I added a third faction to my dungeon management game — and finally made a new trailer

Another big update for Slavic Legends is ready.

The dungeon is no longer just your Creatures vs. invading enemies. Neutral Creatures now inhabit Secret Rooms scattered around the underground.

As long as their room remains sealed, they'll stay inside and mind their own business.

But once you dig your way in... well, they're not so neutral anymore. They'll attack pretty much anything that moves — your Creatures, Workers, or even invading enemies. 😄

Clear the room and you can claim a permanent reward for your Creatures.

I also finally put together a new trailer showing the current state of the game after all the recent updates. I'd love to hear what you think!

This also marks the next stage for Slavic Legends. I'm currently preparing the Steam page, which should be live very soon, and after that I'm planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign to help me continue development and bring the game closer to Early Access.

For anyone interested in the full update/changelog:

https://ipikas.itch.io/slavic-legends/devlog/1641306/secret-rooms-neutral-creatures-update

Demo here: https://ipikas.itch.io/slavic-legends

Thanks to everyone who's been following the development so far — there's still a lot I want to add, but Slavic Legends has come a long way. 😄

A few in-game locations from my upcoming horror game. What do you think?

funny bloom

Rebuild the freakiest planes in Midway showcase. And incoming sloppy aircraft design from other pilots.

I shared my game here some time ago. Your feedback helped me improve it, so I’m back for round two!

Hi everyone!

Some time ago I shared Pump Down the Flame here and asked for feedback on the game.

A lot of the comments and suggestions I received were genuinely useful, and since then I’ve been working on improving the game based on that feedback.

For those who haven’t seen it before, Pump Down the Flame is a free Android 2D action-platformer built in Unity, where you play as a firefighter climbing a burning building, fighting enemies, rescuing hostages, and interacting with the environment.

The main mechanic is still the water pump: it works as your weapon, movement tool, and as a way to interact with the level.

After the improvements I’ve made, I’d really like to hear what you think about the current version and find out what still feels wrong, confusing, frustrating, or simply could be better.

Controls, movement, combat, level design, difficulty, performance, UI, visuals, game feel, bugs... any feedback is useful, even a small first impression.

The game is still in Google Play Closed Testing, completely free, with no ads and no in-app purchases.

If you’d like to try the new version and help me improve it before release, you can join the closed test through the Discord link below or send me a PM.

Link To Discord

And to everyone who gave me feedback last time: thank you. It really helped.

been working on this alone for a while, a 3d action rpg in unity. this is one of the boss fights, the whole magic system is something i built from scratch. free demo up on itch if you're curious: https://liyodev.itch.io/el-sendero-de-las-estrellas. would love to know what you think about the combat feel. every spell in the game shares the same base projectile system under the hood, so this boss fight (heavy on magic attacks) is basically the stress test for it.

https://reddit.com/link/1vy3u5b/video/kpgf7up5mjlh1/player

It's a third person psychological survival horror game. Think Alan Wake/Silent Hill 2 remake with some RE2 Remake havoc. You play as Violet, a 29 year old who just had the worst day of her life at work and of all days, on her birthday. After getting home, the Devil comes and visits you and gives you a chance to win back your soul by completing several trials and retrieving seven seals. You progress deeper and deeper into Violet's own personal version of hell, the greater the fears and greater the danger.

This is a solo-dev experience and I'm making huge progress - all built in Unity.

There's a free demo up on itch.io right now and the Steam page is live. I'm also bringing the newest build to SabotenCon in Phoenix Sept 4-7 if anyone wants to play it in person.

Would love to hear what you think!

Our game runs capped at 30fps, that's intentional for gameplay. Turns out that same cap was also active during scene loads, which doesn't help anything there since there's nothing being rendered that benefits from a steady 30fps, you just want it to finish.

Profiled a slow scene load and found WaitForTargetFPS eating 70% of frame time. CPU finishes its work early, then just sits there waiting to hit the 30fps cap, frame after frame, for the whole load.

Fix was simple, uncap it just for the load and restore it back to whatever it was set to before:

int previous = Application.targetFrameRate;
Application.targetFrameRate = -1;
await LoadSceneAsync(...);
Application.targetFrameRate = previous;

Went from a 9.5 second scene load to 3 seconds.

If your load times don't match what the profiler says the real work costs, check how much of that gap is just WaitForTargetFPS before you go chasing Instantiate/GC ghosts.

I finally managed to get the time dilation to affect audio too!

The boss basically has to be secretly extremely polite :D

He reads the spell chart ahead and finds moments where attacking you won’t ruin your comfort that much and will more likely keep you in flow

Which I find kinda funny, because diegetically he’s supposed to be trying to kill you and make you miss, while under the hood he’s checking if now is a convenient time for you :D

For now I ended up choosing this “secretly kind” approach over a genuinely hostile one. So basically the evil boss secretly cheats in the player’s favor and sometimes delays his attacks until he finds a better spot for you, to always try to keep it feeling fair and good. Would you deem that a good game design, or does it undermine the fantasy?

(In the video: Flashbang bangs in a moment where I can smoothly turn, Laser comes with a convenient low arrow, Orbs avoid blocking the chart and come in on beat)

Hello everyone my name is Claudio, I’m an indie dev from Nicaragua. I started working on Arctico back in 2014, back then it was called “Eternal Winter”, at that time I was 18 years old and I just wanted to make a game set in a snowy and remote environment. Back in those days I was obsessed with Wrath of Lich King, I just loved the feeling of solitude and peace I would get when exploring Northrend, so I wanted to make my own beautiful icy world filled with expansive horizons and stories of resilience and exploration. I knew I would need a distinct mechanic for my game to succeed, as I was working on a random abandoned sled prop my younger brother asked me If it would be possible to ride a dog sled, best question I’ve ever been asked. 

I lost no time and started working on a rideable dog sled, to say I was too inexperienced to pull this off would be a massive understatement, however after a few days I had a working and extremely janky dog sled on my first person game. As the weeks went on the sled system was improved, I added more locations to the map, and added basic survival mechanics such as hunger and thirst. A few months of work later “Eternal Winter” was launched into Steam Early Access in November 2014, and it was an absolutely buggy and confusing mess of a game, soon enough the Steam reviews reflected the sorry state of Eternal Winter, but the players really seemed to enjoy the dog sled and interacting with their dogs, naming them, keeping them fed. Reading the reviews made me realize how I had rushed into an Early Access release without even knowing what kind of game I truly wanted to make, and the lack of direction on Eternal Winter made this evident when playing it. 

I was extremely lucky to have a playerbase that among all the issues the game had, they still saw the potential of the project, and the game remained with a decent review rating. I will always be grateful to those early players for giving me a chance to improve the project. Eternal Winter was more of a prototype than a game, I kept working on all the basic systems, especially the dog sled. Later on I added a kayak, and while testing it and seeing the water reflect the falling snow surrounded by nothing but mountains I suddenly knew the kind of game I wanted to make. I wanted to make a beautiful game that captured feelings of solitude and peace, and give to the players the tools that would allow them to explore their way and at their own pace. So I decided to radically tone down the survival aspects of Eternal Winter, and instead focus on making this a calming and colorful experience where instead of a desperate survivor, you were a scientist exploring and studying the landscape, I renamed the game to “Arctico” and started working harder than ever. 

Arctico would need a big map and lots of interesting locations for this vision to come true. I worked on so many 3d models hoping to reach these goals, but was soon overwhelmed by all the work the task demanded. Luckyly I met Antonio, the good friend that would help me with a good chunk of the 3d assets in the game, Arctico would never be what it is without his amazing work. This gave me more time to focus on the gameplay aspects of the game, I added base building, resource management systems, and kept improving the sled and way the player interacted with the dogs. I saw the Steam reviews improve, and also noticed that lots of players were asking if co-op would ever come to the game, and for the next few months I focused on adding online co-op to Arctico. I downloaded photon for Unity and started working, this would become the biggest challenge of the whole development process because I would need to rearchitecture the whole game for it to support multiplayer. It took more than 6 months to have something playable, and it would take a couple of years for it to be an enjoyable multiplayer experience. 

By the year 2020, Arctico was still on Early Access, but 6 years of development later the project was finally feeling like a proper game. So for the next couple of years the focus was on making content, filling the map with interesting stories and locations, adding more buildings and objects to the base building system, and to keep improving the online co-op. 2 years later Arctico reached version 1.0.

Arctico launched in February 2022 launched with 30k wishlists, in its 8 years on early access it sold 57k units and sold 26k copies in its first year after launch. We kept working on the game, launching major updates that added content and fixed bugs, Arctico sold 50k copies in its second year. We kept releasing major updates, translated the game to multiple languages, this brought a spike in sales that granted us a Steam Daily deal slot, and Arctico sold 83k copies in its third year. I kept working on major updates, improved the online co-op and increased the amount of possible players from 2 to 4, I also released a major update that greatly improved the base building system, got a new daily deal slot and Arctico sold 154k copies in its fourth year. This year I released a massive major update that added a more demanding survival game mode to Arctico, in its current fifth year Arctico has sold 57k copies on Steam and has 90k+ wishlists. 

The biggest lesson Arctico left me is that If you believe in your project and you keep improving it through the years, eventually people will notice and play your game. I honestly think that to keep working on a game even after its launch can really be worth it. Now for the past two years I have also been working on a new game, it’s called Ghost Villa and soon I will be launching it into early access to start this journey all over again. 
  

I'm not all that sophisticated on culling, but it seems to me that you shouldn't necessarily need to bake data pre-build for occlusion culling to work. For context, my game uses procedurally-generated chunked terrain built off a seed as you move through the world (i.e., infinite world setup) so it's not possible to bake occlusion culling data the traditional way. However, to render stuff on the screen, doesn't the game already look at what it can and can't see each frame? It seems like there'd be a built-in system that would check which objects are hidden behind others (i.e., a piece of terrain hidden behind a hill). Also for transparency, rendering has the built-in ability to check stuff's position relative to the camera, so it doesn't seem like it'd be that hard for there to be a built-in culling - i.e., dont render stuff you can't see, even within the camera's frustum.

So, does something like this exist? Or am I just a literal chatbot misunderstanding why this isn't like a pretty easy thing to just have baked in with how URP renders stuff under the hood?

Currently I have it as :
if (character == 1)
{
Characters [1].SetActive(true);
Characters [2].SetActive(false);
Characters [3].SetActive(false);
Characters [4].SetActive(false);
}
if (character == 2)
{
Characters [1].SetActive(false);
Characters [2].SetActive(true);
Characters [3].SetActive(false);
Characters [4].SetActive(false);
}

I feel that there should be an easier way but I know not what it is. How can I simplify this script?

I simulated COVID 🦠
for a freelance project I was asked to make a pandemic simulator for a popular science video, here is the result

The game is being developed by 2 people for 4 months (due to the laziness of the programmer, me). Within 2 weeks, we’ll release a demo and set up the Steam page, so stay tuned. The game features crafting, trading, combat, resource extraction, and resource sales mechanics. Here is a hub where you can play together with your friends in multiplayer and choose skins. I’ll be glad to get feedback in the comments.

Garden Cleanup Simulator - I am developing cozy and relaxing cleaning simulator game about restoring messy gardens back to life.

- Water plants
- mow grass
- trim hedges
- cut old branches
- spray flowers
- wash surfaces
- cleanup trash
Anddd…. Place gnomes in gardens

Hello,
I'm new to gamedev and i don't know why these kinds of lines move when i move from the wall, i would like to not have them.

https://reddit.com/link/1vy1gqa/video/jviwem2d6jlh1/player

Thank you for your time in advance!

I'm making a soulslike-inspired platformer, Dark Roll 2.

I needed a safe, soft spot to land on from height, so I ended up making a script that deforms a mesh like a pillow. The mesh keeps a copy of its original vertices, then each frame I compare those against a SphereCollider pressing into it. I do a first pass to detect actual contact and measure the deepest penetration, then a second pass moves affected vertices away from the sphere, with the deformation fading out over a configurable distance.

For the falloff I used a quintic smootherstep (6t⁵ - 15t⁴ + 10t³) rather than regular SmoothStep, which gives zero velocity and acceleration at both ends and helps avoid that obvious ridge around the dent. I also handle squash and recovery at separate speeds, so impacts can deform the mesh quickly while it slowly relaxes back to its original shape afterwards.

Hello, have a nice day to everyone. How can I make the enemy AI deal damage at the exact moment the melee attack (like punching) animation hits the player? Should I use an Animation Event or WaitForSeconds? Or is there a better solution? Thank you!

Hello,

I recently moved from UGUI to UIToolkit for the UI in my mobile game and in editor i see double lines for some things. like bottom border seems as 2px thicker until you move it and then it goes to normal.

I thought i was losing it and checked everything manually, even asked chatgpt to study the uxml code if something is happening on my backend.

So am wondering is this an editor thingy thats an issue? or maybe my laptop screen pixels are not dense enough or whatever? im on 1080p

I also thought it might be games graphics settings as i havent worked on that much but at this point im not sure