I've been a game devloper professionally for over 5 years now, but until this year I have always run into the same issue. Once I've conceptually created the architecture of my game, the classes, who calls on who for information handshakes etc., I go to implement them in engine and find tons of small roadblocks! Now this is not to say that these "roadblocks" aren't useful engine features for people who know how to use them. But for the life of me it felt like pulling teeth setting up anything beyond basic code in Unreal and Unity.

But this year I discovered Godot. And I know, I fit the archetype that some people give godot devs: too inexperienced to understand other engines, they will go to something simpler. But genuinely the layout of information is precisely where I first think to look for it, and the way you can call between objects is not a huge hassle. It's a smooth and quick experience.

This could be due to the fact that I have learned over the years what does work for me and what does not. But I'm happy with what I've found!

I'd love to hear what engines just "clicked" for you guys? What engine features are like rocks in the road of development?

*(Maybe we can all agree that finding a checkbox in ue4/5 is the most annoying way to spend your time lol)*

About 2.5 years ago, I released my first game, Banebush, a horror visual novel. It launched with just over 7,000 wishlists before release, and the launch exceeded all of my expectations.

Tomorrow I'm releasing my second game, Zoo Protocol, a co-op horror game, with around 1,400 wishlists. Well...

One obvious difference is that Banebush had a very distinctive black-and-red visual style that immediately stood out. Zoo Protocol is much less eye-catching at first glance. I've also noticed that my videos now get far fewer views than they did a couple of years ago. At the same time, the people who do see them are incredibly supportive, and the comments are overwhelmingly positive.

Have you also noticed that it's much harder for videos to get organic reach than it was 2–3 years ago, or is it just my impression?

Does anyone else hit a mental block near the end of game development?

I'm in the final stage of developing my game, doing everything by myself, and I was feeling really confident. But all of a sudden, it feels like my brain just exploded. Has anyone else gone through this?

I'm grateful for everyone's words—and feel free to check out my process on Steam👇

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3600000/Football_Champions/

I launched the demo for my first Steam game last week, and something surprised me.

A few small YouTubers (most with only a few hundred subscribers) found the game and made videos about it. None of them brought a huge number of wishlists, but watching those videos has been one of the most valuable parts of releasing the demo.

Seeing someone experience the game for the first time is completely different from watching friends or doing your own playtesting.

You get to hear everything they're thinking:

• "What does this do?"
• "Oh, that's actually clever."
• "Wait... why did I die?"
• "I wish this worked differently."

I've spotted bugs I hadn't noticed, identified tutorial and design problems, confirmed mechanics that players understood immediately, and found places where they got confused.

Even when someone didn't enjoy the game much, their video was still incredibly useful because I could see exactly where the experience broke down for them.

Since launching the demo, I've been searching YouTube for "Mr Bunny roguelike" every few days to see if anyone had uploaded a playthrough. I was just excited to find people playing the game, but those videos ended up becoming one of the best sources of feedback I've had as a developer.

Has anyone else had the same experience?

I came here seeking advice from developers who have completed long-term projects.

I’ve been working on a VR game, ACCRETION VR, for a year and a half, and I’m currently finishing the process of converting the entire project to multiplayer. Up to this point, I’ve held up pretty well, but more and more, I feel like I’m beginning to enter the valley of despair.

I’m developing the game entirely on my own. I’ve somewhat neglected marketing because I have no experience with it, and marketing a VR game seems particularly difficult.

I announced a December 2026 release date, but I’m starting to believe that I’ll sell three copies in total. Despite fulfilling my dream of releasing a full-fledged commercial game for a platform other than smartphones, I’m beginning to feel bitter about sacrificing nearly two years of my life to something that may bring almost no return.

It would be easier if every factor narrowing down the potential audience didn’t seem to be working against me:

The number of people who own a Quest 2 × the number of people who enjoy flight games × the number of those people who like sci-fi × the number of those people who don’t throw up while flying in VR × the number of people who won’t be completely consumed by GTA VI at launch = me + two friends who don’t want to hurt my feelings ;)

How do you deal with the valley of despair during a multi-year development process?
Can the fun factor genuinely carry a game without massive marketing?
How can I get footage in front of a large number of people who might potentially be interested? I’m ruling out paid advertising because, with a limited budget, it is more difficult than it seems.

I stumbled upon this article called overjustification effect.

The overjustification effect happens when giving someone a reward for doing something they already enjoy actually makes them enjoy it less. It basically "rewire" the brain so that they start to think they are doing it for the reward, not because they actually like it.

In 1973 they experimented with children who liked to draw. They split it into 3 groups, two were rewarded for drawing, one was not. The non-rewarded group continue to draw in their spare time, the paid group did not.

I think there are some parallels that can be found in gamedev, or any other hobby really.

Hey everyone.

Some of you may remember a post I made here before. For people who don't, here's a quick recap.

Our studio spent 2 years making our first game. We reached around 120k wishlists before launch, but the game sold way below what we expected. One big reason was that we launched very close to R.E.P.O., which became one of the biggest games at that time.

After that, we learned a few important things.

• Don't spend years waiting to release.
• Open your Steam page as early as possible.
• Post content on social media all the time.
• Build a community early.
• Try to release much faster.

So we started working on our second game, OK BOOMER.

We opened the Steam page on May 24 and wanted to release on June 24. We actually released on June 25. I'll explain why later.

The game is a 1-4 player co-op game where you play as Boomers going deep into the internet. Every run is different. You collect glitches while trying to survive against meme-inspired enemies. Every map has its own internet theme.

That's the simple version. We really tried to make it look different. We also built the code in a way that let us develop much faster. The whole game took us about one year. I'm not going to lie. After our first game, money became a serious problem. Making games in our country is getting harder every year because of the economy. Finishing this game was honestly a huge challenge for us. (Financially, we are nearly crashed.)

When we launched the Steam page, we got 10,160 wishlists in only 20 days before Next Fest. By the end of Next Fest we had around 22k wishlists. Normally you hope to multiply your wishlists several times during the festival, so we knew those numbers weren't amazing. Still, we stayed positive because we had another good sign.

Wishlist Screenshot

We released the demo one week before Next Fest. By the end of the festival, over 40,000 people had downloaded it. The average playtime was over 40 minutes, which was actually a little better than we expected. That gave us hope.

There are 7 people in our team, and this is our full-time job. We thought that if the game had a decent launch, we could pay our debts and keep building games.

Then another problem happened. Five days before release we realized we forgot to enable Early Access on our Steam page. We almost launched the game as a full release by mistake. So we had to send the page back to Steam for approval. We think the support team was very busy after Next Fest because we didn't get an answer before June 24. Late that night we realized we wouldn't get approved in time, so we posted an apology and delayed the launch.

Thankfully we got approved the next morning and released the game on June 25.

Then... chaos. The game barely sold. At first we thought maybe delaying one day ruined everything. But after a while we realized the game simply wasn't reaching more people. Maybe this genre is just too crowded. Maybe we picked the wrong game.

When you spend a year building something, it's hard to accept that people may not even notice the things that make your game different.

Our reviews are ''very positive'' right now. Of course, the game still has little bugs. That's exactly why we launched in Early Access. We have a lot more ideas we want to add. We're honestly at the point where we may have to close the studio. For the last two weeks we've been thinking about what to do next. Half of the team has moved on.

One thing became very clear. Even if our games didn't become successful, we actually became pretty good at marketing them. Both games reached a lot of players in a relatively short time. That made me realize maybe we can help other indie teams too.

Over the last three years we've learned a lot, not only about game development, but also about Steam, marketing, creators, wishlists, launches, and all the mistakes you only learn by doing. I think it's time to share those experiences instead of keeping them to ourselves.

We're also changing our direction. Our next game will be much smaller, much faster to make, easier to understand, and much less risky. We need to start making money again if we want to keep the studio alive.

I'll share more about it very soon. I also want to start posting here every week. I'll share what we're doing, what works, what doesn't, our numbers, our mistakes, and everything we're learning while building the next game.

Maybe it helps someone. Maybe some of you can also tell us what we're doing wrong. Either way, I think being honest is better than pretending everything is fine.

If you have any questions, ask me anything. I'll be around, and I'll keep sharing our journey every week.

Thanks for reading. Your support really means a lot right now.

TLDR: Several long paragraphs relaying the game's many successes to explain why I thought anyone might actually be interested in my answers to the interview questions below.

Subjects touched on:

• inspiration
• early challenges
• advice for getting started
• monetisation
• ludo-narrative dissonance
• balancing complex numbers-go-up mechanics
• how a story can start to write itself
• mechanics that worked and didn't
• AI

______________________________

Hey guys, 5 years ago almost to the day, I released my niche mobile game called Dragonfist Limitless or DFL for short (Google Play / App Store). I'd call it an incremental beat-em-up power fantasy, essentially "Dragon Ball Z cum Streets of Rage."

The game's had 800k players by now. It's been both Editor's Choice and Game of the Day on the App Store as well as briefly ranking in the top 30 role-playing games in the US App Store, and was voted one of the Best Mobile Games of 2023 in the incremental games sub. Despite being unabashedly dodgy, my game has somehow inspired amazing fan art and animations, fan fiction, a comic*, a web series*, a novel, song covers, and uncomfortably enough I suspect some sexual awakenings. I'm very proud to say that I've had players reach out to tell me how it's helped them through divorces, cancer treatment and losing loved ones. I'm also very proud that it's shaped the future of some younger game developers who have reached out to talk about it inspiring them to learn game dev, and even played and enjoyed one of their games myself!
^\Not officially/commercially; just fan projects that probably only had a couple of releases, but still very cool! Can't find 'em now.)

While sometimes it's kept me on the rocks a little, the game is unarguably a firm financial success, having endured as my consistent, sole income source since its release, even continuing when I have been inactive and not delivering on promised updates, without any advertising during that period. It even allowed me to buy my first home.

However, it hasn't been an easy journey; I've been plagued with mental health problems from burnout (and, to put it somewhat more morosely, what I now suspect was actually a nervous breakdown in 2023 due to stress). I still haven't released content that I've been promising players since the game first launched, and despite the game being my livelihood and only focus, I still struggle day to day with focus and motivation.

Despite my long intro, I'm not here to tell you my life story -- just setting up context. A player and aspiring game dev was doing a school project in which they chose to interview me, and I probably put way more detail into the answers than he was expecting, and rather than see them disappear into a school grading system, I thought I could at least share them here where perhaps some other aspiring game devs might see. So, if you've read this far, and you're interested, I hope it gives some interesting insight to someone.

Credits to u/vasco3vasco for the interview itself -- some good questions, and good luck with the assessment!

_____________________________

1. How do you keep yourself motivated?

This can be an ongoing problem; it's well known that the first 70% of any project but especially game dev is the most fun, and the final stage of polish (menus, settings, camera tweaks, etc.) is a drag. That's a subject that has been talked about extensively, so I'll answer for a different stage: I've found that *post-release* is like that, but worse. There's an abrupt transition from "making a game" to "running a business," which is not what most people in this line set out to really be doing!

As a person with some mental health issues (which it must be said are in part *also* the result of the post-release phase), I wouldn't suggest staying motivated here is a problem I've yet solved. For an "early access" model like mine where more content is coming post-release, I think the biggest motivator is thinking of things I want to add that I *love* and am excited to work on. I think it's really important to ensure a balance is struck there because post-release you're not just fighting bugs and platform support, but also the fact that your game is in the hands of a community now with its own ideas, interpretations and expectations; the project becomes larger than you, and it's easy to get swept up in trying to deliver what other people want.

I say this because this is an important lesson I've been absorbing over the last couple of years: firstly, again the element of excitement and passion you need to continue feeling to motivate yourself, which you may not get if your creative designs are just about "meeting expectations;" and secondly, it's my opinion that the best work, and what made my own game successful, really *comes* from creating something you yourself are excited and passionate about. That's your unique vision and character. When you worry about giving the audience what THEY want, you ultimately fall into the trap afflicting many mediocre and forgettable games from larger AAA studios: a watered down product that pushes no boundaries and may kind of interest a larger audience but ultimately inspires none of them.

So, in essence, I think intrinsic motivation due to excitement about *what you're working on* has to remain a core element throughout the project as much as possible, and keeping sight of that is important!

2. Where do you find inspiration?

I've drawn from loads of sources. I think that creativity is like a spark that happens internally, but that it doesn't come from nowhere; it comes from the mixing of all experiences and feelings a person can draw on, equally from the richness of life, emotions, and real world experience as from experiences you draw from *other* people's media. I'm always skeptical of someone who makes games but doesn't really play games in their spare time! I spend most of my spare time gaming and I think, as a somewhat obsessively analytical person, unpacking what I think is working or isn't working mechanically while I play, and understanding how the game is shaping my feelings and expectations. Almost every game that I find myself enjoying gives me some surge of inspiration, to the extent that I regularly find myself having to argue down an internal monologue that tries to justify significant genre pivots in my existing project to the genre of whatever game I'm enjoying, thinking "I could add this! And if I did it this way, it would be so satisfying!" Yeah, control, discipline and scope creep are an endless battle. ;)

Aside from other games, though, in DFL alone I've drawn inspiration from my love of the beach, of martial arts movies and tropes, of cartoons I loved as a child, my cats and their personal lives... In fact, a character in my game, Wave Fist Master, is even loosely based on my mother, an attempt to capture her loving, carefree nature... and her addiction to tea.

3. How did you come up with the story?

I'd say the story has come from equal parts "unplanned chaos & reactivity", and actual planning. To paraphrase Bob Ross here, it's about the happy accidents! My plans started small and in fact as a fan project for a show I was obsessed with as a youth, being Dragon Ball Z, before I took it more seriously and removed copyright infringing elements. While originally keeping strong parallels to the show, over time the game simply grew to have its own unique identity.

An interesting (and for me, pivotal) concept in this shaping, is avoiding ludo-narrative dissonance: the sometimes jarring distinction between what you achieve in a game while controlling a character, versus what happens during cutscenes and canonical story. I try to make a point of addressing the player's actions (necessitated by the gameplay itself, e.g. you have to beat up these 10 random people to finish a stage) in the story itself; sometimes very directly and sometimes as a sort of 4th wall breaking nod. This approach has helped shape the story, though, because for every gameplay element or mechanic I want to add in, I tend to try to weave it into the story itself, which creates subplots.

4. How do you try to keep the game balanced?

By hammering calculators and losing hair! Just kidding, I was bald when I started. My approach is sort of "working backwards from goals:" I know I want this enemy to represent this level of challenge at this point in the game, so I can calculate the trajectory a player should take to scale their own stats to that point. It's an imperfect system that I've revisited many times, and my current approach is that when adding a new stage, I think of it not in terms of enemies dropping "this particular arbitrary amount of gold," but instead of: "I expect the player to have upgraded their gold drop multiplier to *this* extent by this point, so things here are priced accordingly, and the base gold drops of enemies are a division of this; and a player should have to kill this many enemies to afford to buy this item, and this many for this one." I've found this approach most natural and it keeps me grounded in what players will really be thinking and doing at this point.

I feel strongly though that one of the best parts of a well balanced game is giving players the ability to strategically BREAK that balance, but only a little, and the balance should return at a later threshold so it can be enjoyably broken again: linear and predictable growth is boring, which is why many people detest level scaling in games like Diablo 4. The most obvious way I achieve this feeling is with the limit breaks unlocking new power up phases in which the player immediately scales up their combat stats by 50% additively at the time when unlocked; a significant and sudden shift creating a sense of immense power and progress, but owing to its additive nature, the relative benefit of this power up decreases as base combat stats grow until the power up itself becomes trivial -- allowing room for a new one to create that feeling again, but without creating a problem of limitless number creep. This is a system I'm quite proud of.

5. Do you regret adding any features/ mechanics?

Totally -- plenty. Having no way to know how successful it would or wouldn't be before starting, I planned the game around some things like a premium IAP currency and ads; things which seemed fine for what was then to me a silly throwaway mobile game, but with the game's success and my increasing fondness and seriousness about it, now create a foundation which I think undermines the game's quality, and the balancing of this is very delicate indeed; it also adds quite a lot of technical overhead due to the third party software/licensing/privacy policies etc. that are constantly changing.

I'm not crazy about the way gold costs scale in the main shop. It was designed to encourage progress in the game but doesn't make much sense (see ludonarrative dissonance), and even though gold is completely separate from any IAP concept and scales only on organic progress, new players more familiar with greedy cashgrab games have repeatedly mistaken the gold scaling as a paywall and gotten a bad first impression.

One of the current major endgame mechanics, affectionately known as HORP, involves endlessly collecting drops from bosses that add unlimited, powerful scaling. I woefully underestimated how willing players would be to spend literally thousands of hours doing this and scaling their characters FAR beyond what I had hoped for which is its own problem for the game's future, but it also manages somehow to be both addictive and profoundly boring. From one perspective, that's striking gold, but it's not really what I want for my game and has created an ecosystem in which spending thousands of hours on this monotonous, fairly shallow grind is necessary to achieve what's considered a respectable endgame level.

6. How do you come up with names for items/ mechanics?

...Whatever pops into my head first!

7. What do you think is the ideal way to monetize a game?

Financially speaking, for mobile, unobtrusive optional ads with a purchase that permanently removes them and several other permanent boosts that can be purchased, with no premium currency. In terms of satisfaction for players and longer term for the developer if you can afford it, certainly just a classic, single purchase to own the game, and a free demo for people to try it -- and eschewing the modern hyper-capitalist concept of DLCs in favour of meaty expansion packs that can be purchased and add significantly to the game's core rather than superficial elements.

8. What did you have the most trouble with when you started game development?

Oh boy. Well, you'd get very different answers to this at any point in the journey. I think when I started, I had a lot of trouble actually understanding how to structure a "level," what that really means in terms of objects and memory and the abstraction of your character on screen into data when moving between scenes so not present in space but only as stats in memory; having to concern myself with the mechanical plumbing of serialising that data to a save file and back again. Whether I need to make a loading screen. What happens when the game first starts. The pipes connecting all this disparate concepts! Almost all of my projects up until now have consisted of coming up with a lot of cool mechanics and getting the bones of a game working all within the scope of a single in-game scene, and then moving on to another project instead of adding more scenes and transitions!

9. What inspired you to become a game developer?

I've been obsessed with video games for as long as I can remember. My father was a programmer and tragically he died when I was too young to remember him, so I grew up on stories of him and how similar I was to him, which I think really shaped me and my expectations of myself, for better or worse: to psychoanalyse myself, I think I chased his shadow, the idea of a father I didn't get to know, and taking up his own hobbies let me feel closer to him. Heavy, huh?

10. How do you keep track of all the features you want to add?

Trello! DOZENS of scattered text files, sometimes focused on a single topic, sometimes just full of random unrelated ideas that I never read again! Obsidian notes! Google Keep notes on my phone! Emails I've sent myself!

The short answer is probably: "keep track? huh?"

I do my best. :')

11. What do you think is the most important trait of a game dev?

Passion. You gotta love the journey, every bit of it. Few are the folk who finish a game, fewer still their first, and fewer still where it's a hit. You need to be excited and curious and feel rewarded at every minor step of the journey, from first printing a line of text to making an avatar move. Passion, I think, is what gives you that sense of reward for the small tasks while you learn. Without it, you're going to go straight for your cliche "I've got this dream game idea and it's like GTA V but it's an MMO with dragons," and you will never, ever have a chance in hell of making it.

12. How do you think AI will impact the jobs of game developers?

Just my hunches: "Concept art" might become niche, but in studios that still employ real concept artists and art directors, the difference in their art style will be very noteworthy indeed.

Programmers will temporarily find less demand, and the quality of games in the AAA space will slide considerably, and then there will be a resurgence. AI will be relegated to some simple tooling and boilerplate generation, because I don't think it's capable of creating scalable, quality code for a project -- maybe fine for the "leaf nodes" on a tree, that is to say code that nothing else will depend on, but many have been the classes and methods written with that expectation then later found to be a dependency in lots of other future code! So no, I don't think that'll fly either.

13. What do you enjoy most about making games?

I love programming and the challenge of creating solid architecture that captures concepts! There are a billion ways to skin a cat, as they say, and I think that transforming life, objects, action into structured data and behaviours is somewhat of an artform. Having said that I think my real passions and probably main "MVP" are in world/level design and writing.

14. Could you give a reason why a person should become a game developer?

Intellectual curiosity, creative growth! The multi-disciplinary nature means you get to dip your toes in, and learn about, art, graphic design, animation, audio design, coding... Learning so much is great for shaping both your brain vis-à-vis neural plasticity and stimulation, and for your well-roundedness as a human! It makes you interesting! In turn, learning about these fields also allows you to genuinely appreciate other people's work on a different level, as you can get a lot more out of it once you know what was or wasn't a difficult achievement, what tricks they may have had to employ to pull that off, etc.

15. If you have one thing to say to a beginner game dev, what would it be?

Start now, and start small. Don't worry about game engines; don't even touch them. Mess with JavaScript in a simple web game, or Python. If you can satisfy yourself making a game that is just text-based or has a simple UI (ala some incremental games), all the better. You want regular, immediate rewards to keep the process of learning fun. Eyes on the ground, not the horizon!

_________________

If anybody has questions, I'll happily answer what I'm able to.

Basically I’m experimenting with ai navigation in Unity and wondered how does a game like l4d do it? Im doing a similar idea but it’s just (ranged and melee) drones and mechs that chase after you instead of zombies.

Basically a scenario I’ve thought of was say a player is on a raised platform, normally the ai would take the stairs based on the baked navmesh on unity, but say for a drone, they would just fly higher to reach the platform instead of taking the stairs, or fly inside a window of a room to reach the player.

So, what’s the best approach? Custom AI Navigation or can I do it in Unity’s NavMesh? I’m new to this so I’m hoping for some ideas! Thanks!

Also why L4D? because I love how they handled the navigation for the zombies, simple yet it works in most scenarios, which is why I take huge inspirations for my game!

I'm a programmer and I suck in art part of the game. I'd like to know how can I overcome this? Is there an easy way to make 3D renders of characters, props, environment, make art for banners, menu, etc?

I wouldn't like to use AI for this and nether get ready-made assets, just an easier way to make them.

Hello all,

Wondering what you consider the best resources (paid or free) for learning game AI? I know it's quite a wide topic but want to leave it open ended. Foundational stuff too (like prereq math, etc)

Hi all, I'm planning to store data between scenes on a scriptable object, but I've run into a bit of a crossroad. I was planning to copy the data from the scene to the SO every time the scene changes and reload it afterwards. But apparently the better way to do it is to just have the SO as the source of truth and read and write from that directly? I'm hesitant to go with that approach because that would mean having to rewrite a lot of stuff to link to the SO instead of the existing systems I have now

Edit: I didn't realise before that I would need save data for my game. I think I will try use json for save data and a scriptable object to serialise to and from the json and just to store data between scenes

Hey guys,

We all love numbers, so I wanted to share the numbers for my first ever steam game which is currently in Early Access since 4 months, it is called What Is The Ghost. I wanted to make this game because I loved playing Phasmophobia, but it overwhelmed me. So I made the first ever 2D Ghost Hunting Game, which also has a multiplayer!

Current Stats:

• Wishlists: 1300
• Units sold: 183 (14 returned)
• Net revenue: $1370 (this is after returns)
• Median playtime: 1h 50min
• 35 Reviews overall (95% positive)

What did I do wrong?

Bad Marketing: I focused way to less on marketing, I went into Steam Next Fest with just 300 Wishlists. For understanding, the Steam Next Fest can double or more your wishlists that you bring in. That means going into the Next Fest too early means you end up losing a lot of wishlists. I needed to wait till I have like 2-4k at least. This is what I currently try to to better with my next game Capy Farm.

Bad Demo Launch: I launched the demo way too early, there have been a lot of bugs, bad balancing and so on. Also my capsules haven't been final at this stage. Which costed me A LOT of wishlists and players. For Capy Farm I did it better, ending up with 500 players and a median playtime of 1h which is insane and a good bunch of wishlists. Your Demo Launch is one of the most important steps on the way to success!

Adding Multiplayer: Even though multiplayer fits the game very good and had a lot of positives, it costs so much more time and energy. The development time increased so much and bugs have been mostly because of multiplayer, some of which I'm unable to fix till this day. You should think twice if you really want to add multiplayer to your game. If so, do it BEFORE your game is finished, not afterwards.

What did I do good?

E-Mail Marketing: I reached out to 50+ creators multiple times sending them keys. Some picked up my game and played it onstream. Creators can have a huge, if not the biggest impact in your marketing! Research your audience creators, small, medium and big ones, create a speadsheet with name, mail, language and go for it! Make sure your mail template is not like a spam mail.

Actually Finishing My Game: Yes, you read it right! Most of us never succeed in any way, because they keep adding new stuff, jumping from unfinished project to unfinished project. You need to make the full journey for one game and then go on to the next. Each full development cycle (beginning to release) gives you so much experience! Each game you will get better and better in every aspect.

Making A Good Game: If your game is bad even the best marketing will not work. Make a good game!

Not Making My "Dream Game": I would not recommend making your dream game, if you want to earn money. You should make research on what People actually want to play. Look for existing games as inspiration, make them better, make them different.

Using Every Possible Sale: I used every sale possible for my game to sell my game. In the current sale I already sold 6 copies.

Asking For Reviews In Updates: I kindly remembered players of my game to leave a review in some updates I posted. This made a huge difference!

Last Words

In the end I want to say, don't listen to haters or negative people. Focus on your work, get a little bit better every day and FINISH your games. I don't want to collect wishlists here, but I would really appreciate chatting with fellow game devs and sharing strats and experience. For that I would ask you to join my discord server to get and keep in touch. This means the world to me.

Deda

\This Post has been written with love entirely by a human.*

When we first showed off Patchkins Party, the feedback we heard the most was: 'This is just a clone of UCH'. We were inspired by UCH, but we truly felt like we had something unique and made with love on our hands.

So, instead of pivoting and remaking the game, we decided to continue updating it to make it bigger, funnier and even more different! In the last few months we've worked non-stop on new updates, and just released a new one: making and remaking a bunch of objects that can be drawn by players on the course, expanding the player count to 8, and adding 2 new characters!

We want to continue making the game with the community, so we even started a 'create your own character' event, where our artists will put a design you create into the game!

We'll continue to add more to our passion project, so that while it's inspired by UCH, we want to continue carving out its own identity.

Other devs, who faced similar criticism, how far did you have to go to lose the 'clone' stamp?

We're developing a game and it's in its early stages - we're still testing the game mechanics, and do not have final assets yet. And we do want to start validating early, so we're looking for the lowest friction way to run a playtest.

After some cursory research, we thought Steam Playtest will be ideal, because players can install the game from a reliable source, and updates can happen seamlessly. However, after setting up the Steam app and seeing the release process, I'm super confused as to whether this is the correct route.

Some context:

• we're developing a game on UE
• no final assets yet, so we don't want our page to be publicly discoverable (through steam search or google search etc.)
• distribution should work similarly to "unlisted" - think of unlisted youtube videos or google docs that are distributed by link
• our idea of "playtest" is a playable version of the game where we're testing a particular hypothesis / mechanic during the development process

And that's where I'm confused on whether Steam Playtest is defined the same way? In its release process, it seems like the store page itself will be public, discoverable, and "Coming Soon"? While that still gates behind signups, that seemed more like a Beta tester signup process more than a "Playtest"?

Then we explored the idea of Steam keys, but we're not sure how they actually work. I see previous posts saying that Playtest keys only work once the Playtest page is released, while the only way to privately distribute is to generate release-override keys on the main app?

So tldr, is Steam Playtest really "playtesting"? Or is it just a beta/alpha flow for the weeks/months before release? What's the correct way to distribute our playtest without having a public page?

I see a lot of indie games on SM platforms, say Instagram for example, that seem pretty far into development, that seem to not have an original soundtrack. I could be wrong and maybe they do, I don’t know forsure.

But it’s got me wondering, as a fellow composer, the following question: How far into development does a dev/team wait until they begin to look at seriously hiring a composer?

I could imagine, though I do not develop games, as someone who creates music, that finding the right composer could seriously take some time. Even though there seems to be millions of composers knocking on the door, imagining the perfect atmosphere/mood is a patient process sometimes and I totally understand that, and so finding the right composer certainly might take some time.

Also, what makes a composer stand out from the rest?

For you, is it mostly their musical ability/quality and professionalism?

Is it their approach or genuine interest?

Their experience? Their ability to be able to deliver high quality SFX in addition to the OST?

How much does pricing play a role?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts about this as I continue to learn and grow, and educate myself further in this industry. Keep making awesome games, seriously. I’m blown away every time I start searching online for indie games in development.

Regarding Steam players, would it be worth it to buy a Directinput controller or should I just stick to Xinput and Ds4? Can I just stick to Xinput and Ds4 or should I buy DS5 as well?

Despite not owning every controller type, what types should you absolutely have if you want to reach most Steam players?

Another question : you've probably heard there's emulation to switch between input types, like XOutput for example, which lets you switch from Directinput to Xinput. There's also software to switch to Ds4 as well. Could I just buy a Directinput controller and use that type of emulation?

I don't have a fixed budget, but regarding Xinput and Ds4, I'd prefer actual official controllers, since I've used, like, 4 third party ones and they've all stopped working at some point. And where I live, most controllers sold are Directinput, so keep that in mind as well

I'm currently doing the GMTK Jam, but I realised that I have no idea how to make tessellating tilemaps if I don't want to use pixel art. Does anyone have any experience in that field?

I got a small thing in my head that I can't quite figure out. For a long time I have had my input handling functions inside the script that uses it, e.g. (MoveHandle(InputActions.CallbackContext ctx) in the PlayerMovement.cs script) using invoke unity events.

Now I want to follow the single responsibility principle, so I'm leaning to have a separate class/script handle all inputs.

My question is how do I go about it and is it really best practice or worth it? Also, I'm trying to develop an eventually pretty big metroidvania so I believe my scale is pretty big, should I stick with invoking unity events? Or go to generating a new C shard script and invoke its events?

I'm not talking exclusively about Unity here either, I'm taking generally about gam dev best practices, is it worth having a dedicated Input handling class when there is a built-in system that does that (in my case it is the Player Input component)

We’re two brothers making Moo Who?, a voice-driven multiplayer party game.

Animal players record their own sounds and hide among NPC animals. Hunters must watch, listen, and decide which animals are real players before using their limited shots.

This is our first trailer, and we would love honest feedback. Does the concept come across clearly?

Hello! I've been wanting to make my own game with my own 3D engine as well but I have no idea where to start with one. Does anyone know of any sources for helping with making custom 3D engines?

Recently i started thinking about how i entered on this life, i was a little kid playing some years before, passionate by games on my Ps2 with Matrix, and now i'm a graduating student on Univali, doing Game Design and Digital Entertainment, almost finishing my College and making a Hard Sci-fi point-and-click to my TCC (I don't know if thats the term on English, but is my Final Work for College, so i can graduate).

And all that said, i was thinking on how devs like me started on this life, and when they get they first job on this area, how was it? How did they get it?

I can start by saying that i entered this life because i was tired of feeling that the passion of making games has passed away, i want to make people, independent of age, feeling like i used to feel when i was a little kid playing Kung Fu Panda (PS2) or GTA SA (PS2) and etc.

That's my motivation, what was yours? How did you get in jobs in the area? I didn't get any job yet, but i'll make my way on doing indie games

hello everyone! im working on my player customization menu for a 2d pixel game similar in appearance to games like stardew valley and undertale.

i was wondering advice from you guys. i was thinking to have a colour picker to customize colour of clothing items to be anything. however, this is consistently not the norm of similar games I’ve played. stardew has a dye system, fields of mistria has a few select number of colour variations, animal crossing/tomodachi have select clothing variations.

i was wondering if there was some reason behind this which i may be missing. perhaps colour picker creates some extra friction? would love to hear thoughts :)

I was watching this video

https://youtu.be/RvZyewbvO64?is=qQ8EoeI2hVJffQLf

It looks very similar and easy to use as RPG maker. Did you never try it? Is it easy as it looks?

Recently I started playing Black Desert Online again after like 10 frickin years and I suddenly was reminded of the infamous R spam. For any BDO players, you know what i’m talking about. But to anyone who doesn’t, it’s basically just canon that most, if not every BDO player has zero interest in the actual story and so whenever that little ghost shows up to give you a quest, you just spam the R key to skip through the story and then suddenly you’ve finished the game and literally have no clue what the game is about.

This got me thinking about a serious problem in the MMO genre. How many players ACTUALLY give a damn about the story? I mean aside from WoW which I never personally played but understand actually has a story that a lot of players like, there really isn’t many MMO’s out there that have a story the players who play it on the daily can actually sit down and explain to you.

And to follow up that question, what do you think is the solution to this problem, aside from just writing a better story? Do you think it’s essential that every MMO has to have a story, even if it’s a bad one? I’m sure there are also people out there who actually enjoy the process of interacting with NPC, skipping through all the dialogue and progressing in that sort of manner, as it may bring them a sense of nostalgia, or it’s just ingrained in them at this point. But honestly if you ask me, I think most players wouldn’t give a damn if you got rid of storylines entirely. Well.. maybe not get rid of but replace?

Maybe there’s a genre out there that kind of combines the freedom and lack of linear progression in something like elden ring, with the gearing system and social aspect of a traditional mmo? feel free to make me sound like an idiot if a genre like this already exists.

I think in essence what i’m really getting at is that most players, whether they like to admit it or not, really only care about the combat and the social aspect of mmos and couldn’t give two damns about questing. I think if you ask the majority of players if they’d prefer an mmo that forces you to partake in the mindless quest loop that is killing x mobs and talking to x npc, or just letting them level up by just killing stuff endlessly at their own pace and their own leisure, i think most players would prefer the latter. Or idk, maybe i’m wrong. Maybe people really do just enjoy mindlessly skipping through quest lines just for the sake of it.

what do you guys think? can you truly have an mmo without quests?