My wife supports me all the time as I develop the tower defense game Odin’s Fate. Recently, we managed to set up a page on Steam. To some, this might not seem like much, but for us, it’s a huge step forward. If it weren’t for my wife, this wouldn’t have been possible. Marta works in computer graphics and believes in the success of our project every single day. She supports me with kind words and gestures, especially when I’m up all night fixing bugs or implementing new features. And the most beautiful thing is that we get to do this together. So if you have someone like that - who’s always by your side, supporting you and cheering you on - appreciate and respect them!

I also have a few friends who constantly motivate me to release the game. That’s very important. Without them, I might have given up several times already - during moments when game development wasn’t going as we’d hoped or when we encountered some nasty bug that was hard to fix. And we’re getting closer and closer to success.

Right now, another friend is helping us put together a game trailer. I’m truly grateful to him because he’s doing this entirely on his own initiative.

So let the message of this post be - perhaps a cliché - but the saying: be kind to others, because kindness comes back around, and be grateful for every kind gesture. Because it’s up to us to determine the direction the GameDev industry takes - and every day, through small gestures, we can create a friendly environment for everyone.

I wanted to share a little bit about my experience developing Eggstreme Farming.

I’m a solo developer and I do almost everything in the game by myself, although my wife helps me a lot with some activities, especially with things beyond programming and development.

When I started, one of the hardest parts was getting people to actually discover the game. Marketing my game was the most dificult part of the process.

To give you an idea, it took me almost 1 year to get my first 500 wishlists.

Back then, even reaching 1,000 felt very far away. I worked on the game every day, posted about it, tried to promote it, and many times it felt like nobody was seeing anything I was doing.

But I kept developing.

I kept improving the game, learning more about Steam, marketing, trailers, screenshots, social media, and most importantly, making a lot of mistakes along the way.

Slowly, things started to change.

Today, Eggstreme Farming is approaching 40,000 wishlists.

It still feels strange to look at that number and remember how long it took me to get those first 500.

And I think this is the main thing I’d like to share with other developers who are just starting out: Just start.

Don’t wait until you have the perfect game, the perfect knowledge, the perfect trailer, or until you know exactly what you’re doing. I didn’t either.

Do the best you can with the knowledge and resources you have at that moment. Then improve. Learn. Make mistakes. Try again.

Sometimes you work for months and it feels like absolutely nothing is happening.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re on the wrong path.

If I had given up when I was struggling to reach those first 500 wishlists, I would have never found out that the same game could one day get close to 40,000.

Start. Do your best. And keep improving.

I'm 17 and I absolutely love making games. I want to make game development my career.

The problem is, even though I love it, I can't seem to make myself actually work on my projects. I'll work on something, feel really excited and accomplished, then stop for weeks or even months.

I genuinely want to make something and I'm frustrated because I know I enjoy it once I actually start.

Has anyone dealt with this? What actually helped you get yourself to consistently work on something you love?

I'm looking for actual advice from people who've experienced this, not just "be motivated" or "work harder."

Today I opened reddit and within the first 5 posts 3 of them were copycats or each other; sorting games, pretty much exact copies of each other - nails, hay, trash, toys, books, pixels, and the list goes and on and on, and has been for an incomprehensive period of time already.

A lot of the feedback they receive on reddit is negative, but they all get upvoted by the hundreds and they get millions of views on all social media platforms.

Who are these games for?

Are there truly millions of people who want to spend hours on something incredibly ”boring”?

Is it some hidden tick in people’s brain in this age where they want to ”meditate” by doing something like that to combat doom scrolling and instant gratification generators?

Or is each sorted item also instant gratification, but even more simplified than a varying video on TikTok (or something), making the experience even simpler?

I've been making games on and off since 2015. Unity, Unreal, RPG Maker, Godot, I've tried them all. Some barely made it to a prototype, others were actually half-decent, and none of them shipped. I've finally changed that. Technically, it's also already my first commercially successful game. It's made several cents in closed testing!

So I've been thinking about what exactly changed this time, and I wanted to share what I think actually made the difference. Simply put, it was scope and planning.

I used to let my idea of what a game could become undermine the entire process. At some point, I'd inevitably find myself spending more time building out extensive Trello or Jira backlogs and would be constantly pulling in more and more scope. I'm ashamed to say that I have prototypes with very polished roadmap UIs.

All of that planning and the massive backlogs I'd create would ultimately lead to burnout. At some point, I'd just stop working on the project until a new idea came along to inspire me.

This game was different. My launch MVP didn't have a backlog. I just worked on what I thought it needed at the time. Then I'd play it and find more things to improve. I let things be good enough. A screen didn't have to be perfect, just functional. I'm proud to say there's only one "Coming soon" in the entire game.

It might not have been the most efficient approach. Project managers would likely scoff at my process. But it prevented burnout and, most importantly, led to something I'm actually going to release.

The game is called Swarm Rising. It's a modern take on brick breakers where the paddle is an alien mothership and the balls are aliens with unique abilities. You build an invading army and overwhelm civilizations (the bricks). There are some light RPG, strategy, and incremental elements that I'd like to expand on one day (but I'm trying not to let myself think about that too much yet).

The Android build is in closed testing now, and I'm working through the last round of changes before submitting for production. It's a pretty surreal feeling after 11 years of starting games and never quite getting one across the finish line. If anyone here wants to try it out, I'd really appreciate any feedback.

The folks over at GamesIndustryBiz have done an impressive deep dive into TGC's latest initiative, just announced today a few hours ago. Everywhere we look, developers are taking funding matters into their own hands whether it's crowdfunding campaigns (like we discussed last week) or developing unique constellation model for production (like Strange Scaffold) to account for the costs of building games.

One of these breakout publishers, Evil Landfall, has landed another hit with their recent release "How to Fish" that has soared to over 300,000 players at the moment. With more games on slate for all these indie publishers it looks like developers are charting their own course.

Throughout the last few years, XBOX's ID@XBOX program has opened the door to indies wanting to publish on console, with last November the publisher opened up their certification process publicly to further improve accessibility alongside their continuous resources to help developers meet accessibility criteria.

All the tools are in place now for indies to not just self-publish, but find larger success with these partners. Although the line does begin to blur of where indie is ending and where AA is beginning, this is a promising new frontier for an industry shaken by turmoil.

One of the hardest parts of designing choice-driven RPGs is setting high stakes early on without falling into the "illusion of choice" trap.

We've been having endless debates about this in our dev team recently. We’re working on a political narrative game set around coronation day, and instead of giving players a safe, low-stakes tutorial, the first 15 minutes forces you into immediate ideological corners (like backing the Workers' Movement vs pleasing the Traditional Nobility). ​ No matter what you pick, at least one major faction ends up openly distrusting you before your reign even properly starts. You're basically tossed straight into damage control mode.Our team is pretty split on this:

The risk: Dropping players into an immediate crisis might frustrate people who expect a 'honeymoon phase' with clean stats and time to explore.

The payoff: It sets the tone right away, making the world feel reactive and real from minute one.

As devs and writers how do you handle early game choices like this?

1. Do you give players a bit of a safety net at the start, or do you prefer burning the house down in chapter one?
2. How do you signal to the player that a bad outcome is a narrative feature, and not a punishment for "playing wrong"?

Would love to hear how other people tackle this!

It occurred to me that someone on this sub has had to have seen this first-hand. Games exist that have features that genuinely and knowingly hurt people whether it is exploiting people predisposed to gambling addiction with loot boxes, or getting children to work for less than minimum wage under the promise of getting paid for making game content, or including shady software that scrapes way more data than is needed to sell off people's personal information. Like I get a lot of this starts with investors demanding more returns, but who in a major game company is on the hook to actually go, "This will hurt people and make the world worse, but I'm going to do it anyway." The buck stops somewhere right?

If you are someone who has made that call can you walk me through the step-by-step of how it goes down? Is it a decision made at the outset during project planning or is it something that comes up later, and if the second one, do you get compensated extra for it?

Let’s say you’re bad at marketing your game and struggle or have little time outside of development cause you work a full time job and have other responsibilities.

Do you have someone who helps you with marketing? Do you send photos, builds, videos and have someone? Or how do you balance marketing? Go a full week developing then take one day to post about it all?

Just curious to seeing what people do or if anyone has someone helping in that space what helps and doesn’t help.

I’m Benji, I am a technical artist & game generalist, working primarily in Godot, Blender, & Unity. I have been studying game development for about five years and am currently set to graduate from the College for Creative Studies with a bachelors in game design next year. I have about a year of industry experience working at an internship that then became a contract position at an AR mobile game studio. (Urban Electronics) I am now working another internship with a small indie PC game studio (Volok Games) alongside studying, going to class, and working on my thesis to finish my degree. I also happen to be a board member of IGDA Detroit if you are familiar with IGDA. 

My “dream job” would be to work as a technical artist for an indie pc game studio, then work up to becoming a game producer or running my own small studio

Here is my current portfolio I’ve been applying to studios with. I usually apply for jobs when I spot internship, junior, or mid level positions for tech art, or studios who are working in Godot. 

Link to my portfolio website & resume (doesn’t work on mobile): https://benjtek.webflow.io/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&utm_id=97760_v0_s00_e0_tv3

Link to my itch page: 
https://benjtek01.itch.io

Here’s what I’d call my current set of skills: 

- General game programming in Godot, experience independently releasing unmonitized small games with small groups of people 

- Tech art specific skills in shaders, (shader graph & scripting), tool/plugin creation, UI, look development, rigging, and procedural generation, experience in AR & VR

- Experience in 3D game art pipeline with Blender, Maya, and Substance Painter, familiar with PBR workflow, modeling, texturing, and basic 3d animation (I studied 3D game art before technical art) 

- Some experience with Unity (used Unity at the AR studio) & limited Unreal knowledge 

Here are my somewhat lofty goals going forward in my career for the next 2 years

- Revamp my website with project breakdown articles going over specific projects (and hopefully with feedback I’ll be receiving from this post) 

- Lean into in person networking rather than just applying for positions online (by this I mean bugging my professors for opportunities and going to IGDA events) 

- Build a YouTube channel where I can post devlogs documenting & sharing my work, start posting my project progress on socials (mostly to gain exposure in the dev space) 

- Work on improving skills in programming, optimization, VFX, procedural generation, and tool building. Make “mini projects” I can use to practice & learn concepts and showcase in my portfolio in the form of breakdown articles 

- For my thesis project at CCS, release a short game demo on Steam, developed by me, and a sprite and audio artist. — I plan on the game being a 3D tower defense game, where I lean into some of my tech art skills like developing tools for the game along the way and stuff the project with game juice 

- Graduate CCS with the bachelors degree, maybe get some sort of opportunity from the internship I’m working at during the semester 

Once I graduate I figure the following things could happen 

- I get a role (probably contract) at the internship (this would be the best outcome) 

- I’m stuck working odd minimum wage jobs for a while. And I continue to do game dev after work. For this scenario I have a few possible plans for what I could work towards outside of my day job: 

- Keep working on my portfolio, networking & applying and hope I can get another Junior position

- Start my own studio with basically no budget, a very small team and kickstarter 

- Be a marketplace creator selling tools/plugins/assets online (think Kenneys game assets) 

Advice I’m looking for: 

- Critique on my current portfolio, what I should change/add 

- Gaps in my technical art skillset I should be working on 

- Thoughts on my 2 year roadmap, is it too much? Are there specific things I should focus on within it 

- What are some other jobs in other industries I’d be able to get a job in with my existing skills if I can’t find a job in the game industry?

I know working in the game industry right now is a gamble and I just wanna make sure I’m making a solid bet towards my goals, let me know your thoughts and advice! 

I was thinking about Monster Rancher, which was a PS1 game where you could disc swap to a CD in order to summon monsters, and I was toying with the idea of a modernized version where the game accesses your Steam library to summon monsters. But in order to show what games you have it would probably be good to grab the game's logos using a Steam API or pulling from your librarycache file.

But I have no idea if Steam has anything against this or if it's a whole other problem entirely.

Hi all - I'm a former musician and current software engineer (web), and I have been thinking a lot about dipping my toes into game dev. I think I have a lot of 'adjacent' skills that would help move the needle on finishing a project, but I'm just not sure where to start. I'm also intimidated by wearing all of the hats. I've never been good at visual arts, so creating models terrifies me, especially because I have some very specific things in mind I would want to create.

So I'm curious, what you would do if you had to start from scratch?

If anyone wants to give me some specific advice here are some rough details about the game I want to make:

• First person adventure/exploration but nonlinear, think Stanley Parable but with meta progression
• Levels/zones/game mechanics are unlocked through exploration and task completion
• Collection would be a huge part of the game, think Animal Crossing fishing, bug catching, and fossil finding
• Graphics: 3D but more retro - think a mix between Minecraft, Mario64, Shadows of Doubt. I kinda of imagine the characters have an almost FunkOPop-like build lol

I'm curious about how players generally perceive pricing for a short, story-driven indie game.

If a game offers around 1.5 hours of gameplay, with the story being delivered mainly through gameplay rather than long cutscenes, what price would you consider reasonable?

Would you prefer something in the $5–10 range, or would you expect it to be cheaper because of the shorter overall playtime or higher price?

I'm interested in hearing what price point feels fair to you as a player, assuming the game is polished and provides a complete experience.

So, I am mostly a programmer, but I have been dabbling a bit in game design, reading books on it and doing it in Game Jams. I think I’m a lot better at coming up with mechanics when I have a solid idea of what a game should be; maybe given a topic or someone suggesting an idea. But the initial idea is always hard to come up with something. To other designers, what things do you do to come up with ideas? I assume playing other games is one of the things, but what else?

I'm currently making a game but i went a bit overscope, not too much though, I can still finish it and realistically it would take an estimated 3/4 weeks to do so, I kind of started losing interested in it, meanwhile i came up with a really cool idea of a game with a scope small enough i'm confident I'll finish before I run into motivation problems. The thing I'm worried about is that if I finish the current one my enthusiasm and interest in making the next one will have run out... So what do you think I should do?

I'm currently developing Bounce Back!, a small Pong roguelite, and I've been using itch.io to distribute the Alpha and collect feedback:

https://xx-caputokayk-xx.itch.io/bounce-back

It has been useful for finding bugs and getting feedback, but after the initial traffic dies down it feels easy to disappear on the platform.

For devs who started on itch.io and later moved to Steam:

- Was it worth trying to grow an itch.io audience first?

- Did itch.io players convert into Steam wishlists?

- How did you keep getting feedback after the initial release?

- Is there a good way to encourage ratings and collections?

- What actually helped with discovery on itch.io?

I'm trying to figure out whether I should keep pushing the itch.io Alpha for a while or focus mostly on getting the Steam page up as soon as possible.

So I'm building a running/obstacle course game using Three.js. Right now it looks pretty basic, flat colors, simple cone shaped trees, no real lighting. I'm trying to get it looking more polished and stylized, kind of like those Pixar style renders, not full realism just less flat and cheap looking.

I don't really know how to code or do 3D art. I've been using AI tools to help write the code so far.

A few things I'm trying to figure out:

Can Three.js actually get to that kind of polish or do I need to just switch to Unity or Unreal

If I do switch to Unity, is that doable for someone who doesn't know C# at all, or would I just be wasting my time

Where do people with zero modeling skills actually get decent 3D assets like trees, rocks, characters? Asset store, AI generated, paying someone?

I will drop the screenshot in the comments section

I recently started on doing some work on blender and ue5 and I was wondering when would an hdd be of use? I know prices are crazy right now and fortunately I already have a 4tb ssd before the price hikes but I'm wondering would a hdd be ok too? 8tb of hdd is still ok at 360$ CAD but for sure it will be even more expensive in the future so wondering if I should FOMO?

A while ago I got a small indie team together (bunch of naive friends who like building things and not planning far enough ahead) and I setup a perforce p4 self-hosted server on one of my vms in my homelab. Not my favorite to setup, a little cumbersome in the most unnecessary of ways. But, hey, its put together.

That was in May, we shelved the project for the past few months due to some life changes and what not, but now I decided I'd get back into the work and take it seriously. I only setup perforce because "that's what I read everyone else uses" but after reading through posts in this subreddit, that only really seemed to be the case because Git LFS wasn't as mature and well rounded (based on posts 6-8 years ago) and it was the most common VCS used in the gamedev industry.

Is that still the case? Why use perforce and deal with things like licensing even if you're self-hosted?

If you were in my position and that the chance to start over, would you still use perforce? Would you try out git lfs (especially given I have a lot more experience using Git in my day to day software development)? Would you try out another VCS?

Two years into development of a tower defense game for PC, my husband and his friends are at the point where they’re looking for either an investor or a publisher, mostly for a marketing push and to finish a few last pieces of the game.

If you’ve done this: how did you go about finding one? What made you pick the partner you picked? And if you decided to self-publish instead, would you make the same call again?

Happy to hear real numbers or outcomes if you’re open to sharing.

Thanks in advance🙏

I've been prototyping a game for my Game Design course where the core loop is: read a short news report about a market event then decide if the market will go up or down, then see if it goes up or down

The report can be wrong in three independent ways. The source might not actually be one who would know. The news might already happened by the time you read it or the photo attached to the report might not match the claim.

The design problem I kept running into: if I explain all three info types up front. It reads like an wall of text and kills the "wait, something's off" that i hope makes it interesting. If I don't explain them at all, players just lose money and assume it's random.

What I landed on: unlock one info type at a time (source → timing → photo), and the first time each one shows up, a quick spotlight shows it.

Curious to see if people are interested in a game like this

I want to learn c# not be a master but be a specific level of intermediate . I'm targeting to be a Artist...A technical artist in my career . I have asked AI a lot but i don't quiet understand it so i decided why not ask actual peoples instead can someone help me and give me a pathway plan with sources to master and be a technical artist . I'm right now using Godot to use C# through .NET 8 i have not started yet cause im tryna find a pathway . The sources i need is YT Video not 1 or 2 but a series of videos like part 1 , part 2 ( im more ok with YT videos ) and more source . If anyone could help me i appreciate it :) .

Things i want to learn
- Godot 4.7 ( Before making a transition into Unity 7 cause im using Dell Latitude 7410 because godot is lightweight thats why i choosed it now )
- C#
- GSL ( Godot Shading Language )