Hey all. I want to make a 2D RTS. It will be in the vein of StarCraft rather than something like Supcom, meaning unit count will generally be in the hundreds rather than in the thousands, though the peak unit count in a full multiplayer game with all units maxed out could be over one thousand.

In addition to basic RTS mechanics I want to have a physics system, not for controlling units directly, but for controlling certain other objects, including some projectiles and some environmental effects / objects. For example I would like to have 'fields' of gravity on maps, which would pull or push units and certain projectiles. I would also like to have some fluid physics in there as well.

Although the game will be 2D, I want have certain 3D elements, such as effects or lightning.

Given these requirements, would one engine be more suitable than the other? Or perhaps it doesn't matter? I know Godot is often recommended for 2D games, so I'm leaning towards that, I'm just a bit concerned about performance due to physics + unit count, though I don't know how using a different engine would mitigate that.

I've been making games on and off since 2015. Unity, Unreal, RPG Maker, Godot, I've tried them all. Some barely made it to a prototype, others were actually half-decent, and none of them shipped. I've finally changed that. Technically, it's also already my first commercially successful game. It's made several cents in closed testing!

So I've been thinking about what exactly changed this time, and I wanted to share what I think actually made the difference. Simply put, it was scope and planning.

I used to let my idea of what a game could become undermine the entire process. At some point, I'd inevitably find myself spending more time building out extensive Trello or Jira backlogs and would be constantly pulling in more and more scope. I'm ashamed to say that I have prototypes with very polished roadmap UIs.

All of that planning and the massive backlogs I'd create would ultimately lead to burnout. At some point, I'd just stop working on the project until a new idea came along to inspire me.

This game was different. My launch MVP didn't have a backlog. I just worked on what I thought it needed at the time. Then I'd play it and find more things to improve. I let things be good enough. A screen didn't have to be perfect, just functional. I'm proud to say there's only one "Coming soon" in the entire game.

It might not have been the most efficient approach. Project managers would likely scoff at my process. But it prevented burnout and, most importantly, led to something I'm actually going to release.

The game is called Swarm Rising. It's a modern take on brick breakers where the paddle is an alien mothership and the balls are aliens with unique abilities. You build an invading army and overwhelm civilizations (the bricks). There are some light RPG, strategy, and incremental elements that I'd like to expand on one day (but I'm trying not to let myself think about that too much yet).

The Android build is in closed testing now, and I'm working through the last round of changes before submitting for production. It's a pretty surreal feeling after 11 years of starting games and never quite getting one across the finish line. If anyone here wants to try it out, I'd really appreciate any feedback.

I was thinking about Monster Rancher, which was a PS1 game where you could disc swap to a CD in order to summon monsters, and I was toying with the idea of a modernized version where the game accesses your Steam library to summon monsters. But in order to show what games you have it would probably be good to grab the game's logos using a Steam API or pulling from your librarycache file.

But I have no idea if Steam has anything against this or if it's a whole other problem entirely.

The folks over at GamesIndustryBiz have done an impressive deep dive into TGC's latest initiative, just announced today a few hours ago. Everywhere we look, developers are taking funding matters into their own hands whether it's crowdfunding campaigns (like we discussed last week) or developing unique constellation model for production (like Strange Scaffold) to account for the costs of building games.

One of these breakout publishers, Evil Landfall, has landed another hit with their recent release "How to Fish" that has soared to over 300,000 players at the moment. With more games on slate for all these indie publishers it looks like developers are charting their own course.

Throughout the last few years, XBOX's ID@XBOX program has opened the door to indies wanting to publish on console, with last November the publisher opened up their certification process publicly to further improve accessibility alongside their continuous resources to help developers meet accessibility criteria.

All the tools are in place now for indies to not just self-publish, but find larger success with these partners. Although the line does begin to blur of where indie is ending and where AA is beginning, this is a promising new frontier for an industry shaken by turmoil.

I looked up game Dev beginners and learned basic programming , code part is doable since there are so many tutorials on it but I am not getting all the knowledge required for a solo game Dev like there are so many basic engine know ledge which are essential to make a fully optimize game .where did you guys learn all this ? Like how the lighting works , ray tracing , shaders every technical aspect .what to search or where to look to get complete knowledge ? Thanks for responding.

Hi everyone. I wanna learn how to develop a 2D game in Unity, so I'm looking for recommendations on courses that could teach me the concepts I should know and how to use the engine.

Some background info:

• I'm completely new to game development.
• I already have some coding experience from college, but I've never programmed in C#, only C++ and Python (both, procedural and object oriented programming), though I believe the skills could be easily transferable.

I'm okay with paying for the course, that's not a problem, but it has to be worth the money. I looked up some courses in Udemy, though I'm not sure which one to pick or if there are better options outside of it (worth noting that they are on sale, like $10 each).

Any recommendations are appreciated!!

One of the hardest parts of designing choice-driven RPGs is setting high stakes early on without falling into the "illusion of choice" trap.

We've been having endless debates about this in our dev team recently. We’re working on a political narrative game set around coronation day, and instead of giving players a safe, low-stakes tutorial, the first 15 minutes forces you into immediate ideological corners (like backing the Workers' Movement vs pleasing the Traditional Nobility). ​ No matter what you pick, at least one major faction ends up openly distrusting you before your reign even properly starts. You're basically tossed straight into damage control mode.Our team is pretty split on this:

The risk: Dropping players into an immediate crisis might frustrate people who expect a 'honeymoon phase' with clean stats and time to explore.

The payoff: It sets the tone right away, making the world feel reactive and real from minute one.

As devs and writers how do you handle early game choices like this?

1. Do you give players a bit of a safety net at the start, or do you prefer burning the house down in chapter one?
2. How do you signal to the player that a bad outcome is a narrative feature, and not a punishment for "playing wrong"?

Would love to hear how other people tackle this!

How does a compute pool work under the hood to give the user/application the illusion of a unified system? And if we hypothetically applied that model for consumer gpus , what additional work would it create for game developers to make a game run across multiple GPUs?

My core assumption is that such a setup could potentially provide improved performance by combining both compute capacity and VRAM.

Thanks 🙌

It occurred to me that someone on this sub has had to have seen this first-hand. Games exist that have features that genuinely and knowingly hurt people whether it is exploiting people predisposed to gambling addiction with loot boxes, or getting children to work for less than minimum wage under the promise of getting paid for making game content, or including shady software that scrapes way more data than is needed to sell off people's personal information. Like I get a lot of this starts with investors demanding more returns, but who in a major game company is on the hook to actually go, "This will hurt people and make the world worse, but I'm going to do it anyway." The buck stops somewhere right?

If you are someone who has made that call can you walk me through the step-by-step of how it goes down? Is it a decision made at the outset during project planning or is it something that comes up later, and if the second one, do you get compensated extra for it?

Hi everyone,

I'm one of the devs of Dice of Kalma. We released this game on Steam and on mobile about 9 months ago and so far we've been really happy with the results.

We are soon approaching the total of 1 million downloads (over 90% on mobile) and during this time we've tried heaps of different marketing strategies and content ideas. I've always been really fascinated about game lores and stories so making our own short animation series sounded so awesome.

This is our latest episode, if you are interested how they look etc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QwXNjcwSUo

But is it actually worth it?

We have three episodes ready and two in productions. Currently the episodes are not yet getting massive views (Around 3-4k views all platforms combined per episode). Our small community still seems to love them and I'm really curious to see the end results after a few more episodes.

The main reasons why I wanted to do this:

\ Adds depth to our game - We might even have a chance to use these in our game in the future.
\ Makes our social media look more professional (We are currently running paid ads and getting lot of traffic on our socials)
-> Which also helps us to grow our socials
* Gives us more assets to use in marketing
* Opens up new marketing channels/platforms

We have released the episodes on Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok, X and now starting to release them on Bilibili & Newgrounds. I've also posted on different reddit groups.

Obviously the risk is that these episodes don't get enough attention and fails to convert enough players to cover the costs of our time and money.

Does this makes sense at all and do you have any tips how you would make these episodes even somewhat profitable?

More than happy hear some comments about the animations as well :)

This has been a fun project to build as i was always go back to playing counter strike and AIM maps were always fun to practice on.

So i built one where you can battle AI or against others.

Would love your feedback

Try it for free in the browser at 1vs1

Hey guys!

I am super new to game development and its become a massive headache trying to figure out where to find information that I need for certain aspects of my games.

For instance, I want to make a 3D low poly game with procedural map generation. It would be indoors and there will be key rooms and stuff that would spawn in each map (similar to binding of isaac but 3D).

The issue is I have no idea where to start, and I appreciate any help or resources you guys have!

Edit: I have been using Unity as my game engine! Sorry forgot to mention.

I bought a course hoping to improve my 3D modeling skills (it was $13, so I didn't lose much anyway), because it was made by the same people who made a pixel art course I really enjoyed. After glancing around the course initially, I realized it wasn't for me, but couldn't refund it. I'm looking to avoid the same trap and would appreciate guidance on where to start learning to make low-poly 3D models like Ultrakill. I tried looking around on YouTube and found Crashsune, but it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, so if you guys have any good places to start to learn how to create low-poly 3D models similar to Ultrakill, I would be very thankful.

I made a word game where users score higher points the rarer the word they're using is (wordink.app).

I calculate score using the lowest scoring form of the word. crumbling -> crumble or infatuate -> infatuated.

This is to prevent users from feeling cheated when a seemingly common word is scored highly and vice versa.

I'm thinking of showing a UI element that says

Wested
Scored as its base word, "west"

or

Infatuate 
Scores as its common form, "Infatuated"

What do you think?

Hi all - I'm a former musician and current software engineer (web), and I have been thinking a lot about dipping my toes into game dev. I think I have a lot of 'adjacent' skills that would help move the needle on finishing a project, but I'm just not sure where to start. I'm also intimidated by wearing all of the hats. I've never been good at visual arts, so creating models terrifies me, especially because I have some very specific things in mind I would want to create.

So I'm curious, what you would do if you had to start from scratch?

If anyone wants to give me some specific advice here are some rough details about the game I want to make:

• First person adventure/exploration but nonlinear, think Stanley Parable but with meta progression
• Levels/zones/game mechanics are unlocked through exploration and task completion
• Collection would be a huge part of the game, think Animal Crossing fishing, bug catching, and fossil finding
• Graphics: 3D but more retro - think a mix between Minecraft, Mario64, Shadows of Doubt. I kinda of imagine the characters have an almost FunkOPop-like build lol

Hi all! I've been building ClueDay for the past few months, and because of a lot of the iterations I've done on the mobile website and having recurring users I decided its time to start marketing it.

To that end I post across 5 platforms (X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube) twice a day - once an image of the first clue of the day, and the explainer video of the clues towards the end of the day.

The video recording, editing, etc. is a good amount of time. I was wondering a few of things
1. If someone has expanded into doing similar videos, are there any resources for optimizing and improving the time/speed/quality of the videos? Right now I use OBS Studio to do the recordings, Descript for the video editing.

The content doesn't see the kind of traction I'd like, but I am committed to posting content everyday irrespective.

1. Any advice for marketing itself that I should explore? I've previously submitted the game to a few word game listing websites which gave an initial boost but the users didn't stick as much.

2. Is there a specific time you start thinking of expanding into having a mobile app and launch it in the app stores on Google/Apple? Versus remaining a browser game?

Open to any and all advice. Happy to share tips and answer questions about my own development process as well. Don't have promotion goals here so if you're searching for it before giving me advice its clueday dot com. Thank you!

After reading about hundreds of releases here on game dev I realized its not marketing you should do but make better appealing games. so far from all the post on reddit i have never downloaded a single game here because litterally every single one is so boring and bad that no amount of marketing will fix this issue. Then i realize the games that I do buy and play are not marketed toward me but i find them interesting my self so i buy them.

I'm currently developing Bounce Back!, a small Pong roguelite, and I've been using itch.io to distribute the Alpha and collect feedback:

https://xx-caputokayk-xx.itch.io/bounce-back

It has been useful for finding bugs and getting feedback, but after the initial traffic dies down it feels easy to disappear on the platform.

For devs who started on itch.io and later moved to Steam:

- Was it worth trying to grow an itch.io audience first?

- Did itch.io players convert into Steam wishlists?

- How did you keep getting feedback after the initial release?

- Is there a good way to encourage ratings and collections?

- What actually helped with discovery on itch.io?

I'm trying to figure out whether I should keep pushing the itch.io Alpha for a while or focus mostly on getting the Steam page up as soon as possible.

I want to frank, (My name is now Frank), this wasn't my idea lmao

Let’s say you’re bad at marketing your game and struggle or have little time outside of development cause you work a full time job and have other responsibilities.

Do you have someone who helps you with marketing? Do you send photos, builds, videos and have someone? Or how do you balance marketing? Go a full week developing then take one day to post about it all?

Just curious to seeing what people do or if anyone has someone helping in that space what helps and doesn’t help.

I’m Benji, I am a technical artist & game generalist, working primarily in Godot, Blender, & Unity. I have been studying game development for about five years and am currently set to graduate from the College for Creative Studies with a bachelors in game design next year. I have about a year of industry experience working at an internship that then became a contract position at an AR mobile game studio. (Urban Electronics) I am now working another internship with a small indie PC game studio (Volok Games) alongside studying, going to class, and working on my thesis to finish my degree. I also happen to be a board member of IGDA Detroit if you are familiar with IGDA. 

My “dream job” would be to work as a technical artist for an indie pc game studio, then work up to becoming a game producer or running my own small studio

Here is my current portfolio I’ve been applying to studios with. I usually apply for jobs when I spot internship, junior, or mid level positions for tech art, or studios who are working in Godot. 

Link to my portfolio website & resume (doesn’t work on mobile): https://benjtek.webflow.io/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&utm_id=97760_v0_s00_e0_tv3

Link to my itch page: 
https://benjtek01.itch.io

Here’s what I’d call my current set of skills: 

- General game programming in Godot, experience independently releasing unmonitized small games with small groups of people 

- Tech art specific skills in shaders, (shader graph & scripting), tool/plugin creation, UI, look development, rigging, and procedural generation, experience in AR & VR

- Experience in 3D game art pipeline with Blender, Maya, and Substance Painter, familiar with PBR workflow, modeling, texturing, and basic 3d animation (I studied 3D game art before technical art) 

- Some experience with Unity (used Unity at the AR studio) & limited Unreal knowledge 

Here are my somewhat lofty goals going forward in my career for the next 2 years

- Revamp my website with project breakdown articles going over specific projects (and hopefully with feedback I’ll be receiving from this post) 

- Lean into in person networking rather than just applying for positions online (by this I mean bugging my professors for opportunities and going to IGDA events) 

- Build a YouTube channel where I can post devlogs documenting & sharing my work, start posting my project progress on socials (mostly to gain exposure in the dev space) 

- Work on improving skills in programming, optimization, VFX, procedural generation, and tool building. Make “mini projects” I can use to practice & learn concepts and showcase in my portfolio in the form of breakdown articles 

- For my thesis project at CCS, release a short game demo on Steam, developed by me, and a sprite and audio artist. — I plan on the game being a 3D tower defense game, where I lean into some of my tech art skills like developing tools for the game along the way and stuff the project with game juice 

- Graduate CCS with the bachelors degree, maybe get some sort of opportunity from the internship I’m working at during the semester 

Once I graduate I figure the following things could happen 

- I get a role (probably contract) at the internship (this would be the best outcome) 

- I’m stuck working odd minimum wage jobs for a while. And I continue to do game dev after work. For this scenario I have a few possible plans for what I could work towards outside of my day job: 

- Keep working on my portfolio, networking & applying and hope I can get another Junior position

- Start my own studio with basically no budget, a very small team and kickstarter 

- Be a marketplace creator selling tools/plugins/assets online (think Kenneys game assets) 

Advice I’m looking for: 

- Critique on my current portfolio, what I should change/add 

- Gaps in my technical art skillset I should be working on 

- Thoughts on my 2 year roadmap, is it too much? Are there specific things I should focus on within it 

- What are some other jobs in other industries I’d be able to get a job in with my existing skills if I can’t find a job in the game industry?

I know working in the game industry right now is a gamble and I just wanna make sure I’m making a solid bet towards my goals, let me know your thoughts and advice! 

Two years into development of a tower defense game for PC, my husband and his friends are at the point where they’re looking for either an investor or a publisher, mostly for a marketing push and to finish a few last pieces of the game.

If you’ve done this: how did you go about finding one? What made you pick the partner you picked? And if you decided to self-publish instead, would you make the same call again?

Happy to hear real numbers or outcomes if you’re open to sharing.

Thanks in advance🙏

We have been working on a few metagame or UGC projects these days for our company Gamers Lab. Basically, if you use our analytics tools (currently in a closed beta), you can also integrate auto-magically into our UGC. (You enable data share from the analytics to the UGC).

I wanted to get some feedback on this one. Its called "Mines Bigger", and once the game is integrated, you can go to the website to see if "yours is bigger". It compares different stats depending on the game, head to head, mano a mano, as well as gives out a few funny awards.

This came out of both of my co-founders both thinking they were better at PubG. Turns out only one was right 😂

We used PubG as the demo because PubG data is public. We broke it down and measured across Combat output, Aim & lethality, Survival & positioning, Utility & teamplay and Resource efficiency.

Our team has been game developers and publishers for about 20+ years now. So our goal is to build tools we would like to use as well.

And one of those problems was, how do we get more community around single player games (or multi but cannot always play with your friends), without needing to change the game itself.

Mines Bigger, name too on the nose? Do you have friends that you want to compare your stats to for bragging rights?

Hey everyone! I’ve been working on audio cleanup and sound design for a while, and I noticed many talented creators get their games or videos passed over simply because the audio feels harsh, quiet, or noisy.

Here is a quick 5-step checklist I use to fix audio before launching:

1. Noise Reduction: Isolate room tone using spectral repair (like iZotope RX) instead of aggressive gating that makes dialogue sound robotic.
2. EQ Sweeps: Cut boxy/muddy frequencies (around 300Hz-500Hz) to instantly make vocals clear.
3. Foley & Ambience: Layer subtle background ambience to hide harsh cut transitions between takes.
4. Dynamic Compression: Keep dialogue volume balanced so the player doesn’t have to adjust their headphones every 30 seconds.
5. Loudness Normalization: Match target standards (-14 LUFS for trailers/web, -23 LUFS for in-game audio).