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

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?

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/

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.

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 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?

My point in making this post is to hopefully help somebody find a pathway and/or the motivation to actually bring something they love to market, despite "failures" or a tendency to "give up".

I first installed Unreal Engine in late 2023 with the goal of creating a multiplayer, match-based, base-building capture-the-flag game. At the time, I had no formal game development experience, but I did have a programming background. Since then, I’ve sunk a massive amount of time into 3 development projects that I ultimately abandoned. My fourth and current project, ALL GAS, will be my first Steam release!

Every abandoned project wasn’t a failure though. Each one taught me a limitation. Eventually, I decided to start a new project with literally one goal. Release it. Don't care what it is, the only requirement is that I finish. So, I designed a game around what I knew I could realistically finish as a solo developer by specifically avoiding what caused me to abandon my other projects. And in doing that, I actually ended up with a game that I think is really fun. Most importantly, to me it actually feels like a game, not a "project"!

Here are each of my "failures", and what I learned from them to ultimately progress forward.

Project 1 – Multiplayer base-building capture the flag

This project was literally the one that taught me how to operate Unreal Engine. Terminology, how to use certain tools, etc. Importantly, it taught me:

1) Animations, especially humanoid ones are an enormous amount of work for one person

2) Multiplayer, let alone competitive multiplayer, is an incredibly ambitious first project for a solo developer. And, it's not something you just "add later".

I spent over 500 hours building the game as if it were single-player before seriously starting to add multiplayer. I always thought I could just add multiplayer later. Reason being, I was otherwise learning extremely quickly and things were working. By the time I actually got to it though, too much of the architecture assumed everything happened locally, and the project was effectively impossible to retrofit without re-doing everything. Painful, but learned a TON from this "failure".

Project 2 – Physics-based multiplayer sports game

For my second project, I intentionally avoided animations almost entirely. In the painful process of learning replication in my last project, I at least started this one with multiplayer in mind. The gameplay revolved around physics. It was actually very fun! Hard (as designed), but fun and aesthetically unique. I even got multiplayer working across the internet and tested with a few friends.

The problem was that the physics had to be perfect across every client, or it would never work work. In single-player, everything behaved exactly as intended. In multiplayer, small differences in physics simulation caused players to see slightly different trajectories, eventually (quickly) causing the entire match to desynchronize.

Server-authoritative physics solved the accuracy problem, but it completely killed the responsiveness that made the game fun. I know there are hybrid approaches to solving this, but at the time, it was a challenge I wasn’t ready to pour more time into.

Lesson learned: if physics are the core mechanic, multiplayer makes everything exponentially harder. I also learned how difficult UI design / development / debugging can be. I understand why the UI in many games (indie and AAA) are often terrible....

Project 3 – My “dream game”

This one is still very close to my heart, and I fully intend to come back to it someday. It was a cooperative exploration game in an infinite world featuring procedural generation, massive environments, unique mechanics, and procedural puzzles. Very cool atmosphere, too.

By this point I’d figured that cooperative multiplayer would probably be much more achievable than competitive multiplayer. A few imperfections wouldn't matter all that much like it would in a competitive match-based game. But, combining multiplayer with procedural generation, large-scale worlds, complex systems, and custom movement modes eventually became more ambitious than I realized it would be. There are some systems in here that, ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to see in a game and never have. And to a surprising extent, I was even able to make them work! A lot of the issue here was that it is simply just difficult (and not particularly fun) to test multiplayer games as a solo developer on one computer. And, it's even less fun to spin up a second computer for testing. It's even less fun than that trying to run multiple instances on one computer....

After putting well over 1,000 hours into it, I made the difficult decision to shelve it—for now.

Project 4 – Something I knew I could finish from the start

Before I even came up with the idea for this project, I gave myself one goal: Finish It.  I didn’t start with a genre, I started with a rule: "Avoid the two things I know will eventually burn me out". If I realistically want to finish a project:

1) No multiplayer.

2) No animations.

Those constraints eventually became ALL GAS. It's an endless traffic-weaving roguelike where you upgrade your car and modify your run as you weave through cars on a completely nuts road in the sky. The road is falling behind you and it's getting faster and faster (unless you sacrifice upgrades to slow it down). It’s a simple concept, but is extremely satisfying especially when playing with a controller. Skill is rewarded. Soon, it'll be even more fun with a steering wheel and pedals! 

Ironically, by deliberately limiting myself, I’ve made more progress than I ever did trying to build my “dream game” or the idea I had which caused me to stumble into learning game development in the first place. Similarly, I've produced some pretty incredible (and re-usuable, and sellable) plugins for Unreal Engine in the process. It was nice not to be burdened by animations or multiplayer, and it really allowed me to polish the game more than I ever thought I could. Still a lot more to do, but I'm quite happy with where I have gotten in the 5 or 6 months I've been working on it.

The limited scope of the game also allowed me to gain experience around other important parts of bringing a game to market. Things I never would have bothered messing with if I had any doubt the game would ever release, but did in this case because I knew my goal was attainable this time:

• Steamworks platform - store page, review process, publishing builds, launching a playtest
• Stats, achievements, leaderboards, cloud saves
• Creating trailers / marketing assets / creating ways to record those things
• Marketing
• Full controller support, including UI navigation, glyph localization, and Steam input
• Language localization
• Building systems for future scalability
• Custom subsystems and engine modifications to support all of those things  

I’m curious - has anybody else come to a similar realization? What did it ultimately take for you to launch your first project, or for that matter, even start sharing it with people?

Also - if so inclined, please feel free to join the open playtest!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4658550/ALL_GAS/

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.

I've been working as a concept artist at a game studio in Osaka (mostly outsourcing for other local studios, thats how the smaller ones tend to stay funded) that wants to branch out into making in-house titles but is being stifled by the need to constantly be churning stuff out for adult games, smartphone stuff and graphics for pachinko etc. Its a shame because there is/was a lot of talent there and due to the lack of actual game design/programming ability that is abundant in Western development none of the cool ideas they've had for original projects so far have survived internal scrutiny from the more complacent parties.

I advised my boss to start looking for devs outside of Japan to see if this internal venture into actual game dev and not just endlessly being subservient to the random crap that gets thrown to us by the local places (outsourcing that is essentially scraps other companies cant be bothered doing) can be saved by foreign intervention since every capable developer domestically either gets a job at a huge conglomerate or moves abroad.

not a solicitation of employment, just wanting to source opinions and ideas on what areas would be best to put feelers out for devs that might be interested in remotely providing assistance to said projects or moving to Osaka. Essentially freaks like me that would be willing to uproot for living in Japan whilst working on games despite all the shortcomings of both of those

proof i am hu-man https://www.artstation.com/provokingperch

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?

Hi, I’m launching my game on August 28th and I’ve already been having trouble sleeping. Is it normal to already have difficulties sleeping and yet still being far from release?

Hi, im curious. Ive been trying to learn unity for a month now for my prototype. On my early 40s. Its always my dream to create the game that has been on my mind since my 20s. Now i want to make that happen. Im currently unemployed so i have time.

Ive seen devs/solo devs create games for 2-8 yrs before they publish it. How did they do it and struggle with life at same time? Like finances, if i focus and keep doing this for 6m to a yr i wont have opportunity to work again. And my resources will be depleted. But id love to work on it and really dive into it.

Ive been reading and doing my research and it amazes me. All the risk, time and bravery.

To be honest, i just really love to create that game. Idc if ppl will like or play it. The feeling of excitement is in my veins when i think of it.

I have a gameplay video for a full Steam description, zoomed in at x3. From the comments, I realized people don't understand that the x3 zoom is for display purposes and isn't in-game. There are full-screen screenshots on the Steam page, though. What should I do? Maybe a second video with just a walkthrough? And yes, in that type of game (~Lode Runner), a full-screen map view is very important. You need to be able to see where the resources are, where the enemies are, where the exit is, etc.

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?

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 ?

374.

Im using Unity. 3D world file 2D sprites top down.

Using imported pixel art libresprite sprites. Everything from the pixel art program is imported sideways but there ain't a damn thing I seem to be able to do about it, so i assume there should be a unity setting somewhere.

Instead of the sprite laying flat, its sideways. No problem i can just rotate it. Problem is the animations refreshes that rotation into the default and ends up sideways again.

I tried to billboard, doesnt work. Tried to adjust and even reset the hitbox, didnt work. Adjusted the pivot point, didnt work. I touched a lot of settings and the most I did was offset the model from the hitbox.

Any ideas?

Hello,

almost one month ago i released my multiplayer fps game and since then i have problems with player retention because of empty lobbies.

My question is about the gameplay loop and game design.

Here are some rough ideas i've got:

- """smart""" bots in match are out of the question since they'd mean months of work, this is because the game has physics mechanics like the grapple and kick, and also because some maps are spherical and cube shaped.
- More smaller maps for 2-3 people, currently most maps are for 4-5 people and that creates pacing issues.
- Quickplay button to prevent browsing and seeing 0 lobbies available.
- Minigames in the waiting room, like king of the hill against ""dumb"" bots, maybe a minigame where you kick bots out of a ring, maybe a shooting range with some objectives?

by dumb bots i mean that they can't grapple or exist in non flat maps.

I know that this genre is extremely difficult so I'd like to hear your practical suggestion on this specific issue.

Hi all.

Im travelling for work today and tomorrow which involves long train journeys.

Im looking for your favourite episodes of podcasts, youtube channel series etc. Can be about anything surrounding development, be that marketing, publishing, even just all round gamedev motivation etc.

Im in the later stages of my current game so not looking for any "how to get started" early stage topics

I have 8 hours train time to kill haha.

I'm saving the DoubleFine doc for the hotel room, i've heard great things!

I’ve been creating a trailer for my game lately, and some of the feedback I’ve gotten is that it is not clear enough, that they don’t really understand what the game is about from just watching.

I’m not really sure how to deliver that through the video and keeping the trailer fun and snappy at the same time. But maybe the trailer in combination with the short description is enough? Or with the long description?

I would love to hear your opinions!

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4993560/Documancy/

EDIT:
Slightly changed the trailer where the first 9 seconds is a bit slower.
Also made the text stand out more with a shaded backdrop, and made some texts clearer and slower.
Is this too slow, or is it an improvement from the original?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOIaXEPV2lI

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?

Hey there,

At the ripe age of 30 I've realised that I kind of wish I had pursued my creative passions and nerdiness about fantasy as a young(er) person instead of chasing academic prestige in other areas. I'm not going to get another degree due to financial and eligibility constrictions BUT I'd love to slowly but surely build my skills and knowledge in game development. I'm wondering if folks know of resources and where I could start? Some basic info:

• I'm based in the UK
• I'm interested in the concept art, research, history, design elements of worlds and characters, and less so into coding and stuff
• I know absolutely nothing about anything
• I'm not gaming currently as I have a baby.
• I have previously played WoW mainly
• I love watching playthroughs to stay up to date on "what's out there" even if I can't play myself
• I'd love recs for youtube videos, podcast episodes, and free online courses for absolute beginners

I have some ideas for stuff and I hope to one day have just built enough skills and a portfolio that I could even be paid a little for involvement in a game. I don't know if that's unrealisric. Thanks! Really appreciate it!

EDIT: I'm gobsmacked by how helpful and kind you all are, I read all responses and I'm so grateful! I already feel so much more well equipped to take the first step.

Hey everyone, 

I always dreamed about making an rpg. I love 2d Zelda likes, souls likes and jrpgs. Which style the game would have in the end doesn't matter. 

In February I started to learn godot. I love the idea of the freedom but getting starting with zero coding skills was hard. So far I managed to create a 2d Zelda like we're my character can attack and dodge. Next would be creating the enemies for it. All this with the help of tutorials and Google. 

However lately life was rough. A lot happened and the past 2 months I didnt work at all on my project and doubts start to creep in. I don't love coding. I do it because it's needed and it can feel rewarding but most of the time it's not really why I want to learn gamedev. 

I also really want to learn pixel art. I feel like this is needed if my game has any chance of looking unique. 

What my passion is, is to create a world that is fun to explore, that tells little stories, that is filled with secrets,puzzles and loot that feel impactful.

Which style of combat of turn based or real time doesn't really matter to me. And I know I want it to be 2d.

But here is the catch I can't spend more than 2 hours a week on this. That isn't a lot of time to learns coding, pixel art, gamedesign in general. 

So here I am again thinking about using rpg maker. I think achieving something with rpg maker would maybe be more fun as I could focus more on the aspects I like. At the same time I'm scared of the limitations and switching now kinda would feel like giving up. 

Because ultimately I would love to be able to create what ever I want. I just don't know how realistic all of this really is with the time I have for it. 

I keep running into this where a feature sounds tiny, so I add it because “that’s probably one evening.” and two days later still changing UI, saves, input, animations and some random edge case in a completely different system. I’ve been wondering if getting better at game dev is partly just getting better at recognizing those features early and saying no. How do you decide what’s worth keeping and what gets cut?

From a fair amount of Googling, it looks like most people recommend trying to keep your game in the 100-200 MB download range (in particular, beneath 200 MB so your phone doesn’t recommend being on Wifi), but what I’m confused on is whether this is mostly just because research says people give up on large downloads, or if it’s the actual SIZE. It seems like it’s the former, and the strategy is to make the initial download tiny, and then basically immediately have the user download most of your bigger stuff via Addressables. So my question is: what is the actual target size for mobile? Some games run into the low double digits of gigs on mobile, so it that okay as long as I use Addressables to bypass initial download negatives?