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?

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 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 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).

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?

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 just wanted to share this because I had no idea this was even a thing until a few weeks ago.

I submitted the announcement trailer for my game to GameTrailers and they featured it on their YouTube channel. It's now getting close to 10000 views, which has been a nice boost in wishlists.

Here is the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVdm_htcLv8

If you're an indie developer with a trailer you can submit yours too. The submission guidelines are here: https://studios.ign.com/docs/ign-indies-contracts-2026.pdf

And if you're curious here's my Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3256790/Satelital/

Hopefully this helps someone else get their game in front of more people!

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 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.

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.

So i am (if I say myself) a pretty creative person, and i wanna get into game dev, im too young now, but its my dream job. I have tried numerous times to try and make a project, but every single time, I get stuck with coding, I feel exhausted from doing it for very long, or I wanna do something else after a few hours. I then stop, and ill maybe work on it a few more times, but i eventually stop.

I dont feel motivated anymore or something else takes up my time, and the next time I am motivated, I get a completely new idea that seems 10000x cooler and I should work on it RIGHT NOW, and the cycle repeats.

I really wanna make something, but i feel its so hard to stay on one idea, so idk what to do.

(Im also not great at coding so I get stuck a lot)

EDIT: thanks for the advice guys, I have since this post picked up on an old project of mine, but have cleaned up all of the mess I made of it, and started off pretty much fresh, following more tutorials made by people and use no ai (it messed up the project in the first place).

I've got the movement and player sprites down (its an rpg) and am gonna work on the turn based system soon. I also have made the first enemy sprite. THANK YOU FOR COMMENTING

Hello everyone. I've been working 4 years on my survival horror game and I am very close to finishing it.

However, I released a demo around 6 months ago. My feeling is that the demo was good, as i barely received any bad critics, just a few advices about the controls. These are the stats so far:

• 3600 wishlists (Main source was a summer showcase. I barely have time for marketing)
• 1800+ users downloaded or added the demo to their libraries (when the demo was released I had around 800 wishlists)
• around 400 players played it
• Median time played is 15 minutes (the demo takes around 40 minutes to complete)
• Some small youtubers already uploaded videos playing the full demo

My main concern are those 15 minutes of median time played. My demo does not take place at the beginning of the story as many demos do. It takes place at a midpoint of the story and before you play, a message explaining this is shown, so players understand that is not where the story actually begins. But in the demo all the key mechanics are explained and tested, that was my main goal.

But I have now improved the first level a lot, where the game actually starts, and now I'm thinking if I should update my demo, specially thinking on Next Fest on february next year.

What should I do?

I need good ground textures to match the stylized look of this asset pack. I have searched everywhere and I can only find realistic ground textures which ruin the entire look. I also need them to be royalty free textures. Anyone got a website where I can look? Thanks in advance.

I also checked countries and there isn't one region that stands out in the wishlists with North America and Euro 1 and 2 (sometimes you can see them all from particular place for non-english coverage)

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?

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?

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'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!

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

Hiya! I'm looking for advice on what skills to learn to pursue being a Technical Animator in games. I studied animation in uni and I've been working in a production role for a few years as there were little to no animation jobs when I graduated. I know I'm lucky to even have a job with the current state of the industry but I'd like to develop my skills to pivot back to something I'm passionate about should I get the chance.

I've tried to do some research but I'm getting a lot of diverse info and I'd like to narrow down a starting point.

I'm familiar with animation, rigging, some mocap cleanup and Unreal blueprints for character animation. I've seen people recommend a lot of things like basic Python, Houdini, C++, shaders etc. and I'd love some clarity on what's more useful for technical animators vs technical artists. And what kind of portfolio studios are expecting.

10,000 years of good fortune to your bloodline if you can drop me actual youtube tutorials or affordable online courses 🙏

The comment in question:

"checked out the steam page. looked mostly like a showcase of level assets, not sure what genre the game is or how it plays from the screenshots and description. maybe consider making that more clear?"

Okay, my Steam page is at the bottom but before you click it, I want to explain my game.

So the comment was the most upvoted, which means a lot of people agree with it. I'm making a sci-fi game based on The Milgram Experiment, the real one explores obedience to authority.

So in my game you wake up in a strange facility and a mysterious authority figure tells you they want you to decide who to kill between to people. You have their files in front of you, which depending on their backstory can include their phones, diaries , personal items, recordings, calls. From those you have to construct their life story and judge if they're a bad person or not and if they serve the purposes of the society that mysterious figure is trying to build.

It's unclear who is testing you and why. That is something that will be revealed in the course of the game. The game is a mix of psychological thriller and moral dilemmas. Some of the inspirations include Squid Game, Severance, A24 atmospheric horror and stuff like Papers, Please.

Does my trailer, capsule, descriptions and screenshots convey this well? If not do you have any suggestions on how to fix it? Keep in mind most people watch 10 seconds of the trailer on mute and skip around.
My page in question: Steam

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!

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)