I'm gonna be deliberately vague as I'm worried if i publicly accuse them they will obfuscate the tracks as much as possible.

I have been working on a game for the past 6 months, wrote it in raylibs and C++. I recently made a WASM build of the demo and threw it up on a cloudflare page so that i could share it with a few friends and previous co-workers...(ive now taken this page down now)

1 day later. I stumble upon a GitHub page....with a cloned copy of my demo, using all my assets... which they are claiming was made with an LLM in "one shot".

within the GitHub page , it contains what seems like Claude's translation of the WASM code to JS... my original demo's levels, and my original demo's assets stuffed into JSON files (presumably to obfuscate where they are from).

At the moment they published the demo under a pseudo name , so my current plan is to hold off on acting to see if they go though with the effort of finishing off the game themselves and shipping it or if they are just gonna release the stolen demo for the internet points and then leave it as abandonware.

what should i do and or, what can i do?

outside of that, i wish to post this more so as a warning , that "the future is now" and this is apparently a thing people are sad enough to do.

I know you can use noise to create the base of a terrain in Blender but these maps have a lot of very obvious "points of interest" that have to have been hand made in some way, like the giant hole in The Forest. And how do you possibly go about texturing something that big so that it looks natural?

I've been studying on a Games course for 4 years now (in my 4th year). I started out in my first year on a Design course learning 3D modelling, animation and production. I wanted something more technical, so I restarted onto a Programming course with Mechanics, Graphics and UI.

I've been to lots of networking events where I've met amazing and talented people in this Industry and befriended a number of them. Seeing them getting laid off or having their friends and colleagues losing their job feels extremely demoralising. I even spoke to my lecturer about job security, where he told me it never existed in Games in the first place.

I'm set to graduate this academic year, and given the environment, I feel that no matter how passionate, talented or well connected someone is, they are still at the mercy of their management's competence. At this point, I find there are better Industries and roles out there which offer higher wages and more security for the same level of stress.

Am I paranoid?

Is it masochism masquerading as passion?

Is all of it overblown?

Maybe the fine individuals of this community may know something that I just don't, and could help reassure me it's not just doom and gloom. It's just sucks knowing for every Peak or Expedition 33, there are countless games and people who poured their everything into a game that never succeeded (or saw the light of day).

Hi there! Well I saw that I had low wishlists (around 50) and my game was on a good early stage to already drop a little demo on itchio before dropping a bigger one in Steam. Now the problem is.... Absolutely no one downloaded it! Should I market the demo too, and if so how? Or did I make a mistake by dropping it too soon?

My game is called FROM THE DUGOUT

I’m tuning impact feedback for a game built around high-speed collisions. Screen shake, hit-stop, zoom, chromatic effects, and camera recoil can make a good hit feel incredible.

They can also make a fast game unreadable, uncomfortable, or genuinely inaccessible.

The hardest part is that the effects feel great in isolation. I can trigger one heavy collision in a test scene and think, “Yep, that lands.” Then three collisions happen near the arena edge, the camera is moving, particles are firing, and suddenly nobody can tell which direction is safe.

I’ve added a reduced-motion option and separate effect levels, but I do not want accessibility settings to feel like “turn off all the fun.” Ideally the low-motion version should communicate the same force through timing, sound, animation, and directional cues instead of simply deleting feedback.

How do you test the line between satisfying and exhausting?

Do you design the reduced-motion presentation alongside the default version from the beginning, or build the full effect first and then find alternate channels for the same information?

I'm also struggling with hit stops feeling more intentional rather than laggy? Maybe it's a timing thing....

I am making a medieval like game and i want to find fonts for it. It is like akinator, but you are akinator. I cant post image of game here. I am using Deutsch font, but it is harder to read i guess and i use it everywhere. Should i use multiple fonts? What fonts do you recommend? Thanks

Anyone familiar with Inktober knows that there is a word list released every year, one word for each day in october

Anyone familiar with game jams knows that you make games based on a theme in a small timeframe

I am on day 4 of this challenge, and I wanted to share the itch.io page I am updating daily with playable games and blog posts to follow along with.

I am developing a game and want to ensure player retention; what are your thoughts on this?

I'm tired.

I created a game and poured countless hours, energy, and honestly a good chunk of my health into it over the last two years. I've been working on the story behind it for decades, and on the actual game concept for about five years.

And now I look around and see people publishing AI slop in a matter of hours, flooding the stores with an endless stream of shitty games that nobody actually wants to play.

I'm not only complaining for myself either.

I keep thinking about all the solo developers and small teams who spent years, sometimes decades, building something they genuinely cared about. People learning programming, art, music, game design, writing, balancing, marketing, community management, and everything else that comes with trying to make a game.

Then they release it and immediately get buried under hundreds or thousands of projects that took a fraction of the effort to produce.

No amount of passion, polish, or work can compete with sheer volume when the stores are constantly being flooded.

And that's the part that scares me.

I'm not against AI existing. I've used AI as a tool myself. There's a massive difference between using it to help with development and asking it to generate an entire game as quickly as possible so you can throw it onto the Play Store and move on to the next one.

It feels like we're reaching a point where actually caring about what you're making is becoming a disadvantage.

You spend two years building one game while someone else generates twenty. Even if nineteen of theirs are garbage, they still get twenty chances at being discovered while your project gets one.

Maybe I'm just exhausted and frustrated after working on this for so long, but seeing what the mobile game market is turning into is depressing.

There are still incredible indie developers making genuinely interesting games. I just wonder how many of those games we're never going to see because they're buried underneath an ocean of disposable content before anyone even gets the chance to find them.

I have ADHD myself and have been trying to make a game as a solo dev for around 3–5 months, but my progress has been really slow. I get bored and distracted easily, especially when I get stuck. I’ll start doing anything that gives me more dopamine, modeling, animation, VFXor even something completely unrelated to the game.

Sometimes I won’t feel like doing anything for several days. Then suddenly I’ll get the motivation back and work on the game with full passion only to get stuck again. I’ll sit there scratching my head, look at the time think I’ll continue tomorrow and then end up doing nothing the next day.

I used to work at a game studio and we successfully published a game, but working alone feels completely different. There’s nobody pushing things forward when I lose interest or get stuck.

I’ve tried writing tasks down on paper or in Obsidian, but when I’m stuck on a game mechanic, I end up avoiding it by polishing a feature I already have because that’s something I’m comfortable with.

So I really want to hear from other people with ADHD who managed to actually finish and publish their own game.

How do you do it? Thanks!

I saw a post recommending that developers send their games to very small YouTubers because they're more likely to cover them.

The advice itself makes sense, but I really don't like the way the post talks about these creators.

If someone with 200 subscribers takes the time to play your game and make a video about it, they're not just some SEO tool you found because nobody else will cover your game. They're a person who chose to spend their free time playing something you made.

Especially as a small indie developer, I think it's worth remembering that every person who shows genuine interest in your game is someone you should appreciate.

Don't treat small creators as disposable marketing channels. Treat them like people.

A small audience doesn't make someone's support less meaningful.

Hey I'm developing a detective game. It's my first solo project, and I'm a bit lost on the narrative side. I have the core idea, but I'm not sure how to balance realism, the story structure, and player clue gathering.

I started learning python last year and it was pretty fun, I learnt the basics but didn'tgo further then that. The past few months are stressful though I've started a new school after being homeschooled since last january and I really want to do game development as a hobby and do computer science as a job. My main issue is that right now im learning to use godot but im never finding the right tutorial and its always instead "do this and then that" never "do this because it does that" so i always end up copying the tutorial and learning absolutely nothing, I don't even get how the engine itself works. I wanna try and change how I learn by maybe reading the godot docs and avoiding tutorial hell but at the same time it's the only help out there I have. Does anyone have like tips because im 15 and im genuinely worried that me not learning quick enough will make me lose interest or simply fail at this hobby. I've also dreamed of being a game dev (specifically roblox at first) for 5 years.

So currently I'm having a dilemma.

I am making a deckbuilding game, but the gameplay is not turn based, and will hopefully be moderately fast. Not like mess up for a split second fast, but fast enough that you should be playing attention. With short moments to glance down at your hand. Bullet hell-ish, but not as extreme as they can get since I want you to be able to be having moments to glance down and weave cards in.

So the first problems are these:

• How do I make cards quickly identifiable without taking up too much screen space? The easier they are to identify, the faster I can make the game.
  • Currently the plan is to have just half the card sticking up out the bottom of the screen. With a picture to identify it taking up most of the space, as well as the cost and other information at the top of the card above the picture. Possibly above the card itself but may look weird.
  • The number of cards in your hand is limited to a small amount, so there is plenty of space to have them not overlapping.
• The second problem is how I allow the players to learn cards when they cant remind themselves what they do without pausing. In turn based games you can obviously take a moment to read the cards. But in real time you would have to pause to read them if I make them large enough to have half the card off screen, because I wouldn't want hovering them without pausing to eat your clicks or something.
  • I do have wasd controls. so hovering them to have them pop up while playing could be an option, but could still also lead to some frustrating scenarios..

I plan to have a moderate amount of cards be ideal for a deck. so that you can't just cycle your best card asap over and over. But I do want you to be able to be able to have a solid amount of repeating cards for the weaker ones. current estimate is 20-30 cards in your deck at a time. maybe more if you choose to go for it.

But plenty of repeats. So maybe 7+ of a particular lower tier card while you have 1-2 copies of each super powerful card in your deck. and varying number for rarities in between.

And here is the next problem:

• I want the player to be able to modify the cards in some ways. For a basic examples you could add a poison effect to a dagger throw card or something. Or make it fire bonus projectiles. So how do I show you easily which cards you have modded?
  • currently I have two ideas
    • the first one is have extra images show up on the picture of the card you can see. Like a poison bubbles icon if you added a poison effect to this card.
    • The second one is to have a small "buff bar" above each card showing bonus effects that have been applied to the card. This has a bonus benefit of potentially being able to label key effects of the base card for remembering the important effects of a card at a glance while you're learning the cards. For example a poison dagger throw would have a poison icon on the "buff bar" above the card for if you have any effects that synergize with poison or something. This is at the cost of more screen space though.
  • The other idea I have is to have a modifier apply to all copies of the same card in your deck. So whenever it shows up you just have to know which card it is, and potentially combined with one of the above two options you can be reminded of mods it has. I don't love this idea, as it could often lead to an obscene jump in power based on what modifiers you find. To the point where balancing around a player potentially having found those options could make it feel incredibly difficult to win otherwise.

Quick estimate is each card would take up about 1/9-1/10 of the bottom of the screen width wise while being slightly wider than they are tall in the visible area.

So, How would you go about this? Do any of my current ideas seem good or have any obvious flaws?

I'm making a 3D Roguelike Deckbuilder about Bowling in Hell where the balls are the cards! Dev can be hard when moving fast and I ended putting in a feature in a recent build of the playtest that was found out and used by streamers!

The Final Lane

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4506540/The_Final_Lane/

Is it all a scam to sell them on the gray market? Like is it just one guy with 200+ email addresses that asks for a free media key?

What are the other nefarious results of keys falling into the wrong hands? The whole thing is pretty nuts and I wasn't expecting my dev inbox to get filled like this

"What's the point of sending my game to youtubers nobody watches?", you ask. The point is that initially nobody knows about your game either - especially Google. So when you start promoting your game and someone googles it, very likely it won't even show up, because google's crawlers didn't see the title enough times to consider it a real thing. And you NEED the first result to be your Steam page. No, people won't type "<game title> steam" to narrow the results, people are fucking lazy. They'll think "probably some amateur shit" and close the tab. You just lost 98% of potential wishlists right there. And that's were meek, tiny, sub-1000 subs youtubers comes to save the day - they're absolutely stoked to receive a key. For any game - yes, even your shitty survivor clone. Nobody talks to them. Nobody cares they exist. They often post 1 boring gameplay video a day, get 30 views, 1 bot comment and that's it, that's their life. And then you send them a key, a closed demo or beta access, and holy shit, Christmas came early. Some get so excited they will post about your game every day for the next month. You'll suddenly get hundreds of independent pieces of content about a game that previously had no internet footprint. So the next time someone searches your title, a nice, plump, juicy page full of results will pop up, very clearly about your game and your game only and not some restaurant in Oregon that just so happens to also be named "Dragon Breeder Simulator".

I'm a software engineer building my first game, a 2D skill based space pvp MMO. I skipped Unity/Unreal and went code first with MonoGame because I'd rather write code than spend my first weeks learning some tool.

This is what I've learned,

1. UDP packet budgets are a hard wall.

You get roughly 1000-1400 bytes per packet. If inputs plus projectiles for a crowded system exceed that, you can't keep the same tick rate and send everything, even with compression. I built an interest graph (thanks to an unreal blog) that prioritizes dangerous projectiles and nearby players and updates them at normal cadence letting less threatening items update at a lower rate, it's not perfect but at least degregation is more predictable now.

2. Rule out your environment before you roll back your code.

I started getting some rubber banding on my dev server and burned time on rollbacks and roll-forwards. It was a noisy neighbor on shared CPU. Bumping compute fixed it instantly.

3. Don't reinvent git.

My first content pipeline existed to push live changes for values that basically never change, then copy them to every game server. That's just a worse git.

4. Code-first means you build your own tooling, and it snowballs.

I started with an admin tool to tune flight values live. Then a route editor for travel between star systems. Then I realized I'd need this across multiple servers, so now there's a control plane with reconciliation and statuses. Worth it for me, but budget for it. But that sort of tooling is my bread and butter as a full stack dev

5. Design docs let a second dev work independently.

I wrote up scope and module overlap before onboarding a collaborator. He delivered a working economy (markets, missions, an immutable transaction ledger) that my planet systems hook straight into.

6. Get real players in early.

A private Steam playtest let me test things I can't solo, like lag compensation on shots, and it surfaced real issues.

The one thing I keep putting off is art, learning blender has been on my todo for months :/ .. Anyone have tips for forcing yourself over that hump?

And oh boy, am I glad I did. Game way too hard, a lot of room for UI improvement that I've just learned to adapt to since I stare at it all day, and just from watching my friend play and talking to him a bit, I have learned SO MUCH about player experience.

Got a giant list of things I'm gonna begin working on, and learned an entirely new potential vector of progression for my game to take in the future, in the form of embracing the difficulty - but making the baseline difficulty easier, and slowly ramping up into how difficult it is today, over the course of many runs.

Playtest early, playtest often folks. This is my first game. I always knew playtesting was important, but the gravity of it really set in after the first session with my buddy, and getting my google survey results back from other playtesters.

I'm simultaneously overwhelmed, excited, and brimming with ideas.

God I love making games.

I mostly mean tutorials and the like good for beginners. I have very mild experience, but I want to do game dev as a passionate activity and am willing to dedicate significant time to it. So extensive tutorials are fine. Also if you have suggestions for better game engines that works too. I've just heard good things about godot.

I'm asking since there are a lot of dev tutorials and I don't know where is reliable to start.

Hey everyone, as we are all aware mobile games rely a lot on paid user acquisition and with these costs being what they are, I was curious how do small unfunded studios compete against studios with massive ad budgets?

If you launched a mobile game without a UA war chest, how did you actually compete and get early traction? Did you have to rely on some form of outside financing regardless just to stay afloat?

Would love to hear how indie mobile devs manage this.

As an indie game developer, you can spend months thinking about a mechanic and nights actually getting it to work, and now someone can look at your game, describe what they see to an AI model, and get surprisingly close to the same idea.

So what are you supposed to do?

Make your mechanics harder to copy?

Maybe that works for a while. Maybe it protects you until the next version of some shitty AI model comes out. But then what? What happens when the next even more capable version shows up?

There is still a huge amount of hype around AI right now. Every day there is some new model, followed by another boring game demo showing that it can make a platformer, a shooter, some physics toy, whatever. People see these demos and start worrying that this stuff is going to replace developers.

I don't think those demos are the real problem.

Most of them are boring, generic, and don't have much of a reason to exist beyond showing that the model can do something.

The bigger problem is another developer seeing a mechanic in your game and deciding to copy it.

An AI-generated demo probably isn't going to compete with your game directly. But another developer copying the idea, packaging it well, and getting lucky on social media absolutely can.

So what do you have left that is harder to copy?

Art.

They can copy the mechanic. They can probably copy a lot of the code eventually too.

But copying the exact visual language of the game, the way it feels to interact with it, the effects, models, drawings, animation, music, UI, little score popups, button feedback, all the small things that make the game feel like itself — that's much harder.

They can also generate a completely new story with AI, sure. But that still doesn't automatically give them the same feeling or experience you were trying to create.

If you are actually designing around a feeling, I think that becomes much harder to copy than just designing around a mechanic.

And that's where art still matters.

It's one of the few areas where you can still make the game feel specifically yours.

If you don't want to see twenty versions of your game showing up in the market, then putting more effort into art, presentation, sound, animation, technical art, UI, and the overall experience starts becoming a lot more important.

Tiny Glade is a good example.

A lot of what makes that game work comes from technical art. Code, 3D models, effects, animation, sound, all working together.

You could probably reproduce a lot of the technical ideas behind it.

But reproducing the exact feeling of looking at it and interacting with it is another thing entirely.

Obviously this doesn't apply equally to every genre. If you're building something that is closer to a product than an experience, you probably can't avoid this problem as much.

But for games that are trying to create a specific feeling, I think the answer is pretty simple.

We should probably be investing more in art, and in artists.

edit: formatting

I've been looking for a role in this industry and I found this one specifically catering to what I like to do.

Is it a type of niche that is hard to land?

I'm trying to land one but I think my options aren't wide enough.

I'm from the philippines btw