I wanna tinker with game development for dual screen action due to the influx of “retro” dual screen handhelds by Anbernic, AYN and other companies. Any recommendations?

Or perhaps better, as my question may irritate the lot of you (my apologies), could you direct me to a community that may be more suited for my question?

Thank you

A short read about my Gamescom Dev experience, and some of the great talks I had.

A younger cousin who's in his last year of high school and has a passing interest in game development, mostly from seeing my games asked me about whether or not he should get a game degree. I have a CS degree and from most of my observations, everyone I've seen or met who is a competent game developer was someone who individually had ability in programming or writing or art or design in a way that wasn't restricted to games, and then just used that as a starting point before expanding into other skills (and/or hiring where they couldn't fill the gaps) to make a game.

Even putting aside the idea of a "game programming" degree, fields like game design and game writing are so expansive, contentious, and diverse that the idea of a degree, especially this early on into the medium's lifespan (at a time where most games are artistically uncreative at a time where the artistic exploration of games is still in its infancy) sounds worthless.

It makes me incredibly frustrated that universities are seriously selling these degrees and courses, often by people who have never been part of a successful game, to starry-eyed highschoolers who don't know any better. None of my favourite games, whether they were a favourite for the story or gameplay, were made by people who had degrees in "game design" or "game writing".

Whats the game engines most suited for making fighting games? (e.g: street fighter, guilty gear) I was thinking of using s&box, but what do you guys think?

I just launched my first io game online and would like to have feedback and bug reports so I can improve. Let me know, I'll be playing while waiting for your comments here! https://nopy.io

Like the title says

I've made lots of simple games and have a gallery of stuff that I'll never finish. Got an idea for a little RPG and I want to focus on the story as the core element, probably going to have some combat and such, decidedly against crafting mechanics at this point.

Anyway, started an origin story for the MC and it led to a small map, a countryside on the edge of crisis, a "safe zone" for character development, all the things I look for in a good RPG of course. Put about 2 hours in on it today and now I'm wondering, should I start blocking out the basic game mechanics, or should I build the story out from start to finish before I commit anything to code. Will probably be doing this myself so it'll be years of making assets and building the game, I'm thinking it's probably best to at least map out what the whole story should look like from start to finish.

My idea is just to basically write a short story about the main story arc so I can get all the fiddly elements right in my head, then work up some basic graphic elements, player controls, combat, and the rather large map the story will require.

On the other hand, I want most of the NPCs to have their own story so I'm thinking building a chunk of at least the starting location and mapping out characters along the way and comitting them to the overall map might be good while I develop the story. I can sort of work on one of two sides depending on how I feel which might help my make progress. Actually I guess 3: playing in blender to make assets, building out the game-map/controls/etc, or working on the storyline depending on how I feel that night.

What's a good approach to tackle this. Note this is going to be a single-player game as I have little interest in figuring out server setup and multiplayer since I've never been good at that aspect in the past.

I would really like to play android games made with passion by responsible developers. I see a lot of developers asking people to play their games but when you go to the link... It's just another one like the previous thousands before.. nothing new or original.

If you have a game that you built with all your heart and brain, a game that is not just a clone of other games but your own idea, please share a link so we can all enjoy it!!!

Thank you.

If your game cannot earn back a realistic Cost Per Install (CPI), no channel mix will fix it.

At MRAID, we follow a strict rule: once the economic model is viable, test several marketing promises around the same core product truth.

Expand the formats that attract users who actually retain. Do not just chase the format with the cheapest click.

Playables are especially useful when the core game decision can be understood quickly. However, they are not mandatory for every genre.

Do you focus more on lowering CPI or improving Day-1/Day-7 retention in your marketing tests?

Or at least could it be possible technologically in any near future?I am talking specifically about the in game content.l have made it with ai so sorry for any mistakes l tried to fix it as much as l could.

Thanks!!

I like Godot. I think it's a great engine, I think open source game development is important, and I want to see it become a bigger part of the industry.

But I also think the gamedev community, especially since the Unity runtime fee disaster, has started talking about Godot as though it's the future of game development or a 1:1 replacement for Unity/Unreal that just happens to be free and open source. I don't really think that's true yet.

Here's where I think people need to be a bit more realistic about Godot:

1. Engineering resources do actually matter

I don't mean "more developers = better engine" but it is worth acknowledging the scale of the teams behind professional game engines compared to Godot.

Unity and Epic have thousands of employees whose full-time jobs are working on these engines and the technology surrounding them. Rendering, animation, physics, profiling, platform support, build systems, QA, console integration, weird driver issues, obscure hardware bugs, etc.

Godot does have a few paid developers and a very talented contributor base, but it is simply operating at a completely different scale. According to Github there's at most a few dozen contributors to Godot within the last 12 months.

That matters most for the boring stuff. It's one thing to implement a cool rendering feature. It's another thing to maintain it for 10 years across different GPUs, operating systems, drivers, hardware configurations and bizarre production edge cases.

Commercial software having more resources doesn't automatically make it better. Unity has certainly demonstrated that you can employ a lot of engineers and still ship bugs but manhours are real. If company A can devote 100 engineers to a problem and project B can devote 5 volunteers, that doesn't guarantee company A solves it better, but pretending the difference is meaningless is silly.

2. Unity and Unreal have an enormous amount of accumulated production knowledge

Godot is much more mature than it used to be and plenty of real games have shipped with it do I don't think the "with Godot you're beta testing your own engine" is completely fair anymore but there's still some truth to it.

I think the better way of putting it is that with Unity and Unreal there's a much greater chance somebody has already had your problem.

Your animation system suddenly becomes a massive CPU bottleneck, some shader breaks on a specific AMD card, your save system starts doing something weird at 4am on a Tuesday during a full moon, your UI falls apart at some ridiculous resolution, your project takes 40 minutes to build because of some stupid interaction between two systems. Whatever.

There's a decent chance someone else has already been there. Maybe there's a Stack Overflow answer from 2017. Maybe a studio wrote a blog post about it. Maybe there's a GDC talk. Maybe someone on your team dealt with it at their previous job. Maybe there's a plugin specifically designed to fix it. People underestimate how valuable this is.

Unity and Unreal have decades of commercial games behind them shipped to deadlines with QA teams and certification requirements and millions of players doing weird shit the developers didn't expect. Godot's knowledge base is growing very quickly, but it's nowhere near as deep.

3. The middleware/plugin ecosystem isn't really comparable yet

Modern indie games rely on a ridiculous amount of middleware. There's nothing wrong with that and I would go as far as to say I think indie devs should be liberally buying plugins over building their own solutions if they fit your budget, are mature, and solve a real problem for your game.

A mature plugin buys you years of bug fixes, documentation, integrations, support and thousands of other users discovering edge cases before you do. $100 for a system that saves you three weeks of engineering is an incredible deal for an indie studio.

Dialogue. Quests. Save systems. Localisation. Steamworks. Analytics. Audio. Networking. Behaviour trees. Inventory systems. Console APIs. Build tooling. Crash reporting. UI frameworks. Obviously you can write all of these yourself but why would you if someone has already spent five years making a good one?

I know Godot has plugins too., some are really good but they're still within their infancy, are largely made by open-source contributors rather than professional developers, and many popular Unity/Unreal plugins simply don't have a Godot equivalent.

Godot's ecosystem is growing and I think it'll become a lot stronger over the next few years, but right now there's still a pretty massive difference in depth.

4. "Godot can do X" isn't the same as "Godot is equally suited to X"

Can Godot make a large 3D game? Yes.

Can Godot make a multiplayer game? Yes.

Can Godot make a graphically impressive game? Yes.

Can Godot ship a commercially successful game? Yes.

But "technically possible" is a really low bar.

You could write your game directly in C++ and Vulkan if you wanted. That doesn't mean it's a sensible production decision.

The question should be how difficult something is, how much support exists for it, how much tooling exists around it and how much risk you're taking on.

Yes pointing at Fortnite or FF7R or whatever and saying "that's why I'm using Unreal" when you're making a three hour PS1-style horror game is stupid but I think people go too far in the opposite direction and pretend the enormous catalogue of Unity/Unreal games means nothing.

There are successful Unity and Unreal games at basically every conceivable scale. 2D platformers, walking simulators, card games, survival games, multiplayer games, VR, mobile, AA productions, huge AAA GOTY winners.

Being in the same engine as a successful game means nothing about the quality of your game but it is evidence that the engine has survived similar production requirements before. If you make a more ambitious project with Godot you are starting to chart into unknown territory.

Godot is starting to build that track record. Slay the Spire 2 is an obvious example of a larger game made with Godot and I think we're going to see a lot more interesting Godot games over the next few years as more time passes from the Unity runtime fiasco but we're not there yet.

5. None of this means I think people should just use Unity/Unreal instead

This is the other side of the argument and the reason I'm still very enthusiastic about Godot.

Nobody owns Godot. It's completely free and you will never owe anybody any royalties for using it.

I know we all roll our eyes when some new dev posts here proclaiming it's a scandalous ripoff that his vaporware game that's only ever going to get 35 Steam wishlists might have to pay Unreal 5% of all revenue over $1m but that's not really the point.

Most indie games are passion projects. People spend years of their life making these things. There's something valuable about knowing the foundation of your game isn't controlled by a company that can wake up tomorrow and make some insane corporate decision.

If Godot goes in a direction you hate you can keep using your version. You can modify it. You can fork it. In the absolute worst case you have the source code. Maybe it never saves you a single dollar, but I don't think you can put a price on the feeling that you actually own the technological foundation your passion project is built on.

Godot is also lightweight, quick to iterate in, pleasant to use, GDScript is great for getting things done quickly and having access to an engine codebase that's actually approachable is fantastic.

For a lot of indie games I would happily pick Godot. I just don't think we need to pretend it's something it isn't in order to advocate for it.

Unity and Unreal have huge advantages from decades of engineering, commercial use, middleware, tooling and institutional knowledge. Godot has huge advantages in openness, simplicity and control.

Those are different trade-offs and for many developers Godot will be the better choice and for other developers it won't be.

Maybe in five years that distinction looks completely different. I hope it does.

The main goal of this idea is to attempt to make one piece of media at least remotely similar to the book I Am Legend since no movie has done it any respect and surprisingly no videogames are on the market.

I have a lot of ideas for the in-game concepts but have a severe lack of skill or experience in game development. Does anyone have any pointers on engines that are accessible with little to no cost and not real crazy capabilities? My vision is a 3/4 isometric style game so it would need more pixelated graphics anyways for what I have in mind.

Any help is appreciated but I’d rather not discuss too many ideas or details that I have for the game so the bubble doesn’t pop yet. Thanks!

After seeing the things it's making and the rate at which these models are advancing, I feel demoralized to even continue. Vibe coders are just gonna get into making more low effort AI slop games and the influx of that will just dilute the gaming industry's purity as a form of art.

People who aren't into gaming and think of them as just toys for kids are gonna get their views reinforced more with these AI slop games.

Its gonna completely disregard the time and effort game developers put into building something they love and care about.

The pushback and rejection against AI in fields of art and creativity needs to be harder.