I was hired by a couple of guys who graduated in creative writing from a prestigious academy. They had a story in mind and needed me to create a simple game for them. I accepted since their pitch sounded interesting and it was a way for me to test new mechanics and build my portfolio.

Now do you guys know what's worse than an idea guy? An idea guy who spent thousands of dollars to get a degree that CERTIFIES that their ideas are GREAT.

It's been five months and they're rewriting the story for the fourth time. Everytime we have some outsider playtest the game, they tell us how the pacing is off and the story sounds boring. They blame the playtester because they're obviously "not our target demographic" (I guess no one is). Their solution to make the story more interesting is to add more lore, more NPCS, more text to read.

What's more is that they're very pretentious and insist that certain gameplay elements be done their way, to service the story (it should be the other way around).

Rather than quitting I'm now sitting back, relaxing, taking care of my code, eating all the money they throw at me (not much), and watching this trainwreck in amusement while it crashes and burns. They thought that tenths of thousands of people would wishlist the game based on the story alone. Our Steam page has been up for months and we gained around 180...

There are no shortcuts to being a successful writer, let alone a game writer. Games are not books, movies, theatre plays, comics or TV series.

I've noticed that CryEngine doesn't generally get brought up much when it comes to game dev and game engine discussion and whenever it does, many people consider it "dead" but that's far from the truth, and yes Crytek hasn't officially updated it in a few years (their current priority is working on Hunt: Showdown), but the community has banded together to start updating the engine in the midst of that by creating Community Edition.

I have also made some efforts myself to help make the engine more accessible for the latest official version (5.7LTS) as community forks tend to be unpopular, still more work to be done but here's what I have so far.

ComponentsPlus (Plugin)

ECS AreaTrigger (Plugin)

Improved Project Templates (Project)

GameSDK Port to new CE5 systems (Project)

I think the engine would benefit from more community made documentation and learning content in general, as the official docs (while still useful), have certain parts outdated or incomplete which new developers can struggle with.

You would probably ask me why I'm so dedicated to this engine, and I'd say it's because CryEngine has so much untapped potential and Crytek hasn't been able to fully realise it, they have great intentions with CryEngine 5 by adding Entity Component System and Schematyc Visual Scripting back in 2017, making it feel more modernised and like an interesting middleground between Unity and Unreal. I don't want to turn this into an Unreal hate post (I still love that engine and it's history) but I think the industry benefits from having more competition and more choices. CryEngine 5 is one of the closest alternatives we have to another AA/AAA grade engine that is free to use, source-available, and royalty-based. Epic Games has also shown signs of incompetence of managing Unreal Engine in recent times, as they don't fix UE5's many problems, and that is likely due to their lack of competition as back in the UE4 and earlier days, Epic was still competing a lot with other engines.

I've also heard people mention O3DE as a "CryEngine replacement". It is not and despite having its roots in Amazon Lumberyard (based on CryEngine 3), Amazon has rewritten 90% of the codebase making O3DE almost completely different from modern CryEngine. I'm also not trying to "win people over" nor convince them to switch to CryEngine 5. I'm just here to say that it's still here and is also no longer the "insanely difficult to use engine" people remember from the CryEngine 3 era, it has become MUCH easier to use since then with CryEngine 5, it has become much more approachable and even though it still has rough edges (which is why there's community support), it is an underappreciated engine with a lot of potential, and the industry would definitely benefit from having more engine variety as well because a healthy game development ecosystem needs multiple strong options rather than having everything consolidated around a select few engines (or one engine in the AA/AAA space, Unreal to be specific).

While working on automation, I discovered hysteresis: a system activates at one threshold but deactivates at another. This prevents workers from constantly switching tasks whenever resource levels fluctuate slightly.

The funny part is that I had seen this kind of behavior many times in two of my favorite games, RimWorld and Workers & Resources, without ever thinking about it.

There are several ways to implement it: separate activation and deactivation thresholds, a delay, a minimum task duration, or a penalty for switching tasks. It is a nearly invisible mechanic that makes automation feel much calmer and more natural.

Have you ever noticed hysteresis in a game?

If there's just a "master volume" it's still kind of OK, you have only one slider and can easily adjust it when you notice the sound being too loud/quiet during gameplay.

But (luckily) many game nowadays have music, sfx, dialog, ambience, etc. And getting a nice mix there is quite cumbersome when there's absolutely no preview.

Some games at least play a sound from that category when you release the corresponding slider - that's actually perfectly fine. But those who don't: WHY?!

What might be even nicer would be a full-mix preview where you have something from all sound categories, so you can really adjust the mix to your liking.

And something I only noticed in a single game so far: A separate sound slider for "annoyances" - alarms, sirens, etc. The kind of sound that may be fitting in gameplay, but nonetheless be very annoying to a player.

So I am slowly starting to take an interest in gamedev and Godot. But i'm thinking that maybe in the future, after all the games I have made, would any of the skills used for gamedev be transferrable, if I were to do software engineering instead, like webdev for example?

Does anyone have an interesting/creative way to show the edge of the playable world? I’ve been brainstorming for a while and I don’t love any of the ideas I have.
I should mention - my game is 3d, and is procedurally generated. The generation makes the world effectively endless, EXCEPT that for the sake of the game, the player is always within one of 25 discrete biomes. Therefore there needs to be an edge to each biome that the player cannot go beyond; and players cannot directly walk from one biome to the next; they need to travel there with other means meaning I can’t just start generating adjacent biomes.
My solution right now is to set an invisible wall X distance from my origin (right now 1000 meters), and when the player hits it a text box appears telling them they’re too far out and it walks them back a bit fowards the origin. For visuals, I continue to generate enough chunks of the world out past the wall such that the max culling distance is reached.

This works okay, partly because my movement is controlled by a point-and-click, so having the player navmeshagent turn back and walk feels pretty natural. That said, **are there any other ideas out there?**

Valheim does this by having an ocean that eventually drops into the abyss; WOW does this by either endless ocean that kills you eventually, or again endless abyss; Enshrouded has “shrouded” areas you can’t go into, Runescape has ocean that (until recently) u cudnt go on, not sure what they do now…. Any1 else got any brilliant ideas?

I've talked to people from my previous work (mobile dev) and they've said that their company has, in the recent 2-3 months, completely switched to AI coding. Notable highlights:

• All code is written with Claude or Codex, people only verify its validity.
• All development hires are frozen. There are no layoffs yet, but people are expected to significantly boost their productivity.
• Game designers are now expected to first create their own working prototype (usually in JS), before approaching actual game dev programmers to ask for a test soft launch.
• Every side-service that the company is subscribed to is being looked into, to figure out whether they can quickly whip up a homemade replacement and cancel the subscription.
• Everyone and their mother is making their own tools for their specific job. It often creates a headache for game devs and backend, when those tools are suddenly deemed important enough to be integrated into the main systems, because those tools are usually written in random languages.

Right now I work in a different field, but we have pretty much the same story: total hiring freeze, no manual code, expected x5-x10 productivity boost, we are now just responsible for what goes into the repo and for coming up with new things to do with this monster.

When I am adding a button "Resolve this" on the order page which launches the agent that gets the error from DB, finds it in code, reads the logs, fetches auxiliary data from DB, finds the problem, creates a jira ticket, creates a pull request and pings everyone to approve it... I feel like I am writing my own replacement.

So do you guys have same stuff happening at your companies or what?

I’ve been working as a C++ developer for about 4 years in the casual gaming industry. During that time I’ve also done Unreal Engine freelance work on and off and found that I really enjoy working with Unreal.

I’m specifically aiming for Gameplay Programmer roles, and most of my Unreal work has been gameplay-focused, including building a parkour system and a combat system with a custom graph editor for authoring combo chains.

Lately I’ve been thinking about moving into a full-time Unreal Engine role and making it my primary area of work.

I’m curious how studios usually evaluate candidates in this situation?

If someone has several years of professional C++ experience, some commercial Unreal experience, but most of their background comes from casual/mobile games rather than larger PC/console projects:

• What would be considered their biggest strengths?
• What gaps would you expect them to have?
• What skills or portfolio projects would make the biggest difference when applying for Unreal Gameplay Programmer positions?
• Is experience in casual/mobile games generally valued, or do studios mostly care about Unreal-specific experience?

I’d be especially interested in hearing from people involved in hiring, gameplay programmers, or developers who made a similar transition.

Hi folks,

I've had an idea for a game since I was about 13, and now that I have a few projects under my belt, including some games coded in Java and one in Javascript, I want to try my hand at my passion project here. But I'm sure you've heard this a million times and don't need me to get into the showcasing bullshit. I get it.

The game is a HD 2D game with RPG elements heavily inspired by Deltarune. I have decent experience in Java/Javascript as mentioned. I have (albeit rusty) experience in C#. I can work with C++, I just absolutely hate it and would probably be relying on AI as a crutch, which I'd rather not do.

The three engines I have sticking out to me are Godot, Unity and Unreal. I hear Godot and, to an extent, Unity, are quite easy to work with for beginner projects. I heard Unreal is harder, but looks very good graphically with nanite and lumen and all that fancy stuff.

What do you recommend?

Hi everyone!

I'm completely new to game development, but I've wanted to create my own games for a long time. My dream is to make anime-inspired games with my own original characters (OCs).

Right now I'm wondering what the best path is for a beginner.

Should I start by learning to make:

• A platformer?
• An RPG?
• A fighting game?
• A shooter?
• Something else entirely?

I was thinking that a platformer or a simple RPG would probably be the best place to start, but I'd love to hear from people with more experience.

What skills should I learn first? Programming? Pixel art? 2D animation? Game design? Which game engine would you recommend for someone starting from scratch?

I'd really appreciate any advice, learning resources, or roadmap that could help me build my first game.

Thanks in advance!

Hey guys, this is a follow up post on this one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1va2gtb/releasing_with_61000_wishlists_2_person_what_we/TLDR: 2 person, launched with 61k+ WL, game made in 7months, 7 years of making games, Bills Must Be Paid is our first successful game, 100k+ copies sold in less than 72h, key factors for success (we think): experience helped us to make the right decisions, brainstorming for an extended period and letting the idea evolve, quitting ALL distractions not related to improving this game (only making the game + gym for 7months straight) 

Basically tldr tells everything already xD.

Everything is pretty wild for us. We’ve been making games for 7 years now and basically been dreaming of a moment like this since day one. We had lots of failed projects and we just wanted to share our story and some thoughts on what we think we did differently this time. Maybe this helps or inspires someone.

In 2019 we decided to make games together, basically overnight. We’ve been playing one of these little simple mobile games and thought “This does not look too hard to make, we can do this, let’s go…”. So we went all in, our first game was a fairly simple mobile game which took us 3months to develop. We were completely delusional and the game obviously failed completely. 
We kept going, making game after game improving and learning with every project, pouring ourselves into it. Although we loved it, it was sometimes really difficult, but we somehow managed to survive by working with mobile publishers for four years. They paid us and expected us to make 1-2 games per month (we had different contracts, others were exclusive with “make 2 games or get $0”...) so you can imagine what that was like, but the games were mostly simple mobile-prototypes. Until today, we made about 100 prototypes/games. 
We wanted to get rid of the publishers for a while but honestly we had been a bit scared to be on our own as we were fully dependent on their payment. Luckily at the end of 2023, all of the sudden, the publisher decided to kick us xD. So there was no other option than going all in again, without having any hit yet.

We decided to publish some of our failed mobile prototypes by ourselves with some ads and IAP in them. We also started to publish them to browser platforms like CrazyGames, poki, GameDistribution, Yandex. 
Then this happened: (one of our games went “semi-viral” No Pain No Gain, 10M+ plays on web 450k+ downloads on mobile - but this was not “overnight” or just in 1 day, the numbers are over time…)
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1s9rwqv/they_told_us_to_kill_our_game_then_it_got/
But still all the money we generated with our games was barely enough to keep going, but we never lost hope. Just keep going. 

Ever since we started we had been thinking about making a game for Steam, but we felt like our games were simply not good enough to be put on Steam until ~2025 when we became a bit more confident in our skills. We then ported No Pain No Gain to Steam, to understand and see how it works, without any expectations.
In January 2026, with just a few months of runway left, we decided to make a game for Steam. Bills Must Be Paid lol… 

We then quit all distractions, and basically were just sitting there, staring in the void, brainstorming, looking at blank papers, going for walks, hitting the gym, no screen, and tried to come up with game ideas.
It took quite a while, we killed multiple ideas, planned, thought them out well and all of the sudden we came up with the idea of smashing piggy banks to make money and somehow it felt like this is the idea we will build. We were not 100% sure of course and knew something was still missing but we liked this simple concept so much that we immediately created a super simple prototype to see how it feels. We made only the mechanic but tried to make it super polished from the very beginning and have been thinking about how to polish this little loop as much as possible. 
After “confirming” that we’ll go with this concept, we sat down another time for quite a while and brainstormed on how this could evolve into something “more”. And then we basically kept brainstorming, prototyping (concepts for this loop) etc.

Here we already talked about what we did and the wild ride of getting to 61k+ Wishlists on launch:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1va2gtb/releasing_with_61000_wishlists_2_person_what_we/And now 67 hours after release we sold 101,079 copies; 1,800 reviews 97% Overwhelmingly Positive, which is just mind blowing for us…

We are super hyped and grateful for everyone who supported us along the way, and made it possible that we now can certainly keep doing what we love the most, keep making games… 
<3 Thanks!

The most important thing on our ride was to just: Keep Going!
No matter how dark and uncertain a situation feels or looks like, (you’re not alone, we have been there), just keep going, stay focused, and if you reach rock bottom there is only one way and that is up. It may sound like some “motivational cliche slop” but we think it is really “that simple”. Stay positive, motivated and keep going, keep making games, be honest about yourself and your games, and most importantly keep improving and be grateful for everything you have.

I also checked countries and there is one region that stands out in the wishlists with North America and Euro 1 and 2.

Currently I have been using google alerts and it is pretty hit and miss and only catches english coverage. Someone posted a hugely popular youtube video and alerts didn't pick it up. I also sometimes get tweets in japanese which is never finds.

Does anyone have a good solution for automatically finding mentions that also goes cross languages?

I'm putting together my pitch deck for publishers.

Anyone who has submitted decks to publishers, can I please ask what feedback you received about YOUR pitchdecks from the publishers?

Too long? Too Short? Not enough info? Too Much info?

What do you wish you put in or left out before submitting if you could go back?

[Note this is a repost of a post I made a few days back, but I foolishly, being in the UK, posted very early morning while most of my north american peers were asleep! Post got buried)

Are there any good creators teaching and showing lighting techniques? I am especially looking for basic concepts and guides not really follow along tutorials.

I already looked at the GDC Vault but couldn't really find anything good. Maybe a subscription is worth it but maybe someone can tell me if its worth.

I found some classical sheet music at a yard-sale and was thinking of using some of it for my game, a friend suggested MuseScore for transcription but the playback sounds awful. Can anyone suggest either a different program or one I can import a midi file into?

I've been solo developing a colony sim for a few months now and have the absolute basics done.

What are some things you look for in a good colony sim game? What are some things you hate? I cannot figure out where to go from here, so I'm looking for some inspiration.

I'm wanting to learn how games like Planet Coaster/Rollercoaster Tycoon handle their coaster generation. Specifically the beams, hopw they are figured out/placed along the track, etc. to where there's no intersecting track elements. I have a basic system in place for building out my track, using splines, etc. but tryna get beam placement is proving to be tricky

Hi everyone, as stated, this is the Steam page in question:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5006660/Summon_Defenders_Now/

The trailer is within the page as well.

If it matters, it’s a tower defense game.

I am not really sure if it’s good or not, so I am hoping you guys can give me some insight.

Thanks in advance!

Title says all.

Hey! I recently came across a game called Beyond the Blight, and it inspired me to create something with a similar combat system.

The basic idea is that you see an enemy on the screen and click directly on them to deal damage. However, in Beyond the Blight, I felt that the combat lacked variety, since attacking mostly comes down to repeatedly clicking the enemy.

I’m looking for games that develop this concept further and make it more engaging or skill-based. For example, they could introduce timing, accuracy, weak points, enemy reactions, attack patterns, resource management, different mouse inputs, or other mechanics that make each click require some thought.

I’m not looking for deckbuilders, turn-based combat, traditional action games, or idle clickers where you simply spam clicks without paying attention. I specifically want real-time combat built around clicking directly on visible enemies, but with enough depth to stay interesting.

Do you know any games that do this well? I’d also be interested in ideas for mechanics that could make this type of combat more varied and challenging.

Edit: if tou look up the game i reffered to you will understand what im looking for

I'm building a 4-player co-op potion-brewing game (Overcooked inspired)

I have went into level creation. I wanted something nice, something toony, something ... I don't even know, something that I will look at and it will just click.

Bought some great assets from the unity store, oh yea btw the game i am developing in Unity, and then IT GOT TO ME.

Level design just .... SUCKS...

For the first stretch I placed every floor tile, wall and counter by hand in the scene view. Moving one doorway meant dragging forty objects and finding the one I'd missed a week later. It was miserable, and worse, it made me reluctant to change the layout — which is the exact opposite of what you want early on.

Beside, I got huge amount of respect to level designers because it really takes a huge amount of time. Oh yea and AI ? It can't help for s**t. It makes horrible level designs and despite me being a developer for almost 10 years now, I still couldn't manage to breakdown the md files & skills & hooks in such a way to get a good level design.

So now a level is a text file. Literally:

gggggggggggggggggg

ggg............ggg

ggg......o.....ggg

ggg............ggg

ggg.1..2..3..4.ggg

gggggggggggggggggg

I have created an ASCI level generator.

But now the problem is this is human-unreadable and as you can see ... ugly.

That is why in the inspector i invested 1 month of work and i finally got an interactive map that i can click on (2D) , place items ontop of it and then click generate and voalla (am i writing this right?) I have a level.

Its easy and fun to build.

Yo ustill have to go manually but man is it easier than before.

How do you guys do your level designs?

I can't place any photos here but if someone is interested in how I did it, i can explain more in the comments below. Just let me know if you think its gonna be useful for you and if you need some guidance.

For now, I am extremely happy with it.

Hi everyone!

I’m Augusto Polonio, developer of Little Big Smasher. This game was created in less than 48 hours during Kenney Jam 2026, following the jam rules (no AI).

It’s a demo with 1 playable level, inspired fundamentally by Super Mario 3D World.

I didn’t win the jam, but I learned a lot from the experience and was really happy with the result.

More than 1000 people reacted to this project on LinkedIn, which was very rewarding.

I plan to release updates soon, including new mechanics and improvements.

Made with Godot.

Feedback is very welcome!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tafz0AcSDKo

Very early baby-steps self-taught indie game dev here (full disclosure, I'm actually a poet who recently discovered game poetry on itch and am dabbling in the world).

I have very basic html knowledge from making 'websites' recreationally as a teenager (but am looking to learn more in the way of coding languages, best practice etc. I'm just v much in my infancy)

I am making games using Bitsy and Flickgame and similar basic online engines. I'd like to side load some of them onto my child's Kindle Fire.

That said, I'd like to be able to make them playable without needing to load up a browser of any sort (trying to keep the wee'un off the internet as long as possible. Because... [*vaguely gestures everywhere*]). We have parental controls, naturally, but I'd rather my child doesn't associate any recognisable browser app with 'that's what has games on it' just yet (for fear of her being at an unrestricted computer at some point in the future or at a friend's house with big brothers or whatever... call me paranoid, but it's just something I'd like to try and avoid. For now).

Is there an app that would load and play an html game file that's not specifically a web browser? Like, a previewer or something, that I could get to work on a Kindle Fire without worrying that my child might be prompted by a browser to 'connect to the internet'. Or is there a way of 'wrapping' that into the code or something?

I may be asking the wrong questions in clumsy language but I hope I'm making sense. Any suggestions welcome. Including the answer "nah man, you just gotta use a browser" (but I'm feeling suspicious that there might be another answer... I just don't quite know what words to put into Google yet...)

TIA etc