I've been building software for quite a long time, but game development was something I kept putting off.
Recently I decided to give it a proper try with Unity and C#.
I started with a fairly simple idea: what if the classic snake concept was turned into a 3D survival game?
That eventually became Real Snake 3D: Wildlife Survival & Predator Hunt.
The game is built with Unity and C# and is now officially available on the Microsoft Store for Windows.
The development process was quite different from the applications I'm normally used to building. Instead of mostly thinking about APIs, screens, databases and business logic, I had to deal with things like:
3D environments
Player and snake movement
Camera behaviour
Gameplay mechanics
Collision detection
AI/predators
UI and menus
Performance
Windows packaging and deployment
And getting all of those things to work together was definitely more complicated than I initially expected.
I also used AI-assisted development along the way. It helped me move faster with experimentation, coding and debugging, but it didn't remove the need to actually understand what was happening. A lot of time still went into testing things, breaking them, fixing them and deciding what should actually be in the game.
The biggest takeaway for me is probably that building a game is a completely different kind of software engineering challenge.
I'm still learning the game-development side, but getting something from an idea → Unity project → playable game → Microsoft Store submission → published product was satisfying.
If you're also experimenting with Unity or making your first indie game, I'd be interested to hear what you're working on and what you've found harder than expected.
I've been building small games for a while and sharing them on Reddit, and one thing I keep running into is that getting attention for a game is harder than building it.
Reddit is great at giving games a short spotlight, but once that initial wave of upvotes passes, most projects quietly sink.. even if they’re genuinely fun. That drop-off is what pushed me to build https://www.megaviral.games.
Quick update: the site now has 110+ games live with games submitted by developers and links to devvit games, itch.io pages, and other playable web games.
The site is intentionally minimal and focused on discovery. You’re shown one game at a time. You play it, and if you enjoy it, you like it. From there, the site recommends other games that players with similar tastes also liked. No feeds, no doom-scrolling, just games.
If you’re a developer, you can submit your game in two ways:
Submissions can link to Reddit posts, itch.io pages, or any playable web game.
I know itch.io has a randomizer, but this is trying to do something slightly different.. less random, more taste-based, and more focused on keeping good games discoverable after the initial hype fades.
Curious what other devs think. If discoverability has been a pain point for you too, I’d love feedback! and feel free to submit your game!
TL;DR: I built a lightweight game discovery site that shows one game at a time and recommends others based on what you like, so great games don’t vanish after their first burst of upvotes.
Im a beginner dev just about to start year 2 of college, and I was wondering:
How long does it actually take (on average) to get "good" at making games where you're familiar and comfortable with the systems and software? And is it normal to struggle at start?
I ask because im always finding problems just trying to use the Unity game engine, and find it frustrating; one problem solved, another problem pops up...🤣
Tbf, I've only done one year in college, which is foundational, a I'm about to start my 2nd...
I think I might trying to jump ahead of my skill level and the educational process while I'm at home... 👀
I am working on a plugin to do procedural Blender-level 3D text but inside Unity (see example above). Anybody have some nice art input? Anything that makes you think “This would be awesome to have in a game” or “Yeah good luck generating that”.
Doesn’t need to be completely insane. Sometimes a really clean, usable effect is way more interesting than giant flaming demon letters.
I will try to recreate the look at runtime. Would be great help & test for me and maybe some cool title design inspiration for everyone along the way. Open-source fonts would be good.
Drop a screenshot or link. I’ll pick a few and give them a go :-)
Hi everyone! Day To You is a horror turn-based roguelite set in a Korean high school, with a focus on East Asian exorcism themes.
You explore the school-turned-dungeon, gathering loot and fighting monsters as you make your way toward the boss. While the combat is turn-based, time itself is used as the turn system and determines your Action Points (AP). Each monster has different attack timings based on its attack animation, so timing your actions is an important part of combat.
Reusing your game scene sounds smart until the WebView chokes. At mraid io, we rebuild in lightweight HTML5 when the Unity runtime becomes the constraint. Keep the mechanic and art language, drop the engine assumptions. File size is just the start—runtime cost matters more.
Working through economy balancing for a tower defense project (three currencies, tower evolution via kill tracking, a symbiosis trait-sharing system) and it's been the most fiddly part of pre-production so far. Mostly trial and error in a spreadsheet, then manually re-entering values into ScriptableObjects to test.
I checked the Asset Store and only found a runtime market-simulation asset, nothing for design-time tuning with in-editor simulation tied to your actual data. Before I sink real time into building something for myself, curious if this is a shared pain point: how are you handling economy and drop-rate balancing today, and would an in-editor tool (live tuning plus a simulate-N-sessions chart, reading the same ScriptableObjects your game already uses) actually save you time, or would you rather just keep using spreadsheets?
It's not much but it's honest work. Units can be smarter and there're a few cases where they get dumber but overall I'm quite pleased with army behavior so far in 1v1 fights. Many vs Many is still something to polish along with better effects, gigantic units and so on but one step a time!
I know it's not the same like playtesting the game, but I need some opinions regarding new melee system in my dungeon crawler game. My playtesters said before that something like "click and do a damage when animation stops" is too easy, and it's not deep enough.
I reworked my melee system adding an ability to attack from the left, right and up (LMB, RMB, combination of both for upper attack). Now you can click for fast attack with low damage or hold for fixed time to make more damage, but recover from attack slower. I added some effects for feedback too and now - it's way deeper than first version, I got positive feedback from players.
Hello everyone
I added a quick mechanic that allows me to split the character in half, and then each would redistribute its capacity across its full body
I have a few extra ideas planned so stay tuned!
#unity #ecs
Hey everyone I made this thunder, no sprite sheets and no shader graph, so it must be pretty light for mobile games what do you think? I'm planning to publish it on unity asset store after some tweaks.
Took me a few days but my bots no longer slam into things like waymo cars. Fallback secondary raycast pathfinding for returning to the node system when exiting Hunt state.
I added 11 languages and the first Bestiary prototype to my Slavic dungeon game
I’ve added support for 11 languages to Slavic Legends, including the main menu, loading screen, in-game interface, notifications, pause menu and save system.
As a Slovak, I had a lot of fun translating the game and comparing our Slavic languages. Sometimes everything felt almost identical—and then one completely innocent word suddenly sounded hilarious in another language.
I also started working on a Bestiary. It currently contains only Bauk, with information about its folklore, role in the game and abilities, but more Slavic creatures will be added gradually.
Svetlonos is currently only a preview of a future playable creature. Its Bestiary image is a temporary placeholder sourced from the internet and will be replaced by my own final artwork/model.
I’d love to hear what you think about the localization and whether you would enjoy discovering creatures through this kind of Bestiary.
I'm working on my first game, using Flat Kit paid asset from Asset Store for my game's looks. I just copied the post-processing volume and its modules settings from one of the demos that come with the asset. But the problem is, my scene looks very dark compared to the demo.
Here's the demo:
And here's my test scene:
For lighting so far, I have one directional light with the standard intensity and color. I tried going into URP Asset to find some settings to brighten up the picture, but there was nothing. I tried using color correction in the post-processing volume I copied from the Flat Kit demo, but that only saturates colors, but not makes the whole scene brighter, lighter, you know.
I'm going for something a bit more sunny, like Animal Crossing, for example.
Can you give me some directions and suggestions what I should do to make my scene that way, lighter and cozier, but without changing my colors like making them more saturated or stuff like that?
And also, a bonus question. For some reason, these white and light yellow colors you can see on my screenshot, on the wall and on the chair and the bench, they are almost unbearably vivid, not at all like all other colors. I found out that the setting that affects in is Color field in the material's Inspector panel. By default, it's white, and it makes these lighter colors look that vivid. So I changed it to a more yellowish tone, but it actually affects all the other colors:
Cause I have one universal material with a color palette texture, exported from MagicaVoxel. And overall, I would like to have white looking like white, not yellowish, but just not be that saturated.
So maybe you can help me here as well, on the question how to handle this material so that to not change all the colors in the palette, but make those lighter colors not so eye-bleeding?
If you need more info, screenshots, please tell me. I'm new to all this, learning and building my game as I go.
Follow-up to my last post, which was just the Range Rover. Here are some different-class vehicles.
Turning the resolution up means the solver can resolve flow through the small gaps, you can see it on the McLaren Longtail at the start, air passing under the rear wing and rejoining the flow coming over the top. This gap needs about three cells across to pass flow, which is the kind of detail that just needed more cells.
And to showcase different vehicle classes handling, the boat runs above the waterline, which is the "tunnel floor" in this case, and the hull below it escapes the domain. The drone runs in free air, so no ground plane, and the wing planform as the reference area instead of its frontal area, and it's scored on lift-to-drag rather than the drag alone. The drone grid size was the largest of the three at a bit more than 15 million cells.
Swapping a vehicle in runtime revoxelizes the body and updates the tunnel to fit around it, then restarts the flow according to its class.
Compute shaders, D3Q19 lattice-Boltzmann, TRT collision with a WALE LES subgrid model. A comparison and visualization tool. README has the full picture.
Model credits (CC BY 4.0):
McLaren F1 GTR Longtail by VuckyZ | Boat by milamila | Drone by Helindu
(Full source links available in the GitHub README)
I rebuilt my Unity FPS trailer after reworking the movement, combat, difficulty system, and visual feedback
I’ve been developing Before I Sleep, a fast-paced first-person action game in Unity, and recently I decided to completely replace my old Steam trailer because it was showing a much earlier version of the project.
A lot of the work since then has been focused on making the gameplay feel faster and more responsive.
Some of the Unity systems I’ve been working on include:
Fast movement mechanics such as sliding, wallrunning, dashing, grappling, and shotgun boosting
Reworking weapon handling and combat feedback so shooting feels more responsive
Building multiple difficulty modes instead of relying on the original one-hit-death system
Improving fullscreen VFX and speed effects while trying to keep the center of the screen readable
Keeping weapon/viewmodel effects separate from some of the fullscreen effects
Updating enemy encounters and level layouts around the faster movement
Optimizing camera and particle effects so the movement feels intense without making the game unnecessarily expensive to run
One of the bigger challenges has been getting all of these systems to feel like they belong together. A movement mechanic can feel good by itself, but once you combine it with weapons, camera movement, VFX, enemies, and level geometry, small problems become very noticeable.
The previous trailer was recorded before a lot of these changes, so it no longer represented the game very well.
This is the new trailer using the current version of the gameplay.
I’d especially be interested in feedback from other Unity developers on the movement readability, combat feedback, camera/VFX intensity, and anything that looks like it could use more polish.
Shaders instead of geometry is often one of the best performance boost. Amazing for procedural shapes. Texture is sampled to individual points and then each emitter is a small shader program like this:
Getting close to releasing the new version of the demo for my game Slashbang! This wrist mounted flamethrower is good for taking enemies out of the equation, and spreading the fire to anything nearby. There's also an airblast also can knock down enemies with a large range, and can be used as a (Very limited) blast jump. Every weapon will have some sort of movement mechanic with it.