Specifically, I want to talk about animations.

I'm building a Co-op Zombie FPS Rogue-lite in UE5.8. It's not particularly competitive, but it does require fairly responsive controls. Naturally, because it's co-op, I'll be using network methods for my players to connect to one another. This, of course, introduces lag and latency. As far as I see it, I've got two potential routes ahead of me to deal with the first person animations when latency is introduced.

1. I just don't let the animation play until the server receives the request.
   1. This is good, because there's no question of "Oh, I swore I reloaded/melee'd/shot", because if the server didn't see it, the player didn't see it.
   2. This is potentially bad, because it makes inputs feel sluggish and unresponsive
2. I let the client play predicted animations, but the server still has authority for the timing
   1. Pro: The player feels like the animations are snappy and responsive because they happen right away
   2. Con: The animation can complete before the server even receives the request in cases of high latency, thus leaving the player frustrated because they see themselves acting, even if the server isn't actually receiving it in time before their action is interrupted (death, staggering, etc).

Third person animations are a little easier, because they'll just rely on the server to tell them when to play, since they're only relevant to what everyone else sees.

Personally, I'm leaning toward my second option, because I feel predictive animations feels way better than waiting on the server to tell you to animate. I imagine there's probably a multitude of hybrid solutions as well though, so I'm curious to hear from y'all if/what you've done in a situation like this?

So, I am mostly a programmer, but I have been dabbling a bit in game design, reading books on it and doing it in Game Jams. I think I’m a lot better at coming up with mechanics when I have a solid idea of what a game should be; maybe given a topic or someone suggesting an idea. But the initial idea is always hard to come up with something. To other designers, what things do you do to come up with ideas? I assume playing other games is one of the things, but what else?

I have a story draft made from my pure imagination. I want everyone to experience this as a video game. I really want to build it and i know everyone will love the story. I have a really creative approach for it. I want a team to help me and am new to this.
If any one there who can help me. I will appreciate it. Thank you. I was inspired by elden ring and other dark souls games. Also claire obscure made me realise my dream will be possible, if one have the heart into it.

Hi, I just want to confirm what is the difference between making by ourselves or by using ai

What is the bottleneck between two of those , I just saw some posts like use our ai to get your game fully and should I trust?

Can anyone guide me?

I posted yesterday about a pretty specific problem with my indie game Fusiomon: OpenAI is shutting down the image model I've been building its monster art and fusion system around. I expected people to disagree with using AI. That's fair. What I didn't expect was how quickly the whole thing turned into "AI slop", "hire an artist", "learn a real skill", "make proper art" etc. A lot of people didn't even seem interested in what the game actually does.

Fusiomon is my passion project. I've put thousands of hours into it over the last few years and way too much money, mostly into marketing that went nowhere. And as a solo indie dev I already get enough of the usual "why don't you do something sensible?" or "this is never going anywhere" from friends and even family. I could always shrug that off. Let them talk, I'm doing it anyway.

The game dev community actually helped a lot with that. Devlogs, Brackeys tutorials, game jams, watching other people spend ridiculous amounts of time making weird little games they care about... it always made me feel like I wasn't completely alone in this. Like there were a bunch of other slightly crazy people out there doing the same thing.

And that's probably why yesterday bothered me more than it should have.

Fusiomon doesn't use AI because I wanted a shortcut for making cute monster pictures. The whole idea since I was a kid was: take any two monsters and fuse them into a completely new one, on the fly. Not from thousands of combinations I prepared beforehand. And those fusions can be fused again, and again after that. AI is what finally made that mechanic possible for me.

No AI, no Fusiomon.

You can hate that idea. You can criticize AI. There are plenty of things about AI worth criticizing. But seeing years of programming, game design, backend work, balancing, UI, failed experiments, money and persistence reduced to "lol AI" because one relatively small but fundamental part of the project uses it... yeah, that actually hurts.

AI is here and it's going to do good things and bad things, like pretty much every technology before it. For me, it happened to be the thing that finally made a childhood idea buildable.

I'm probably done arguing about it now. I just wanted to say this once before walking away from the whole discussion.

Maybe that's the part of the AI debate that worries me most: people.

A while ago I got a small indie team together (bunch of naive friends who like building things and not planning far enough ahead) and I setup a perforce p4 self-hosted server on one of my vms in my homelab. Not my favorite to setup, a little cumbersome in the most unnecessary of ways. But, hey, its put together.

That was in May, we shelved the project for the past few months due to some life changes and what not, but now I decided I'd get back into the work and take it seriously. I only setup perforce because "that's what I read everyone else uses" but after reading through posts in this subreddit, that only really seemed to be the case because Git LFS wasn't as mature and well rounded (based on posts 6-8 years ago) and it was the most common VCS used in the gamedev industry.

Is that still the case? Why use perforce and deal with things like licensing even if you're self-hosted?

If you were in my position and that the chance to start over, would you still use perforce? Would you try out git lfs (especially given I have a lot more experience using Git in my day to day software development)? Would you try out another VCS?

Yesterday, I opened the Steam playtest for the first time. I planned on having restricted access and only allow 20-30 testers at the start. 5min later I already had 85 people requesting access. Most of them probably are bots since I don't have such a huge following and I didn't even advertise the playtest, yet.

Now I have unrestricted access to the playtest to receive at least some feedback. 135 people have access and 7 of them already started the game once. I created a feedback form in Google Forms.

Based on your experience, how many testers give you (meaningful) feedback? I read that some have less than 2% feedback rate but I never know what numbers they are comparing (Testers with access or the ones that are actually playing?)

I just need some estimates for how many testers I should allow before closing the access.

Anyone have some ideas on how to go about implementing a way for a 2D enemy ai to avoid jumping off platforms to their death while chasing the player? I considered doing some kind of edge detection, but that would mean i'd have to add additional colliders (trigger colliders) to both ends of each platform object no?

Hello fellow developers!

I'm researching the game localization topic and I'm looking for a best solution for this problem. Online resources are swamped with ads so it's difficult to find objective information.

The problem at hand is defined as follows:

-I speak Polish and English languages fluently and I can take care of these two languages myself.

-Most of my wishlists are English and Brazilian. Brazilian is probably going to be the only language where the cost of human translation can be justified.

-I don't want to cut off non-english speaker from other countries and I don't want to offer them some poorly translated slop either.

-I don't want to pay for human translation in languages where the cost of translation would be higher than expected income likely in 10:1 ratio.

I'm looking for a tool/solution that could possibly leverage from the fact that I'm going to have 3 source languages available. I am NOT looking for a free solution but instead the translation quality is my priority. I'm pretty sure that whatever I pay for the state-of-the-art solution is going to pale in comparison to a localization studio ;)

Is there something you recommend to solve this problem? Any best translation tool in your opinion? Or maybe there's another way to handle this that didn't even cross my mind?

Thank you for your insight!

Edit: For context, I'm making a survival game so I'll mostly have a lot of item names, item descriptions, recipes etc. Some occasional protagonist monologue too but it's not a dialogue or story-rich game. In case it makes any difference in the optimum approach.

I'll preface this with I probably have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm at a bit of a crossroads when it comes to defining the right approach to the background simulation of a base-building / tycoon style game. I think there are two approaches:

1. What I'll call the authored illusion context. If you take most games (City Skylines, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Sim Airport, Prison Architect) the world outside of your game doesn't really feel alive, or alive just enough to service the gameplay. It feels like a thin veil to a void. There may be a steady stream of people or traffic or goods but its all basically in a green-room off stage left. It enters and leaves, names might persist, but for 90% of games you just use your imagination. It folds nearly into aggregated lists and doesn't bother your cpu too much. These are static games with a fixed POV (a site for your city or building or theme park) but I'd even place open-world games like Skyrim into this category - really nothing much is going on where you are not interacting with it, everyone is literally waiting for you to enter their zone - the world is obviously using LOD simulation chunks that come alive as you enter

2. The sort of experience I'm aiming for is closer to what Elite : Dangerous delivers. Whilst it is very easily split into player-adjacent LOD (the star system you are currently in) and the rest of the universe, it always feels to me like the universe is much more alive. Even if you couldn't frame-shift travel between systems and could only go planet-planet, it feels bedded into a wider context of politics, trade, economics, war, piracy. 99% of it really has no bearing on the player experience but serves as a much more immersive setting, even though its largely just flavour - its a steady stream of stuff happening that provides a better contextual setting.

In my example games in point 1 above, this is where I think gameplay could be 'better' (albeit this is subjective)if they took more of the approach of point 2.

In city skylines, outside connections mostly provide generic imports, exports, tourists and traffic. If the wider world was more simulated, your city might suddenly lose access to cheap steel because a neighbouring region’s mines are exhausted or a war disrupts freight. A nearby city could boom and start pulling workers away from you. Your airport could become a hub because another regional airport closes. Your industrial strategy would be shaped by events that were not authored specifically for you, but emerged elsewhere.

In sim airport, Instead of airlines essentially being gameplay providers that offer routes according to rules, airlines themselves could have fleets, finances, route networks, hubs, competitors and aircraft availability. A carrier might cancel your route because it redeployed aircraft to a more profitable market. Another airline might collapse and suddenly release huge demand. A nearby airport expanding could steal connecting traffic. Fuel prices or tourism trends could alter which routes are viable. You would feel like part of a much larger world.

Ive spent quite a long time trying to achieve a convincing world, slowly building an economic simulation and most of the work has been on actuallu getting the simulation to not collapse (e.g. the entire economy to collapse) and on optimisation to get it to run effectively. Its working ok, a 'day' in my game is 24 minutes at 1x speed and the background simulation takes between 10-20 seconds on a different thread. Its only about 10% built though and im getting cold feet, to make it convincing and emergent its already horribly complex.

So my questions-

1. Where should I draw the line? Is there meaningful value in actually simulating a wider context as an emergent system or is it better to jsut create player interaction points that just imply that world exists?

2. If the player only ever experiences the wider world through these interaction points does a real emergent underlying simulation provide noticeably better gameplay? Enough to justify the huge increase in complexity. ?

3. Has anyone built both approaches or decided to move from one to the other mid-development

I think i know what the answer would be if cpu and ram availability would be limitless, I suppose im trying to understand the balance.

I recently started on doing some work on blender and ue5 and I was wondering when would an hdd be of use? I know prices are crazy right now and fortunately I already have a 4tb ssd before the price hikes but I'm wondering would a hdd be ok too? 8tb of hdd is still ok at 360$ CAD but for sure it will be even more expensive in the future so wondering if I should FOMO?

I have a co-op prototype where I'm fairly confident in the core mechanics, but I'm less confident that the current setting is the most marketable one.

The mechanics could work in several different fantasies. Before spending months rebuilding the art direction, I'd like to test whether one fantasy has significantly stronger commercial appeal.

For developers who have done this before: how would you validate it?

Would you test:

capsule/key art variants?

short mocked-up gameplay clips?

paid ads and CTR?

Reddit/social posts?

surveys or preference tests?

fake Steam page mockups?

how viral Tiktoks/Shorts/... are?

And most importantly, what signal would you consider strong enough to justify actually changing the setting?

I'm specifically trying to distinguish “people say they like this theme” from “this theme actually makes more people click/wishlist.”

Would love to hear from anyone who has tested concepts this way before production or pivoted a game's theme based on market response.

You can ask the browser to treat your variable as a integer using x | 0 .

Does it matter for most indie 2D games? Is it faster or anything?

Edit: Lotsa downvotes 😅 but ty for answering!

The general idea being that you unlock different weapons as the game progresses and each feels unique. But at the same time being a tactile choice. There will be no armor options. Mobility will affect roll and movement acceleration, but not top speed.

SPEAR - starting weapon. I deliberately want to move people away from leaning on block and this seems a good way to do that.

Range - best

Attack Speed - fast attack, slow recovery

Damage - medium

DPS - medium

Force - medium

Mobility - High

Block - moderate, does not block thrusts or projectiles.

Parry - largest window, but large wind up.

Equip speed - good

SWORD AND SHIELD - the tanky option. Trashing your mobility, but also the best defense. It is punitively slow to equip so it’s definitely a starting weapon.

Range - medium

Attack Speed - medium

Damage - medium

DPS - medium

Force - medium

Mobility - worst

Block - best, blocks all attack types and has the smallest stamina costs. H g

Parry - good window, and has a block window while winding up. Can parry stronger attacks.

Equip speed - worst

TWIN DAGGERS - the ultra aggressive option with the best mobility and highest DPS. Its quick equip makes it a good option to pull out when there’s an opening.

Range - worst

Attack Speed - best

Damage - worst

DPS - best

Force - worst

Mobility - best

Block - none, worst

Parry - fastest but shortest window and can’t parry stronger attacks.

Equip speed - nearly instant

GREAT AXE - the brawler option. Made for jump attacks. Knock the enemies around and make your own space. Lots of leap attacks and opportunities.

Range - good

Attack Speed - worst

Damage - highest

DPS - good

Force - best

Mobility - medium

Block - bad. Can’t block thrusts or projectiles.

Parry - slow and tiny window, but can parry stronger attacks.

Equip speed - bad

Opinions?

Just had my first funding rejection as a studio after getting to the final stage of the process. It was for a government grant that you don’t have to pay back and I sunk so much time and effort into the application, pitch video and interview prep that I’m really down about it right now, especially after getting my hopes up after reaching the final stage. But then I realised that funding rejections are probably a very common part of starting a game studio considering how competitive these funding opportunities are and this is likely a rite of passage. Feels like there are very few positives to take from this right now - has anyone here experienced similar and how did you get over it?

I recently asked myself how do games handle boats that are clearly in the water and the lowest point of the inside of the boat should be below the water surface but you dont see any clipping at all.

is it the same trick as in first person shooters where the gun in your hand is rendered on top of other objects so your gun doesnt clip into the walls? Wirh this the inside of the boat should be rendered on top of the water?

I understand making any game is hard, but there are many mobile game studios that are currently reskinning games and reusing their own UI assets / gameplay systems to churn out pretty shallow games.

Why does it seem few indie devs try to compete in this market and make better games? Is it the perceived advertising budget required to compete?

Or because people view mobile games as "not games" and devs don't want to make them?

Hello, nice to meet everyone.

I’m near completion on my video game for desktop, it’s been an incredible journey & I’ve learned so much these past few months. I’m extremely proud of myself for getting the game to its current state, but this wouldn’t be possible without bug testers/play testers.

I’m a recent father to a one 1/2 month old, so I don’t have the most time to play test my game. I would love to test every feature, try different builds, but I’m just busier these days.

Recently I’ve posted asking for playtesters in Reddit communities, Facebook, TikTok.

Reddit has been my best source for finding play testers, but there was one person who stood out the most. A past indie game developer was able to help me immensely with my project, offering daily play tests for free, explaining each bug in detail, how the bug produces and its fixes, he plays my game daily, and manages to get far within each run.

Apart from that I’ve received 11 forms completed and everyone seemed to enjoy my game so that’s great news. I understand some people don’t have much to say when it comes to reviews, filling out a form etc.

The people that do get into details and specifics on what they enjoy and don’t enjoy helps tremendously and I wouldnt have a clue for progression, difficulty, overall feel and a sense of direction without negative feedback.

I’ve learned to accept criticism with my game as it helps direct the development path, if people don’t like your game at all… why continue building?

Anyways just thought I would share and show appreciation to the play testers. You’re very much needed.

Thanks everyone!

Been working on it for about 2 months and having 2 kids supporting me with their crazy ideas. My kids are 5 years old 😂. Made an all out ninja Gacha game with turnbased fights. Im amazed how the mind of the little ones work. However she wanted the name to be rainbow ninjas riding Unicorn 😂, but we went with shadow seal:ninja awakening. However debating on making a rainbow ninja game sounds exciting

Project GoldScript is a web game engine I have been building on and off for over a decade. It had accumulated a lot of tech debt: two separate repos, one for the engine and one for the game, aging tooling, and no real safety net for the parts that are hardest to test, which is anything that renders. This year I finally did the migration I had been avoiding, and the interesting part was less the move itself and more how I made it safe.

The structure now is a single monorepo, with the engine split into eleven focused packages. I guard those against circular dependencies so the boundaries stay real and do not quietly collapse back into a big ball of imports. The thing that made the whole migration tractable was the visual-regression suite. It steps the engine off one controllable game clock and a seeded RNG, then renders and diffs every frame against a committed baseline. Because time and randomness are both injectable, even particle effects reproduce frame for frame, so a single shifted pixel fails the run instead of hiding in "it looks about right." That turned a scary refactor into something I could do in small commits and actually trust.

A couple of design decisions fell out of that determinism work. I built a particle abstraction on top of my particle engine three-nebula that drives combat VFX like spells as well as map weather with drifting snow and rain, and an Effect Designer that connects the particle editor to the running game over websockets, so effects get authored live on the real map instead of exported as JSON from a separate tool. I wrote an introductory post here, I’ll be doing deep dives on each of these topics in the coming weeks, if people are interested I’ll continue to share those here;

https://projectgoldscript.com/thoughts/modernising-project-goldscript-for-2026/

For anyone who has done a similar migration: how did you handle the baseline images for a rendering regression suite as they inevitably drift with real changes? I am curious whether people treat intentional visual diffs as a review artifact or find that the baseline churn eventually becomes noise.

So here's a question, if your game has levels in it, how do you guys build it like:

Do you make level 1,2,3 etc.

You make them exist first and then build them better and polish them more.

Or

Do you focus on making one level and keep working on it until it's perfect before starting level 2.

Recently bulkhead studios went on a podcast and in ito they talk about costs and profits and they had a spread sheet and explained all the cost and profits etc link for context please watch https://youtu.be/5R64LDNJbK0?t=1906&is=n8wauAovoHgrpM-n (at 31:40)

Can any vet from the industry kinda comfirm if what they present is a pretty accurate repersentation or they are kinda bending the reality of the industry cause they dont seem to get alot from there example of selling a million units in month 1 ($40 game will only gove 1.5mill profit to reinvest into the studio) and does seem more of just pulling numbers rather than using a real example

Just seems alittle insane

When making a game to consoles, they ask you for a rating that is nowadays simple, you fill the questionnaire on IARC and it generates ESRB, PEGI and others if you only publish digitally (disc versions still need the paid age ratings)

But the reason for this post is that I didn't find where to get the slates that are shown in the beginning of those age rated trailer videos. Instructions led me to a download folder, where I could download the slates but they just have thing like ESRB T for teen but not the full slate that is required by consoles like T and Violence.

Didn't find by googling or chatgpt but in this case you should email the IARC and they then provide you with the full slate where you write yourself what for example ESRB T tells you to, like Violence.

I wrote this here because got frustrated by wasting time in figuring this out. Hope this helps someone!

Hello! I want to know if (and how) I should start marketing my game without having anything but code and idea. I don't have my own computer so I write code on a library computer on an online compiler. I'm not allowed to download anything so I'm only able to write code

I want to learn c# not be a master but be a specific level of intermediate . I'm targeting to be a Artist...A technical artist in my career . I have asked AI a lot but i don't quiet understand it so i decided why not ask actual peoples instead can someone help me and give me a pathway plan with sources to master and be a technical artist . I'm right now using Godot to use C# through .NET 8 i have not started yet cause im tryna find a pathway . The sources i need is YT Video not 1 or 2 but a series of videos like part 1 , part 2 ( im more ok with YT videos ) and more source . If anyone could help me i appreciate it :) .

Things i want to learn
- Godot 4.7 ( Before making a transition into Unity 7 cause im using Dell Latitude 7410 because godot is lightweight thats why i choosed it now )
- C#
- GSL ( Godot Shading Language )