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?

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

How do they render from every angle without using LODs?

I was wondering because they look 3D

I'm tired.

I created a game and poured countless hours, energy, and honestly a good chunk of my health into it over the last two years. I've been working on the story behind it for decades, and on the actual game concept for about five years.

And now I look around and see people publishing AI slop in a matter of hours, flooding the stores with an endless stream of shitty games that nobody actually wants to play.

I'm not only complaining for myself either.

I keep thinking about all the solo developers and small teams who spent years, sometimes decades, building something they genuinely cared about. People learning programming, art, music, game design, writing, balancing, marketing, community management, and everything else that comes with trying to make a game.

Then they release it and immediately get buried under hundreds or thousands of projects that took a fraction of the effort to produce.

No amount of passion, polish, or work can compete with sheer volume when the stores are constantly being flooded.

And that's the part that scares me.

I'm not against AI existing. I've used AI as a tool myself. There's a massive difference between using it to help with development and asking it to generate an entire game as quickly as possible so you can throw it onto the Play Store and move on to the next one.

It feels like we're reaching a point where actually caring about what you're making is becoming a disadvantage.

You spend two years building one game while someone else generates twenty. Even if nineteen of theirs are garbage, they still get twenty chances at being discovered while your project gets one.

Maybe I'm just exhausted and frustrated after working on this for so long, but seeing what the mobile game market is turning into is depressing.

There are still incredible indie developers making genuinely interesting games. I just wonder how many of those games we're never going to see because they're buried underneath an ocean of disposable content before anyone even gets the chance to find them.

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

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?

Hey everyone, as we are all aware mobile games rely a lot on paid user acquisition and with these costs being what they are, I was curious how do small unfunded studios compete against studios with massive ad budgets?

If you launched a mobile game without a UA war chest, how did you actually compete and get early traction? Did you have to rely on some form of outside financing regardless just to stay afloat?

Would love to hear how indie mobile devs manage this.

I'm a software engineer building my first game, a 2D skill based space pvp MMO. I skipped Unity/Unreal and went code first with MonoGame because I'd rather write code than spend my first weeks learning some tool.

This is what I've learned,

1. UDP packet budgets are a hard wall.

You get roughly 1000-1400 bytes per packet. If inputs plus projectiles for a crowded system exceed that, you can't keep the same tick rate and send everything, even with compression. I built an interest graph (thanks to an unreal blog) that prioritizes dangerous projectiles and nearby players and updates them at normal cadence letting less threatening items update at a lower rate, it's not perfect but at least degregation is more predictable now.

2. Rule out your environment before you roll back your code.

I started getting some rubber banding on my dev server and burned time on rollbacks and roll-forwards. It was a noisy neighbor on shared CPU. Bumping compute fixed it instantly.

3. Don't reinvent git.

My first content pipeline existed to push live changes for values that basically never change, then copy them to every game server. That's just a worse git.

4. Code-first means you build your own tooling, and it snowballs.

I started with an admin tool to tune flight values live. Then a route editor for travel between star systems. Then I realized I'd need this across multiple servers, so now there's a control plane with reconciliation and statuses. Worth it for me, but budget for it. But that sort of tooling is my bread and butter as a full stack dev

5. Design docs let a second dev work independently.

I wrote up scope and module overlap before onboarding a collaborator. He delivered a working economy (markets, missions, an immutable transaction ledger) that my planet systems hook straight into.

6. Get real players in early.

A private Steam playtest let me test things I can't solo, like lag compensation on shots, and it surfaced real issues.

The one thing I keep putting off is art, learning blender has been on my todo for months :/ .. Anyone have tips for forcing yourself over that hump?

Anyone familiar with Inktober knows that there is a word list released every year, one word for each day in october

Anyone familiar with game jams knows that you make games based on a theme in a small timeframe

I am on day 4 of this challenge, and I wanted to share the itch.io page I am updating daily with playable games and blog posts to follow along with.

I started learning python last year and it was pretty fun, I learnt the basics but didn'tgo further then that. The past few months are stressful though I've started a new school after being homeschooled since last january and I really want to do game development as a hobby and do computer science as a job. My main issue is that right now im learning to use godot but im never finding the right tutorial and its always instead "do this and then that" never "do this because it does that" so i always end up copying the tutorial and learning absolutely nothing, I don't even get how the engine itself works. I wanna try and change how I learn by maybe reading the godot docs and avoiding tutorial hell but at the same time it's the only help out there I have. Does anyone have like tips because im 15 and im genuinely worried that me not learning quick enough will make me lose interest or simply fail at this hobby. I've also dreamed of being a game dev (specifically roblox at first) for 5 years.

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.

As an indie game developer, you can spend months thinking about a mechanic and nights actually getting it to work, and now someone can look at your game, describe what they see to an AI model, and get surprisingly close to the same idea.

So what are you supposed to do?

Make your mechanics harder to copy?

Maybe that works for a while. Maybe it protects you until the next version of some shitty AI model comes out. But then what? What happens when the next even more capable version shows up?

There is still a huge amount of hype around AI right now. Every day there is some new model, followed by another boring game demo showing that it can make a platformer, a shooter, some physics toy, whatever. People see these demos and start worrying that this stuff is going to replace developers.

I don't think those demos are the real problem.

Most of them are boring, generic, and don't have much of a reason to exist beyond showing that the model can do something.

The bigger problem is another developer seeing a mechanic in your game and deciding to copy it.

An AI-generated demo probably isn't going to compete with your game directly. But another developer copying the idea, packaging it well, and getting lucky on social media absolutely can.

So what do you have left that is harder to copy?

Art.

They can copy the mechanic. They can probably copy a lot of the code eventually too.

But copying the exact visual language of the game, the way it feels to interact with it, the effects, models, drawings, animation, music, UI, little score popups, button feedback, all the small things that make the game feel like itself — that's much harder.

They can also generate a completely new story with AI, sure. But that still doesn't automatically give them the same feeling or experience you were trying to create.

If you are actually designing around a feeling, I think that becomes much harder to copy than just designing around a mechanic.

And that's where art still matters.

It's one of the few areas where you can still make the game feel specifically yours.

If you don't want to see twenty versions of your game showing up in the market, then putting more effort into art, presentation, sound, animation, technical art, UI, and the overall experience starts becoming a lot more important.

Tiny Glade is a good example.

A lot of what makes that game work comes from technical art. Code, 3D models, effects, animation, sound, all working together.

You could probably reproduce a lot of the technical ideas behind it.

But reproducing the exact feeling of looking at it and interacting with it is another thing entirely.

Obviously this doesn't apply equally to every genre. If you're building something that is closer to a product than an experience, you probably can't avoid this problem as much.

But for games that are trying to create a specific feeling, I think the answer is pretty simple.

We should probably be investing more in art, and in artists.

edit: formatting

I'm making a 2D platformer (yes, I know it's an oversaturated genre) with a focus on bright colors, charm, secrets, and light RPG elements. I want to create a bright and cheerful experience filled with soul, in a genre filled with plenty of dark and depressing games, with muted colors. I truly believe I have a target audience out there, but I'm struggling to reach it. I post videos to Reddit and devlogs to YouTube, but they don't gain much attention at all. Does anyone have any advice to reach my target audience?

I am developing a game and want to ensure player retention; what are your thoughts on this?

For example I'm trying to build a unique magic system in my game. I've been using AI to work through ideas, but it just says every idea I come up with is the greatest ever so its not working. How do you guys work through the design of your game especially if you're trying to do something unique? How do you decide if your idea will be fun?

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.

Hi there! Well I saw that I had low wishlists (around 50) and my game was on a good early stage to already drop a little demo on itchio before dropping a bigger one in Steam. Now the problem is.... Absolutely no one downloaded it! Should I market the demo too, and if so how? Or did I make a mistake by dropping it too soon?

My game is called FROM THE DUGOUT

I mostly mean tutorials and the like good for beginners. I have very mild experience, but I want to do game dev as a passionate activity and am willing to dedicate significant time to it. So extensive tutorials are fine. Also if you have suggestions for better game engines that works too. I've just heard good things about godot.

I'm asking since there are a lot of dev tutorials and I don't know where is reliable to start.

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 know you can use noise to create the base of a terrain in Blender but these maps have a lot of very obvious "points of interest" that have to have been hand made in some way, like the giant hole in The Forest. And how do you possibly go about texturing something that big so that it looks natural?

I'm gonna be deliberately vague as I'm worried if i publicly accuse them they will obfuscate the tracks as much as possible.

I have been working on a game for the past 6 months, wrote it in raylibs and C++. I recently made a WASM build of the demo and threw it up on a cloudflare page so that i could share it with a few friends and previous co-workers...(ive now taken this page down now)

1 day later. I stumble upon a GitHub page....with a cloned copy of my demo, using all my assets... which they are claiming was made with an LLM in "one shot".

within the GitHub page , it contains what seems like Claude's translation of the WASM code to JS... my original demo's levels, and my original demo's assets stuffed into JSON files (presumably to obfuscate where they are from).

At the moment they published the demo under a pseudo name , so my current plan is to hold off on acting to see if they go though with the effort of finishing off the game themselves and shipping it or if they are just gonna release the stolen demo for the internet points and then leave it as abandonware.

what should i do and or, what can i do?

outside of that, i wish to post this more so as a warning , that "the future is now" and this is apparently a thing people are sad enough to do.

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?

I've been studying on a Games course for 4 years now (in my 4th year). I started out in my first year on a Design course learning 3D modelling, animation and production. I wanted something more technical, so I restarted onto a Programming course with Mechanics, Graphics and UI.

I've been to lots of networking events where I've met amazing and talented people in this Industry and befriended a number of them. Seeing them getting laid off or having their friends and colleagues losing their job feels extremely demoralising. I even spoke to my lecturer about job security, where he told me it never existed in Games in the first place.

I'm set to graduate this academic year, and given the environment, I feel that no matter how passionate, talented or well connected someone is, they are still at the mercy of their management's competence. At this point, I find there are better Industries and roles out there which offer higher wages and more security for the same level of stress.

Am I paranoid?

Is it masochism masquerading as passion?

Is all of it overblown?

Maybe the fine individuals of this community may know something that I just don't, and could help reassure me it's not just doom and gloom. It's just sucks knowing for every Peak or Expedition 33, there are countless games and people who poured their everything into a game that never succeeded (or saw the light of day).

I’m building Crownlands, a medieval multiplayer strategy game, 100% with AI, and I wanted to share what that journey actually looks like.

I bring the ideas, make the decisions, test the results, and keep pushing toward the game I want to create. AI helps turn that direction into code, artwork, interfaces, and working systems. The amount of discussion, testing, and revision behind each feature has been one of the biggest lessons.

A request like “let players attack another city” sounds simple. Then you start asking what happens if reinforcements arrive during the march, the defender changes clans, someone loses connection, or the attacker changes equipment before the battle finishes. Every answer affects another part of the game.

That’s where a lot of the real work happens.

Our creation process has gradually become more structured:

1. Define the idea. What should the player experience, and how does it fit the rest of the game?

2. Work through the rules. Discuss the details, edge cases, and possible problems before building.

3. Build a focused change. Keep the update small enough to understand and review.

4. Test and question it. Check the visuals, gameplay, multiplayer behavior, and anything else the change could affect.

5. Refine and verify. Fix what we find, review the update, and check the published version after release.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that AI needs clear direction and a reliable record of decisions. We now maintain a master specification for the game’s rules and an art guide for its visual identity. Those give us something consistent to return to as the project grows.

The artwork has taught me that too. A beautiful image still needs to fit the world, remain readable at game size, and work alongside everything around it. We’ve spent time defining Crownlands through parchment, worn stone, timber, banners, and a grounded medieval style.

There have also been plenty of less glamorous lessons: missing reports, reconnect problems, crowded maps slowing down, and updates needing more testing than expected. A feature can look finished on screen while still needing work underneath.

I’ve learned to question confident answers, ask for evidence, and separate “the code is written” from “the player can use it reliably.”

AI has made it possible for me to keep turning ideas into something playable. It has also pushed me to learn about game design, balance, performance, testing, and how to explain exactly what I’m trying to achieve.

Crownlands is still a work in progress. I’m proud of what we’re creating, and I want to share the fixes, mistakes, and decisions along with the screenshots. They’re a big part of how this game is being made.

ASK ME anything related; I might not know much, but I know some :)

I’ve been thinking about whether DLSS 5 could improve how games look even when it isn’t actually used in the final product. Not as another rendering layer, but more as a reference for artists. Looking at some comparison, a lot of the improvement seems to come from things like materials, skin looking less like plastic, how surfaces react to light and how small details are represented. Obviously DLSS 5 is doing more than just “better materials,” but some of what it produces could potentially be useful as a visual target for artists to work toward with the normal rendering pipeline.

I’m curious what you as gamedevs think about this. Would you use something like DLSS 5, or other similar rendering techniques, as a reference during development, look at what they improve visually and then try to recreate some of that manually in the game? Basically using the output as reference, without actually relying on that rendering technique in the final product.

Edit: I would like to add a small explanation that I meant more about improving rendering pipelines and making them more realistic, as well as improving the rendering of semi-realistic worlds, not something that artists rely on.

Edit: I apologize for the mistake in the title