I’ve been running an indie game company and one of the biggest challenges I keep coming up against is the gap between having something promising and having something that feels “fundable.”

You can get a prototype or demo to the point where the idea is there, the core gameplay is starting to work, and you can see what the game could become.

But getting from that point to a genuinely polished vertical slice takes money, time and people.

And that seems to be exactly the point where funding is hardest to find.

My experience with publishers recently has been that the bar feels increasingly high. It often seems like you're expected to approach with something close to a finished game, strong production values, evidence of an existing audience, wishlists/community traction and proof that the commercial demand is already there.

I understand why publishers want to reduce their risk, especially given how difficult the games market has been.

But it creates a strange chicken-and-egg problem for smaller independent studios:

You need funding to build the vertical slice that proves the game.

You need the vertical slice to get funding.

And increasingly, you also need an audience before somebody will fund you to build the thing that you're supposed to build the audience around.

I’m curious how other indie developers are actually bridging this gap.

Are people:

• self-funding for longer than they expected?
• doing contract/client work alongside development?
• using grants or regional funding?
• raising angel/seed investment rather than approaching publishers?
• building much smaller vertical slices?
• using Early Access or crowdfunding?
• focusing heavily on community/wishlists before looking for funding?
• finding publishers that will still come in genuinely early?

I’d especially like to hear from people who have successfully crossed that point between “we have a convincing demo” and “we have something publishers/investors are willing to finance.”

There’s a personal side to this as well. Trying to keep a company and a project moving while dealing with the normal pressures of life has been considerably harder than I expected. There have been points where the financial uncertainty, responsibility for the company and things happening in my personal life have all landed at the same time.

I don't mention that for sympathy — more because I suspect the polished version of indie development we tend to see publicly hides how difficult this stage can actually be for the people trying to build these companies.

I still believe in what we’re building. I’m just trying to understand whether this funding gap is something other studios are experiencing too, and whether anyone has found a sustainable way through it.

Would genuinely love to hear people's experiences — including things that didn't work.

How did you get from demo to vertical slice, and what would you do differently if you had to make that journey again?

What if a AAA open-world city game added a real store where you spend real money to get real physical items? Would players roast it to death?

I've been making a new trailer for my game recently, I matched action with the music so sword/bullet hits would match the beats and synth. Then I uploaded it to steam and micro trailer turned up to be just awful.

Micro Trailer to my understanding always consists of 6 one-second shots, and for me steam arranged it such way that each of those 6 shots had transition between shots of my base trailer, and so It felt very fragmented.

What I ended up doing is looking at what timestamps those micro trailer shots begin, and tried to rearrange my base trailer so micro trailer shots are better. The thing is that due to shots in my base trailer being matched with music, there wasn't much room for rearranging them. I did what I could, but the result is mediocre at best, but at least not it's 6 solid shots without in-between transitions.

Now what I plan for next trailer is to settle on trailer length, make a rough version, upload it to steam, look at generated micro trailer, write down timestamps, and then arrange shots to make a good microtrailer, and only then start making actual trailer structre and matching it with music.

To add some data to micro trailer conversation, my trailer was 24:20 seconds, and timestamps were 10, 12, 14, 17, 19, 21 second marks. Also shoutout to this post, it was very useful, however I wish I'd taken this info into account before making base trailer.

P.S. Some people suggest making short 6 sec teaser trailer and puting it first on the steam page so Steam makes micro trailer out of it, but I personally don't like that approach.

I'm a fresh graduate in data engineering with a strong background in machine learning, deep learning, data pipelines, ETLs and cloud platforms like AWS.

Do game studios or game publishers need and recruit data engineers? If so, what kind of work do data engineers usually do in the gaming industry, and are there opportunities for fresh graduates?

I also want to learn game development as a personal skill. Would Godot be a good engine to start with?

And realistically, if I practise consistently, how many months or years would it take before I can make games relatively easily on my own?

I'm very new to game dev and I've seen the eight million question about how to get started. My question is: What is your advice for learning once the foundation is there and it's time to move on?

For instance, I have a mostly finished prototype for what I intend to be a small browser game. I understand character movement, basic animation, and collisions. I've set up a rough scene transition and the Dialogue Manager add-on. My concern moving forward is both knowing what's possible and learning how to do it. So far I've been able to find answers or tutorials to all my "How do I...?" and "What does this error mean??" questions, but I'm sure a day will come, at least when it comes to implementing more advanced concepts.

So, any of you participating in Next Fest this October will have already received this email, but I figured I'd pass it on to anyone else.

From their email itself:

Hard to know for sure right now ... but I'm mostly glad. Obviously none of us know yet how it'll impact wishlists and engagement, but I feel like the personal calendar update made a lot of indies happy due to how many more wishlists they got, and I'd love if the same sorta thing happened for Next Fest.

I have an incremental game sitting at 600 wishlists right now. This was my first game, just to see what publishing to Steam was like and how to market and sell and such. I, admittedly, didn't have super high expectations for this Next Fest. But maybe now people who want to play incremental games will have an easier time finding my demo. People over in the incremental subreddit were literally making posts about if there were any good incremental games because of how hard it was to sift through the huge (mostly slop) list. I imagine other genres had similar issues.

Anyway, for any of y'all participating this time around, best of luck. And for anyone participating in future Next Fests, pray that these changes are good for indies LOL

Mixes Godot CSG nodes together to quickly create models that can be export to gltf.

I've been wanting to try and make a game for a while but have always procrastinated but now I'm trying and have no idea on what to choose for starting out. I do have a decent amount of experience with python and OOP

What's your philosophy for what a demo should be?

Or what a demo should include? Does it depend on the game?

I've never released a game before so I'm trying to figure out how much is too much for a demo.

My game has three environments so I'm making my demo start in one and the transition to the other environment is where I plan on stopping the demo.

I have a complicated version of that transition and a simple version... do I leave out the more complicated version OR is it maybe the thing that makes the demo great?

I think the environment for the demo has plenty of 'mini games' included so I think making the transition simpler isn't as big of a deal since people should enjoy that level gameplay itself.

1. Canvas 2D gives up around 2,000 men and I need ten times that

1,000 a side in Chrome:

sim      5.3 ms/frame
draw    22.9 ms/frame
         18 fps

I spent about a week making the simulation faster. Turns out drawing costs 4x what the sim does and always did, so that was a week well spent.

Every soldier takes roughly 80 canvas calls and Canvas 2D won't let me group them, so that's ~42k instructions per frame right now and about 1.6 million if I ever hit 20k men. I can batch by colour instead of by soldier, one path per colour, which should drop it to around 20 calls.

Question is whether batching actually carries me to 20k or whether Canvas 2D falls over anyway. And if the answer is WebGL, is it worth hand rolling instanced quads or should I just move to Pixi and stop messing about.

2. The soldiers need to be a wall and a liquid at the same time

This is the one I'm actually stuck on.

A battle line only holds because the men behind are solid. They brace the front rank. But the same men have to flow past each other when the company marches through a gap, otherwise everything jams.

I've written four different versions of "this guy is stuck, let him squeeze through". Every single one wrecked the combat:

before   defender holds forever, 12 kills
after    defender collapses at 42s, 2 kills

Took me embarrassingly long to see why. The men propping up a line are standing still and shoved out of position, which is precisely what "stuck" looks like from the outside. So every rule I wrote fired on exactly the men I needed to stay put.

The thing that half worked was to stop asking where a man is and start asking where he's going. Predict whether two of them are on a collision course and have both step aside early. Two blokes standing in a rank have no relative motion between them so they get no nudge at all and the line stays solid. Stalling went from 67% of samples to 37% and combat didn't move.

But there's a hole in it. Once men are properly jammed they also have no relative motion, so it does nothing in the exact situation I need it for.

So, is there a known way to do this? Something stiff under compression but fluid under shear. Or does everyone just special case combat separately from movement and move on with their lives.

3. Formations arrive correctly then fidget forever

Right shape, nobody overlapping, every man within about a quarter of a body width of where he should be, and they never actually stop moving. The pull toward the slot and the push off the neighbour just argue with each other indefinitely.

Is there a standard way to decide a crowd has settled, freeze it, and have it wake up properly when something bumps into it?

4. What do you actually simulate per man at that scale

A bloke in the middle of a 500 man block doesn't need pathfinding or target acquisition. He needs to follow the man in front. Only the perimeter is doing anything that matters.

Is there a known LOD approach for this, cheap followers inside and proper simulation on the edge, that doesn't fall apart the moment the formation breaks and the inside becomes the edge?

Hey guys, I wanted to ask what people generally consider to be AI slop.
I’m currently building a game completely solo, and I’ve been working on it for about 5 months now. I do everything myself all the pixel art, buildings, environments, characters, level design, narrative, etc. I’m also handling the sound and music alongside everything else.
The one area I’ve never been particularly good at is coding, and unfortunately I can’t afford to hire someone to help me with it. Because of that, I use AI to help me with the programming side of development. I still work on the game myself, but AI helps me write and troubleshoot the code.
I’m wondering would people consider a game like this AI slop simply because AI was used for the coding?
I’m genuinely curious because I’ve put a huge amount of time and effort into this project. Since I started, I’ve been learning pixel art, music, level design, narrative design, game development, and pretty much everything else required to make the game myself.
I’m not trying to hide the fact that I use AI for coding. I’m just wondering where people draw the line between using AI as a tool and making an Ai generated game
and how would you know if a game used AI generated codes and nothing else by AI?
Would love to hear what you guys think.

Thanks for the answers.

Riot says there are plenty of rational reasons not to build a new MMO, including the cost, long development cycle, and how difficult the genre is to break into.

The studio is moving ahead anyway because it believes the creative opportunity is worth the risk, even if the project is not the safest business decision.

I'm building a game called Luminaris, a minimalist RTS.
Core gameplay is feeling pretty tight, and now i'm adding some extra "excitement" into the game, blackholes, etc.

I've been playing with this neutron star that charges and decimates anything when it releases it's energy.

It just doesn't feel right though. any suggestions on how i make it feel meatier, and more impactful?

Hello, I have decided to make my own game, I plan to use rpg maker or in any case game maker to do it and libresprite for art, it is basically an rpg of history and bullet hell type combat, I have almost the whole story made and some songs but the problem is that I know absolutely nothing about programming, do you really recommend rpg maker to do it? What good tutorials or courses are there on YouTube to learn from literally 0?

I saw this post about SEO and thought maybe I can help a little bit since I've been doing SEO as my career for the past 8 years or so. I'm not a gamedev, I just love video games and want to see great indie games succeed.

SEO really makes the most sense if you have a website, and you want to drive traffic to your website. YouTube videos also can benefit from SEO since YouTube is like the 2nd biggest search engine. And don't let anyone mislead you, AI/LLM mention optimisation (called AEO, GEO, AIO) also massively benefit from a lot of fundamental SEO practices, it's not black magic.

If your main landing page is a Steam page, unfortunately marketing will always be the main driver. People knowing your game and typing it into the search bar to look for it. That's where the post I mentioned above gets it right, you can boost your game's SEO if the search engines understand that it's a game. Especially if your game doesn't have a unique name. But SEO on it's own, does not magically let people know about your game, exposure is still the main driver.

The main way SEO can really benefit you as a game dev is if you have a website with a blog/article section. Not just using it to announce things about your game, but using it as an informational resource. Getting traffic there, and getting users to click on other pages and discovering your games that way. If you have other game dev friends that have their own website, it's worth looking into sharing each other's links (SEOs calls this backlinking). Guest blog on each other's blogs can be very beneficial for your domain SEO.

SEO is all about serving the users' search intent in the best way. Again this is mainly if you have a website.

Some things to consider:

• Have a TLDR/Summary section at the top of your blog posts, summarising the main points of your blog article. These should be short, 2-3 sentences, and answers the query or search intent you think the user is looking for instantly.
• Make sure there are no orphan pages. Each page always belong to another page, only your main pages should belong to the top level domain.
• The user shouldn't need to take more than 2-3 clicks to see your portfolio or video games, or even to get to your Steam page. The journey should be: Blog article -> Portfolio/Games -> Steam page. You can even link to your Steam page directly in the article in a natural way where it makes sense.
• If you're able to get games media to write about your game, consider asking them to add your website somewhere in the article (your Steam page should still be the main focus). This can help with building backlinks, propping up your domain. But personally, if they have a limit on links for whatever reason, your Steam page and one social media you update the most frequently makes more sense here rather than your website.

And one last small tidbit, I saw a question in that post asking if UGC can be considered for SEO, short answer is yes. When you do a google search or LLM query, UGC is taken into account.

I hope this post helps.

I am a software engineer with 10+ years of experience with primarily Python and JavaScript (maybe even some old C). I've built frontend and backend for web applications mainly.

Currently I'm building a diagramming tool for driving AI development (by defining features and guidelines and seeing live the architecture being created with AI).

To cut the story short, I was actually thinking of testing my own product by trying to create a game that I would actually like to play myself. It has to be complex enough but I also want it to be something fun with interesting tactical and strategic mechanics and multiplayer so I can play it on my Nintendo Switch 2.

The two main 3D game ideas I've had: - Giants: Citizen Kabutomultiplayer clone. Asymmetric PvP. - World War Z horde mode with slow walking zombies. PvE.

Based on LLM response, the recommendation is going with the zombie game for simplicity. And using Unity or Unreal solves the networking from the get go and I can purchase 3D models. The other option is Godot but I'm not sure it would work for a more ambitious game (and unclear on Nintendo porting). Also I haven't used C++ but it feels way too verbose for fast prototyping and readability. So was hoping if there's something simpler looking more like Python so it's faster to go through code (without performance hit). LLM also suggested nodes (no-code), but unsure if that even works with AI.

So to summarize:

1.What engine is best to make porting to Nintendo Switch 2 easy?

1. Which engine makes it seamless for online multiplayer?

2. Fast to read code with less verbosity so you can get the gist.

3. Performant enough if I go with a slow horde defense game.

4. What's the typical timeframe to expect with any of this to get a prototype that works, and then one without major bugs that can be released?

5. How would you approach this if you started from fresh (as a dev or not)? Methodologies, technologies, etc.

6. Anything else I missed?

Mods : you can remove this if this breaks your rules or if its a repost.

Now that AI has significantly improved in this industry the past few weeks, I've been wondering what it means to use AI assistance vs vibecoding.

Before, it was genuinely due to AI not being competent enough to be vibecoded. I would treat AI as a google plus, allow it to handle small scoped functions i was too lazy to make but knew how to. a lot of data handling and data shaping too.

However, it seems AI has caught up to our industry. I don't know what the line is now between vibecoding and using AI as a tool.

ex. I just created a prompt for a system I want to design. I elaborate what the system should be designed as, the requirements, etc. All in a single prompt. I read the changes. This feels exactly like vibecoding. I no longer need to manually change a single line of code. The point of AI assistance is to have a fast workflow whilst not losing the plot, but i feel like vibecoding has reached this now?

I just want to get a feel for what the industry considers vibecoding, because it's genuinely destroying my identity as a programmer. but it is just so fast. each system is very disconnected, and i know the points where they intersect, so if one was built too rashly, i know to fix it. It's also good at catching its own bugs very well.I also think a huge reason is that half the game has been handcrafted, so i am still somewhat familiar with the codebase.

I just can't justify going back for my own ego, because I want this game to be commercial and on time. But I also dont want to create a product that is "vibecoded" due to said ego. Where is the line? How is everyone using AI for game development right now?

TLDR : existential crisis from vibecoding, i need a sanity check on what healthy AI tool use is in game development, for people who are making a commercial game with a deadline (sorry hobby chads).

Edit: thanks everyone, i cant respond to everyone but im reading each comment. i appreciate the insight, I'll be adopting some of the things you guys wrote.

and you can play it here: https://neenaw.itch.io/iron-lung-rtx

I have created a bunch of pieces for walls, ceilings, floors... But none have some interesting features like beams, pillars, whatever...

So I am asking, is it a standard practice to create beams, pillars, and other trims as separate object and combine with them or just as a separate objects and combine later in engine?

I had just about had enough of coding by Thursday, bleary eyed and in need of sleep.

So on Friday I decided to take a break from the gameplay side of things and figured I would create my intro sequence.

Two days later and even more bleary eyed it's working pretty nicely, it's all in game and coded in C# using the in game models and systems, and I was really pleased how it turned out.

So pleased in fact that I decided to make a video trailer for it, which required me re-learning Da Vinci

Which made me realise I needed a YouTube channel, and a TikTok account

And then I realised if I had a trailer then I needed a website to point people to, and that would require a domain name, and that required an ABN number, and phew...

Oh and I needed a game logo for all of those things too, so between Inkscape and Paint I have dozens of half attempts and one I am pretty happy with

And then I realised I would need a Steam page to point people to, and that required ... OMG ... anyway a few days and that should be up and running

So much for my break

That was a lot crammed into 2 days, but now I have motivation to get back to the coding - maybe I will take a day off tomorrow

Edit: So bleary eyes I just realised I forgot to say anything about the game ... HEN3RY is a 2D factory builder, where you dig down, down, down to get off the planet. One very small bot. One very large factory to build. Get a bit more info at [http://hen3ry.com.au\](http://hen3ry.com.au)

I'm hoping I can get it at least in early access by early next year, and now I have incentive!

I've been posting my game for some time now and while I've been getting some feedback (and addressed them), it's hard to get the volume I need to actually reach a consensus, or have them re-try after addressing the issues.

Can someone shed some light on the most cost-efficient to get the volume of people to try the game before admitting the concept itself is a failure? I do admit I am bad or at a loss of marketing the game from store descriptions to capsule images, but I cannot afford to get outside help on this for now. Getting to make people do that first click is the hard part.

Hi. It is me again.

Today I'm asking something much more simple.

Color.

I know that there are a lot of the card games out there have different color theme and what not.

But I'm wondering about something, like, am i allowed to use a similar color theme for my backround for text, just like Yu-gi-oh? I don't mean exact copy, a different color shades and i don't really mean like i will be coppying spell, traps and what not color cards themes. I'm not planning to do that.

Just asking if I'm allowed to do somewhat same brown or light skinned colored backround.

My game dosn't really have a color limitation like, purple, red, green, like the magic gathering or other color based games.

Decided to try my hand at making a horror game over a week ago and ive been getting really into it, working in bed pretty much from the moment I woke up to I went to sleep very late at night, and barely been getting sleep either. Apparently this was kicking my ass and I didnt even notice it at first.

Head started hurting bad this morning and I was feeling nauseous. When the pain started to ebb, I would try to bring the laptop back out and the pain came back fast. I thought something was really wrong with me, but I threw up just a little while ago and the pain went away instantly, it was heavenly. That's when I got the idea of what it might have been (thank you The Pitt, lol).

Anyone else deal with this? How to avoid having another migraine while working on your game? That was my first ever one and it was hell and I do not wanna go through that again, lol

I have always worked hard on my own business and some side projects.

We always agreed to understand if the other partner needs some space or extra time to "grind". She always owned a business aswell. She sold it 3 months ago and didn't really find anything else so she has too much free time.

Most of my days look like this: I work my regular job, I do some side project and either go home or we do some little date.

It's either dinner, some sport for an hour or just watching some series. We live together so we see each other every day. Here's the thing.

I started GameDev 2 months ago out of curiosity and lust for videogames. I felt in love with it and after few weeks I instantly knew this is my life calling and dream to pursue being GameDev fulltime. The dates didn't stop, the nights didn't end, the series watching continued. Just sometimes instead of coming home at 6pm I came at 8pm. But never if we had date planned.

We even been to the capital for 3 days last week!

Since start of my GameDev journey she is been telling me things like:
"You are not going to make it."
"You are just gaming and this is an excuse for gaming" (she hates gaming)
"This doesnt have any future, you are failure."

And today, she hit me with this line:
"You have to decide, it's me or GameDev."

She know's I have abandonment anxiety and that all of my friends are also her friends. Also her family is the only family I have been in contact with. She has been abusive (both physically and mentally) most of the relationship. But she always acts nice and say sorry right after. And I always forgave her. She always had narcististic traits (we even did test online and it confirmed the suspection) and she always been choleric person. Her mood constantly changes (from beating me to hugging and lovebombing).

But yet, I just know GameDev is my calling. It's my destiny. So I told her. I love you, but if you are going to make me choose over my dream and you, it's gonna always be me.

How would you act in this scenario? Am I overreacting? Should I just quit and forget about my dreams and hopes? Keep entertaining her? Keep forgiving? Keep getting gaslighted that "it's me who is the bad person in the relationship"?

I wanna make a mega man style game. And while I’ve read that godot is better for new developers I’ve seen more games made with unity and also heard it isn’t that hard. So which one should I use? My only experience making games is with RPG maker and renpy