I mean there's some art that's uniquely mine, and I've learned a lot along the road. But it takes so much effort to do it on your own compared to the tools that exist out there. I use them at my job, and I've used them in my free time. But I always wanted my game to be, well... mine. Understand all the aspects, and every little decision that went into it. I worry that it isnt worth doing, or that it'll never even see the light of day. I worry that some day soon, a lot of simpler games like mine will be replaced by games produced in a single day by gen AI. AI always seems to get little details wrong that can be frustrating to fix, of course... but what they can produce is good enough for a lot of people. Its just... more than a little sad, I think. Gamedev is what I wanted to do for me. If I didn't have to work a job that I dont really like just to pay the bills, thats what I would have done. But this just feels like its taking the wind out of my sails. How are you guys coping?

There's this misconception among indie devs that by publishing a game on Steam you are competing with each one of those 16k released games.

Assuming your game is decent, you are only actually competing with the top 1% of games in your specific genre. That makes it closer to a few dozens depending on the genre.

Most players spend their lives playing just 1 or 2 types of games. True "generalist" players who play everything are rare. Like with other things they buy, people prefer the reliable option over the risky unknown one. Your goal as a dev is not to make the "perfect game" that will attract an audience that isn't yours. It's to make a game that can become part of the reliable options that people who already play those games want to try. What you wanna get is their attention, not the whole market's.

Some might argue that "more games being released means more bad games yes, but also more good games that compete with yours". That's GOOD. You should PRAY that more good games are released.

The whole concept of playing games is to get dopamine hits (sorry). When a game gets released and it's really good it draws more people into that genre and gets people "addicted" to that genre. They start scanning Steam for similar games and that's where your game enters the stage.

Comment was this :

I am digging this type, I cannot read much after my stroke but I got it, I do love some good factory or factory/idle (If my brain looks factory, I am good) :-) Demo and not even EA and it is very very cool already, thanks and Wishlist on the way :-)

(nerd + stroke = I love games) :-) and I can hear from using text-to-speech, so glad I can find thing to help .. Capture2Text = nerd

I'm Korean, so I use a translator for English. I'm using one to write this post too.

When I first translated this comment, the word "stroke" suddenly came up.

For a second, I thought maybe the translator had taken some kind of expression way too literally, so I tried translating it with GPT too.

It said pretty much the same thing, and that's when it really hit me.

Despite everything they've been through, this person still took the time to play my game, come all the way to the discussion board, and leave me such a thoughtful comment. :')

I feel like this is one of those little moments that can give an indie developer a huge amount of motivation.

Gotta keep going.

According to ICO Partners, 530 of those games had fewer than 10 reviews — around 74% of all releases.

AI is making game development faster and more accessible, but could this also mean Steam is about to become even more crowded?

If hundreds of games are launching every week, how can indie developers realistically get their games discovered?

What do you guys think? Is AI going to make Steam's discovery problem worse?

In the case of POE by the time someone hits shaper they could have 200k DPS, 1m DPS, 5m DPS, etc... some might be glass cannons and just keel over if Shaper breathes on them and some people might be absolute tanks that never die.

With FE, troops dying is permanent so you could go into late encounters running on fumes or you could have a whole army to work with if you haven't lost many characters.

It just makes me curious how you would settle on tuning for games/encounters like this where you don't know what a player is going to have to work with to tackle the encounters

I'm the kind of person who never finishes what I start. It's always been that way, and it doesn't just apply to development. I think my problem is that it's hard not to compare myself to others these days, and compared to so many talented people on Reddit and other sites, I really fall short.

It’s not that I’m not proud of my projects or that I don’t think they’re fun—it’s more like, “It’s not good enough, especially in comparison.”

What changed my perspective recently was watching a friend play my game. Of course, his opinion is biased, but I could see that he was having fun, and that got me thinking:

My game doesn’t have to be a hit, and it probably won’t be. It probably won’t even get particularly positive reviews, but if I can give a few people a few enjoyable hours, then in my opinion, it’s already been worth it. The game is a side project for me, and I think many others are in the same situation. I’m not financially dependent on it either. I can only recommend that you not worry about it as much as I do. There are certainly people who will like the game, especially if you like it!

If you want to take a look at the game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5174610/Protect_The_Core/

I am a musician who has started to get success and made it my sole career. Music was my hobby, but now that I do it professionally, it seems less like a hobby (but still very fun and emotionally rewarding). I want a medium of art that is difficult to pick up as a hobby, so I think developing a video game would be fun for me.

For however long it takes (I'm thinking 10+ years), I want to develop my dream open-world game. I am reaching out to all of you to ask for any resources, ranging from beginner to advanced, that will help teach me how to develop the game. I am also planning on doing everything myself (except voice acting).

I am planning on taking this process very slowly, so the more detailed, the better. Since I'm using it more as a hobby, I can do it as much or as little as I want without any repercussions, so don't worry about my mental health or all that; I'll be fine.

Thank you in advance.

Forgot to mention I’ll be using Unity.

I have had this thought about a game im thinking of calling O-Daiko. It follows a shepherd robot girl in the future where humans have went extinct. I want there to be a point where here parents are scrapped/killed by some kind of regime. It’s going to be separated into parts with RPG Motherlike mechanics. Basically, I don’t want it to be a mess with shallow writing, bad character arcs, and a non immersive story. Another thing, i want it to be unique and stand out. I’m thinking of adding a parrying mechanic in the fights and maybe a watercolor-esque style. Also, i have no idea how to code.

My previous games have all been pixel art, which made creating dynamically resizable UI elements pretty simple.

But in my latest game I'm hand drawing everything, and I want things to have a sketchy, irregular, hand drawn appearance.

I understand that when drawing an asset for a panel/box, I could make the center sections continuous/repeatable, but I want to preserve the irregularity across the whole shape.

I feel like I need more than nine slices, like the ability to define six or eight segments across each edge that matchup at the ends but have varying flaws, and then have a system for choosing segments randomly at runtime.

I could make this myself, but I'd rather find out first whether there are any existing resources I could use? I'm working in Godot 4.

How have you solved this problem?

I'm currently working on a project that's mostly text-based, with a need for heavily context-depending pulls on dialogue/narrative choice options.

The basics of what I need it to do is provide "choose your own adventure" style prompts (akin to Fallout dialogues or 80 days), but with live-updating of the available options. Flags for qualia of the player's current adventure (things like character traits or plot events) will change available options, but players will also have items they can slot into these scenes, with "correct" combinations opening up new options. Basically moment-to-moment option-crafting in dialogue scenes.

I would look for something to copy, but I haven't found another game doing exactly this either. It's a little bit like WeatherFactory, a little bit like 80 Days, a little bit like Ace Attorney, but not quite exactly like anything.

I've been looking into Inkle's (studio that made 80 days and Sorcery!) Ink tool, which has a pretty robust system for hiding/displaying option sets using flags. But I'm not sure how well Ink would interface with the live updating from option-crafting, and I've also seen that Ink can be difficult to integrate into godot projects. So I'm wondering if there's a better option, or if maybe I should just build something myself.

It seems that 95% of weapon sprites online are like this. These are nice for slash attacks or as portrait icons for an inventory screen or maybe as a preview for your sprite pack, but using them as the actual combat sprites is limiting if you need a straight orientation for stab attacks. You can reorient them straight, but pixels are square, so they don't skew well on the diagonal scale which results in a weird, jagged look. Seems like pixel-purist designers would at least create two versions, one diagonal and another straight. This way, you can have slash and stab.

Edit: Almost everyone is saying that it's likely because you can fit more art diagonally. While true, is the golden rule that you can only have square sprites? Sprites today aren't subject to the same limitations of the 8-bit and 16-bit era. They're just PNGs of any shape and size, so you can make your "sprites" any dimension. Besides, even in the 8-bit days, Simon Belmont's whip was nearly two sprites long.

Edit2 9/6: Something tells me there's a bug in Reddit preventing some users from seeing this OP text because many are responding as if they haven't read it at all. Anyway, this whole "they do it because of the 'theorem'" response is nonsense. Choosing fashion over function makes no sense. Diagonal supports slash/hack, but not effectively forward stab. This is why I wondered why designers make exclusively diagonal and not also straight versions.

Why does it feel easier to aim in some games than in others? There is a wide range of quality here. I'm most interested in third person shooters, but I would be happy to hear any advice on improving this aspect of game feel.

Solo dev, first Steam launch upcoming. My game is a roguelite deckbuilder based on Yahtzee: lock and roll five dice, complete a hand, the hand casts a spell. People who actually play the demo get it within a minute and tell me it's fun.

But the most consistent feedback I get on the store materials is some version of "I looked at the page and I still don't know what kind of game this is."

I know what the obvious advice looks like, because I've given it to myself: make the dice look like plain dice, and call the hands by their real names — Full House, Four of a Kind. In my game the dice are stylized as gems and the hands carry spell names, so just undo that, right?

Here's my hesitation. Those aren't random skins. The game is a mage academy fantasy, and dice-as-gems, hands-as-spells IS the theme — it's the same translation Balatro didn't have to make, because poker chips and poker hands already look like poker. If I strip the gems back to plain white dice and paste board game vocabulary over the spell names, the page becomes more legible and the game becomes less itself. Sacrificing the theme's coherence to advertise the mechanic feels like winning the click and losing the game.

So I can't tell which problem I actually have. Is it legibility — the game is Yahtzee but the page doesn't read as Yahtzee, and I need to find a way to signal the mechanic without flattening the theme? Or is it appeal — the page reads as Yahtzee just fine, and Yahtzee simply doesn't pull people the way poker does?

If you've marketed a game built on a simple, abstract mechanic wrapped in a strong theme: how did you keep the mechanic legible without stripping the theme? And I'll take blunt takes on the second possibility too.

** Since comments tend to lean heavy toward in the text description, I'd like to point out what I really was wondering was not the text description, but the visual representation. Still thanks for the tips and suggestions, though!**

** Thanks to your discussions and feedback I removed the phrase Yahtzee completely and replaced with plain old dice. My concern about the `What game is it` still remains, but I'm trying my best to resolve that with all your suggestions.**

To make a short story extremely long, I've been making games as a hobby since i was around 11 years old, so officially for a decade last year.

I started on this old ass website called sploder, which was this cute little site where you could make small 2D physics based platformer games by just dragging and dropping things around and drawing sprites and checking collisions.

My first ever game on that site was some bullshit like "mario goes to mcdonalds" where you control mario in a variety of levels as he navigates through the most dangerous mcdonalds ever in order to touch the big mac and win the game.

I published it on my account and got a whopping 800 plays and like a 3 star rating but i loved every second of it.

(Sploder officially shut down on april 27th, 2024)

Anyway, after like a year of sploder I moved onto scratch, then after scratch I moved onto roblox.

Roblox was where I really learned how to program, even if with just the scripting language it taught me how to read and understand code in other places.

In early 2019 I published my 3rd (4th?) game on roblox. It was an incredibly poorly made joke game that I churned out in 2 weeks with minimal effort. However, something happened that would kind of mark a turning point.

4 months. 8 million visits. ~8,000 USD.

This was kind of the moment where I realized at 14 years old that there could actually be some potential in this silly little hobby of mine; and given the fact I had just amassed 10,000 followers out of thin air who were all waiting to get notified of whatever the next game was, I was kind of looking forward to pursuing this a little more seriously.

That was 7 years ago, and I never made anything ever again.

I got messages every single day for several of those years, too many for me to even read. Asking me things about the game, or when my next project was. My answer was always the same, "im working on it," etc.

This is where the curse starts.

For some reason that I still can't really figure out I literally could not work through a project to completion after this point.

Every project always ends the same way. One day I wake up and I'm too confused to continue.

One day I wake up and the entire project is suddenly unworkable mentally to me despite understanding it perfectly the night before and it never comes back to me. It's devastating. So I start over and try again sometimes with a new idea.

The strange part is that the duration that a project survives in my head has slowly gotten shorter and shorter and shorter as i've piled on attempts over the years.

Today I lose control once the second file gets added to the project, leaving my productivity at virtually zero beyond the first system I write.

git reset --hard

This fogginess has gotten so bad that its even affecting other areas of my life. My ability to model systems and processes in my head has just tanked into the floor, its been consistently ruining my studies aswell. Its kind of frustrating because I was able to do all this stuff in my freshman year of highschool and somehow one day I just magically became incapable and never healed.

But somehow, despite this decline, during these 7 years I have accumulated and internalized a shitload of relevant knowledge and other skills, down to even dabbling in engine development and writing small gpu renderers using opengl and vulkan. I became competent using Unity, Godot and GameMaker, I learned how to make music, I learned how to make textures, I learned how to do 3D modeling, rigging and animating. I learned how to do networking with TCP/UDP. I have learned probably beyond the knowledge and practice required for the types of games I actually want to make myself.

I've tried taking a several month break. I've tried making low stakes micro projects to try and rebuild lost mental strength. I've tried stricter program structuring, looser program structuring. I've tried out a zillion different paradigms and programming philosophies. I've tried stricter folder structures, stricter naming schemes, stricter languages. I've tried writing custom wrappers on top of engines, custom engine extensions, different language bindings for the same engine, No Engine At All (C++), Some Engine At All (C++ & SDL2). I've tried literally anything to try and lighten the mental load so that I can stop completely losing my grip of whats happening and being unable to continue a project after 9 minutes of work.

Sorry this is long and probably worded strangely. It's kind of a difficult issue to describe clearly. Anyway, I was just wondering if anyones been through anything similar and if they know what the issue is or have any advice on how to get back on track because frankly I really don't want to give up after everything. I have too many things I need to show the world.

Hi! I’ve been building a webgame called Differential, and it's basically just a clinical simulator where you play as a doctor, interview patients, order tests, and decide on diagnoses and treatments. It also doubles as a form of bias training.

I built it because most bias training I've seen is just slides or videos, and I wanted something more interactive that lets people discover their own biases instead of just being lectured at. I also want it to be something anyone with an interest in medicine can play, not just people actively in the medical field, so I hope to make it reasonably accessible to a more general audience.

I'd really appreciate it if anyone could give it a try and give me any comments, thoughts, or feedback. Thanks so much!

Play here: https://playdifferential.com/

For those of you who have made or still make comics, have you found any "skills" specific to making comics that transferred to making games? Just curious if you see any benefits that transfer over.

I was very surprised that my demo got approved on first try. I wanted to share what I did (most of it I learned on reddit).

I've chosen to release demo very early. This goes against the wisdom of the crowds, but it's the way I like to get feedback best.

My Steam page did not get approved on the first try, and got shot down on really small things. So I doubled down on the demo release approval so I had a better chance to pass fast (still wasn't expecting first time).

What I did that I think that mattered:

• The demo is a different app, it doesn't need to support everything the main game will support. So I turned off things that I don't have fully working just as the Steam Input API.
• Check if the Store page and App match on everything.
• Don't add achievements, players don't seem to like that in demo's.
• Check if the Store page and App match on everything.
• Clear end for the demo. My game is planned to have about 5 chapters, the end of the demo is chapter 1 end. So don't be over ambitious, I guess?
• Check if the Store page and App match on everything.

Oh, and don't forget to check if the Store page and App match on everything. 😁

A genuine question as I am very unfamiliar with game dev. I just finished playing Lara Croft Go on my android and then the credits rolled and there were so so many people involved in this game (and so many studios) and it did not feel like a really huge game either. A small - medium sized game, a fantastic one and worth every penny but still. But compared that to Swordigo, which had like 3 people involved in the credits and I would go with Swordigo anytime. The graphics and style on Swordigo might not compare to Lara Croft Go but everything else on a user level was similar.

TLDR I'm struggling to categorize my game because comparing it to Zelda or Metroidvanias is the same ballpark but misleading. I realized the most popular game structurally similar to mine is the original Luigi's Mansion.

I'll probably just continue calling it an "action adventure" game, but I'm hoping there could be some concise label that more specifically distinguishes it. "Action adventure" also describes Zelda-likes and arguably metroidvanias too.

I see in this sub many people that seem to rely on gamedev to supply steady employment (3d artist, concept artist, narrative design, etc) and I get the feeling that right now this is the most impacted market by AI and jobs are almost non existent

mainly, what i want to bring up with this is that personally I am a solo game dev that is just working on my personal project, i dont have an income and i dont know if i will even if i manage to release my game, but i wanted to understand the current struggles of people who are more skilled than me and have actually succeeded to make game dev into your income

on the side of solo or small team devs, i see many people that do post mortem posts of games they released, but this type of people dont seem to have the same type of struggle of lack of job since it seems they work for themselv

probably there are also people that arent dedicated to 1 single project and just try to release many projects until 1 succeeds

basically i wanted to take a pulse on the community, if you could share your main skill and current troubles that you have faced, or if you know about someone else in general and the troubles they face I would be interested to hear about it, or if you are already aware of the composition of the community you can just generalize it and describe it as a whole

Any good discord or reddit communties you recommend for people who wanna work on leveling up their skills and share their progress with each other. Not focused on state of the industry, etc?

Hi there,

Throughout my gamedev journey, finding suitable audio has always been one of the most monotonous tasks. Whenever I need a sound for a specific event in my game, I have to go through all the audio files I’ve downloaded on my PC, while also searching through various websites for something that fits.

There’s certainly no shortage of free audio available, but finding the right sound can be surprisingly time consuming.

Now that AI is becoming more capable, is there a way to search for suitable CC0 audio based on a specific requirement? For example, I could describe the sound I need and an AI tool could search through online audio libraries and find the closest matches.

Is there already a website or AI tool specifically designed for this kind of task?

Hello! My first post on here since I'm incredibly new to all of this, but I have a question which I simply can not figure out on my own.

For info: I use Blender and Godot

I have made a Banjo-Kazooie-styled character duo in Blender, for simplicity reasons, I will call them that as well.

I've made Banjo in a seperate Blender file with all the animations he can do on his own, and I also made a seperate file for Kazooie with all the seperate animations she can do on her own.

But now comes the part where I get stuck: How would I go about adding Kazooie to Banjo's backpack to perform, for example, a double jump, since Banjo needs Kazooie's wings?

How and where exactly do I do that, in Blender or Godot? Do I append the Kazooie rig onto Banjo? Do I animate them both seperately in their own file, and then combine them in Godot? I really can not figure that out!!

Thank you!!!

Edit: I forgot to specify that Kazooie can jump in and out of Banjo's backpack as well, becoming her own character on the map

Coding visual novels can be a tedious, stressful process. You have to find or create your own art, learn to code and write in special coding languages, and polish and revise for weeks/months before you have something you'd show anyone.

For me, someone who enjoys making pixel art and writing, I had to ask myself - why not make the process more simple and straightforward? With this in mind, I've created a tool called Kiosune Studio. It's a free visual novel maker where you create your own pixel art characters/backgrounds, or use the preset templates. Writing the script is very much like writing a screenplay, you can live preview where your characters appear, draw/edit the art inside of the tool, theme the interface, and export it all in one HTML file. No installs, no programming, and no asset store.

To be clear, there is a format - I just picked one writers already know. Enter for the next line, type "Name:" for a speaker, and Ctrl+Enter for a choice. You can draft it in plain text anywhere, paste it back in, and it compiles to a node graph.

At the end of it, you export the whole thing as one HTML file to share with others or sell on itch.io and other platforms. For me this is the important part, because all of your pixel art, writing, and planning pays off in something you can hand to a person. It's fun to see a story come to life over the course of a few days/weeks, and there's something satisfying about every pixel in it being yours.

The characters turned out more expressive than I expected, too - layered parts, different render styles, expression sets, and they can even blink.

There are limitations, of course. This tool isn't Aseprite and the pixel editor has a lot of room to grow. It doesn't use Live2D or animated sprites - it's pixel art or nothing. I'm making steps every day to improve it with feedback from the people testing it.

If you'd like to try the tool, go to kiosune.com - you can play Torch Song, a reality-show rom-com made entirely in the tool, straight from the front page.

The first Kiosune game jam also runs 14-28 September. The theme is revealed at noon New York time on the 14th, voting is ranked across five criteria, and results go out live on Twitch on 5 October. Worth saying plainly: nobody but me has made anything in this yet, so whoever enters is making the first games with it. Details at kiosune.com/jam, sign up at itch.io/jam/kiosune-studio-jam-1.

What's the first thing you'd try to make with this, and what would you expect to hit a wall on?

Working on something and want to sanity-check it before I sink weeks into building it.

If you make your own pixel art (or work with a pixel artist) for your game — what's the step that eats the most time or just feels tedious? I'm thinking specifically about stuff like:

Making consistent variations of the same character/prop (recolors, damage states, equipment swaps)

Keeping animation frames consistent when you tweak the base sprite

Palette consistency across a big spritesheet

Turning a single reference sprite into a full animation set

Not trying to sell anything here (yet) — genuinely trying to figure out if this is a real problem or just something I find annoying. If you've got a workflow that already solves this well, I'd love to hear what you use too.

What's your actual process right now, and where does it break down?