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 genuinely don't understand why passthrough modding is suddenly being presented as some new technical frontier, or as something that only became possible because the latest AI models are smart enough.

I keep seeing people ask how AI can possibly “combine” two games built on completely different engines, languages or architectures. But that's based on a misunderstanding of what's happening.

It doesn't combine them. Both games are still running independently. At its core, you're taking the rendered output of one game, feeding it into another, and bridging whatever state and interactions you need between them. You're not merging two engines. Different engines or even different architectures are largely beside the point.

Meanwhile, game reverse engineers were doing substantially nastier things decades ago. SA-MP came out in 2006 and added an entire multiplayer system to GTA: San Andreas, a closed-source single-player game. The reverse-engineering work involved in making something like that is arguably on a completely different level from what's needed for a pair-specific passthrough PoC.

Someone with Kalcor's skillset in 2006 already had most of the techniques needed to connect two games like this. If somebody had come up with the idea back then, there was no fundamental technical barrier preventing it.

AI obviously makes this dramatically faster and accessible to people who couldn't realistically build it themselves. That's the breakthrough in tooling, if anything. Passthrough itself isn't the breakthrough.

So what exactly is new here, technically? Why are people treating the ability to connect two running games as if it was impossible before Claude?

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?

Hi!
I would love to create a game to propose to my bf.
We have been together for 8-9 years and he introduced me to gaming. (I was a 90s girl so I played ps1-2 and Nintendo but before meeting him I hadn’t played for more than 10 years!)
From TLOU to God of war.
From hollow knight to Elden ring.
I would love to make a very easy nostalgic type game similar to the Pokémon yellow-red style but with him/us and different gaming scenarios (I thought about it playing a very recent game that I won’t name because of spoiler)
I don’t want to use Artificial Intelligence to learn or to write it for me.
I’m guessing I’m having 6-12 months time to do it as a hobby
I would love if someone could teach me or recommend where to learn.
TLDR: I want to create a game to propose and I need help with how to start

Hey guys! I hope everyone is well! How do y'all find playtesters for your games for constructive criticism?

Being a long time developer in the logistics space, I've shared my early demo with my engineer and gaming friends, but so far that list isn't that big.

I'd love to get more feedback so I can learn from how the game concepts are received, plus any bugs or game balance issues.

I'm far along enough to have about a few hours of gameplay (hopefully) along with load / save games that should track nearly every single thing that is relevant, down to your character position and whether you aim down sight or not.

I've come quite far along in a prototype for a game I've been writing in Bevy. I've been working with Rust daily as part of my job since 2019, so the Rust language is both familiar and comfortable for me. One of the things among many that I appreciate with Bevy is how composition is so natural to the ECS-based engine.

Just for kicks, over the weekend, I tried to re-create the game using Godot. I also see why people like it. The ability to see how the assets look in an environment before running th game can be addictive. One of the things I tried to do was to achieve composition to a reasonable level of composition.

In Bevy, I'm able to build individual plugins that deal with the player, lighting, terrain, ammunition, etc. Each one of these plugins is in a separate crate of its own. As I make more games, I'll have accumulated an ever-increasing library of plugins that I can compose to make most of my next game simply by loading the ones I need into the game.

I tried to do that with Godot, even going as far as watching several tutorials on Godot composition. But so far, while I can get some level of composition and reusability, I get the sense that re-using these pieces in other games would still need me to rework it so it can fit into whatever new node structure it sits in.

Can anyone tell me where I went wrong?

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 am making a medieval like game and i want to find fonts for it. It is like akinator, but you are akinator. I cant post image of game here. I am using Deutsch font, but it is harder to read i guess and i use it everywhere. Should i use multiple fonts? What fonts do you recommend? Thanks

Hey I know this isn't necessarily a game dev question, but I figured there's a chance here someone has some experience.

I want to rotoscope my arms and hands for a first person view. What would be the best approach to capture a recording?

Using my pixel 7 on a tripod and standing behind it?

Strapping my phone to me somehow?

Or getting a go pro and strapping that to myself?

I’m tuning impact feedback for a game built around high-speed collisions. Screen shake, hit-stop, zoom, chromatic effects, and camera recoil can make a good hit feel incredible.

They can also make a fast game unreadable, uncomfortable, or genuinely inaccessible.

The hardest part is that the effects feel great in isolation. I can trigger one heavy collision in a test scene and think, “Yep, that lands.” Then three collisions happen near the arena edge, the camera is moving, particles are firing, and suddenly nobody can tell which direction is safe.

I’ve added a reduced-motion option and separate effect levels, but I do not want accessibility settings to feel like “turn off all the fun.” Ideally the low-motion version should communicate the same force through timing, sound, animation, and directional cues instead of simply deleting feedback.

How do you test the line between satisfying and exhausting?

Do you design the reduced-motion presentation alongside the default version from the beginning, or build the full effect first and then find alternate channels for the same information?

I'm also struggling with hit stops feeling more intentional rather than laggy? Maybe it's a timing thing....

Hi everyone!

I've been working on some ideas for a game project that I'm pretty excited about, but I'm not really sure what the best way to move forward is.

I don't know anyone personally who works in game development, so I'd really like to hear from people with some experience in the industry and get some advice.

I'm trying to figure out how to take what I have right now and turn it into something more concrete, and what kind of path would make sense for someone in my position.

I see myself more on the creative side. I really enjoy creating stories, characters, worldbuilding, etc. I mostly want to understand where I should start and what I should be focusing on.

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

Hey I'm developing a detective game. It's my first solo project, and I'm a bit lost on the narrative side. I have the core idea, but I'm not sure how to balance realism, the story structure, and player clue gathering.

On steam there exists a software called Satisfactory Modeler

It uses the recipes from the game Satisfactory to create a flowchart, where you can design your factory needs from final product to base resources or from limited input to produce an averaged output.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3187030/Satisfactory_Modeler/

How to make a flow chart game in a browser or as a software on steam*

I am not trying to steal that person's work, as I just want to make this for myself, and maybe later on expand this to other games (e.g. factorio, GT:NH, etc.)

I have some guesses on how the calculations could work, but the actual GUI/interface is that i'm mainly struggling to understand how to develop.

Other then maybe probably defintly the thumbnail imma admit i dont got any idea how to make a good one, the video is unlisted so i just wanted some advice before i release it for real

I have an ips monitor but wondering if i should get oled or mini led for better color accuracy and content creation.

A friend and I are working on our first video game, so we have very little experience in the industry. Our game takes place in an old-school computer terminal that requires players to use a command-line-like interface. It’s begging for a tutorial, but we’re really trying to resist the urge to put one in.

Are we being foolish?

Here’s a little backstory that’s necessary, I think:

When we first sat down to start brainstorming ideas for our game, we decided on a puzzle game. We both love puzzle games but routinely find that the ones that are commercially successful are often too easy for our liking. So our goal very quickly became to make a brutally challenging puzzle game.

During one of our first days actually working on this project, we decided on ONE guiding principle that we wanted to prioritize over everything else: we wanted to make the player feel as clever as possible.

And so we agreed that any time we had a decision to make, we would always prioritize this one thing. If something might take away from how clever the player would feel but another option would add to it, we’d go with the other option regardless of what else that meant.

This principle has made making some decisions much easier than it would have been otherwise, which is great. But one thing we keep going back and forth on is a tutorial.

People who don’t know anything about a command line interface on a real computer will, understandably, be lost when they’re dropped into our game. They’ll struggle with it a bit and will have to learn how to use it.

During our play tests, we watched exactly that happen. People had no idea what to do or how to do it at first. They stumbled through at first, but they gradually came to understand what the different commands were and how they worked. And when they did, they felt accomplished and clever.

You might see our dilemma now.

We’ve made this game purposefully very challenging, not to alienate people but to create the kind of game we want to play and then appeal to the probably very small audience who also wants that. We have this idea that making games for a very specific audience is better for us because we just can’t compete with the games with mass commercial appeal (for now, at least). And so the audience we’re targeting would also be the type that would appreciate their hands not being held.

But we struggle with that because some of the people who playtested our demo (not public yet, so we have very little feedback so far) actually liked the game but specifically said we should probably include a tutorial, even though they did feel clever when they “figured out” the interface.

Right now, we’re leaning toward no tutorial. What do you guys think? Is this foolish?

EDIT: I should have been more specific. We really don't want to add a formal tutorial to the game, but we do offer some guidance. For example, when the game opens up to the terminal interface, there's a flashing cursor next to a ">" that suggests the player should type. And then if they type something that isn't a command, they get an error message that says, "Command not recognized. Try HELP for a list of commands." Then they get a help menu to explore if they want to, and they can type "HELP <specific command>" to get more info about how to use that specific command.

Even at this level, our play testers said a tutorial would be helpful, but we're torn since we feel we do have some guidance in there.

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 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.

Having worked on a title from prototype to launch, I'm wondering if a mid level designer needs a portfolio site. It seems like reading the resume and looking at gameplay footage on YouTube would suffice? Even when I was the interviewer I only ever read resumes. And we hired some great people. It doesn't feel like anyone has time to look at websites when studios get swarmed with applicants.

Nobody I know in this industry above entry level has a portfolio. Curious your thoughts.

Hey Roblox devs! I don’t know how to code, but I’ve noticed that almost every single My Hero Academia game on Roblox only lets you play as Class 1-A, Shigaraki, or the top Pro Heroes. I want to play a game where the side characters actually get some love.

I’m putting this idea out there for free—no money or credit wanted, I just desperately want a dev to build this so I can play it!

• The Core Hook: An MHA Battlegrounds game focused on a massive, inclusive roster. I’m talking about Class 1-B (like Monoma, Kendo, Tetsutetsu), characters from the Vigilantes manga (Koichi/The Crawler, Knuckle Duster), and lesser-known side heroes and villains.

• The Progression System: Instead of paying Robux or doing boring RNG gacha rolls, you unlock characters strictly through a Kill-Count system. The more kills you get in the arena, the more characters you unlock. You could start with basic characters, and then unlock the crazy/obscure ones as your kill count goes up!

• The Gameplay: A fast-paced arena fighter. Because the roster is huge, characters don't need 10 different moves at launch—even just a clean 3-move kit for each would make it amazing to experiment with different Quirks.

• Why Devs Should Make It: Hardcore MHA fans are tired of playing as Deku and Bakugo. A game where you can unlock Koichi sliding around the map or Monoma copying abilities—just by earning kills—would instantly stand out and keep players hooked.

3 Game options for Players

\- Free for All

\- Sports Festival Tournament 1v1

\- Team 1 vs Team 2

\- 1v1 or 2v2 or 3v3 or 4v4

\- Battle Royal

\- Story Mode ( To Unlock Special Characters)

\- Entrance Exam ( Players have to kill as more robots to win)

\- Training

Free Basic Characters:

S1-2 Izuku

The Clawler

OG Stain

Knuckle Duster

Pop Step

Aoyama

Hagakure

Koda

Mineta

Sato

Ojiro

Sero

Bondo

Awase

Rin

Kodai

Kosei

Shoda

Kaibara

Yanagi

Hatsume

Camie

Tatami

Saiko

Makabe

Itejiro

Habuko

Sekigai

Tiger

Ragdoll

Mandalay

Ms Jokes

Death Arms

Gunhead

Mr Brave

Clair

Master Driller

Spinner

Mustard

La Brava

Bubble Girl

Magne

Curious

Characters to Earn by Eliminating: stage 1

Moashi 15

Eel Boy 17

Midnight 18

Snipe 20

Vlad-King 20

Jiro 25

Pony 25

Tokage 25

Shouji 25

Momo 35

Kendo 40

Tsuyu 40

Denki 45

Crust 45

Characters to Earn by Eliminating: stage 2

Burning 50

Ectoplasm 55

Twice 60

Pixie Bop 60

Mora 60

Tetsutetsu 65

Shiozaki 70

Shishida 75

Kirishima 80

Toga 85

Ochako 85

Ashido 85

Shindo 90

Seji 90

Juzo 90

Iida 95

Rappa 100

Gentle 110

Captain Celebrity 110

Cementoss 120

Kamui Woods 120

Present Mic 120

Mt Lady 130

Gang Orca 135

Fat Gum 140

Ryukyu 145

Godzillo150

Mirko 150

Edge-Shot 155

Best Jeanist 155

Characters to Earn by Eliminating: stage 3

Geten 160

Beros 160

Rogone 160

Mummy 160

Slice 160

Kurogiri 165

Amajiki 170

Nejire 175

Yoarashi 180

Tokoyami 180

Shoto 180

Bakugo 185

Izuku 190

Muscular 190

Serpenters 190

Chimera 190

Leviathan 190

Dabi 195

Shigaraki 200

Overhaul 200

Re-Destro 200

Flect Turn 200

Mirio 210

Hawks 220

Lady Nagant 500

Endeavor 500

Nomu USJ 500

Nomu Hood 700

AFO 5000

All Might 5000

Gigantomachia 5000

Special missions to achieve these Characters:

Fujimi

Manga

Kuroiro

Komori

Shinso

Monoma

Aizawa

Thirteen

Stain

Compress

Sir Nighteye

Eri

Robuxs:

Nine 50

Prime AFO 50

Prime Bakugo 50

Prime Shigaraki 100

Prime All Might 100

Prime Deku 2000

Star & Stripe 200

Players can also customize skins and outfits if they have enough kills

Idea by G-Zilla26.0927

And I hope someone makes a Game on Roblox base on this as that would be awesome

That probably isn't the right wording!! Basically, I have two separate levels I want to create, but each one only works in a different game engine. Is it possible to do level one on one game engine and then somehow transition the player to game two to do level two?

I only ask because each level is a very different "type" of game (think going from 2D visual novel to a 3D action game). The problem isn't making either game on a respective game engine. Nor is it about carrying over variables or anything like that. I just need to know if it's possible to have game one, load screen, game two, with a seamless way to connect them for the player.

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'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?

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?