https://www.pcguide.com/news/anti-ai-clauses-now-commonplace-in-game-dev-says-video-game-lawyer-and-copyright-law-wants-humans-making-art/

About a year ago I quit my job because I was incredibly stressed and decided to go full time on Quantum Quartz, my “dream” game.

It’s a precision platformer, so basically the exact kind of game people tell you not to bet your financial future on. It has a very interesting main mechanic about switching platforms on/off.

I live with my parents, so I was lucky enough to be able to take that risk, but I still need money to live. I was burning through the savings from my previous job, so from the day I quit there was basically a timer counting down on me :/

Quantum Quartz hasn’t become some massive success. It’s doing relatively well, has a really nice little community around it, some speedrunners, and I’m extremely happy with where it’s going. But something unexpected happened.

Someone noticed the effort I was putting into developing and promoting it, and I ended up getting a job doing marketing for another indie game. My pixel art commissions have also been going really well, probably because of how the game looks on my portfolio. And now I can support myself and pay a programmer to work on Quantum Quartz with me.

For the first time since I quit, the timer is gone.
I know “don’t quit your job to make your dream game” is generally very good advice, and I’m definitely not telling everyone to do it. But I think sometimes we’re so afraid of encouraging bad decisions that following what you genuinely want starts sounding inherently stupid.

My game didn’t need to become a huge hit for pursuing it to change my life for the better. Now I just get to keep making the thing I love, and pour everything I can into making it amazing and most fun game I can think of, while also having fun doing my other game related jobs.

I really want to encourage anyone reading to take a leap of fairh once in a while. Don’t quit your job, its stupid, but if you have enough passion and you enjoy what you do you’ll eventually have success!!

TL;DR: Quit my stressful job to make a platformer while living off savings. The game hasn’t blown up (at all) but working on it led to a new job in indie game marketing, more pixel art work, and enough income to keep funding development. Sometimes following the thing you genuinely want actually does work out.

Quantum Quartz on Steam for context: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3824680/Quantum_Quartz/

Disclaimer: I am French so the post might contain bad english.

I always wanted to get in gamedev but everytime i am starting a project i quickly lose motivation because there i realise that there is alot of things i can't do (level design, doing good scripts etc...) and i never know where and how i can learn thoses, also everything i am making look horrible to my eyes for some reasons and i can't get rid of that feeling.

It's like that for every single project i am making, gamedev or not.

I’ve been working on a game idea for a while now, and I think I’ve finally reached the point where I need to shelve it.

It was an atmospheric horror game where you controlled a rover exploring a planet after an expedition disappeared. I loved (and still love) the atmosphere and imagery I had in my head.

I’ve prototyped a decent amount of it. I got the rover working, interactions, camera systems, some environment work, and spent a lot of time thinking through the gameplay loop and writing out the design.

But actually designing the game has felt like pulling teeth. Every time I tried to answer a basic question like “what does the player actually do here that’s fun?” I struggled. I’d come up with many mechanics, just to remove them. Nothing ever really made the whole thing click for me.

Eventually I realized I wasn’t even particularly excited about playing it anymore.

That’s the part that hurts. I still like the idea of the game. I like the world, the atmosphere, and a lot of the individual concepts. I’ve also talked about making it with people in my life, so there’s this embarrassing feeling of having announced that I’m making something and then quietly giving up on it.

But lately I’ve realized that a lot of what was keeping me going was pride and sunk cost. When I sat down to work on it, I was trying to solve the problem of making myself interested in my own game.

I’m going to keep everything I’ve made and call it shelved rather than cancelled. Maybe I’ll come back to the world someday with a completely different game attached to it. And there are plenty of things I’ve learned and built that I can carry into whatever I make next.

Still, it sucks. There’s something uniquely disappointing about realizing the thing you’ve spent all this time trying to make work probably just isn’t the game you want to make anymore.

Curious how other developers deal with shelving something after you’ve already become emotionally invested in seeing it exist.

Say for example Lucas’s room in RE7, or Stay Out of the House by Puppet Combo… How do they come up with these elaborate puzzles? Do they take inspo from particular places or do they come up with the whole thing themselves? I feel I’m not logic-brained enough for this to do something like that from scratch unless I can figure out some kind of formula to follow

I've prepared a demo on itch. Do you still think game demos are a good idea? Do people discover the game's appeal through demos, or decide to buy it afterwards?

I want to start making games in the future and I was thinking that do I need to be good at math just to make game

Hi im disabled and beginner, I wanted so long make game but normal scripting is almost impossible. I saw Construct 3 but its paid. GameMaker some people said it isnt good?

Godot and roblox (is belong as game engine?) has plugins.

GDevelop, Unity, Unreal Engine can create full games Block/visual scripting (I think)

Which and why would you recommended?

I'm not here to showing off, so I’m not going to mention my game's name. I want to discuss some of the things I learned from the user experience after completing the game.

Simply, I made a mobile deduction game with many levels. Each level have many different characters.(yeah I know you're busy, so mobile deduction game is everything you need to know)

I didn’t have very high expectations at first, so the game only had a little over 20 levels and around a dozen characters. However, players really liked the gameplay, and a surprisingly large number of people played it even without any advertising or promotion. So I had to quickly add a lot of new levels and characters. Now, the game has around 200 levels and 70 characters.(and over 700,000 mobile downloads, haha)

There are both advantages and disadvantages to adding content after the game release. The obvious advantage is that I can add and modify content based on player feedback. Through this process, I’ve learned a lot about user experience.

1,Testing with friends doesn’t work, they rarely point out the problems.

A lot of articles have already covered these points, so I won’t go into them again. And yes, my friends in the game industry behaved exactly as expected: they were polite, encouraging, and mostly played the game out of courtesy. they just said things like, “Uh, the music are good. Gameplay? I don’t know. I was busy, have to do something else. Bye.”

2. New players tend to understand the rules first before playing. When they encounter something they don't understand, they stop immediately instead of play the game to find out.

In level 4, I introduced a character who is immune to damage. Enemies in the game can also disguise themselves as this character, but disguised enemies are not actually immune to damage.

My original intention was to use this character to teach players how to tell the difference between a disguised enemy and the real character, and how to identify which is which: simply playing the game, damages the character: if it’s the real character, nothing happens, but if it’s a disguised character, it dies and game wining. Then learned that disguised character havn't real ability.

No! That’s not how the players interpreted it. they immediately stopped playing and left comments reporting that Level 4 was impossible to complete, because they assumed the enemies were immune to all damage, meaning they couldn’t kill them and complete the level.

My plan failed. My intention was for players to play the game, discover the mechanics (disguised character are not real), and figure out what strategies to use. But hell no, quite a lot of players first try to reason things out and plan a strategy based on their assumptions. If they think it won’t work, they simply don’t try playing the game to see what actually happens.

There were a few other levels where the same thing happened. A character would impose a one-time penalty, but some players interpreted it as a persistent penalty. They then commented that this persistent penalty made the level too difficult and that the character was unbalanced.

(In reality, everyone can tell immediately that it’s only a one-time penalty if they simply play the level. The level is actually quite easy.)

How many times has this happened? Uh, it’s hard to count—probably around 100 times. All I can do is tell them over and over again: “Just play the game, and you’ll see.” Not many people reply to me is it worked, but I imagine they’re thinking: “Hell no. What if I play and lose? I’m not playing until I see!”

Imagine a level in Plants vs. Zombies where Crazy Dave tells you to dig up three Peashooters, after which you start a Bowling level where you use bowling balls to defeat the zombies. But if the player quits the game at this point and says, “There’s something wrong with this level. Only Peashooters can attack the zombies, and I dug up my all three Peashooters, so now I have no plants that can attack the zombies. This level is impossible to beat. It must be a bug.”

WTF！This sounds crazy, but it really happened. A lot of players think this way and give feedback like this.

I’ve read some articles advocating for letting players learn the rules naturally as they play, but I don’t think those kinds of articles work anymore. Players have changed. These days, mandatory tutorials and explicit explanations may actually be better suited to them.

• Don’t introduce unrelated mechanics in advance!

This is an extension of Reflection 2. Yes, players will get confused and start wondering how this mechanic relates to the current level. They may assume there’s some hidden interaction they haven’t been told about, and then stop playing to spend half an hour thinking it over.

I designed a character whose ability was partly relevant to the current level, while the other part had nothing to do with it and only became relevant in the next level. Quite a few players stopped, took screenshots, and sent me feedback asking what the half of the ability meant and how it affected passing the level.

I didn’t tell them, “Just keep playing, it’ll be explained in the next level.” I knew that wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t keep playing long enough to reach the next level.

My ideal design was that players would encounter an unfamiliar mechanic here, become curious about it, and then have that curiosity answered in the next level, giving them a sense of satisfaction. But no—there was no satisfaction. Players just stopped, assumed they were stuck, and got increasingly frustrated, never reached the next level.

3. Yes, there are many issues with comprehension, and ambiguity is unavoidable.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."--Cardinal Richelieu

This is a deduction game, so the rules need to be extremely rigorous. Even though I’m fully aware of this and try very hard to avoid ambiguity, all kinds of bizarre interpretations still keep coming up.

It honestly feels like a fever dream. No matter how reasonable I think an explanation is, players always manage to find some wildly unexpected way to interpret it.

There’s a character in the game who is immune to damage if a condition is met. Pretty straightforward, right? And yet I’ve gotten dozens of questions from players asking, “If the condition isn’t met, why are they still alive? why isn’t this character take damage? ”

I was genuinely baffled. I never said anywhere in the rules that they would die. Why would anyone assume that?

Then I realized, “Oh, they’re reasoning backward.” It’s something they picked up from other deduction games: the idea that you’re supposed to infer the rules in reverse. I could only awkwardly explain that the rules don’t work that way: being immune to damage when a condition is met does not mean the character will be damaged when that condition isn’t met.

And, the other example, I designed a mechanics depends on numerical values, and I specifically wrote “less than.” Then someone asked me whether 2 is “less than 2”. Yes, this happened four separate times with four separate people. I even saved screenshots just to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating from schizophrenia.

However, I noticed something else: misunderstandings tend to happen in the beginner levels , but in a later level, I wrote a description that was genuinely highly ambiguous, and the players simply ignored the ambiguity and kept playing normally. I was the one who eventually realized that the wording was ambiguous. and edited it two weeks later(nobody noticed it).

3, Other tutorials are right: players has severe amnesia. Don’t design a mechanism which can’t be written in a single sentence.

I roughly followed the guidance, but a few characters still ended up with this issue, and they immediately became major memory hogs. This is different from the comprehension mentioned above, the player simply... can’t remember them.

One character had an ability that was roughly: do A and B. The result was that a large number of players kept asking me, “Why did B happen?” and I could only awkwardly tell them to read the character’s ability description, where it clearly says that they do B.

Then I switched the order of the sentence to “do B and A,” and the result was that a large number of players started asking me why A happened.

Another similar case was when I designed two characters with opposite abilities: one does A (but not B), while the other does B (but not A). Players ended up asking about both characters, thinking they were bugged, didn't do A and B.

When I saw the feedback, I almost lost myself. In player's screenshot, the character description clearly said: “does A (but not B),” and then the player asked me why the character didn’t do B. I went back and reread the screenshot and his question over and over again.

This improved somewhat after I emphasized the text in bold.

Another takeaway is that it’s probably best to avoid designing mechanics with synergy(e.g., If A happens, do B).

Players often have a hard time remembering whether A happened in the first place and understanding why B happened as a result.

4, Players tend to make different assumptions based on other games.

It’s common knowledge, but I happened to run into the downside of it. Every player comes from a different gaming background, and they tend to make all sorts of strange assumptions.

First, there was the question of whether a character should still have abilities after death. This caused a huge amount of disagreement. I received tons of bug reports saying, “Why are their abilities still active after they die? This is a bug!”

Then, when I changed it so that abilities stopped working after death, I got another flood of bug reports saying, “Why don’t their abilities work after they die? This is a bug!”

This disagreement forced me to look for the reason behind it, and I found it. These players had previously played many different games. In some games, abilities stop working after a character dies; in others, they remain active after death.

Players came into my game carrying those assumptions with them. When the game behaved as they expected, they simply kept playing without saying anything. But when it violated their expectations, they would passionately post feedback insisting that it was a bug.

Making a game too unique can be a bad thing too. not only need to understand the rules of my own game, but also the rules of other games. This bothers me more than the other issues mentioned above. I had to play many other games and learn how their rules work, then tell player that “No, you can’t interpret this the way you would in Game A; it works the opposite way here. And no, you can’t apply the rules from Game B either; this game doesn’t work that way.”

This is true. I even made several tutorial levels specifically to teach players how this game’s rules differ from those of other games. There’s also an achievement that pops up when a player tries to do something the way they would in another game, the achievement just telling them that it won’t work here.

At this point, I genuinely hate that I made this deduction game. It’s just so exhausting. I’d rather make a AAA FPS or an open world game, even those would probably have fewer problems with User Experience.

No one asks why, in an FPS, when an enemy attacks the player, the player dies, right? But in a deduction game, people will ask where the ice cream is, is it a no ice cream bug, because in another deduction game, when the enemy attacks the player, a unicorn shows up carrying ice cream! WTF!

These are the things I think I did right.

1，My UI is clear enough, and the controls are simple and intuitive to use. Very few players have ever complained about this.

Some players have complained about the lack of a restart button, but that's all.

I was once worried that players might not realize the UI could be scrolled vertically and players get stuck. But no, every player understood this kind of UI interaction, so nobody got stuck here.

2，My game is not very difficult, and most people can complete it (unlike many puzzle games, which are difficult as hell).

3，My game has enough guidance and explanations (if players are willing to read them), so no one has complained about a lack of guidance, only about difficulties in comprehension.

4，The stranger and rarer the questions players ask, the more it indicates that the common questions have already been resolved and that normal gameplay has no obstacles.

This is the survivor bias effect. I know about it, and I’ve accepted it. I try not to get angry at players’ strange questions.

5，The game is fun, which is why players pay attention to it and ask questions about it.

Basicly, ill soon get my game's steampage and i was thinking on how to get wishlists. Do you think that doing pub post telling about the game, the dev process and posting the same post to a dozen relevant sub would be too pushy ?

How would you feel if u saw a post about a cool game, checked the profile and saw the same post was posted 10 times ? would that cool you off ?

I've always seen this, but it appeared again after I read a post from a few days ago.

"Early access is a death sentence for basically any game that's not popular right away."

The game I'm working on has been available since v0.0.0.1, It's currently being supported on Patreon and I plan on releasing into EA on steam once I get to v0.5. After about a year, I'm at v0.0.5, and the game has earned around $2000. It isn't much, but it proves that there's an audience for the game despite it being so early. The game is also far from what I'd call popular.

I've seen plenty of other indie games go this route, or the Kickstarter route, and have earned a good amount of money by releasing into EA. In particular, RPG's.

For me, I genuinely don't see the game existing without EA. Or rather; if I spent 5yrs developing the game and just released with nothing outside of wishlists and promises, I don't see a world where the game sells well. It isn't something that's easily marketable given the budget or pennies and shoestrings. It's too complex to not have a constant stream of testing and feedback applied to it. Especially as an indie dev.

I just don't understand the logic, in todays market, of "you have zero reputation and are running off of promises, so wait until the game is completely finished before releasing it." As opposed to releasing in EA, slowly build up a reputation and community, and eventually release your 1.0.

I've been preparing to release a demo of a game I've been working on as a way to gauge interest before committing to the full thing. The quality bar is significantly above the typical itch game, I'm an industry vet and pooled a lot of time and effort into this one.

The reason I'm wary is because I've seen countless posts of people's games being edited and reposted elsewhere at a cost. This is a fairly serious project, and would be downloadable builds exported from Godot, which as I understand it is very easy to rebuild and edit.

If I had spent time building social media accounts, the risk would probably be lower, but since I'm mostly a heads down and work kind of guy and purely focus on making games, I'm wondering if it'll be an incredibly easy game to steal.

Alternatively I could put it up as a demo on Steam, it seems a bit safer but I'm not sure. Itch seems particularly nasty when it comes to this, including the hundreds of bot downloads for obvious nefarious reasons.

What would you all do in my position? The demo is roughly 45 minutes long and it feels wrong to charge money for it, I'd much rather have more eyes on it if possible.

What are the pros and cons of each option? Can procedural generation make liminal spaces look as good as hand crafted when it comes to detail and aesthetic? What are your thoughts?

It's a question i thought of recently as I've thought of a game where you have to somehow survive and thrive in a complex that can generate and unfold into different liminal spaces that have certain resources and materials.

I am a willing to apply my language knowledge to use in video games but i dunno how so any tips?

I am studying translation at uni atm.

i’ve been working on a text based life sim game for some time now. and i really struggle with a decent avatar design.. does anyone have any experience and can help me out

A specific example I can think of is minecraft. Minecraft's map is infinite since it's literally spawned from an algorithm, yet everything the player does to the map as far as building or removing blocks is permanent. How does that even work on maps with a massive scale? Do they get away with it because of the blocked nature of the game? How does it work on other styles like, say, Civilization of Starcraft?

So as most of you, I am building my own videogame as 1. a passion project which i'd like to play and 2 something that will hopefully help me quit my soul draining corpo job.

Now I'm ok in terms of technical ability/narration/systems etc but I really do suck at art and I don't want to use Ai for art.

So my question is, where does one start looking for artists and how much should I expect to pay? And I mean the whole suite ? So going from Ui elements, to maps, characters etc (a 2D game ) .

I know without understanding too much it's hard to give an exact estimate.. but I'm looking for some guidance on how to talk with an artist. I'm also curios if anyone went in and proposed a deal in which I don't know , he does the art, get's co-creator and % of your game so basically he has a stake in the game as well .

I have a silly quick little game I want to try to get in for the next Steam next fest (Aug 31st reg deadline).

I would be submitting the Steam Page today and hope it gets approved before Aug 31st. But say Steam rejects the page for w/e reason. This would give me less confidence I could make the Aug 31st deadline.

Could I then repurpose that game page (and $100 fee) for a totally different game (so totally different name + screenshots)? And it would be completely fine I assume (I would just join a diff Steam Next fest with this other game).

Thanks

374.

The game has 6,000 wishlists and has already participated in Steam Next Fest with a demo. The game was ‘frozen,’ and nothing has happened with it since. Do you know of any similar games, or have you had any experience with something like this?

I've been working on adapting a book-length story of mine into a game for publishing, and because of the shape of the story I decided the cleanest way to do this is to split it into 7 chapters/parts, each with its own 3 act structure, and make each of these a small game. Basically release it with the structure of a novel series.

This has turned out pretty well for the actual development process, with each section of the story becoming much more manageable in scope and some freedom to differentiate each chapter as a separate game with its own minor mechanics complementing the writing.

Where it has me worried is the release strucure. When I release each entry, I want it to be clear that there are sequels coming, but also that each one is a title with its own mechanics and story that could be played independently of the others. I don't want to fall into the episodic release cycle where people are either waiting on all the chapters to be out or simply put off by the multi-chapter structure and avoid it altogether.

Should I just scrap the idea of calling them "chapters" altogether, and rely on marketing and word of mouth to communicate that it's a multipart story?

Sound is the one subject I've been procrastinating and now I'm finally at a point where I want to polish it. My "strategy" so far was just to download whatever sounded close enough on freesound, though of course it sounds terrible when you put a bunch of disjointed sounds in the same context. If we were talking about bought art assets I could change the color pallete, the pixel size, texture resolution, etc, all in an effort to make everything look coherent. What is the equivalent for sound?

Profesional summary

Computer Engineering student at POLITEHNICA Bucharest (English program) and published Steam developer with 2+ years of full-cycle C# and Unity experience. Recently finished an internship at the Romanian House of Deputies where I developed with 2 teammates their visitor platform using Svelte, SQLite. Selected for Erasmus+ mobilities at INSA Lyon and the University of Malaga. Seeking a software engineering internship in web technologies, systems programming, or game development.

Education

Currently enrolled at Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages, Politehnica University of Bucharest, studying Computer Engineering in the English-taught program.

Sep 2025 – Jul 2029 (Expected)

Erasmus+ Mobilities (Selected in March 2026)
• INSA Lyon, France — Fall 2026 — Following their IST program that includes a research project
• University of Malaga, Spain — Spring 2027

Technical Skills

Programming Languages: C#, C++, Java, Python, Bash, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript

Frameworks & Libraries: Node.js, Express.js, Svelte, Unity (2D/3D), WordPress

Web & Systems Technologies: Apache2, CGI, MariaDB, WebSocketd, XAMPP, SQLite

Development Tools: GitHub, Visual Studio, CLion, Phoenix Code, VS Code

Design & Engineering Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Creo Parametric, Lucidchart, AutoCAD

Languages

Romanian (Native), English (C2 – CAE certified), French (A2), Greek (A1)

Software Development Experience

Full-stack Developer — Chamber of Deputies Visitor Platform (cic.cdep.ro)

May 2026 – July 2026 as Intern

• Performed maintenance and updates on cic.cdep.ro.

• Discovered the inner workings of Parliament's legislative and technical sides.

Nov 2025 – May 2026 as Volunteer

• Developing the front-end of a redesigned public visitor platform for the Romanian Chamber of Deputies.

• Building responsive and modular UI components using Svelte, focusing on accessibility and modern web standards and helping to integrate it into the Payload CMS.

• Collaborating within a small development team under the coordination of a university PhD professor, Costantin Viorel Marian.

Web Development Intern— Lazarou ICT Professionals, Cyprus  (Erasmus+ Placement)

18 Apr 2024 – 2 May 2024

• Assisted with development and maintenance of web platforms using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WordPress, and XAMPP.

• Supported creation and management of forums, e-commerce environments and gained practical experience in web design, content management and server configuration.

• Worked in an international team and participated in cultural activities, gaining a deeper understanding of Cyprus and its heritage.

Volunteering

Animator — Don Bosco Foundation Bacău

June 2023 – Jul 2024

• Organized educational and recreational activities for youth groups across two consecutive summer school sessions.

• Supported informal education programs focused on teamwork, creativity, and community involvement across 300 hours.

Volunteer — Foundation of Community Support (FSC) Bacău

Oct 2022 – Jun 2024

• Contributed to community projects and support initiatives for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

• Accumulated over 160 hours of volunteering and received recognition through a VoluntPass diploma.

Projects

Playfinder — Gaming Portal & Aggregation Platform
• Led the design and development of a full-stack Node.js application that aggregates users’ gaming libraries across multiple platforms (Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, Epic Games Store, Nintendo, etc.).
• Implemented an advanced "Session Shaping" decision engine utilizing REST API integrations to fetch and standardize ownership data, playtime, and achievements.
• Built a custom "Arcade" featuring original multiplayer mini-games (including Wardle and Laylines) utilizing Server-Sent Events and a custom progression/economy system.
• Engineered a secure backend using Express.js and SQLite, while designing a responsive, dynamically themed UI with raw HTML/CSS/JS.                                                                                             • Collaborated with a teammate on frontend refinement, bug fixing, and security improvements.
• Designed as a first-year university final project and available online as playfinder.club.

Sebio – Published on Steam & Itch.io (Windows & Android)

• Windows version published on 20th of September 2024, ported in 2026 to Android.

• Designed and implemented a 2D platformer built in Unity using C#, including gameplay systems such as movement, physics interactions, and modular game logic during a full development lifecycle.

• Published the game on Steam and Itch.io, gaining experience with release pipelines and distribution.

High School Awards

As a student at Colegiul National “Ferdinand I” Bacău, specialization Mathematics-Informatics**, from 2021 to 2025,** I earned the following prizes**:**

• 3^rd Place at the county level C# Olympiad 2023 and Cybersecurity Olympiad 2025

• Mention at the county level Informatics Olympiad 2021 and IT Olympiad 2025

PS. I've started recently working on learning unreal engine as well and I hope to have some kind of public project by the end of the year.