I completely understand where that criticism comes from.

For most of my life I’ve been someone who observes and thinks a lot about systems, stories, and worlds. I’ve been online since the early 2000s and spent years just absorbing how internet culture, games, and storytelling evolve.

Creativity has always been overflowing for me (probably helped by ADHD), and over the years I’ve built a lot of lore, characters, timelines, and what people would probably call “world bibles” for different fictional universes.

I’m currently learning Unreal Engine so I can actually build things myself and not just live in ideas.

My genuine question is this:

Do teams ever look for people whose main strength is worldbuilding and lore creation, assuming that person is also actively learning practical skills? Or is the expectation generally that you first become a developer/designer and only then bring your own universes to life?

To be clear, I’m not looking for people to build my ideas for me, and I’m not trying to pitch anything here. I’m honestly just curious about how the industry treats people who start from the “worldbuilding first” side of creativity.

In the long run I’d be happy simply seeing those worlds exist in some form, even if it takes years of learning to build them myself.

Thanks for any honest perspectives.

I am talking more about indie developers.

Been working on my game for 3 years. Living with parents. No income.

Used to tell people I'm an indie game developer and got these weird looks.

Started just saying yeah I'm unemployed rn and suddenly everyone's chill about it.

Turns out indie dev sounds like I'm delusional. Unemployed sounds honest.

Same situation. Different words. Way less judgment.

Anyone else just accept they're basically unemployed with a hobby?

I’ve run into an interesting design problem in my gladiator management game and I’m curious how other devs deal with this.

Before scheduling a fight, players can see a combat rating for their gladiator and the opponent. Both numbers come from the same single source-of-truth script, so the calculations are identical. It’s mathematically impossible for one side to be secretly advantaged.

Despite that, some players still feel like they are losing constantly, usually later in the game when the economic pressure starts to build and the stakes feel higher, even when their actual record is roughly around 50%. I can easily see that frustration turning into negative reviews if the perception isn’t addressed.

When I step back and think about it, it seems more like psychology than mechanics:

• Loss aversion – losses feel stronger than wins.

• Negativity bias – players remember the bad fights more.

• Probability distortion – even if odds are 60–70%, the losses still feel unfair.

• Recency bias – lose a couple in a row and suddenly it feels like “I always lose”.

So the system can be statistically fine, but perception is completely different.

I’ve seen some games address this in different ways. For example XCOM subtly favors hits after a streak of misses, and other games quietly soften losing streaks through matchmaking or hidden adjustments.

I personally would not like to manipulate the underlying balance though. My instinct is more toward visibility and transparency, for example:

• Show the player’s actual W/L record so they can see their real performance.

• Show an estimated win chance in the match preview so expectations are calibrated before the fight instead of flat numbers?

• Maybe show something like “Last 5 matches: W–L–W–L–W” so players can see recent streaks. That said, I’m not sure it actually helps, since the law of large numbers applies to larger samples. Focusing on only the last few matches might instead highlight a short losing run and reinforce the feeling that the system is unfair.

The idea being: if players see the data, they might rely less on emotional memory. Do you think this would help the issue?

Curious how others have approached this.

5,863 games earned $100k+ in 2025. And the accompanying slide which shows the growth of that statistic.

1,500 games featured on Daily Deals. 69% of which have never been featured before.

8.2M customers bought a Daily Deal in 2025.

125% more players buying Daily Deals.

66% of players view Steam in a language other than English.

Over 50% of active Steam users in 2025 played on more than one machine highlighting the importance of Steam Cloud-support.

I’m new to game development, especially coding, and I had an idea for a first game to work on.

It’s a game where you play as a kid in a 90s arcade and win tickets to save up for a “Gameboy”. So Atari style minigames combined with a bit of resource management.

I came up with it since those minigames don’t seem too difficult to code compared to my other far more complex ideas. Do you think it’s a good idea?

Last week, completely out of nowhere, a bunch of people I follow were excitedly talking about 3 different game festivals that had just ended, and that I'd never heard of until they were over and people were talking about how cool they were. And about the cool games they'd featured.

I looked into them, and it looks like my game that I'm desperately trying to generate buzz for would've been a perfect fit.

I asked if there were any more festivals coming up, and was told that the spring season is all wrapped up now and there won't be any more until fall.

How could I have found out about them and submitted my game? I know there's that "How to Market a Game" spreadsheet of festivals, but it's out of date and these festivals weren't listed there.

They aren't even good at being style-coherent

I am not even anti-ai, but this is just kinda sad. These animations are terrible. I don't get why people would buy this. The power of anime titties i guess. Apparently we cannot post images in this sub either? wtf? Ok. Go to itch and browse assets, sort by Popular yourself I guess. Ciao.

My free mobile game reached $1500+ in revenue (proof at the end)! I’m very happy, however note that this happened over 1 year, so it’s still not enough to pay the bills ^^'

For fellow game devs who are curious (or confused) about how to make money from a free mobile game, here are some lessons about what brings money and what doesn’t:

ADS

Yes, my game has rewarded ads. No banners, and no interstitial (forced) ads.

Rewarded ads usually bring between $0.001 and $0.03 per completed view. Yes, it’s not a typo, it really is that low. But with volume and time, it can turn into real money.

The difference is explained by multiple factors:

• How many ads the player has already seen that day (the first ads pay the best)

• Country of the player (USA > Canada > Europe > Asia > developing countries)

• Player habits: their device (iOS > Android), consumption behavior, and whether they are a paying player

• Ad network market saturation: nobody really controls that

Concrete example

For my game, which only uses rewarded ads, I usually make between $2 and $10 per day, with 100 to 500 impressions.

In-App Purchases (IAP)

Yes, my game also has some IAPs.

While they occur much less often than ad impressions, they bring way more money and are generally a sign of good user retention (a player who pays is a player who stays).

Basically, I get one IAP between $3 and $30 every 2-3 days. Not much, but still nice.

Note that the stores take 15% of that money. So yes, fun fact: Apple’s greatest product is not the iPhone, it’s the App Store.

Now that I’ve explained the basics, here is what didn't work:

Putting IAP prices too high

In an early version, I had five IAPs: $1, $9, $29, $49, $99.

Well, the last two were received pretty badly. They brought me zero money and even some bad reviews.

=> Don’t blindly copy what other games do. Try to be coherent with your own product.

Putting useless ads

While this is not completely wrong, some rewards are too useless, so players don’t click on them.

This isn’t fatal, but always monitor your data and remove (or rework) what isn’t working.

Not putting ad limits

In early versions of the game, I didn’t put ad-watch limits on some rewards.

So some players were watching 500 ads per day just to get infinite money.

This is NOT GOOD AT ALL:

1. After the 20th ad in a single day from one user, it barely brings any money anymore

2. Ad networks can detect it as fraudulent behavior and ban you from their networks

=> Always put an ad limit on everything in your game.

End of the post

Alright, that’s all about monetization.

There’s still a lot more to say, but I don’t want to write an essay, so I’ll stop here.

If anyone has questions, feel free to ask in the comments!

If you’re curious about the game itself, feel free to try it <3 :

iOS:

Android:

Proof:

Hi guys, Not talking about success just purely architecture of game and backend. Not asking as a dev or aspiring dev but to understand game devs community’s views about such games. Where depth is fixed moves are calculated. The board size is fixed etc exactly like chess.

How difficult is it to create a lets say online mobile multiplayer pvp turn based chess game. Lets say unity3d for mobile using firebase as backend.

How would you rate this project on difficulty level out of 10. Matchmaking, turn management, anti cheat, server side etc.

Is it fairly simple? The architecture? Of such games?

Our game has often been called "a mobile game" or even "a fake mobile game ad".

Yet it sold over 500K copies on Steam in Early Access.

So what worked for ?

First - what didn't work (so far): social media.

And this is an interesting case showing how different marketing approaches can be depending on a game's visuals. Even within our own studio it shows - .

If your game isn't considered a "work of art", it might struggle on social media (though we're still experimenting with new approaches - and it's worth trying as well).

1. We focused on development and constant content additions []

Most of our resources went into making the game polished, intuitive, and as bug-free as possible. We delivered 9 major updates, and countless QoL improvements.

2. We put our hearts into the demo (and kept updating it)

A polished, content-packed demo (while still leaving players wanting more) was extremely important for us. After releasing it, we kept it live and updated when necessary.

Next Fest brought us unexpected success and showed us that people wanted more. That was the moment we decided to expand the scope of development and add more features and content than we had originally planned.

When Early Access launched, 10,000 players jumped in right away. We were happy to keep supporting the game even more, but that also meant a longer Early Access period.

3. Word of mouth

A lot of our growth came from players recommending the game to others.

How did we make that happen?

• Being close to the community. We answer questions, ask for feedback, and stay active with players. We've received many messages like: "Hey, you're cool, I'm recommending this game to my friends."

• Playtests and betas. Many features in the game came directly from player suggestions. A lot of fixes and improvements also happened thanks to observant players who told us what could be done better.

• Discord integration. There's a Discord button directly in the game. Building that community was important to us (we now have over 5.5k members).

• Humor in the game. We add small jokes and puns. People laugh and show them to their friends.

• Being on Reddit and subs like or . Forums are your best friends.

4. Relationships with content creators

They don't just show what your game looks like, but also the gameplay and the fun.

We send a few keys every week, mostly to medium and smaller YouTubers, especially those focused on our genre (bullet heaven / survivors-like) like , , , or .

If you can, build relationships with creators. Most of them enjoy interacting with indie devs.

5. Festivals related to your game's genre

In our case it was the (worked best after Next Fest), which happens every December. In 2025 it offered a midweek deal that gave our sales a noticeable boost.

Don't aim only for official Steam events - look for third-party festivals run by passionate devs or publishers as well.

In 2025 we even became co-hosts of the festival, which helped increase our recognition in the genre.

6. Unconventional actions

Think outside the box.

(with the help of BHF hosts) asking Steam to add a dedicated tag for games like Vampire Survivors, Megabonk, or Halls of Torment - in short, bullet heaven / survivors-like games.

The action was covered by , , and , and it . We managed to reach hundreds of thousands of people, and even Steam itself.

While the tag still doesn't exist, Steam acknowledged the genre in another way by giving us an official event - - which will give us additional visibility every year.

And who knows, maybe we'll get that tag eventually.

7. Discounts

We discount the game very often - basically every time we can (there is a cooldown period between discounts).

Of course we appreciate when players support us by paying full price, but we also want the game to be accessible to as many players as possible.

This is the strategy we chose, especially since many titles (particularly bigger ones) are not discounted that frequently.

Bonus: Is it still worth developing bullet heaven / survivors-like games?

Yes - if you bring a twist and execute it well.

It might not become a worldwide hit (though you never know), but it can absolutely sustain a small studio.

We also think it's a good genre to start with as a developer. It's still growing and gaining recognition - believe it or not, it's still relatively niche.

Another interesting thing about these games is that they usually keep players engaged in shorter sessions (so replayability is key - make sure to put work into it). Because of that, players tend to collect multiple games from the genre and are constantly looking for more.

Steam still places them under the very broad "roguelite" category, so players are used to searching for them on their own.

And having such a dedicated community is incredibly valuable.

Hi everyone,

No one will know me, and that’s fine, but I’ve been coding for 40+ years and making games professionally for most of that.

I just wanted to say, I love seeing the new generation of programmers and game makers explore the space I’ve spent my life in!

I have an especially happy glow for all of the C64 work I’m seeing! That was the first machine I coded for back in the 80s, followed by Amiga etc all the way through to mobile, and to see people get excited about side border sprites, ASM, SID chip sound and hacking just warms my soul.

Carry on next generation, it’s a super fun ride! :)

Basically any stat that use % as a unit (e.g. crot chance, luck, etc.) needs better terms than "+50%". Or some other elegant way to convey multiplicative/additive increase.

If I have 30% luck and you tell me an upgrade gives me +50%, do I have 80% or 45%?

Pixel art is my favorite art style though I think low res 2.5d is really popular rn it's not as fun to make. As a game developer I don't do much design but lately I've been doing 1 pixel art a day on a master sheet which is a ukranian farm that will eventually be a master sprite sheet for a wartime ukranian top down farm shooter. What's your go-to video or resource on game design? Shoutout to any artists, or devs near Long Beach, LA, or SoCal.

Nearly 19,000 games shipped on Steam in 2024, and almost half received fewer than 10 reviews. Your press kit is basically a first impression with anyone who might cover your game, so I spent some time going through journalist surveys and advice from Rami Ismail, Chris Zukowski, and others to figure out what actually belongs in one.

Big Games Machine surveyed 150+ journalists (IGN, PC Gamer, Kotaku, Eurogamer) in 2024 and 64% said lack of time was their biggest challenge. They're not going to hunt for your assets. If they can't grab screenshots, a trailer, and a description in under two minutes, they move on.

So here's what your press kit should have:

Game description - write two. A short one (1-2 sentences) for roundups and social posts, and a longer one (2-3 paragraphs) for previews covering genre, mechanics, story, and what makes yours different. Rami Ismail's take: "A press kit isn't supposed to look fancy or colorful. It's supposed to be a resource with easy-to-access information and assets." Basically write it like facts a journalist can rephrase, not marketing copy.

Screenshots - 6-8 minimum at 1920x1080 or higher. Mix of environments, mechanics, and UI. No watermarks or logos on them, journalists need to be able to crop freely. PNG, not JPEG.

Key art and logo - logo on transparent background, key art in 16:9 for article headers and 1:1 for social thumbnails. Throw in your Steam capsule art too, streamers will grab it without asking.

Trailer - YouTube or Vimeo link. If you have raw unedited gameplay footage, include that separately. Content creators often prefer uncut footage they can talk over.

Contact info - Steam URL, website, socials, and a real email address. Not a contact form. Journalists want to email you directly. Lewis Denby (Game If You Are, indie PR agency) found that personalized emails using the journalist's name get 60% higher click-through than generic blasts. It works the other way around too and is worth the extra 30 seconds per email.

Fact sheet - developer name, release date (even "TBA 2026" is fine), platforms, price, and genre. Be specific with genre. "Action-adventure with roguelike elements" is useful. "Indie game" tells a journalist nothing. Simon Carless (GameDiscoverCo) has pointed out that if your top Steam tag is just "Indie," you're wasting your most valuable descriptor.

The biggest mistake people make isn't missing assets though. It's making the press kit hard to find. This came up over and over. Put it at /press-kit on your website, link it from your Steam page, put it in your social bios. If a journalist has to dig for it, most won't.

I wrote a longer version with all the sources and press lists to consider reaching out to on my blog:

I've also been working on this from the tooling side, building something that auto-generates press kit pages from your Steam data. That's what got me down this research rabbit hole in the first place. Let me know if you have questions about any of this.

Hi fellow developers!

I'm not gonna defend myself or searching for a validation, I'm looking for advice how I should shape my game.

Several people online says if my game is a ripoff of Stardew Valley and some even accused of stealing SDV assets.

I put screenshot comparison between SDV and my game here

Just a clarification, the entire art is hand drawn, use different palette and not even tracing SDV sprites, we also use different grid size, we use 24px based grid, SDV use 16px, we intentionally use different size exactly to create a distance with SDV art, but it seems not working as expected.

I can't ignore these accusation, it's a sign if something was wrong with how I shape my game and I catch it early, my game is not released yet, so there is a room for improvement before it's too late.

I'm not gonna lie if my game is inspired by SDV, but other than farming, my game is in a different genre (colony sim & factory automation)

So, here is where it's begin if you guys are curious:

I play SDV for hundreds of hours, yes I'm fan of SDV, but more in the business side, farming, crafting, fishing and selling. in the late game, I put Keg everywhere to make Wine, but it's getting more tedious work because I need to interact with every Keg to fill and pick output. I desperately need a Mod to make this easy, but at that time, it's not exist.

Then, I'm thinking to create the game what I was looking for, and here am I. It's SDV-like cozy vibes game, but everything can be automated in industrial scale.

Yes, I bring several SDV general mechanism on my game, like how sprinkler works, how to plant seed, chop wood, harvest, animal wandering, use tools, like pickaxe can be used to mine and remove objects, how to use fish trap, how to craft and the craft output have similar mechanism. I'm expecting most player already played SDV so they will grasp how mechanism are work, no need new learning curve.

No one shout about the similar mechanism yet, but I think it also have impact on the look of the game. I may can remove sprinkler system or completely remove manual tools to make it completely handled by workers, just for not called a SDV clone, but after implement it and still being accused, it will be a waste of time.

Thanks for reading this long post!

Hi!

I'm a 16 year old student who's really interested in becoming a composer for different types of media (especially games). I study music and music tech as A-level options, and I plan to study music composition at university. I write music in Cubase (the DAW I use), and although I haven't put anything out online in recent years that reflects my current skill level, I'm currently working on writing an EP for me to launch in a year or so.

Anyway, I really want to give myself some experience when working as a composer for something like a game project, and I really want to somehow find a small indie project in need of some music. I'd of course compose for free (at first) as long as I was able to keep the rights to my own music.

I just have no idea where I could find such projects, and by looking online it seems that the number of composers looking for roles such as this are higher and oversaturated and not always of the highest quality. I really don't want to be annoying and DM people pre-emptively asking if they need a composer for their music.

Sorry if this is a common question or at all out of place

Thank you for taking the time to read my post :)

I made Marble's Marbles in less than 2 months and in the first month of sales it has a gross of over $30K!

Here is the steam page for the game

It sold 4.3K units with a 6.5% return rate. Most people say your game being less than 3 hours is dooming you excessive refunds but mine is a 2 hour game for most people and hasn't been a problem for me with a low return rate. Most of the returns aren't related to length.

I launched with 5.8K wishlists. Until a week before launch it was a bit less than 3K. I managed on a 4th attempt to get the trailer on game trailers where it performed well (30K views) and better than other games at the same time. Despite this it sadly never got to the IGN channel however it did get a japanese article which really grew the wishlists.

After launch it got in the discovery queue (ended with about 2.5 million impressions on steam) which has furiously grown the wishlists to about 22K.

Overall I am very happy with the result. Despite the short development time it is a high quaility game and people like this. The art has been a huge selling point (which makes me happy as a non-artist) and the "Marble Madness clone" has actually been a big positive as people know what to expect and most modern marble games look like a dev's first game.

I didn't do a demo because of the short development time. I also felt the trailer was all you needed to see to know if you liked the game.

I was actually trying to finish in closer to a month but xmas slowed me down a bit and then finding decent time to launch not clashing with the winter sale meant I needed to delay.

I have made a longer video where I show the actual stats/dive deeper if you are interested. It is about 10 minutes long

Hey all,

My game was selected for the MIX + Kinda Funny Showcase, but participation required a $600 fee.

So it was a bit of a dilemma, but I decided to give it a shot.

Once accepted, I had 13 days to produce a new teaser for the showcase.
Here’s the result:

Our segment appears at 53:48.

For context, Monster Punk is a vehicular combat roguelite where players fight waves of bots and rival drivers inside an arena.
Stunts and driving skill directly empower your attacks, so mastering movement is a key part of the combat system.

Results after the showcase

The showcase itself was streamed on the IGN YouTube channel (19.8M subscribers).
At the moment the stream has around 7,982 views.

It was also streamed on the Kinda Funny Games Twitch channel, where the VOD currently has 11,822 views:

Within the first 3 hours after the stream, the game received about 35 new wishlists on Steam.

About three hours after the showcase started, GameTrailers uploaded our teaser trailer to their YouTube channel:

Their channel has 1.25M subscribers, and the video currently has around 2,000 views, which translated to roughly 30 additional wishlists.

The game is also currently featured on the Steam MIX sale page and will remain there from March 9 to March 16:

So overall the immediate results were roughly ~65 wishlists so far.

My takeaway so far

It was honestly really cool to be selected and be part of the showcase alongside some amazing trailers and games.

Overall I'm happy we did it, even if the short-term results were modest.

That said, I feel this type of event might work better if you already have a demo or a released game, so viewers can immediately interact with it instead of just wishlisting.

I'm also wondering if there is additional value I'm not seeing yet, for example:

• Does being part of showcases like this help when talking to publishers?
• Are there longer-term wishlist spikes that usually happen later?
• Is the Steam sale page exposure the real value?

Curious to hear if other devs here have had similar experiences.

Also feel free to critique the trailer. We're always open to feedback.

In 2024 i finally got to a point of learning gamedev more and more. Gamejams and whatnot. I spent all 2025 essentially trying to find the perfect game that i wanted to make to get success. No matter what genre of game thatd be. I expanded my horizons on what i liked and didn't like and it was essentially research for a whole year. A YEAR of decision paralysis and prototyping. Why? Because the games i made were either too niche or i didnt personally have fun replaying them or working on them. So the thought was "if im bored of this after 15 minutes, then theres no point of releasing because other will feel the same way. That was the issue though. I was too worried about what would be successful and i ended up having nothing to show for it. Now? 2026? I'm finally making meaningful progress on my game. If anyone cares about an indie rpg, I'll share mine sometime in the future.

OK, rant over.

Hey everyone.

We recently announced our game Black Sailors: A Santos Bay Tale, a naval tactical strategy game set in colonial Brazil. The story follows enslaved Africans who rebel, take control of a slave ship, and become pirates while fighting for freedom and supporting resistance communities.

Since announcing the game, we’ve been getting a lot of negative comments that aren’t really about gameplay, mechanics, or design, but about the themes and the characters themselves.

We’re completely open to criticism about the game, that kind of feedback is important. But when the reactions are mostly about the representation or the historical themes the game explores, it becomes harder to know how to handle it as a team and as community managers.

For other devs who have dealt with something similar, how do you approach it? Do you moderate heavily, ignore it, or try to engage with the discussion?

Context:

Hello everyone,

After taking a few computer programming classes I've realized that I enjoy coding more than I thought I would. I play a lot of games and already do music production (as a hobby) so figured I'd maybe give game design a try again. In the past I've made a simple pong clone so I'm not completely starting from scratch.

I want to make something that looks like the classic fallout games (1 and 2) I've always seen them as peak visuals and would love to try and make something in that visual style era for my next thing. Not necessarily post apocalyptic but in the weird crusty 3d sort of 2d art style. My question is, is the game actually 3d or 2d? Did they make 3d models and then sort of scan them and import them into a 2d environment?

Any help would be appreciated thanks.

Hello everyone. I'm an aspiring gamedev and my first project will be a browser incremental game (simple graphics, simple UI, nothing fancy). I'm going to start actually writing code instead of spreadsheets, and was going to use Unity since it's the engine I'm most familiar with. After some research (and anecdotal experience with Idle Wizard on Kongregate taking waaaay too many resources), I found that WebGL can be quite heavy and has some unnecessary overhead. Is it really a bad idea to use Unity for developing my game? The alternative would be learning Godot, since I read that it can be decently performant on web builds. Since I'm not in a rush to release my game, I'm ok with using it as an opportunity to learn a different engine, if necessary.

I’ve noticed something interesting while talking with different developers. New devs often try to build very complex systems early, huge architecture, overly flexible frameworks, advanced AI systems, etc. But when you talk to experienced teams, a lot of them keep things much simpler and only add complexity when the game actually needs it.

So I’m curious from people who’ve worked on larger teams, what’s one thing you often see new devs over-engineer that experienced teams usually keep simple?

Does anyone know how can we make a small or medium sized world feel lively and big but keeping it small, i know i heard we can do it by placing a lot of interactions or activities to do, but if there is anything you have which is specific, i would appreciate it : )

It's a horror game where things like directionality, attenutation, reverb, occlusion are pretty important.

At any moment in time there's only a few active audio sources.

This game runs on android too, so the implementation can't be too resource-intensive (although currently it's GPU limited instead of CPU).

I'm thinking of two methods.

1. Making a sparse waypoint graph: It's a small level and i'm sure I can handle placing some waypoints here and there.

- The edge costs will probably have to be updated every so often to account for doors opening etc, and weighted pathfinding may or may not be expensive.

2. Raycasting: Might have some directionality and attenuation issues, but it's fast.

Which should I choose? Implementing the first option seems like the best but i'm not too sure about the performance cost for a small level.

And if I am using waypoint graphs, what direction does the player hear the sound if it were to bounce off a wall? Do I use the direction to the last node?

Thanks!

I am on of those guys who is planning to quit my job this year. I already have enough savings that can last me 10+ years if I play it safe and don’t spend it on buying things like an expensive car.

I searched and found that most of the people have negative experience about it. Most people have strong opinion that making games is not viable even if you live in low cost country like I do.

My target is to make atleast 10K USD annually from selling games and assets. But even for that number people have negative opinion saying that most games don’t even cross 1000$ mark on steam.

So I challenged myself. I searched on reddit on various sub reddits to find a game that is good enough (In my view) and didn’t cross 1000$ mark and I just can’t find any. Whenever I came across a post that had weak wishlists or poor sales (under 1000$) it was always because the game was extremely bad. Like a basic 2D platformer or a basic 3D horror game that looks and feel horrible. Most of these games looked like game jam games that were made in a month. But felt like people in comments didn’t want to be rude so everyone eventually blamed marketing. Which felt wrong to me.

So I challenge you. Share any game (Or your own game) that didn’t cross 1000$ revenue. I’m willing to bet it’s not good enough (In my opinion and research so far).

EDIT: I don’t mean to offend anyone or talk sh*t and judge your game. If you’ve put any game on steam you’re already successful then I will ever be. Just trying to understand the narration about it specifically for someone who doesn’t live in a high cost of living country.

Hello there :)

It’s Rafał Pęcherzewski, lead dev at Byterunners Game studio and the original lead developer of Drug Dealer Simulator 1 & 2 games. It has been some time since you’ve heard from us, but we had a lot going on over the last couple of months and I'd like to give you a brief update of our situation.

Following our conflict with our former publisher – Movie Games S.A. we needed to take measures to react and secure the studio. Without any warning, Movie Games banned us from all DDS-related channels and social media, including the game Discord and blocked our access to any game-related resources. In consequence, we lost all access to the games and their community – you. We were no longer able to either speak out, talk to you directly, answer your questions or participate in the games’ further development, including the content that you were promised.

This was a direct and swift followup to an article published in a Polish business outlet, „Puls Biznesu”, that described our disagreement with the publisher. Lastly – Movie Games cut us from any of our revenue share from the DDS games or ports. Basically, we haven’t seen one dollar from our game sales since then. In this difficult position we want to keep our talented team intact and we want to keep our fans informed about the studio’s dire situation. Our efforts to speak out and reach our community abroad failed - that is why I’m writing this post. All our communication efforts were blocked by the publisher and we’re just a small development team. That's why we thought that reddit might be a great place to explain everything.

We are currently rebuilding from scratch, creating a new game and seeking new potential partnerships based on our own resources. I will not dive deeper into our conflict with Movie Games here, as this is not why I’m posting this. If you’d like to know more on the topic, here are some helpful links:

• ;

• ;

• Our statements ( and ).

What’s more important for now - we feel that a lot of you may be confused about what happened and you deserve some explanation. Unfortunately, we will not be able to continue working on the Drug Dealer Simulator IP, as it is not and never was ours - it rests in the hands of the publisher - Movie Games. The information that we abandoned the games is not true – although we do not hold the rights, we still feel responsible for our passion project and as a good “parent” we still want to see it grow. The whole conflict and its consequences struck us in the middle of production of future DDS2 content, with both financial and human resources already dedicated to its development. Suddenly, the opportunity to work on our games has been taken away from us forever.

Unfortunately I’m afraid we won’t see each other in the DDS universe again. With legal actions in progress, we already know there is no turning back. As mentioned, we want to keep the talented developers at Byterunners and create great games together - we’ve already started working on a new project - Raining Lead. The last 5 years were a great adventure which led to building a great community, and we’d appreciate it if you show support for our latest project - every wishlist and spreading the word is very important for us. We also want to stay on our new journey with you - our fans. We’d love to show you that our connection does not end on DDS and we can bring to you more awesome games that you’ll enjoy as much as we enjoy making them – as this is the core of the developer-player relationship.

Let’s get back together, let’s create and play awesome stuff! We hope our mutual journey will continue. If you have any questions feel free to write to us on any channels. The best way to reach us is our Byterunners discord server, which we invite you to join! Be sure also to follow us on X as we will be posting all future developments when possible.

We’ll do our best to stay in touch.

All the best, Rafał & the entire Byterunners team

I just posted the first entry in a new weekly devlog series on my site called Into the Dream Again.

This week’s post covers progress on two custom retro game engines I’m developing in parallel:

DreamAgain Engine for Dreamcast

• Transform2D

• Geometry2D

• DreamMath

• Improved real hardware testing with serial debugging

WiiDream Engine for Wii

• Started implementing Collision2D using Separating Axis Theorem

• Continued laying the groundwork for more gameplay-focused systems

I’m trying to document both the technical side and the long-term progress as these projects grow.

Blog post:

If anyone else here is working on retro/homebrew engine tech, I’d love to hear what you’re building too.

Hey everyone!

I lurk here a lot. I see a lot of the same posts where people share their processes and some of them would benefit from a different point of view. I see a TON of posts that just dredge up bad memories of me doing the exact same thing and wondering why "nothing was working".

I don't consider myself an expert by any means in the indie game dev scene, but I do know some stuff. I am fortunate enough to have gone full time gamedev this year after my 4th title found some commercial success.

I didn't really plan this post out, I'm a bit wired tonight and suffering from a bit of design-decision fatigue around a new mechanic I'm working on, so I'm doing this as a little decompression exercise. Hopefully it's helpful.

This is targeted at the hobbyist indie dev who wants to make it into more than a hobby.

So, here we go, diving right into it:

I'm doing Steam NextFest with X Wishlists. Is that enough?

Steam NextFest is touted as this "equal opportunity for all games to shine" and then "the good ones bubble to the top".

No. Don't sit back and say "it is what it is". You need to tip those scales in your favor as hard as you can.

1.) Don't launch your demo right before NextFest. This is a major mistake. You need to be *ESTABLISHED* for NextFest. You a.) want your demo to have been thoroughly played and tested and you want to have gotten and acted on feedback and b.) you want a large group of interested people who are watching your game.

2.) "The good games bubble to the top" means: "The games that get the most play bubble to the top". If you have your demo out, and it's going well, and you've gained wishlists, and it has built you a solid community, then you're in a good place.

If you have a demo out, and not much is happening, and you can't get traction, NextFest isn't going to drastically change things. You need to figure out what's going wrong and fix that before you do anything else or else you're leaving too many things up to chance.

Get your demo out way ahead of time and get that thing tuned up. Make sure it's engaging. Make sure it's driving people to your community who want more. The whole point of a demo is to make people want more. It's not a courtesy peek, it's a tool you can use to drive interest and it needs to be doing that for you or else you need to change it up.

When NextFest comes along, GIVE ALL THOSE PLAYERS A REASON TO COME BACK. Don't just move forward with a stale demo. Add something! Add new content. Get all of those thousands of players to log back in on that specific week. That's player count. That's bubbling. You're moving towards the top now.

Speaking of Demos...

Your demo launch is the second biggest day in your gamedev career, eclipsed only by your actual launch. So many people just shadow drop a demo and go "hey why is nobody playing?"

You have to treat a demo launch just like you treat a 1.0 launch. Don't launch a demo without a boatload of wishlists. Don't launch a demo without a press release, reddit posts, announcements, and hype. Don't launch a demo if your discord is empty.

Your DEMO PAGE can get onto New and Trending. Your DEMO PAGE can get reviewed and get actual traffic from the steam algorithm. To do that, you need sales velocity right away. Build the community first, THEN launch the demo.

Ok, how do I market my game without a Demo?

Screenshots and Trailers and Hype. There are so many places you can promote your game legitimately. Twitter gamedev groups and "follow for a follow" are not one of them.

Gamedev subreddit posts disguised as "I just changed up my capsule what do you think?" are not one of them.

You need to have a hook, and know how to market it in one sentence: attention spans are short, so you have to grab on quick and present that idea in a captivating way.

Sharing the idea:

- Register as a developer and look at all of the amazing post opportunities they give you as a rule-following poster. AMAs, announcement posts, etc. Bonus: Major media outlets follow and regularly pick up stories from that subreddit. It's happened to me multiple times.

- Indie Sunday. Developers can post about their games without fear of being banned once per month on Sundays. Post every single month. Talk about your game, what's new, what you've developed and what you're going to develop. Share a new trailer. Make sure you CTA discord joins and other actions.

- Press releases! Write them just like you're writing an article about your own game. Some automated media outlets will literally copy paste your writing and publish stories.

Tons of gaming journalists troll this site for stories. I've had a ton of success here. They'll take your press release and make an article out of it or maybe even contact you for details.

The more "article like" you make your press release, the less work journalists have to do to use it, so take extra time and write something nice.

Gaming Media and YouTubers and Streamers all have MASSIVE value

I see a lot of people say "media is dead, it drives no traffic" or "youtubers aren't as good as they used to be" and I 100% beg to differ. It's about getting covered in front of the right audience. You should pursue every avenue of coverage that you can.

I've had media outlets write up my game and drive over 10k wishlists in one weekend from one article.

I've had YouTubers cover my game post-launch and I can credit over 800 unit sales to their specific video over the following week.

Even bad press is good: Pre-launch / during my demo phase a youtuber with ~60k subscribers played my demo and BASHED IT INTO THE GROUND. This one sent me reeling, but I commented on his video thanking him for playing, and told him I'd be in touch when the game was 1.0. That video drove over 3000 wishlists to my game that weekend.

Get an article written about you? Thank the writer! Write an e-mail and thank them for taking the time to feature your game. Ask them if they'd like direct messages for major updates in the future and then DO NOT SPAM THEM. Send them big stuff only: Demo launch, Participating in NextFest, 1.0 launch, major patch, etc.

None of that is working, why not?

The hard truth is that there are between 18,000 and 20,000 new games launched on Steam every year. Gamers have all the choices in the world. If your idea or game hook isn't unique in some way, you're making it really unlikely that a massive group of those gamers choose you.

Yeah, lots of those 20,000 games are slop. We all know that. But the slop isn't what's holding anyone back. A lot of those 20,000 games are also genuinely good and that's what's going to get the attention.

Don't focus on "ew too much shovelware on steam" - that doesn't matter. We shouldn't care. We're not competing with the shovelware.

The things that will attract gamers are graphics (let's be real, we're indies and graphics aren't in most of our budgets) and ideas.

So if you're making a (insert generic genre / hook) with indie graphics, you're in for a tough go of marketing.

If you're trying to carve out a niche you really have to bring something special or unique to the table. Make sure you know how to communicate this idea effectively and concisely so you can get people's attention right away.

The Trailer

Gameplay in the first second. Get rid of your company logo, your game title, the Unreal Engine logo, and anything else. Gameplay first. Always.

30 seconds to 1 minute long. People who see longer trailer start skipping around. Text on screen over gameplay, don't do splash screens with just text.

Make sure the idea comes through right away! Every open world RPG / Platformer / Roguelike / whatever feels the same until you get that big idea across.

No AI voiceovers. Whether you're pro or anti-AI doesn't matter. You're giving people ammo to use against you. Plain text on screen is better than a fake voice.

The community

Got a discord? No? Get one.

Got a Youtube Channel? No? Get one.

Are those things branded with your logos and name? Do that ASAP. Does every YT video link to your steam page and discord? Does every YT video get posted in your discord?

Every single person who joins your community is doing you a massive favor. These people are actively supporting you and your project. They are to be cherished. Without them, you're making a game for the abyss.

Bug reports / Critiques / Complaints / bad reviews can all feel like personal insults. It's easy to go "eh they're just playing it wrong" or "they don't get it". For every voice that speaks up there are dozens or hundreds who don't. No matter what they say, they're at least partially right.

Listen, acknowledge, consider, and respond. See where they're coming from and how you can improve based on what they're saying.

Be open with your community. Talk timelines, work flow, talk ideas and brainstorm with them. The folks in my discord have given me so many incredible ideas and suggestions for improvements my game would not be anywhere near as good as it is today without them.

Stop setting arbitrary public deadlines for yourself (pre-launch)!!!

You're an indie. You don't have deadlines unless you quit your job to make your game and have run out of funds - that's a subject for a whole other conversation though.

Assuming you're not in a life or death situation, stop putting pressure on yourself. I know you're excited to launch things. I know you can't wait to share your demo / patch / trailer / announcement, but the joy of being an indie is you don't answer to anybody. So stop rushing things.

Take the time you need to make the preparations that will allow you to have the best chance at success in whatever step you're currently on.

BUT HOLD YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE

Work on your game every day. Open the project and do one thing minimum. Write some text. Realign your UI. Fix a bug. Spend 5 - 10 minutes minimum every single day. Work on a trailer or media. Lots of days you'll get sucked in and suddenly you've made 4 hours of progress.

Don't let it go stale.

10 minutes of progress over 365 days is over 60 hours of work. That's with absolute minimum effort, and you're going to put in a lot more effort than that I bet.

If a "Publisher" contacts you unsolicited, it's probably not in your best interest.

I had a publisher contact me, one you've probably heard of. They wanted to do an exploratory video call to discuss publishing my game. I took them up on it and was super excited that I "had made it" to this point.

They offered me something like $600,000 in marketing, no up front, no recoup, and 40% revenue share in perpetuity.

I asked where the marketing would be spent and how. Guess what? It was spent almost exclusively on websites that they owned.

Approach these situations with EXTREME CAUTION. If anyone contacts you "wanting to help you", they're doing it for a reason that doesn't benefit just you.

Transparency in Early Access is SO important!

Lots of gamers don't buy early access titles. So if you go that route, be ready to answer what you're working on and when players can expect it to be 1.) in testing and 2.) live.

I know earlier I said stop setting arbitrary deadlines for yourself, but once you launch you DO have to be able to answer to your players, the people who have invested money in your idea.

Roadmaps should be clear in their goals and flexible with timelines. "Summer 2026" gives you a lot more breathing room than "June 2026" when you're talking about new features. Things come up, life happens, bugs happen, and it's ok to move dates around a little bit.

During development, I've made videos twice a year going over what I'm currently working on, and how far we've come. Those have been a big hit within the community, and I highly recommend it for all developers.

Do I really need 7000 wishlists on Steam to launch my game?

Honestly, I think this estimate is way way way low. I'd put that number closer to 20,000 - 30,000 these days. More than that if you're launching Early Access.

7000 might get you onto new and trending briefly, and that's only if you're launching 1.0. You're still leaving a LOT up to luck with 7000 wishlists. You still have to generate enough NEW INTEREST to get noticed, and that's not easy and steam's not going to push you if it doesn't happen.

Lots of us launch into EA and that means that the new and trending list isn't for us at that point in time. That means less built-in promotion on Steam. That means we developers need to bring our own crowd to the party.

Don't rely on steam to send people your way right off the bat.

I launched my game this year into early access with 72,000 wishlists. I had around 3000 people in my discord at launch. I became really close with the folks in my community. I did and still do talk to them daily, and I genuinely enjoy it. I spent weeks leading up to launch with these people, being transparent that I really wanted to take this full time and what that meant. I spent time talking through what makes a good launch: reviews, player count, sales velocity. I was so extremely open with my community that it sort of became this team effort to make my launch a good one. They really came through, too.

To give a bit of an idea how my specific numbers translated:

EA Launch: 72,000 wishlists

Day 1 sales: 10k units - hit steam's FEATURED AND RECOMMENDED carousel on the front page for days 1 and 2

Month 1 sales: 30k units

Month 6 sales: 50k units

Month 6 outstanding wishlists: 150k

Month 6 reviews: 94% positive @ ~1500 reviews.

Anyhow, it's past midnight, I hope this isn't a rambling mess, but I've been wanting to make a post like this for a while now and tonight just felt like the night to do it.

Happy development to all of you!

Throughout our 1 year journey in creating a 2D point-and-click puzzle adventure game, we made a costly mistake in our workflow pipeline: polished prototyping.

Since it's a 2D stylized game, we thought that there was no way around this, and that the design can only be fairly judged with the full art implemented (excluding animations ofc). However, we were wrong, and we learned through our playtesting. It turned out that most of the iteration we had to do because of the feedback we received could have easily been noticed in the prototyping stages.

No matter what genre the game is at, if the design is well rounded, it can be proven with white and black squares on the screen. This mistake of ours made iteration costs much higher and caused A LOT of work to be thrown out of the window, but hey... lesson learned!

Little Woody's free demo is now on Steam and we are keeping our heads up and marching forward.

How did you handle prototyping? Were you able to find a cheaper way to prove that a mechanic design is working well?

About The Game

Genre: Single-player Visual Novel JRPG

Release Date: 28 March 2025

Price: $19.99 USD

Platform: PC (Steam)

Available Languages: English, 日本語

Steam:

Overview

Haaaah... this is kind of a hard and embarrassing post to make. But I think it's important to make it and get the weight off my shoulders, so here we go.

Well, as the title says, I spent 5 years developing Sacred Earth - Reverie(referred to as SER from here on). I started in late 2019 going into 2020, and finally released in late 2025 after much trial and tribulation. The game was delayed multiple times. First in 2021 to beef up presentation. Then in 2023 to add more polish and content. Then in 2024 due to linking up with a small publisher and localizing the game in Japanese. Then again in summer 2025 to add additional polish. After that, I put my foot down and said 'No more'. I pushed it out the door in November 2025 after one last polishing round.

Certainly the form it's in now is the best form of the game. If I had released it earlier, it would have been a worse game, but I wonder if the mass delays and endless polish was worth it? Questions for later.

Anyway, SER is a JRPG passion project, and it's also a game that's not ashamed of what it is. Evoking the imagery and vibes of anime, manga, and 2000s visual novels and JRPGs. It's not a revolutionary game that will shake up the industry. It's a love letter to anime weeb culture and 2000s JRPGs. I figured that a game like this would do well with the JRPG player crowd. There aren't a ton of games like it. And less that lean so deeply into the style and aesthetics within indies, I think.

I never had any illusion that I was going to have a breakout indie megahit on my hands, but I at least thought it would match its average peers in the indie JRPG space and sell modestly to its target audience.

It did not sell. Not by a long shot. It's been a little over 3 months, closing in on 4, I think. And the game is sitting at just barely 11 customer reviews(18 total with keys). It took a solid month and change to get to that magical number of 10 reviews, which likely tanked the game's visibility too. I don't know a lot about Steam, but it doesn't seem like it will recover any time soon.

The revenue? Split between the publisher and Steam, I walked away with a little less than $1.2k in the end. It's kind of embarrassing how bad it turned out to be, but it is what it is.

Am I too early in spelling doom for the project? Some have suggested that I am, but personally? I feel that I see the writing on the wall.

The Experience

I think I did everything within my power in terms of marketing on a whopping budget of $0. I participated in game dev trends on social media(twitter and bluesky mostly), posted occasional progress shots and clips, Screenshot Saturdays, Turn Based Thursdays, Trailer Tuesdays, Pitchyagame, got into a Steam Next Fest, shilled the Steam Page and solicited wishlists, ran a Keymailer campaign, advertised the demo, tried to get into showcases, sent out a bunch of keys separate from Keymailer, contacted websites and creators via email and DM, hung around JRPG communities and subtly promoted while participating in said communities, etc, etc. All with frankly low amounts of success.

It was a slow crawl to build mild interest, which is likely the case for most of us. I never had a big blowup moment. There was no flash in the pan and no angel influencer that found the game and blew it up.

I will say that I'm not especially surprised that the game failed so badly, but it is disappointing all the same. My last commercial game, Sacred Earth - Promise, also failed. But it was a much worse failure. My latest release was comparatively more successful than my previous, but still it did not make its investments back, and it's been crickets after the initial buzz wore off. Most of which was from Keymailer rather than organic customer buzz out in the wild. 99% of websites, influencers, and streamers I've contacted gave me the cold shoulder. None of the creators in the JRPG Youtube ecosystem gave me the time of day. Getting articles and trailer reposted? Nope. Didn't happen.

I don't fault them for this. I know everyone is busy and that their platforms aren't a charity that indie developers are entitled to, but I figured at least some would bite. I did my vetting and reached out to those with platforms of all sizes. Huge and out of my league to modestly sized creators. Anyone that seemed like they would be the audience. Almost no one reached back. I'm grateful to those that did, but it was too few and of little influence unfortunately.

That said, the actual release day buzz was pretty neat. Even if it was 99% Keymailer, it was nice seeing the game being played on Twitch. Not to any big audiences, mind you, but even so I appreciated any that were interested enough to grab a key and play anyway. There were also a few Youtube Let's Plays or single video Let's Tries and I got a rather nice review video. Along with a review on a website. So it wasn't all ignoring and silence. Just mostly.

So this begs the hard question: Just what went so wrong? How did this game fail so badly? Is there anything that can be or could have been done?

Was it the presentation of the Steam Page? I did everything I could. I added lots of art and gifs to showcase the characters and gameplay. I got feedback from people and updated the wording on the page to be more engaging and less wooden and plain.

Does the trailer just suck perhaps? This is very likely. I made it myself, considering my $0 budget. I should have remade it, but at the time, my old PC was falling apart. So it was literally 'this game has to go out soon'.

The art maybe? I will admit some of the character designs are bit..... adventurous. But for a JRPG evoking the 2000s, I think it's just fine? But I'm biased. I did draw and design the characters. Of course, it's entirely possible people looked at the screenshots and thought it was Nekopara and not a heartfelt JRPG. That's a potential fault I can own.

Is it the apparent gameplay appeal? I call the game a JRPG, but it's really half JRPG, half Visual Novel. And it doesn't have traditional JRPG conventions like running around pretty maps with pixel art characters and awe inspiring landmarks and set pieces like the SNES classics. Nor does it have flashy sideview battles with cool character animations. It's front view like old Dragon Quest games, but with a more of a speedy modern flair. And most of the story is conveyed through character portraits against backgrounds with the occasional cutscene illustration.

Did I just completely fail to reach the audience I was courting? What reviews the game does have are actually quite positive, so that tells me that when people actually play the game and engage with what it is, the experience is good. People praise the surprising depth of the story and they enjoy the combat. So either people just aren't seeing the game at all despite my attempts to reach them, or if they are seeing it, they aren't being drawn in to try it, even with a demo up.

I'm honestly quite confused because this game is definitely not slop. Effort was put into every pore of the game to make it an enjoyable experience. It's not asset flipping or low quality. Reviews are positive, but the buzz just did not follow. Either the marketing failed to reach, or the game just ain't that great. I'm not sure which it is.

Still, after examining the successes of indie JRPG peers and talking with friends over the months, I think the main core issue of the matter, my assumption, is simply that the game has no real strong hook to compel people to stay and try. There isn't any one big 'thing' that defines the game and jumps out of the gameplay, the art, or the presentation. There's no identity. There's no flash. No Wow Factor. The game just.... exists. And that's probably not going to sell copies in today's crowded indie landscape. At least, that's the takeaway I get from this experience.

So... with all of this said, what's next?

Well, there's no use crying over spilled milk for much longer, or failed games in this case. I've learned my lessons from both 5 years of development and a disappointing release. I plan to patch the game with a bit more additional content at least once more before I sunset it from updates. There's also sales over time and the off chance that lightning might strike far into the future. Who knows? I don't bank on it, but I'll keep the door ajar.

In the meantime, I'm in preproduction for my next game. Contrary to how SER started as an off the cuff project that got haphazardly built year over year, I intend to take my time planning and building with intention for my next one. I want to look at what worked and what didn't, and build a better game. And I am definitely paying attention to more traditional JRPG conventions for my next one. Being more adventurous and a mechanical rebel isn't always a good thing.

The next one will certainly still be a game that I want to make, with characters I want to design and a story I want to tell. And also one that will hopefully actually sell copies. But still mostly the former. You can never predict the latter, but you can still try and influence the variables, yes?

And finally, if you were to ask me 'Do you regret making this game?'

I would answer.... No. I don't regret making SER at all. There were tough times, ups and downs as with all things, but SER was an important project for me. It's the game that dragged me out of a years long creative slump. It was just the thing I needed to create at a time when I was seriously considering quitting game dev for good.

...But this game taught me that I enjoy game dev too much to quit. JRPGs were the foundation that shaped pretty much all of my hobbies and interests. I love telling stories and playing with characters and seeing mechanics come to life. I don't want to write novels or draw comics to tell stories. I want to make games. I might not be the most clever or creative indie developer out there. I will never create a popular emotional walking game about depression that will garner a massive fanbase and endless theory crafting.

And that's okay. Really. My dreams aren't crazy big. I just wish to proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with my indie JRPG peers, and actually sell something one day. But maybe it's just not the right time or the right project. I won't give up. I'll keep trying as long as I still have creative juice in me and a dream. And maybe one day, I will make a game that both I and the players will love.

But there's only one way to make that happen.

Keep creating.

Seeya.

It's an incremental idle clicker game. Demo version is playable until level 14 and it takes approximately 1-hour to complete.

29 mins median and 37 mins average play time looks good to me. Also, 24% of the players played it to the very end.

273 people are not that many though.

WDYT about these statistics?

Edit: Guys, thank you so much for your answers. I feel better now knowing the future of my project does not rely on this person. This means so much for the project, the business and me as a person. I already started the documentation with AI and it seems to be working wonderfully. Y'all are the best

I appreciate you reading me.

My team and I have been working very hard on a project we believe in, good community, wishslits over 8K+, demo has very positive reviews on steam.

I hired this technical person that was supposed to create a workflow and that cost me a fortune. He basically poisoned the project with a technology only him knows and made the project dependent on it. I asked him to make a documentation that I could not see few weeks ago as I had to go back and forth in the hospital and stay with my mom who has cancer.

I looked at the documentation by Tuesday and he basically did nothing and though I was not going to see it. Hopefully, another dev has been keeping up with him telling me something was fishy with him.

I am not going to mention how he talks to me and another of his coworker, because of our ethnicity, nor his excessive condescendence, as if I was the one working for him. Of course, when trying to confront him about it, he gaslights me.

It has been a long time since what he was supposed to do has not been done, we did not had any progress in the missions, and we spend most of the time trying to fix bugs caused by his system.

Right now I am getting him to write a proper documentation with the other dev I mentioned so that his leave does not affect the project too much.

Looking forward to hearing your advices about how to get rid of this person. Again, appreciate your time reading

Hello There! im a voice actor and I ofc love video games. I currently voice in a couple BUT sometimes I have a hard time finding opportunities, what would YOU say is the right place/website or time/development phase that I should be massaging people, some say it's too late or too early, so I wanna learn the sweet spot.

Please and Thank You!

TL;DR: Join hackathons, it can change your life.

My story with gamedev didn't start years ago. I didn't quit my job, didn't leave my wife and family.

A few months ago I saw that Reddit was organizing a hackathon with a grand prize of $15,000. I decided I was going to participate. There was just one small problem. I wasn't a programmer, I had never made a game, and I had absolutely no idea what the fuck I was doing.

And on top of that, there were only 27 days left until the hackathon deadline.

Phaser sounded to me like a razor brand. I started building the first version of my game in React, but when I found out what spritesheets were and how to use them, surprise surprise turns out React isn't the best choice for that. I had no idea what whole server/client split was about, what each side was supposed to handle, or how they were supposed to communicate. It was a completely new world to me.

The hackathon forced me to work hard and learn fast. It was probably the most intense 27 days of my lifem I was constantly learning new things and working 16 to 20 hours a day. Every night ended with a large dose of melatonin, and every morning started with caffeine.

Somehow, I finished my game and submitted it 3 minutes before the hackathon deadline.

My code was a total mess, the project architecture made no sense, and the technical debt was bigger than the US national debt. Of course, at the time I had no idea what technical debt even was, or how much I would end up hating myself for the stupid design decisions I had made earlier. The game was full of bugs and solutions that didn't make sense.

But despite all that, I couldn't stop playing my own game. Trust me, it's the best feeling a game developer can experience.

As you probably already know from the title, my game won the hackathon. I still can't believe it. It completely changed my life and showed me which direction I should go, because seriously even though those 27 days were really tough I had never felt that kind of satisfaction from work before.

The game is now publicly available. The Devvit platform lets people play it directly on Reddit in a browser or in the Reddit app, and over the past few days thousands of players have played it. I didn't expect that my favorite part of every day would become reading new feedback from players. Reading stuff like

I love this game. I don't usually play anything, but this is Tetris-level addictive for me, seriously, this game has consumed my dreams and waking hallucinations for the past two and a half weeks.

makes me certain it was all worth it.

The game is called Soul Thieves and you can play it here:

A little about the game itself:

In Soul Thieves, you race against other Redditors up the tower. Beat the tower owner's time and take down the Core Warden, and you get a shot at stealing Souls or the Flame Core.

• The Flame Core is an item that allows you to create your own tower. Once the tower is built, you earn souls for every player who loses their life in it.

• Souls are the currency used to upgrade the tower, so you can earn more souls.

It's free to play and playable on all devices where you can run Reddit. Enjoy, and let me know what you like and what you'd change. Thanks!

I’m working on a space-farming sim called Mootation and i just released a demo on steam a few weeks ago. To boost demo play rates and wishlists, I added a 'Moo Button' in the main menu that plays random Moo recordings from real players. To get in, they have to finish the demo, get a secret code, and send us their recording on Discord. What do you think of this kind of community-driven reward?

I always wanted to wanted to know, How do poeple get good titles for their games. Do they have any secret? I can't think of any good title ideas, forget titles, I barely get any good game ideas. Any one knows any tips to improve on this aspect of game dev?

Hey all, I mostly lurk around here but I've seen this type of comment a few times and I just wanted to chime in.

Before going into the topic, just wanted to say you also don't have to listen to me either, from my experience so far I don't know if anyone in the industry really knows what they are doing. I have priced my game high, we have sold well, so yes maybe I am biased too, but I think what I have is relevant anyway.

When someone posts about their game and why it didn't sell, there's always a lot of comments talking about the price. "It's too expensive! Of course it didn't do well!" But these type of posts are inviting people to find a justification as to why the game didnt do well, and price is a low hanging fruit. Of course sometimes the price is unreasonable and can be a problem, but I find that most of the time there are way better actionable things to do (improve the steam page, bigger discounts).

But really, I just want to say most Redditors have no idea what they are talking about in terms of pricing. Price higher than you think. For a few reasons IMO:

1. The price people are willing to buy is gonna be the price when it's on discount, not its base price. 80% of sales happen during discounts (unless you do some crazy thing like factorio or have an evergreen game). When someone says "I wouldn't buy this game at 15$, it should be 10$" What they are really saying is, they might buy the game the next time you go on sale at 30% off.

2. They are not your niche. You try to sell a puzzle game like The Witness to a gamer who only plays action games, and they wouldn't even play it for free. Assumingly most indie games occupy niches, then that target audience, the ones who are looking for your specific type of game, are willing to pay more for that experience. OK "But Slay the Spire is 25$, if i price my game at 25$ then the player will just buy STS instead". Yes and no IMO. They will buy STS instead of your game no matter what. It's gonna be at like 80% discount, and it's also better received and people keep hyping it up. But no, you should price your game at 20+$ because your niche is the deckbuilder audience that has already played STS, and are hungry for more games to play. It's not one or the other here, you're not reaching the casual audience or mainstream anyway.

3. This one is just a side rant, but there's a race to the bottom happening and I don't like it. We've seen it happen in mobile games, I don't want this to happen to video games.

Video game prices have barely changed... 25$ in 2017 is worth 33$ today... So imagine that STS has released at what is now worth 33$! And that feels like an impossible price for indie games. Blah blah economy is different, etc. But we can't just keep going down in prices, it's unsustainable for indie gamedev as an industry.

Okay maybe this race to the bottom is inevitable and there's not much we can do to stop it, but what I've noticed is deckbuilders have collectively been "holding the line". All the big deckbuilders have stayed in the 20-25$ range, and it's one of the only roguelike genres that can stay that high without feeling overpriced.

Anyways, rant over! I've just seen examples of devs reducing their prices after being scared of low sales - and surprise, the devs tell me that they haven't seen any difference in copies sold before or after they reduced the price point. It was actually surprising the first time I heard it too, I thought for sure sales would increase. And this is a big game too, 1000 reviews, backed by a major publisher - you'd think they know what they are doing! But the copies sold went down, so they just cut out like 30% of their revenue for no reason.

So at the end i don't think anyone knows what they are talking about, including me ( I am but a Redditor after all). But do your own research, think about the ramifications, get more insights, try to get in contact with other games you've seen that have lowered their prices. Ask devs in similar genres if they regret what they priced their game at, etc.

If anyone got more experience or insights or cool articles about this, that would be awesome to share as well.

Ok bye!

I am tinkering with the basics of an RPG, and I've played a lot of RPGs, but I've never really been concerned with the numbers before, the game handles that, and that's kind of what I am going for as well, I don't want the players to worry too much about stats outside of "I want this character to be a tank, I want this one to be a glass cannon."

But now that I'm into the meat and potatoes of it, I'm not really sure what constitutes good RPG math, with regards to character progression. I looked at some of the basics for old RPGs like Chrono Trigger or the earlier Final Fantasy games, cause you don't really worry about allocating stats in those games. And I also looked at pokemon's stat progression cause for most people it's less noodly with regards to stats (and the game is a monster tamer), and that was a huge rabbit hole.

Currently, I just have a Character Statistics Calculator, where I assign equipment to slots, I assign a character class, and I assign a level and it spits out their statistics. And right now, the numbers go up in a linear fashion.

Is there something I am missing? Should the numbers just go up in a linear fashion?

Ladders in first person games often feel finicky and imprecise. I'm currently working on an immersive sim, and I want to implement ladders that the player can freely let go of or jump off. Are there any games I should look to for inspiration here?

In the past few weeks I've been working on my portfolio, basically scrapping the old one (which had so many issues it was beyond saving).

I think this might be the final version, maybe only needing some touch-ups.

I want to thank the game dev community for the help and the kind words, without you I probably would have given up on finding a job in the industry.

Feel free to comment on anything, I'm trying to make it as memorable and as polished as possible.

PS.
I'll get a proper domain and the paid hosting as soon as I start linking to it on application forms, I think it would be dumb to pay while it 's under construction.

Hypothetically could companies survive if they went back to charging $30-40 for their game?

Edit: My bad for the individual fuming in the comments $50 price range. They could still upsell the edition bundles don’t get me wrong. But I’m just curious

I’ve killed more features than I’ve shipped. And every single one felt like a good idea at 2 AM🫩

I need some advice on the best storage system to use. Right now I have this going on

• JSON files (10k rows max)

• Settings, progress, game data loaded once on app start

• The game is turn based and files are modified every turn

• Read/write lag is not a concern

• File corruption can be catastrophic as the game requires reliable persistence. If the progress file gets corrupted I am losing the player forever.

• No backend, all done locally and then saved to Steam cloud

It works alright so far but I feel like it is not a super reliable system. What other options do I have? And what would be the pros of switching?

Using a backend to store user data between sessions is also a plan just not sure if affordable.

Hi there, I am an aspiring 3D game environment artist and currently doing a full year course for the same. The mentors teaching has 7+ years of experience in the industry and are very good in optimization and modelling. But I recently started having 2nd thoughts about the field I'm going into, everywhere I read only see words like, "overtime", "underpaid", "uphill battle". And I'm really confused on what should I do, I have taken the decision and have come far upto the point where I cannot leave this.

I'm from India, the average pay here are shown around 25-35k INR for junior artist, which is very less for a tier 1 city.

So, the actual working professional in this industry, my questions are for you especially.

1. What is the average pay for a junior level environment artist in India as well as a way to get job out of India too.

2. How is the demand for the role in current time and will it increase or decrease in the near future.

3. What are they ways to increase the salary like I have my majors in computer ( I cannot go in that for job) so I do know coding and can learn too but how can I? If I want to how can I become a technical artist or a game dev. Where can I learn that technical part.

And feel free to give any tips. Thank you

I am working on a co-op game (example ) and I am using Unity's built-in netcode for gameobjects instead of a 3rd party library. The latest versions have made a lot of progress compared to a few years ago but I am not sure if there are enough examples with it.

Even games like PEAK have used Photon (unity asset store). What do you guys think?

Outersloth (Innersloth's publishing game fund side) made their contract public for anyone to see. Check it out

Seems like a very generous contract all things considered.

Edit: Thanks Klightgrove

Hi guys, I want to start learning Level design from zero and eventually work in the game industry.

I'm a final year AIML student from India and enjoy testing games and have early testing experience with Mmo or other type of games. My goal is to build a small portfolio of levels and try applying for level design roles in the future.

The amount of tutorials online is a bit overwhelming, so I wanted to ask:

• What engine should a beginner start with (Unreal or Unity)?

• What are the most important level design fundamentals to learn first?

• Any good resources, courses, or YouTube channels for beginners?

• What kind of portfolio projects should I focus on?

I can dedicate 3–4 hours daily to learning.

Any advice or roadmap would really help. Thanks!

exactly as the title says. Only coding knowledge I have was being *really* into Scratch for like 2 years in my teens and extremely basic python coding for a few months. I've heard Clickteam Fusion is great for beginners and uses similar basic coding options like the two things I've tried. I'm looking to make basic arcade games and point and clicks. Think things like Space Invaders, Monkey Island, Style Savvy etc. Stuff that's super basic or mainly games that require clicking as the primary control method. I wanna move away from Scratch just so I can have options in terms of distribution and also because Scratch is super limited as I'm sure a lot of you know.

I know this is probably a weird post but genuinely curious. Is there another software that could be better or is Clickteam what I'm looking for?

is a casual puzzle and observation game where players compare two similar images and try to find the hidden differences. It’s designed as a relaxing brain-teaser with simple controls and visually engaging levels.

We recently updated the first few levels and introduced a new art style to improve the early gameplay experience. Feedback on the first 5–10 levels, difficulty balance, and the art style would really help us improve player retention and level design.

I see quite often that in posts asking for help with choosing one option, people suggest using both for different situations. I've experienced that myself, people suggested using different character designs as the armor progression, although the game doesn't imply that by design (one hit kill gameplay)

I start to wonder whether the people commenting on these posts are even developers?

I mean... I assumed that any developer knows how difficult it might be to implement a new feature, and more importantly how it can cascade to a lot of extra work and problems, while not even being crucial to the game

Hello all ! Hope you're doing well with your projects 😊

As an absolute beginner in 2D animation, I am both looking to create a not too bad looking game, but also to make my life easier as I don't plan to spend my next 50 years on animating my game.

So, the question is :

-> With 2D animation ( sidescroll view here ), do you keep the same framerate for every animation, or is a 5/10 FPS for certain simple animations ( idle for example ) enough ?

This will be my 20th year as a professional game developer. (I hit the actual mark around September, so not quite there yet.)

The one big relevant lesson I've learned is that the sooner you can find a way to build your own personal credibility, the better. Before you find that credibility, you will mostly be applying to new roles based on the credibility of other people. Your previous employers, usually. The way it usually is with CVs.

My personal specialisation has become systemic design. Something I've worked with, freelanced in, blogged about, lectured on, held workshops about, etc., for a few years by now. Today, people reach out to me because of this specialisation, and I can apply to new gigs or jobs as a specialist as well.

There's a lot more work left to be done, not least of all releasing my own games (soon!), but I just wanted to share this lesson and urge everyone out there to think of what value you are generating for yourself and not just for your employer. Especially in this day and age, where there are many very similar CVs shopped around for a diminishing number of roles.

Hi!

Once again, some data from our garage development - this time, the impact of Steam Next Fest on our game Underkeep, a classic dungeon crawler.

Thanks to Steam Next Fest and its effect, we gained around 40,000 wishlists (including wishlists 10 days after the event; in total, our game exceeded 50,000 net wishlists).

Strategy: We decided to release the demo a week before the start of Steam Next Fest. We promoted the release quite modestly - mainly by posting news (screenshots and short videos) on our social media channels (Facebook, X, BlueSky). Unfortunately, we were unable to release an official PR (system error), and we also decided not to contact influencers directly because we were afraid that they would not be interested in the final version - we had experienced this in the past with another game (but given the interest, it was a mistake).

I read a lot of opinions on releasing demos before SNF. Most people didn't recommend it because the game loses its boost in the first few days of SNF and the algorithms then ignore it. The counterargument is that after SNF starts, most games quickly fade into obscurity because there are too many of them. And influencers don't have time to react.

I've watched several games, and both sides are right. It mainly depends on the game. If you have a game that doesn't attract much attention (especially from influencers), releasing it in advance isn't a good idea. Unfortunately, this applies to most games. Only a small percentage of games attract influencers, for whom an earlier start is more advantageous.

We were lucky that the game caught the attention of both the public and influencers, some of whom released their videos during SNF, thereby improving our conditions on Steam. It's a shame that the most interesting influencers released their videos after SNF ended, as the impact on Steam's algorithms could have been even greater. Theoretically.

The graph shows that after the demo was released, wishlists rose to about 500-600 per day. After the start of SNF, we reached about 1,800 wishlists per day, and after the algorithms stabilized, we had 2,000-3,000 wishlists per day. Our maximum of 4,780 wishlists was the day after the end of SNF, mainly thanks to YouTubers.

Top games have completely different statistics, but considering that our game is quite retro, this is a great success for us. It was clear that some of the top games were able to reach influencers even before Steam Next Fest, and timing is a big advantage. We (a team of "two and a half men" :) don't have the capacity, connections, or money for that. But on the other hand, it might not help us much with this type of game, since our game targets to a relatively small group of players.

Interestingly, our previous game, Bellfortis (an indie grand strategy game set in the Middle Ages), only received 3-4,000 wishlists during SNF. We released the demo at the beginning of Steam Next Fest.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time :)

ok so this is going to be a bit of a ramble:

There was this MOBA on PS4 around 2014, free to play, small indie studio. I'm not going to say the name. But if you played it you'll know which one I'm talking about.

Matches were like 15-20 minutes, the art was incredible for a small studio, there was this narrator during battles that just made everything feel epic, and it had this RPG equipment thing going on that gave it a completely different feel from other MOBAs.

I played it a ton.

The main gameplay concept was very engaging. But, there were only TWO maps. So obviously the meta got figured out immediately and everyone ran the same build. And the free to play model was basically... too free? You could unlock almost everything just by playing. There was barely anything to spend money on. Keep in mind this was before Fortnite came along and showed everyone how cosmetics work on console. Nobody had cracked that yet.

So little revenue, studio and server costs, no content updates, player base shrinks, queues get longer, matchmaking gets worse, new players get destroyed by veterans and quit. You know how it goes.

The studio closed.

I am able to reach the current individuals that own the IP of this game, and buy it.

Little about me: I'm a senior software engineer. I currently have a business online that's now stable and pretty much on autopilot, does around 100k€ a month and takes me maybe 4 hours a week to keep running. So I have both the time and the money to actually put into this. I'd be funding it from my own profits and savings, no investors, no VC, full start-up mode (again).

I've never worked in games though. I know. I KNOW. I actually tried getting into gameplay programming a while back, was learning on my own, but ended up going the startup/software route instead which turned out to be the right call career wise.

But TODAY I just remembered this game, and just went to look for a youtube gameplay because I had nostalgia about it... and well, the second comment with most likes was "I miss this so much, I hope someone buys the company and brings it back", and I said, could bringing this game, revamped, polished, with all these issues addressed, stand a chance to become a BIG hit?

Which is why I'm posting this. I want to hear your opinions from professionals in this industry. I'm not going to be able to match big studio salaries, that's just the reality, but I'd put real equity on the table for people who get in early. Not trying to exploit anyone with "work for exposure" bs, I want a small team of people who actually give a shit about making this thing right.

If you played this game and know exactly what I'm talking about that's amazing.

The players from back then are probably in their mid twenties now.

I don't know if this is crazy or not. Maybe it is. But the core of that game was SO good, but they didn't listen to their community.

anyway if you want to talk about this my DMs are open. even if you just want to give me some feedback on this crazy idea is well too!

Edit: My idea is not to put the game back as it was, it’s to do a remake. The game is A, not AAA, which I believe it could fit well in the mobile market. Doing a PC/PS launch is too risky and it’s easier to get player base on mobile.

The game ran between 2014 and 2019.

Hi everyone,

I’m a part-time hobbyist dev and just finished doing my taxes, which meant I had all my numbers sitting in front of me. Figured I’d share them here in the interest of transparency and to give newer devs a realistic look at what the finances can look like.

These numbers are across a few small projects.

Expenses

Steam fees: $400
Festival fees: $177
Graphic + music assets: $992
Commissioned assets: $2,314.90
X Premium: $146 (not worth it)
Reddit ads: $534
Website hosting: $48

Total expenses: $4,611.90

Revenue

Total revenue from game sales (after Steam’s cut): $6,101

Breakdown

Leftover revenue after expenses: $1,489
Taxes: $477
Final profit: $1,012.59

So after everything, I made a little over $1k.

Honestly I’m pretty happy with that considering this is something I work on part-time. I also learned a lot about marketing, Steam festivals, running ads, etc.

Curious how this compares to others here!

So, while working on my game engine, I decided to shift focus a little and start working on my shading language. I did this to automate pipelines and related tasks. I came up with CSL (Custom Shading Language). Simple, right?

Anyway, I would like some feedback on the syntax. I am trying to make it look as simple and customizable as possible. It is basically an HLSL wrapper. Creating a completely new language from scratch would be painful because I would also have to compile to SPIR-V or something similar.

Here is an example of the language so far:

Shader "ShaderName" {
    #include "path/to/include.csl"

    Properties { // Material data
        Texture2D woodAlbedo;
        Texture2D aoMap;
        Texture2D normalMap;
        float roughness = 0.5;
    }

    State { // Global pipeline information to avoid boilerplate
        BlendMode Opaque;
        CullMode  Back;
        ZWrite    On;
        ZTest     GreaterEqual;
    }

    Pass "PassName" {
        State { // Per-pass pipeline state
            BlendMode Opaque;
            CullMode  Back;
            ZWrite    On;
            ZTest     GreaterEqual;
        }

        VertexShader : Varyings { // Varyings is the output struct name
                                  // These are the struct fields
            float3 worldNormal  : TEXCOORD0;
            float2 uv           : TEXCOORD1;
            float4 worldTangent : TEXCOORD2;
            float3 worldPos     : TEXCOORD3;
            float4 pos          : SV_POSITION;
        }

        {
            // Normal vertex shader
        }
   

        FragmentShader {
            // Has `input`, which is the output of the VertexShader (Varyings in this case)    
            // Normal fragment shader code goes here
            // Return the final color
        }
    }
 }

What if you want to make a custom pass with multiple texture attachments? you can do it like this:

FragmentShader: CustomOutput{
    float4 albedo : SV_Target0;
    float4 normal : SV_Target1;
    float4 depth  : SV_Target2;
}
{
CustomOutput out;
//fill the struct;
return out;
}

For writing custom shaders you shouldn't care about all this stuff all you care about is filling the PBR data. That's why I introduced PBRShader. which is a simplified shader that's all it cares about is the input will be the vertex shader output as normal. But, the output will be the PBR filled data. (This currently proof of concept I am still writing it)

Why am I making a shading language? Again, while building my game engine I wanted to automate loading shaders from asset. My game engine still in a far state but I am trying to build it from the ground on the language and the asset (Of course I had a working playable version I made a simple voxel game out of it with physics, particles,...etc)

Thank you in advance and looking forward for your feedback!

I have a background in tech. Familiar with code. I've been looking for a good masterclass like course on game dev to get some fundamentals down.

If someone has some a recommendation from their own experience. Would greatly appreciate it.

Before we start, everyone on the internet has an opinion, and you should decide for yourself whose opinion is of value and whose isn't worth the time it took typing it out. Here's why you should consider listening to my opinion:

I've been developing Infinite Stars, a free romance science fiction visual novel, as a passion project for 6 years now (and for 6 of those years, people have been pirating it).

My game has over 100K downloads, is rated 90% on Steam and 92% on Itchio, and has won both vanity and prestigious awards. I have an entrepreneurial background. I started my first tech business in 2011, which is still running and supporting my family and me, and I mentor several other entrepreneurs with tech startups. I'm by no means an expert or guru. I don't promise to have all the answers, and my words aren't holy nuggets of wisdom you should be collecting. But, I'm also not a wantrepreneur angry typing my opinions from mom's basement.

As a creator, I never used to mind piracy. Having your game pirated meant someone thought it was good enough to 'steal' and share with others. You can't fight against piracy. Other creators and studios have spent millions trying to prevent it, but as you probably know, it's futile. If someone is motivated enough to crack and upload your creation, they will. It's the same with security. If someone is motivated enough, they're going to get in. (As terrible as it sounds, the essence of security is 'having walls higher than your neighbour', making your neighbour an easier target than yourself.)

As I was saying, I never used to care about piracy as a creator, and as I got more experienced, I learned that piracy isn't all that bad. For decades, people have been shouting that piracy is free promotion and that the music industry and game developers actually benefit from it. I've always believed it, and my own experiences over the years have proved it to be true.

Last 30 days of Patreon analytics. (Apologies, Reddit isn't allowing me to post the image directly.)

We've had a few minor releases over the last 6 months, but this was a big release that we've been working on for months. It was pirated within a week.

One thing we need to understand about piracy is that it's a global issue. The US and EU can implement all the laws and fines and warnings they want, but the US and EU make up an estimated 4.2% and 5.5% percent of the global population, which means an estimated 90.3% of the world isn't really affected by the laws and fines in the US and EU.

Additionally, the US and EU hold an estimated 33% and 17% of global wealth, respectively, while the remaining 90% of the world holds the remaining 50%. Without delving into inequality, the reality is that 90% of the world doesn't have equal financial means to pay for your creation. They were never going to buy your music, your book, your game or whatever 'something' your Intellectual Property is, in the first place, which means piracy wasn't a 'loss of income' because that income was never there to start with.

Now, that 90% of the world who own 50% of the wealth aren't all dirt poor. Some of them have decent incomes, in some cases much higher than the average US or EU person, which means they can afford to pay for your Intellectual Property. Additionally, there are plenty of people in the US and EU who still dress up like pirates to meet up with their international mates. When you take into account that the average cost to advertise is around $16K-$33K per million views for US consumers, $8K-$22K for EU consumers, and a meagre $0.5K-$7K per million views for global consumers. (Very rough estimates, but the cost disparity is accurate) You want all the free advertising that you can get, and that's exactly what piracy is. Free advertising.

Last 30 days of itchio analytics.

The new content has not been released to itchio yet, and we expect another spike in traffic once we do release it for free at the end of this month.

It's a fundamental business problem. Your success as a creator isn't determined by how good your story, your music, your game, or whatever you made, is. It's determined by how many people are exposed to what you made. $1 million spent on creating a perfect 'something' with zero marketing will always do terribly compared to a horrible 'something' that's sloppy but gets $1 million spent on marketing. Should we rather stop focusing on quality and just focus on quantity? It depends on your goal. Some chase profits, in which case, they absolutely focus on getting their 'something' seen instead of spending on making it good. But if you're like most of the creators here and me, you care deeply about what you are making. We don't want it to be bad or average. We still want to make a profit, but not at the expense of our output.

In a nutshell, piracy is bad because we should be respecting each other's Intellectual Property. BUT, if someone does pirate your IP, it's not all that bad. Remember, the people who weren't going to buy your 'something' in the first place weren't ever going to buy it. Just because they got it for free doesn't mean you lost a sale. The people who were going to buy your 'something' will still buy your 'something' even if they got it for free on a pirate site.

The best way to combat piracy and use it to your advantage is to put your head down and keep creating consistent, high-quality music, games, stories, and whatever you are creating. The people who want to support you will support you, and with regular releases, it's much more convenient to get it directly from you than to wait for some kid in his mom's basement to pirate and upload it.

That's it. This is only the most recent data, but it's consistent with my findings over the years. It's notoriously hard to change someone's entrenched opinion on the internet, but with an open mind, I hope you'll think about it and not get discouraged the next time someone steals your content. <3

AI isn't just changing how games are made — it's collapsing the barrier between vision and execution. What follows is a market flooded with technically competent games made by people with nothing to say, and a small number of extraordinary games made by people who actually understand what feelings games create and why.

The developers who thrive aren't the best coders. They're the ones who can design systems that generate genuine emotion, and who have the psychological makeup to execute a long vision without external validation.

I think the indie space in 5 years looks nothing like today. The slop problem is real but so is the opportunity.

Curious if anyone else is thinking about this seriously. Particularly interested in people who have game ideas they consider genuinely unexplored — not new mechanics, but new feelings — and the work ethic to see them through.

So in fall 2027 I will be looking to transfer from my community college to a 4 - year university and I am considering double majoring in game design & development and computer science.

I’ve been on the fence about it ever sense I stared higher education because of previous research saying “just major in computer science, it’s more versatile” or “you have a better chance finding a job after graduation”.

My thing is I set my heart on game designing and I don’t expect to lend a lead design role right off the bat but I’m willing to bet on myself and put in the work to get that kind of role and more.

I was wondering if I could get some commentary on this topic. (Apologies if this is long)

While developing this site, I found what looks like a bug in Unity’s Lighting.hlsl:

One function in this part of the file was not being picked up by the symbol tracing system built into my site.

At first, I assumed I had made a mistake while building the IntelliSense / symbol analysis logic.
However, after manually tracing and reviewing the actual code path, I ended up concluding that the mistake appears to be in Unity’s official URP shader logic itself.

This is the line in question:

return LightingPhysicallyBased(brdfData, light, viewDirectionWS, 
specularHighlightsOff, specularHighlightsOff);

Looking at the function signature and comparing it against the other overloads, it seems pretty clear that the intended call was most likely:

return LightingPhysicallyBased(brdfData, light, normalWS, viewDirectionWS, 
specularHighlightsOff);

In other words, the 3rd argument looks like it was supposed to be normalWS.

The same code can be seen in the official repository here:

I also checked the latest Unity 6.3 / URP 17.3.0 code, and the same logic is still there.

Does this look like an actual bug to you as well?

Changes to google's Play store as a result of Epic's lawsuit. It's now a 20% cut or 15% in some cases (for developers participating in its new App Experience program or updated Google Play Games Level Up program). Looks like a much better deal for all developers than what Apple settled on.

Article:

Its just a rectangle overlaying the screen, right?

*How complicated could it be, RIGHT??*

Ive been making platformers for a few months. Tried to make text-heavy rpg like pokemon. Was quickly humbled.

Does anyone have some good resources for learning about this sort of thing? Especially if it’s explained in Javascript or Python, but any guide would be helpful as long as its beginner friendly. And to be clear, I mean implementing menus and old school rpg-syle game systems from scratch, not using an engine.

Building a 2D submarine management/exploration game in Godot 4.

The core loop: manage crew and subs at base, send them on expeditions deeper into the ocean. During expeditions the sub is AI-controlled with minimal input from player-

the player sets a general direction (rise/hold left/hold right/descend) and the crew navigates autonomously. The caves are tilemap-based with 16px tiles and hand-authored, but the sub has no foreknowledge of the layout.

The idea is something like motorsport manager when in race mode where you can give some commands to the drivers, but the drivers are the ones racing. The problem is that I'm struggling with pathfinding ina way that doesn't constantly get stuck, or have 'perfect knowledge'

What i've prototyped:

Potential fields / wall following / tangent bug - all three get stuck in concave geometry. No memory means it just re-enters the same dead ends over and over.

Frontier exploration with occupancy grid - 16px grid, 16-ray mapping raycasts that update each frame, A* paths to the best frontier cell in the goal direction.

Most promising so far but has some stubborn issues:

• It goes through geometry.

• impossible to go back to previously explored areas

Theta* - same frontier selection but smooths the A* path with LOS shortcuts. Straighter lines, same underlying problems.

Flow field - would get stuck in random places

Greedy - pure wall avoidance plus goal direction. No memory, gets stuck immediately in anything concave. Only useful as a baseline.

Where I'm stuck:

Frontier exploration seems the most promising, but I can't seem to get the sub to go back to an area is has explored. I don't really know if this is a huge problem from a game design perspective, but I think it might be once I start having more complex logic like navigating to resource nodes etc

Specifically I'm wondering:

• Is there a cleaner way to handle the open/unknown/wall cell marking that doesn't produce phantom passable regions near wall boundaries?

• How do people typically balance goal direction vs. proximity in frontier scoring without the sub ignoring direction entirely?

• Is frontier exploration even the right tool here, or is there a better fit for "navigate in a general direction through unknown geometry, retrace a safe path back"?

This is my first full sized project so apologies if the answer should be obvious

I think everyone has heard the advice to make the first game very small

It wasn't clear to me what that actually means. Sometimes people give a specific recommendation, like make a game in 3–6 months. To me that sounded like extremely short development cycle and very simple project without any chance of being interesting to players

But now I actually think it’s the right approach. And even if you plan a game for 6 months, there’s a high chance it will end up taking a full year or more

I think it's important to understand that scope isn’t just about the amount of content or the genre. It’s also about quality. A game can be mechanically simple, but if you aim for good art or high level of polish in general, that can dramatically extend development time.

I’m making a game inspired by Hotline Miami, which I thought was quite simple project. And it kinda is. However last year I’ve put around 1k hours into it, and I still don’t really have a “game.” I have a somewhat polished controller, couple of test levels, a DMC-like style system, and art for three biomes. That’s it. There’s no menu, no settings, no localization, no gamepad support, no narrative of any sort, no content, no music. Game is basically in a state of advanced prototype, I guess I can call it a vertical slice

Of course, it might be due to how I personally approach development, how I iterate on things too much, etc., but still, as a matter of fact, after 1k hours I’m only halfway through development

So...Even if you picked relatively small scope, think more about how you can reduce it even further

We’re currently making Stardream, a narrative game inspired by Firewatch, set in a retro-futurist space station.

Gameplay Trailer :

A lot of our references come from walking simulators and narrative exploration games. But we often hear the same thing, that this genre is “dead” or at least very hard to sell today.

Our goal is to try to evolve that formula a bit. The game still focuses on atmosphere, exploration and storytelling, but we’re adding some light investigation mechanics and even some driving sequences where you work as a taxi driver inside the station.

The idea is to keep the strong narrative focus while giving players a bit more agency and interaction.

Do you think there’s still potential for this kind of narrative exploration game if it introduces new mechanics, or do you feel players have mostly moved on from the genre?

Curious to hear your thoughts

If you want more info about the game, here is the steam page :

You can get them all from  with no sign up, no ads or newsletter nonsense. Just scroll down a little bit until you see all the packs.

I have added 10 new packs since my last post in November including, Zombie SFX Male+Female, Horror metal bangs/scrapes, experimental soundscapes, voicemail recordings and a couple others. My favourite one this time being the zombie SFX pack. Me and my friend had a really fun time recording and editing those sounds! I've also added some videos to the site of me capturing some of the sounds which will be up on the website in the coming weeks such as an insane waterfall I came across while driving through Montenegro and a Serbian orthodox choir I got the chance to record while moving through Herceg Novi. Just adding the finishing touches to a lot of packs and I will put them up for free! Hope you find these useful!

With Squarespace it does ask for a lot of personal information  and just use a fake name and email if you're not comfortable with providing this info. I don't use it for anything but for your own piece of mind this is probably beneficial.

Feel free to use anything you like, everything is CC0, so no need to credit me or the site. Just grab what you need and make cool stuff. I'd love to see what you create if you feel like sharing!

Join me at  if you would like as that is where I will be posting all future packs and little behind the scenes videos. If you guys know of any other subreddits that might benefit from these sounds feel free to repost it there.

Phil

That really has to be a surreal feeling. Spending what is essentially the same amount of time it takes to earn a bachelors degree, on a project that leads to your termination immediately after launch.

Do you think the team knew going into it? Or do you think three weeks ago when they were gearing for launch week, that they were promised bonuses and presented with delusional multi-year road maps?

This all seems a little “bet it all on black” — like, how is there no safety net whatsoever? They were playing Russian Roulette with their employees future this entire time?

That seems really unfair. The studio heads are still employed. Do you think they cut their own salaries?

I won't go into specifics but my entire career has been spent with AAA studios.

My most recent project was a mess as our fearless leader had a not so subtle cocaine habit. It's on his twitter feed, some of my coworkers took screenshots of him with a bag during MS teams meetings as "insurance", and sometimes he'd call me up to talk shop while blasted out of his mind. Freaked the girlfriend out who at the time was in addictions counselling, overheard us talking one night, and recognized something was very wrong with him.

In hindsight, his problem seeped into every aspect of the company. Our launch pissed off a lot of people and I feel ashamed that I knew for years how it was destroying the project, but couldn't do anything to right the course and am obviously bound by NDA's and such. The amount of money and time we wasted is pretty horrifying, and everyone associated with the game now has their reputations destroyed.

I'm wondering how common this is?

Hey everyone!

I'm writing a fast-paced mobile multiplayer game in Godot. The lobby and matchmaking system are done and the game networking currently runs on TCP in a client-authoritative manner in Nakama.

I wanted to use a UDP-based solution to lower the latency. It would also allow me to set up game servers in different areas of the world while managing all users within one database. I thought about using an ENet server (either GDScript or custom) that would just relay all the messages to the clients with the same match_id.

However, I'm not sure if that's a good idea, since it would require all the users to be connected to the same server, signals like user_connected, user_disconnected would be flooded.

My game's networking look more or less like:
- 2-4 clients per match
- 2-4 messages/client/second
- the biggest messages containing like 10 ints or something, nothing crazy
- all messages should be reliably delivered

I feel like there must be an established solution out there. There is WebRTC, but I read it has some connection problems, especially for mobile. Does anybody have an idea on what to do here?

EDIT: Thanks everyone, the discussion was awesome! I decided to stay with Nakama + TCP for now, keeping the messaging protocol general enough to be able to quickly switch later. As for the multiple servers, I'll use separate Nakama servers in different parts of the world, in the end I don't really need players from different regions interacting with each other. Thanks again!

EDIT2: With the help of Grok, I made a simple signalling ENet server in Go with match understanding, connected both Godot clients to it, works wonders! Had to implement the client side with bare ENetConnection, but again, Grok helped :) Now I have Nakama for social features and matchmaking, one server for all locations, and very very lightweight ENet relay server for the actual gameplay, at some point hosting one per major location zone should not be too complicated.

• Optimism when planning the feature.

• Complete despair and "I can't do this" when you are deep in the weeds of the logic.

• Relief when it finally compiles and works.

Most of the time i feel like this lol do u also? If not how to avoid this?

Hello Reddit, I have published my playtest and completed the Steamworks review for my project and the store page and my Steamworks dashboard are showing that the game (playtest) has been released. However, I cannot find it on the Steam Store, and every time I click the link on the Steamworks dashboard to view my store page, it redirects me to the Steam homepage.

Things to note:
- The playtest is a child project of the main game. Does the main game need to be published aswell for the playtest to show up?
- Steam keys for the playtest work and other players can access through there.
- I am wary about publishing the main game to fix the issue as I am not ready to release and just want to do a public playtest.

If anyone has dealt with this I would love your input on what I am doing wrong and misunderstanding? Thanks.

When I was 22 years old I started developing my first Flash Game. That was back in '07 and the gaming scene was booming! Flash was a hit and it was so easy just to make something and throw it on Kongregate or Newgrounds and get some exposure. I made a hundred different games on 3 different accounts, creating games for others and being part of that whole community. Those were my "good old days" when making games was just a fun, free brain dump into code for everyone. So many creative ideas were flying around and so many innovations that gamers today don't realize started there.

During those days i had many epic ideas but always got the advice to keep the scope small, make games that are bite sized, don't do anything big without a team. For the most part I listened, until eventually I said f-it and decided to make my own epic RPG from scratch.

My core concept was this... I love theorycrafting and character building, but very often get disappointed with the game itself. I wanted a game where I could just theorycraft, and not bother playing. So when Idle games started being a thing in '11, I decided that would be the perfect vehicle for my vision!

So I worked and coded... and i got overwhelmed and stopped.... then I picked it up again... then I found an artist... then the artist quit... then I put it down and made other games... then i picked it up again with a different artist... then the next artist bailed... and so it went, building the game and putting it down and picking it back up again every few months or years, wondering if I would ever actually finished.

Then, in 2015, the writing was on the wall... flash was dying. Support would end, all games would die, and my entire coding library and history of games would never ever be played again. This was my last chance to make Eternal Quest live! Despite being older, and married with a child, and having moved on to a different career I decided I would make this happen and push it out the door.

So I pulled the project back up, coded fervently, found my latest artist (who was a literal godsend), and finished the damn thing, releasing it on Kongregate!

Of course, an idle RPG for theorycrafters was incredibly niche at the time. Most people didn't "get it", especially on a website that was aimed at casual players. Still, I got a small number of extremely dedicated fans who absolutely loved the game! It pushed me to improve, work harder, make the game better, make update after update. Originally there was no "prestige" loop, it was just a journey to zone 100 and see how far you could push a new character, then when your build hit its limit you'd make a new character and start from scratch. But the players wanted more! They wanted more build options, deeper systems, more items, higher levels, different game modes! And you know what? I wanted all those things too!

Eternal Quest took on a life of its own. I was coding every day. I added microtransactions, released daily updates, pushed my artist for more assets! Together we made a huge epic game for a handful of fans, all with the threat of Flash Death looming over our heads. I worked on live service for the game for a year, with a patient and loving wife supporting me from the side and trying to keep my full time job going. It was a painful but wonderful time, when the game was out and people were not only playing it, but begging for more!

Unfortunately, the game never saw wide adoption. Flash was dying. Players were going elsewhere and I couldn't keep going at the same pace. It was 2017, and flash was officially in its end of life. I was burnt out. The workload was getting bigger but the income was very low. It was unsustainable. I kicked myself for not releasing the game sooner. I explored other ways of deploying it... mobile? standalone? I tried, but they failed - the tech wasn't there. I looked at rewriting it in HTML5. I looked at doing it in Unity. Everything was built in flash though, and just getting the assets and animations exported would have been a year of work.

So I dropped it. I put it down. I moved on to other projects. I got hired as a game designer at other companies, using Eternal Quest as my resume. "I built this game from scratch" looks very good!

8 years later, I hear some murmers. I showed my old art to a new friend and he says "i think i remember seeing that game". My brother makes a reference to his old build. I talk to my coworkers and they say that sounds awesome, they wish they could play. An old player sends me a message saying "can i still play this somewhere?"

So I look at modern tools. I see that it's possible! With the right tools, flash games can be packaged for STEAM.

So I dig up my old backups (on a backup hard drive in a closet; i hadn't started using github yet). I pull it out, i find the tools, i rethink the payment model. I want this game to exist! I need to see if it can be! I wonder... does it have a place in this world? Was it a game ahead of its time? Or was it released too late? Is there an audience now? Or is the design too old?

Well, the final chapter is being written... the game build is made! The pricing model? $5 instead of freemium. Hopefully this is the right call! (I always hated the freemium model anyways).

And now, I'm at the pre-launch phase... looking for people to wishlist my game, my passion project! "the one that got away"!

I know it's probably gonna fail, I know it's such a niche game. But you know what? I never made this game to be successful. This was a passion project! I made it because I had an idea that I needed to get out. Since then I've worked on multi-million dollar games. I've made succesful designs, I've worked on big and small teams. But the project I still think of? My Eternal Quest.

If you're interested in seeing my game, you can wishlist "Eternal Quest Ascended" on steam now.

And if you can relate to my story, leave me a note!

My wife says I named the game appropriately: It's my Eternal Quest! I say this is the last chapter, but it probably won't be lol... after this one fails, i'll make EQ2. I already have the design documents and the spreadsheet calculations! All I need is the time to do it!

And to everyone out there who is building games with passion: It's a hard road, not for the faint of heart and not for the lazy or timid. Having passion only works if you're willing to follow through with bloody, hard work!

Edit: Here's the link:

I have been making a kind of small game with a ball that bounces off the walls of a window. I already have audio, menus, gravity settings, bounciness settings, and color changing as well as a velocity counter. I just need some new ideas for features. If you have any ideas, please let me know. I'm using Java.

Pretty much title. I thought I found either a whitepaper or a writeup on how they implemented either the vehicle or structure creation system.

It's one of those "It doesn't seem that complex on the surface, but it sure would be nice to not have to reinvent the wheel" things.

I've seen a few others like it, My Time At Portia/Sandrock comes to mind for buildings, as does Foundation.

Edit: The whitepaper I'm looking for is "Rigblocks: player-deformable objects" but I can't find a complete version of it.

Edit 2:

Continuing my notes. From the slides, I'm p sure it does do an implicit surface generation, probably just using the metaballs already built in.

I'd forgotten about the "rig" part of the "rigblocks" (I'd forgotten obv). Handles look like they do a blend between three morph targets.

The only other bit is finding attachment points on a given surface based on the normal.

thinking about using Rust to build a new vcs optimized for large binary repos / game pipelines, am I crazy or is this still a real pain in 2026?

curious what people are actually using today, perforce? git + lfs? plastic?

just trying to understand if this is still a real problem worth solving.

I just tried Mewgenics today and it’s been a blast. The mechanics and core loop works really well together and I’ve never seen it done elsewhere.

However, I do not like the theme of the game at all. To be clear, I m not talking about the art style. It’s the vibe that’s very unsettling, with dark comedy and insects. It’s much more intense than the Binding of Isaac. Does anyone actually find this theme enjoyable? Especially it seems that the cats are being tortured.

I used to think the theme of a game is very important, but it seems like Mewgenics is a counter-example. It’s doing very well on Steam, but I wonder if it will do better with a difference theme?

EDIT: since people are downvoting: yes I do agree that there are themes that I don’t find appealing, but appeal to others, but I am not convinced yet that people find the concept of cat torture appealing, so I must be misunderstanding something. If you are the target audience of Mewgenics, it would be greatly appreciated if you could share some insights.

EDIT2: Calm down people. The point of making this post is to understand the appeal of the game from the target audience. How does saying "you are not the target audience" help at all? There are some great comparisons made in the comments about the Binding of Isaac, Palworld, and Tom and Jerry, as well as some other insightful thoughts that I believe are worth a read. Anyways, I appreciate everyone else who took their time to contribute to this discussion in a meaningful way. Thank you.

With the Trailer now released tell me how I can improve my Steam page and/or game trailer.

Feedback from the community would be incredible.

Open to any and all criticism.
Thank you!

Hey everyone.

My game hit 18,000 wishlists in 6 days after launching the coming soon page on Steam. Almost entirely with YouTube Shorts. I want to break down exactly what worked, what completely flopped, and what I'm doing now. Hopefully, someone here can get some value out of this

So here's the story and my key takeaways.

A month ago, I posted a 40-second short on YouTube of my upcoming game, and it exploded. It got over 5 million views, and my comments were flooded with people asking to know where to play it.

I didn't have a Steam page set up, I didn't even apply for a Steamworks account at that point, and I didn't even have a Discord server set up.

I really didn't expect it to blow up.

The only reason I even shared the short was that my wife was appalled at the game I was building and was convinced no one would want to play what, in her mind, is a "motion sickness simulator." And I wanted to prove to her that there was at least 1 other person in the world who'd want to play it.

At that point, I hadn't worked on the visuals of the game AT ALL. Shadows aren't enabled, and I just had a single environment light making everything look flat. In other words: the game looked like absolute dogsh*it.

But none of that mattered.

What actually mattered was the gameplay & hook combo that I used for the video.

1. Instead of making the video a generic dev log or something about the game mechanics, I made it about the viewer

HOOK: "I'm trying to see how much abuse gamers can take, so I'm building a game that systematically attacks your sense of balance, and gets worse with every single level."

VIDEO STATS: 5.2 million views, 0:46 seconds long. 0:40 average view duration. 77.1% stayed to watch

So the video opened up as more of an endurance test than an actual game showcase.

Going broad with ideas seems to work a lot better, because the few videos that were about me or the game got between 50-100k views, and the ones that were about the viewer got millions.

After this video exploded, I scrambled to set up a Discord server, and I started the onboarding process for Steamworks. In the meantime, I started working on my second video, leaning into the "evil developer" persona I felt the first video opened up.

(A bunch of comments compared me to Satan, so I figured I might as well lean into that)

I created the second video, which was an animated showcase of the game being built, and I think the main reason it worked is that people love watching things being built in front of them. Since the game is voxel-based, I could start the animation with a single cube and have the level materialize from it, then have the colors animate in, etc.

I gave the video the title "I weaponized cubes" because, again, I talk about giving people motion sickness with my game.

The video hit 2.8 million views. But this time I was a lot smarter and I pinned a comment inviting people into my new Discord server.

VIDEO STATS: 2.8 million views, 0:32 seconds long. 0:29 average view duration. 77% stayed to watch

I got 1000 members in the first 24 hours, and that quickly grew to 2500 by the time my Steamworks account and Steam page were approved.

I put in some extra time to also create a trailer, which again leaned into the evil dev persona people seemed to enjoy.

To launch the Steam page, I did two things.

First, I sat my ass down and tried to think of the most viral hook I could come up with. I ended up using the comments from the previous video to come up with the idea because a lot of people commented that they've got ADHD, and the gameplay just looks relaxing to them.

So the hook ended up being:

"This game tests you for ADHD, because if you can watch this level and it doesn't make you motion sick, there might be something different about your brain."

This again meant I put the viewer FIRST and game SECOND, because who doesn't love finding out if you've got ADHD from a Tunnel Runner YouTube short?

The video pulled in 8 million views over the last week, and I think it is the major reason why the game made it on Trending Upcoming and later Most Wanted Upcoming.

VIDEO STATS: 8.3 million views, 0:40 seconds long. 0:37 average view duration. 75.4% stayed to watch

Along with the short, I also posted the link on Discord and asked everyone to wishlist the game.

By day 3, I was contacted by the first publisher.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK

It's easy to look at the millions of views and think I have a magic hand, but I had a few big misses as well. So here's what completely flopped and why:

1. I made a video titled "my wife hates this" which is the origin story of why I started sharing the game. It got 80k views and died.

VIDEO STATS: 80k views, 0:29 seconds long. 0:23 average view duration. 68.3% stayed to watch

People are inherently selfish. They don't care about my wife's opinion of my game. They care about themselves. The second I stopped talking about the viewer, retention tanked.

2. Being preachy doesn't work.

I tried a video hook that talked about doomscrolling. It did okay (400k views), but the retention was WAY lower than the viral videos (60% instead of the 75%+ the viral ones have).

VIDEO STATS: 400k views, 0:29 seconds long. 0:25 average view duration. 60.5% stayed to watch

Calling out doomscrolling reminds people of their bad habits and makes them feel guilty, so they swipe away. It's important to make the viewer feel cool, not guilty.

3. Not having a funnel.

Going viral on that first 5M video without a Steam page or a Discord link physically hurts to think about. That's 10k or so fewer wishlists right there. So don't be like me, the moment you start marketing your game, have a Discord link handy to capture some of the interest in case you do go viral.

What I'm doing now:

I opened up an Instagram and TikTok account, and I'm cross-posting the videos on those accounts. I'm not reediting them or anything, just uploading them to those accounts and letting them ride.

And it works!

Not nearly as well as YouTube, but the videos are getting 100k+ views on those platforms as well, so that's basically just free extra traffic to the Steam page.

That initial 5m view video got 700k views on Instagram Reels and 150k on TikTok, so that's basically an extra 850,000 completely free eyeballs on my game for literally zero extra production effort.

Finally, I just want to say I'm still in the thick of this and honestly terrified/excited to see how the launch goes (happening real soon!), but I hope this helps some of you rethink how you script your videos. Put the viewer first, lean into a persona, and don't be afraid to poke at larger topics than just your game.

Happy to answer any questions in the comments.

Thank you all.

The game is called Sensory Overload if you want to check it out.

EDIT: to address some concerns I see raised in the comments:

I don't view ADHD as a tragic medical condition or a disease that needs to be "solved" or feared. It’s simply a different brain type. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being wired differently, and I think it's actually really important to openly talk about how different brains process visual information. ADHD brains are better at handling specific situations meaning it's not a "debuff" it's a tradeoff.

And here's an important stat: there's research showing 32% of adult gamers present with ADHD symptoms. And yet the vast majority don't know they are neurodivergent.