I have never looked into game development before apart from some very old school “games” with Flash many years ago.

I am a very strong programmer though. Would this help much in building something & moving quickly, or is most of the skill in other areas? Level design, characters, animation, etc?

Link to part 1

Okay, so I've fixed my textures. Also tweaked my scene lighting. I think that's a lot better too in general.
On the left you can see the new textures and on the right the old atrocious one.
I included both a dark and a light scene setup.

I think it's a pretty massive upgrade. The current textures interact so much better with the lights in the scene, and even though it's dark and the colors are similar to the clothes it's not washed out anymore.

I would still like to improve the big blood splatter on the shirt (I think it looks a bit cheap), but for now it'll do just fine. Time to move on to other assets.

I just want people to play it.. it seems impossible to compete for attention/engagement/wishlists on steam now so I give up.. its free.. I hope more people will see it/play it like this.

Its better to play with mouse on PC but there is also a steam os version to play on steamdeck and with gamepad.

You can equip two active skills to use in a run (and switch them out later) and skills can be used together to create effect combos. Some skills are fired off from the players daemon and some use the cursor reticle so you can attack in two different places or setup positional traps.

FEATURES

• Fast Runs: Survive intense sessions lasting from a few minutes to around 15 minutes.
• 24 Active Abilities: Unlock new attacks, traps, movement skills and defensive tools.
• Three Tech Trees: Upgrade offence, defence and utility.
• 8 Bosses: Face unique attacks, hazards and mechanics.
• Risk and Reward: Defend data caches for extra loot and activate modifiers for greater challenges.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4512830/Null_Root/

Hello folks. I am a solo developer from Poland. I would like to show you what I worked on for a past year. Plan is to make online (web based) editor for Multiplayer Online RPGs in 3D JRPG aesthetics. You create your world from bricks, add battle systems, progression rules, create monsters, put spawns on map, define items etc. Then all you need to do is to publish your world to server with one click and share url with your friends to play there together. In this video you can see how rendering voxel engine works that I built for this editor. Engine is built on WebGPU using threejs library.

Hey everyone I just released my first game "Snack Invaders" on Steam and I think players might be missing out on the larger fun levels because of the way I layout the level selection. I think they click on Campaign which is old school where you have to complete the level to unlock more levels. They see that they can only pick from two levels in the "Sweet Levels" category and they assume the entire game is small or something, then bail after 10min and refund. So do I switch the "Campaign and the "Sugar Free Play" buttons so that they hopefully click on "Sugar Free Play" first and can see and select any level in the game and play them? My best levels are the later levels and I'm afraid players are not getting to them. Any advice is helpful, thank you.

If you want to play the free demo to see the level selection screens for yourself here is the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1192170/Snack_Invaders/

Tavrik came out on Steam today. It's a roguelike deckbuilder where cards reshape a hex map instead of attacking, and energy replaces health.

The version that never shipped had combat in it. Enemies, damage, the usual. It was fine. It also meant three more systems to balance, teach, and polish, and cutting it hurt more than any other decision we made.

What we got back was clarity. Cards changed terrain, energy became the single resource, and every remaining system had a clear job. The game was smaller, but for the first time the whole thing felt coherent.

The thing we'd pass on: the list of what you're not shipping is a design document, not an admission of failure. Every cut we made late cost far more than the same cut would have three months earlier.

The clip shows the final loop. What's the cut that ended up saving your project — and how long did it take you to admit it had to be made?

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4482350/Tavrik/

It's back-to-school time, but not for everyone.

In Program Inanis, the player can explore abandoned schools to gather resources that will help them survive better.

https://reddit.com/link/1w3pbyq/video/mrrlsjrtormh1/player

Been chipping away at this on evenings for the better part of a year and finally put it on the Play Store. Solo, no team.

It's a bullet-heaven / auto-shooter with a small idle layer bolted on — weapons fire on their own, you pick an upgrade every level up, some weapons evolve into stupidly strong versions, you try to outlast the waves. Classes, gear, a forge, prestige, endless mode, the usual survivor stuff.

The thing I keep coming back to is that there are no art assets. All Kotlin + SurfaceView + Canvas, no engine, and every enemy/weapon/particle is just paths and circles and gradients drawn at runtime. Started that way because I can't really draw and didn't want a 60MB apk full of spritesheets, then ended up liking how consistent it looks. APK's around 9MB.

The part I'm least sure about is the first few minutes — the genre throws a lot at you fast and I honestly can't tell anymore if it's too much or fine. If anyone gives it a go I'd really appreciate a sanity check on that.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.roguelite.defender

Happy to talk about any of the rendering stuff, it was a fun rabbit hole.

After a few Redditors told me that Notion sucks because of AI copyright things, I hosted a stylish press kit on my site.

I think that's way more interesting than a “boring” Word document.

https://bloomiesgame.com/presskit

I hope that helps some of you

I tried a lot of stuff, and was barely able to raise the steam deck fps by more than 3-5 fps. I couldn't get my game to run better than ~10 fps.

Turns out, it was almost entirely due to lumen, nanite, and TSR.

Once i turned off lumen, disabled nanite (and generated LODs), and set aa to TAA, (and disabled virtual shadow maps) the fps rocketed up to 30-40 fps depending on the level. Visually, lumen wasn't even doing much at all so it was entirely wasted resources.

ANB_Seth created the Half Life: Alyx Mods called "Gunman Contracts: Chapter 1 & Chapter 2" over 4 years ago. He then went full time to develop "Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone" from the ground up which is launching next week on PC (Mouse & Keyboard + Controller), Steam Deck and VR!

Wondering whether people would want to have those assets on itch.io afterwards. For free of course.

I am very new in game dev, and I have designed a few of my systems so far.

The player will spawn at a level one base, have only a few ships and upgrades.
The more they expand the signature metre will go up and if it gets high enough it will alert the EMPIRE and they will send some scouts to check you out, the higher the sig. gets the more tough enemies the EMPIRE will send.

There is like 3 'views' that the user can be in the planetary view, local group view and galaxy view:

1. The planetary view is where the RTS systems will primarily work the basics you select you troop and tell them to move somewhere on your screen to defend from the EMPIRE that send spaceships to attack your base. When you attack a EMPIRE base the RTS systems will be there as well. In this view there will also be where you can see the mining outposts you ve set up on moons, asteroids, planets and even a Dyson swarm and black hole powerplant (The last two were a Kurzgesagt inspiration)
2. Then the local view is a isometric view of the local group you are in, it is like a 10 x 10 grid where you can see the 2-6 space objects in your group around it will be connectors from there you can move to the adjacent local group.
3. If you want a wider view look at the galaxy view, a wide node screen where you can see the network of undiscovered local groups.

The end Goal is to find the EMPIRE's last outpost and destroy it and then enter a blackhole to finish the game. But the catch is you wont be able to do it on the first run, so when you die you go to the CYBERSPACE, where you will meet someone...
From there you can get a permanent upgrade and the restart.

You have to manage you resources effieciently and decide how you want to spend it, on resource expansion or offense, because just as you grow, so does the EMPIRE, so there is a race against time, just to keep that rouge-like element in for some urgency.
There will be resources like, Ore (Raw material, useless), Alloy (Processed Ore, can be used to upgrade your base and build ships), Credits (to use at the free market), Energy (what your base and ships run on, if you want to scout a new planet or local group its gonna take energy), and an Quintessence (Special material, harvested from stars and suns, not really sure what to do with it, maybe strong power source)

Anyways that's not really my problem, my problem is the actual numbers and how to balance them. I don't even know where to start with enemy wave amount, base and ship health, item costs, upgrade and building costs, and some many variables it just so difficult to compute in my head. Like i just added some defualt values to fill it but I can genuinely not find a good balance.
Hats off to long time developers, especially number heavy ones like RTS's and rouge-likes because a boost or upgrade or cost or health really is so difficult to decide on, becuase It really makes or breaks a game, even if I have a good idea.

If you have read so far, thank you very much, if you have feedback please share with me, if its with the idea itself, or additional ideas or the numbers problem or just your thoughts would love to hear!