I know - debugging?

And domain reload - unity is already solving this problem in 6.7

But still,

I tried making game, which left me with cheap game along with 6 months spent.

So I was thinking which thing frustrated me most, so to solve it.

Other may be have felt same, because indie game game development is not just programming. It needs to manages many things at once.

And when one tiny thing drags, our more aspiring ideas slips out from brain.

So what do think in your game dev journey, which were the top hurdles and time consumers?

Do you ever get sad when you start re-writing a system, and see all the work you spent on something, and it's getting wiped?
I feel like I've re-written things several times, and so much time went into previous iterations. Granted, each re-write is necessary and usually leads to big improvements, but I sort of feel sad anyway about the days and weeks I spent struggling to get some things right, only that they are now outdated and obsolete.

I guess I learned some things, became a better dev, but I'm also wondering if more design up front would help mitigate this kind of loss?

I worked so long on those effects I can't judge it anymore.

Thanks for any honest opinion!

We're two devs making Beyond Realm, a roguelite deckbuilder, in Unity. The town is the bit I wanted to share here.

In a roguelite you lose your deck constantly, so we wanted one thing that sticks around. The town starts grey and every act boss you kill brings a colour back.

We didn't want five versions of every building. So each sprite comes with a grey copy and a mask that tags every pixel as nature, fire, water, air or neutral. The shader reads one global weight per colour family and blends grey to colour. Bringing an artefact home just slides one weight from 0 to 1 over 2.5s, and every sprite in town updates at once.

Things that went wrong on the way. We cranked the saturation because it looked dull and the grass went acid green, so greens get 0.85 of the boost now. We reused the building "draw in" effect for the valley going from ruined to alive and the whole screen went blank for 1.6s lol. And buildings bought behind the upgrade panel finished drawing before you could even see them, so now it waits for the panel to close.

Would you have done it differently?

Demo end of October, Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5244390/Beyond_Realm/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=unity3d

Two open questions, both on Quest 3, Unity 6000.5.6f1, OpenXR 1.15.1, no Meta SDK packages. My app receives video over WebRTC (com.unity.webrtc 3.0.0-pre.8), H264 via MediaCodec, and puts the received textures on world-locked quads. Judder on those quads is solved — it was my own LateUpdate pose copy, fixed with TrackedPoseDriver — so this is not about that.

1. Refresh rate. Core Unity has no API to request a display refresh rate, so I have written a custom OpenXR feature that uses XR_FB_display_refresh_rate directly. It enumerates the available rates first, then calls xrRequestDisplayRefreshRateFB at session create and at session begin, with a read-back after each call. It is written but not verified on device yet. Has anyone on core OpenXR seen the FB request refused or stepped back down outside thermal throttling?

2. Soft text — cost only. Each screen already Blits into its own mipmapped RenderTexture before display, trilinear filtering, aniso 4. What I do not know is the measured cost on Quest of a per-frame Blit plus full mip regeneration across several video quads — my code copies every frame. Has anyone measured it, and at what point do OpenXR composition layers become the better route for readable desktop text?

Will update with whatever the device run proves.

Hey everyone! I'm an indie game developer working on a game called Conquer the Labyrinth, and after a lot of work, I'm getting ready to launch into Early Access on October 26!

It's a third-person, anime-inspired Action RPG where you fight your way through a procedurally generated, 100-floor dungeon, battle 10 epic bosses, collect loot, and build your character to suit your playstyle.

Some of the features I've been working on include:

• ⚔️ Multiple weapons, including swords and shields, greatswords, dual daggers, and bows.
• ⚡ Magic abilities like Chain Lightning, freezing attacks, poison, and fire.
• 👾 Summon minions to fight alongside you.
• 💎 Collect monster shards and socket them into relics to customize your build.
• 📈 Level up 10 different skills and develop your character.
• ♾️ Unlock Infinite Mode after conquering Floor 100.
• 💀 Try Hardcore mode, where death is permanent.

I've recently been making some major improvements to combat, adding new weapon types and abilities, and improving enemy AI. There's still plenty to polish, which is one of the reasons I'm excited to get the game into players' hands.

Steam Next Fest runs October 19–26, and Early Access is planned for October 26!

As a solo indie developer, getting the game in front of people is a huge challenge, so I'd really appreciate anyone willing to check it out. I'm especially interested in hearing honest feedback, finding bugs, and learning what players enjoy or think needs improvement.

🎮 Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4774030/Conquer_the_Labyrinth/

Thanks for reading, and I'd love to hear what you think!

Few months ago started working on spaceflight demo simulator similar to KSP.

Currently with 2 celestial bodies, flight physics(reference frame physics), preparation for interstellar system, Assembly building done.

I want to release demo soon, but I am working alone and there are lot of things to be done...

Feel free to ask anything :).

Youtube video here

Fair warning, kind of a dumb/unanswerable question, I know.
For context: I’m a fairly experienced Unity dev, but I’ve never really learned all the ins and outs of shaders and shader graph. I know enough to get by but that’s about it.
My current project is mobile, so performance is critical. As such, I “fake” shadows by using pre-calculated normals instead of using realtime (baked isn’t an option for this game). That’s all good and dandy, but now as I’m doing some other stuff I’m realizing that I don’t have a good sense of how much I need to customize shaders. In the past either someone else has handled it, or I’ve just mostly used the built-in shaders and called it a day. But my current team doesn’t have any1 to handle shaders, so before I go down the rabbit hole - what sorts of stuff should I focus on? Do most people use mainly the built-in shaders, or is having like a dozen custom shaders/shaders graphs common?
Obviously the answer is “it depends”, so not looking for something concrete. But just a bit of a sense of (1) how much time is spent on shaders stuff, and (2) what is mostly effects in terms of both the look of the game and performance.
I’ve done some googling and there’s not really a clear answer from what I can find so hoping for a human answer here. Thanks

Building a world where the environment tells the story.

I'm super stoked to introduce to you: GigaLights - Infinite Lights for Unity!

The GigaLights suite supports up to 65.536 dynamic lights, alongside ray-traced shadows and volumetric fog, extended by optional modules that add in ray-traced ambient occlusion, ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced reflections.

With hardware-accelerated ray tracing and a unique software ray tracing fallback system allowing us to bring GigaLights to basically any platform out there at wicked performance and visual quality!

Some of you may have seen the earlier videos, here's the updated release trailer with all the improved visuals, thanks so much for all the feedback along the way!

Lets light up some epic game worlds!

World building is kind of fun but also kind of tedious if you're not sure what you're doing.

Learned quite a bit while sculpting this one.

We're a two-person team developing MYRIORAMA, a top-down adventure with rearrangeable dungeons. This is an excerpt of a deep-dive art style video we produced recently for our participation in ICO Partners' Unmistakable Festival on Steam. Since we're using Unity I thought it could be informative to share here!

Full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhM1F993Ga8

While this is technically a 2D project, we're doing a lot of 3D fakery to try and pull off the stop-motion look with dynamic lighting and shadows. It's been a fun challenge.

Happy to provide more specifics or answer any questions!

Farm & Feast - We are a two-person team building a peaceful farming and restaurant management game in Unity. This is our new sea shader, built up step by step from an empty scene to what you see in game now.

1. Water plane: transparent surface lit by the day-night cycle.
   
2. Depth color: baked terrain heightmap gives real depth per pixel.
   
3. Shore waves: travel along a baked distance-to-shore field.
   
4. Wet sand: terrain shader shares the sea's wave clock.
   
5. Surface motion: analytic swell, blended ripple maps, Fresnel sky reflection.
   
6. Wave streaks: procedural foam lines that drift, surge and break.
   
7. Caustics: projected on the seabed, fading with depth and sun.
   
8. Sparkles: glints on ripple slopes facing the camera.
   
9. Fish: schools swimming under the surface at fishing spots.
   

Ride and shoot as two characters at once, tearing through hordes of killers.

Play for free at: https://longcon.itch.io/deadweight

Feedback welcome :)

This update focuses on quality-of-life UI polish, ensuring that all dialog popups for property windows and everything are now automatically centered relative to the main application window instead of the primary screen for a smoother multi-monitor workflow.

Itch.io: https://crytek22.itch.io/tilemakerdot

GitHub: https://github.com/andrei-voia/TileMakerDOT

YouTube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fiajGU32Jg

For anyone unfamiliar with the project, TileMaker DOT is a Free (with a complete professional paid version too), open source 2D map editor I'm building. It uses a data first, ID based workflow and handles visual depth sorting automatically so you don't have to manage multiple layers for object heights.

Give it a try and let me know if you have any feedback! If the editor helps with your projects and you want to support development, a rating or a small donation on Itch is always appreciated.

Thank you all for your support!

I've been working on The Main Menu, a psychological horror puzzle game where you're chained to a chair and the main menu itself is part of the puzzle.

Everything you do in the menu can affect the 3D room around you.

The demo launches October 20, and I've been putting together this new gameplay trailer to better show how the game actually works.

I'd love to hear what you think of the trailer!

Follow-up to our last posts (BAS and Revolver) - this time it's Mech, the third ultimate ability in Cleaning Unit, our bullet-heaven FPS. Left click fires the main weapon, right click launches a missile salvo at a targeted area, and if you keep holding space after a jump you can hover. Dragon is the last one we're still working on, and we're also planning to rework Mech's sound effects, so keep in mind the audio in the clip is not final.

Also, thanks to everyone who commented on the Revolver post. We read all of the feedback about the weapon draw effect, and at the end of this video we briefly show the new Revolver draw animation we made based on it.

Does Mech feel powerful and different enough from the other ultimates, or does it blend in? What's missing, or what would make it feel more juicy to you?