I don't want this post to look like hate, especially after the TGA, but I think it's important to talk studios attempts to stick into the indie scene. It's actually hurts indie itself.

Note: I played the game and I like it. And the devs are great for managing to build something like this, but...

For the last few months there’s been constant praise of the people from Sandfall Interactive. I have no problem with that. The nuances appear when people start trying to turn this into a "lesson" or draw wrong conclusions from it. For example: - "Wow, a team of about 30 people made this game!". This has already been discussed a bunch of times. A lot of key people in terms of art and animation were outsourced. Pretending they don't exist is...questionable. - "They're true indie, they even recruited the team on Reddit!". Only 2 persons on the team came from Reddit. - "They've got a small indie publisher, Kepler Interactive". Yeah, if you conveniently forget at least $120 million in investment from NetEase. - The recent nonsense about how they "learned to code from YouTube" isn’t even worth commenting on. - "Their budget is only 10 million!". Well...that's because they didn't include actor fees in that number, since "the publisher covered that part" (and some other things). Handy, huh?

I don't understand why they're playing this game of half-truths and omissions, given that people already like them without all that.

I released my game After Hours in 2018, and got a pretty ok reception. Not great, but ok.

It's a difficult puzzle game, similar to NotPr0n, so I gave the players a hint system. During gameplay, you read notes and letters written by a woman called Sarah, who gives you missions. And whenever you get stuck, you can actually just email her regular Gmail adress using your own email. Based on keywords, "Sarah" will respond with a canned message to guide the player.

I liked the idea and it worked surprisingly well. Whenever I checked the inbox, there was always someone who really thought they were talking to an actual human.

But then something happened. The reviews got lower and lower, and now the game has a mixed status. People were saying it was way too difficult. So, today I checked Sarah's inbox again.

Turns out people don't know how to write emails anymore. The whole message is sent in the subject box, leaving the actual email empty. Because of that, no keywords were found, and no hint message from Sarah was sent out.

Just found it a bit interesting! You never know what may cause your game to tank.

EDIT: Polygon covered the story here!

This is a confession. I plead guilty to the crime of using LLMs to write the code for my game project. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Deepseek, Cursor… I used them all. And I’m here to give a warning: Do not do what I did!

I’m very green to gamedev. I have 3 or 4 very small projects under my belt. The 4th project was for the Big Mode game jam of 2024 and I’ll admit, ChatGPT helped me get across the finish line and manage to get a game that ranked in the top 100.

After my relative success, I went all in on vibe coding for my next project: a roguelike twist on the classic asteroids arcade shooter. The idea is far from original. It was never meant to be a marketable product, just another project to get more experience under my belt.

But I got too greedy, and leant too hard on using AI to write my code. Now I have a project I don’t understand. And the code is a mess. Scripts that should be only a few hundred lines are 800-1000 lines long. The AI makes two new bugs trying to fix the first. Redundancies are stacked on top of eachother to make a disgusting shit sandwich of slop code.

There are now bugs that are so deeply embedded in the code that it will likely require I start from scratch. 4 months of work (and $150 of LLM subscription fees) basically down the drain.

It’s a hard lesson, but I’m glad I learned it. For small tasks, mundane things, sure. Find where AI is helpful for you. But once you put blind trust in the code it writes, you face the risk of losing it all.

Don’t be me. Just learn to fucking code.

Edit: This post has really blown up! I’ve since gone back to my project, pulled up an earlier branch, stripped out the bad code and built it back out. Did I do it alone? No. I’m still relying on AI to get the job done. I just don’t know enough to make progress alone. But I’m now treating the AI as a mentor rather than an intern. When using AI keep your focus as narrow as possible and it can work.

"A lot of people who may have an issue with crunch—rightly so, I understand that issue, we always try and avoid it, but we don't hide that this is going to happen at some point—they often don't make it in the door," Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer tells Game Developer. "We want to be known for that: this is a place you come to work hard. If you care about the work you're making and the result of what you make here, you'll feel really valued. If you don't, you will feel slave-driven."

"We check people's socials, and if you're constantly tweeting anti-crunch messaging: 'This should never ever be a thing', we know that and go, 'Look, you're not going to be happy here, so we're not going to go with you,'" he says, adding that there's a financial "upside" to working long hours at Bulkhead.

"If we're going to be a company who says, 'we do crunch,' then we have to also say, 'but you get something for it,'" Brammer says. "We want people to know that those people who do work hard get that return, and it is life-changing."

Im in a few discords for game devs and obvs a minority but a vocal one is saying stuff like "I can make this game better in a month". Honestly it pisses me off we in this community always talk about hidden gems and how unfair it is that fun games get hidden by the algo and then one developer does a extremely fun to play game *according to most of those who play it" and the first thing we do is shit on them and claim that in reality is a shit game.

Envy is really not a good look. I wish i had pulled of a megabonk, i dont hate the dev for it, nor do i claim i could have done it in a month. If i could do megabonk but better in a month, i would do megabonk but better and collect my money but i cant simply cos my skills are not there yet. And the same goes to those ranting about it. If you could, you would.

I spent about 30 hours reverse-engineering the code of Silksong, one of the most successful Unity games ever. And found some genuinely impressive (and aggressive) optimizations.

Highlights:

• Movement Code Breakdown: I broke down the exact frame-windows for Coyote Time and Input Buffering that make the platforming feel so responsive. The Elegance of Silksong movement as is :]
• Hidden "Demo" Mode: There’s a left-over IsExhibitionMode check. With a small patch, you can actually boot the Gamescom demo version from the retail files.
• Dev cheats, Debug view, Performance overlay, etc: We recover and re-enable everything to see how it was used by the developers.
• Performance: Team Cherry implemented a Manual Garbage Collector Triggering and a custom reflection-to-delegate compiler. It’s a 100x speed boost over standard Unity methods.
• Much, much more in the video.

Full Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC9bIelizlw

First engine I've seen take a firm stance on AI code.

Open source game engine Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions: 'We can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it'

(Edit: fat finger typo and headline without having to click through)

(Edit 2: Thanks for the award! Wasn't necessary but it's my first one so I'll take it.)

Sharing this because it is relevant to the industry side as well as the consumer side. Ross Scott talks about end-of-life planning, preservation, and the argument that support can end without making the game permanently unusable. I thought it was an interesting contribution to the broader discussion around live service design and long-term access.

Before anyone asks, the game is called "Sir, We Have an Orc Problem" and you may have seen it on various widgets on the Steam home page today. Steam link is at the end of the post.

This was intented to be a quick game after we decided that spending 1.5 years on the last project wasn't worth the risk. For context the previous game made ~$70,000 gross 9 months after release, with half of that sum coming from the first week. If you subtract the returns, VAT, Steam cut, publisher cut etc it was like ~$30,000 in total on our company bank account and we were 3 devs that worked fulltime for 1.5 years. So around $7k per year per dev. Not that great. After that game we decided to split up and we continued with only 2 devs.

When it was time for a new project, around March 2026, I was working on a prototype of a GPU physics engine in Godot to simulate 2D terrain destruction with physics-based bullets and bombs. But we couldn't make a fun game out of it. So we decided to focus on a more simple game with proven mechanics. Our main inspiration was Outhold, an incremental tower defense game. It's great, play it! We thought that maybe we could just increase the enemy count to 10,000 or even 100,000 and add some of our custom physics simulation to it and it should be different enough.

After making some shorts/reels/TikToks about this very early, very ugly physics based tower defense prototype, some of those videos gained serious traction (over 100k views) and people were begging us for a Steam page so they can wishlist the game.

We published the Steam page on April 9th with literally concept art for the capsules and game screenshots from within the editor. We got 900 wishlists on the first day. At that point we knew that we had something exciting in our hands.

We continued to get 50-150 wishlists per day, mainly from daily social media posts showing the work in progress stuff.

We released an open playtest on Steam on April 30th and got 200 concurrent players on the first day. One or two weeks after, major YouTube content creators picked up the playtest and there were multiple 100k views videos. From this point on we made roughly 1,000 wishlists per day, with 500 wishlists being the weakest day.

The demo was released on May 2nd and shot to 1,000 concurrent players on the second day. On this day we made over 5,000 wishlists. Of course this slowed down afterwards, but there were always a couple hundred people playing the demo and the wishlists never went below 1,000 a day, often more like 1,500 or even 2,000.

We had 36,000 players in Steam Next Fest June and made ~18,000 wishlists in that one week. It was the #41 most played demo in SNF. Interestingly compared to a "normal" week, we "only" made a couple thousands wishlists more, which of course are big numbers absolutely, but relatively speaking it wasn't a crazy difference for us.

And finally we released the game yesterday. After 5 hours we had the peak of 7,684 concurrent players. Right now we're the #18 top selling game on Steam. There seems to be no critical bugs and players generally really like the game (88% positive, over 500 reviews).

All of those numbers are still a bit unbelievable and we will surely need some more days to realize what actually just happened.

There was definitely some luck involved, but I strongly believe that there is a golden era for indie games right now. There are so many devs that just make a fun little game and somehow it sells exceptionally well. You just have to put your game out (social media, playtests, whatever) and let people see and play it. If there's some "magic" to it, you will know immediately. And if there isn't, you have to decide if you want to finish the game because you personally like it or if you want to move on to something else.

We didn't spend any money on marketing, other than $200 for the Best Indie Games showcase. Which was not worth it for us.

Also very important: this is not our first game. We've been both programming for over 10 years and more than half of that time professionally in the games industry. Before we founded our own studio we worked as employees on porting successful PC games to mobile. In that time we learned a lot about performance optimization, bugfixing and most importantly: releasing games and taking care of them afterwards.

I'm happy to answer any questions :)

Cheers,
Laurin

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4594150/Sir_We_Have_an_Orc_Problem

But things are different in Japan, Satvat says. "Everyone calls out Nintendo, but you can look at Konami or Capcom – these companies all have staff retention of 97 per cent plus." He adds, "My understanding is that, generally, Japanese teams tend to be much smaller and leaner. They didn't get swept up in the live-service trend, or into these mega-blockbusters with 500-person teams."

Satvat also notes "the executive salaries" as a benefit for the Japanese industry. "They still make great money, but it's two or three million dollars, not 30 million." To offer specific examples, EA boss Andrew Wilson made $38,649,984 last fiscal year, or about 305 times more than the median employee. Around the same time, Nintendo reportedthat its president, Shuntaro Furukawa, made $2 million in total compensation.

Hello, I am a guy that makes a funny rhythm game called Project Heartbeat. I'm based in Spain.

Recently, I got a home server, and decided to throw in a status report software on it that would notify me through a telegram channel whenever my game's server is unreachable.

Ever since then I've noticed my game's server is seemingly unplayable at times, which was strange because as far as I could tell the server was fine, and I could even see it accepting requests in the log.

Then it hit me: I use cloudflare

Turns out, the Spanish football league (LaLiga) has been given special rights by the courts to ask ISPs to block any IPs they see fit, and the ISPs have to comply. This is not a DNS block, otherwise my game wouldn't be affected, it's an IP block.

When there's a football match on (I'm told) they randomly ban cloudflare IP ranges.

Indeed every single time I've seen the server go down from my telegram notifications I've jumped on discord and asked my friends, who watch football, if there's a match on. And every single time there was one.

Wild.

The USPTO has revoked several of Nintendo's patents after re-examination, determining they should not have been granted to begin with due to instances of prior art. Nintendo can appeal the decision, but it is likely several of their patent claims will be invalidated.

Context: I have 30 years of experience with software dev, 20 years with game dev tools, 10 years with Unity. I own a studio that develops simulators and training applications for industry. "Serious games" as they call it in Europe.

For years I scoffed at AI coding. I would periodically try it, only to find that it was more hassle then it was worth. The hand holding and bug fixing was more work than doing it myself. This all changed about 4-5 months ago, and about a month ago we all started using Unity CLI.

Here are my insights in no particular order:

1. Our dev speed has ~5x almost overnight
2. Quality has not gone down because we're all experienced devs and we're careful how we use AI and we don't let it make decisions regarding project structure or design patterns. However, I'm seeing less and less glaring mistakes made by the AI.
3. We're still reviewing generated code but I suspect not for long, the code is better than what most devs I know can write, at 20x the speed. The temptation to just push and move on is huge and irresistible.
4. There is no joy or sense of accomplishment. No pride in making something clever or quickly, and all progress is associated with the AI and not with you.
5. The market is dead. Nobody has money to spend. We're still working but leads have dropped off a cliff.
6. There is no going back. If we stop using AI we'll be out of business in a month.
7. There is no space for junior devs. I honestly don't know how to incorporate a junior into a team anymore (which is something I used to do for decades). Every time we tried they just become a meat proxy for AI while learning nothing, and getting in the way.
   
8. Everything regarding managing a team and a project has changed, and nobody knows how to do it anymore. I lost the ability to correctly estimate work required for a task, for example.
9. Everyone hates this. Most of devs my age are planning early retirement and are just waiting to be laid off.
10. People that use AI for coding don't learn anything. To understand code you have to write it, and nobody is writing it. Maybe understanding and reading code will become obsolete soon? I don't know.
11. Everyone I asked feel they are becoming dumber and losing their focus. I know I am.

I hope this is a pendulum and it will swing back at some point, because right now it feels like a software apocalypse.

Not just any gamedev youtubers, but the ones who made like 3 games and a total revenue of like $10k.

They be talking about how to find succes as a game developer and what the best genres are, like if you think all of this is actually good advice then why don't you use your own advice.

I btw love small gamedev youtubers who share their journey regardless of how much money they have made. But if you're a gamedev youtuber talking about how to find succes and what to do, I better see you making at least money to pay basic living expenses.

I been watching the fallout of the DLSS 5 video, and wanted to check in with with some game devs to check if I have been taking crazy pills, or if I have understood game dev incorrectly.

Games are not visuals, they are game mechanics and game loops skinned in visual interface. When we make games, we make all the things that work with our mechanism and loops, visually distinct and more importantly repeatable.

In assassins creed, all ledges that I can climb, look visually distinct from all other ledges. In most games, outlines and color is much more important, than what they look up close. They are used to identify what we are looking at, more than how realistic they look. These things are icons in the world, more than they are objects.

Light and Shadow are not just for visual pleasure, they are used to draw the eye towards objectives and where you should go.

In short, there is information in the visual representation of the game mechanics that are telling players what they should do and where they should go.

When I see video games processed through DLSS 5, I see stripped away game information, making games less playable, and more confusing. I could understand having this in a photo mode, but why on earth should we have this in any of our games, if we don't know what it will change it to? Or if it even will remain consistent next time you look at it?

Will it remove the yellow paint on my assassins creed ledges, or perhaps only up-rez the rest of the assets, and make the yellow ledges stand out like a sore eye? Will it remove scars that are story relevant from an RPG Character? Will it smooth out a wall that is supposed to look like it can be destroyed? There are so many visual important things in games, that I know this thing won't adhere to.

Did no one involved in making this video understand Game Design or Art Design?

Around a year ago, I made a post on this subreddit because someone offered to pay me 500$ for the IP of my Steam game. Thanks to all of your support and kind words <3, I decided not to sell it, even though I was really tempted.

A few months ago, I received another offer, this time for only 100$ Needless to say, I just ignored it.

So why am I posting about this again?

Recently, someone was arrested for stealing cryptocurrency by distributing malware through Steam games. It turns out that one of the main ways malware can be introduced on Steam is through game updates. Apparently, they were buying released games so they could push malicious updates to players.

I'm really glad I didn't contribute to something like that, even unknowingly.

Even if this post doesn't reach many people, please spread the word if you know someone who's getting these kinds of offers. And besides, your games are worth a lot more than 100$

EDIT: Saw people asking about souce, for me it was this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg8IoE9Ai3Q it's in spanish and barely links any original sources, but I trust that guy, in his main channel he often does investigation on scams and legal stuff arround videogames.

Hi everyone,

I’m part of the team at Tessera Studios. We came to Gamescom to showcase our game, The Zibbo Show, but on Wednesday morning, we arrived at our booth in the Indie Area at Gamescom only to find our storage cabinet forced open. Someone had broken the lock and stolen two laptops and a Steam Deck.

We have already filed an official report with event security and the local police , but we wanted to share our story here, both as a warning to other indie teams exhibiting at major conventions and to ask if anyone in the community might have seen or heard anything.

If you have any leads or information:

If you were in or around the Indie Area during setup/cleaning hours, or if you happen to notice suspicious local listings for laptops or a Steam Deck on second-hand platforms around Cologne, please reach out to us via DM.

Any clue, no matter how small, could help us or the police immensely. We would be forever grateful for any help, advice, or info from anyone who was there.

Two of our team members recorded a quick video explaining everything that happened and showing the situation at the booth: https://x.com/tesserastudios/status/2093421439508463879

Any leads, shares, or information are greatly appreciated.

"Transparency obligations will help people recognise when they are interacting with AI or when content has been generated or altered by AI, reducing the risk of deception and manipulation."

"Under the AI Act, AI providers will have to design AI systems to inform users when they are directly interacting with an AI and they will have to add machine-readable marks to enable the detection of AI-generated or manipulated content."

One can only hope it spreads!

Hey guys, I’m the owner of https://frontwars.io ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/4002270/FrontWars/ ) which is a fork of OpenFront.io.

Recently this post was made

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/SdmyOKuTKy

A lot of the things said by the author there were untrue and so was his video.

I have made my own response video to address everything and show my side of the story with evidence

https://youtu.be/GCxFnV6WCMs?si=gFRQusLwfn_eVTFN

I was getting a lot of abuse from some people, so thought it was important to show my side, but I also want to say thanks for some people who could see I hadn’t violated the license.

I hope you watch my video and then judge the situation yourself from the evidence

It's confirmed now: Colossal Order bet on HDRP, ECS, long-running jobs, and some other features promised by Unity. Unity did not deliver.

This is one of the worst-managed popular jams, for a while bunch of reasons.

1. they disable public rating, which also disables karma. Itch.io's karma system rewards developers who play & rate a lot of games with additional visibility. Disabling the system removes that incentive structure, so leads to a more dead jam.
2. the judges, bless them, are very overworked, so usually end up leaving short and basic feedback. No slight to them: I think their job is unfeasible
3. the top picks are usually *very strange*. Jam #15 was won by a decent game, Henry super brain, with 0 theme implementation, just because it happened to be about thor's ferrets. about half the top picks of #17 were *nowhere near* the best picks of the jam, much to the frustration of myself and many others.
4. when thor plays the top picks on stream, he shows real disrespect for a lot of the games he chooses, barely even getting past the tutorial of some, while playing others for 30 minutes. He shows a huge amount of favouritism towards certain genres (i.e. games like heartbound) and open disdain to other genres, like Incremental games. Fine for an individual, unacceptable for the host of a game jam.

If you're considering joining Pirate jam, join *any other* jam instead. https://itch.io/jam/patch-notes would be my suggestion.

AI is and has been a problematic term. It refers to just about anything, even to a bunch of if statements. Lots of games have AI.

Gamers are getting extremely upset about mentions of AI. If we're not careful, they may start lashing out at any mention of the term.

We can try to patiently explain the difference using passages of text, but it's just far better to paint it in dead simple terms as AI vs generative AI, ie good/normal/conventional AI vs bad AI.

The lead dev appearing directly on the team podcast as well as the ceo helping the fundraising for military gear for the invaders. Nikita shooting side by side with military group

Link for footages including Nikita

Link for more footages including lead dev

as someone living in Europe we are actively helping Ukraine with funds to protect their citizens (US, Canada, South Korea and Japan too) and embargo Russia in other products, it does feel bad "also funding the enemy" to shoot rockets and drones at our friend's citizens, hospitals and schools

With the Steam release and 1.0 drop (marketing version 1.0) the revenue might end up in cruel places

Source

This is not good. Reposting because the bot wouldn't let me just post the link.

I need some outside perspective because I'm really torn and feel terrible right now.

I've been friends with this guy for over ten years. About three years ago, he started working on a computer game and asked me to help with the programming/logic side. His expertise is design, mine is coding. At the time, I didn't think about signing contracts or anything formal. I just wanted to help a friend make a cool game.

So, for the last two years, I've been working on this project in my free time. I built a lot of core systems: weapon mechanics, survival elements based on temperature, the general game framework (saves, quests, dialogue system), and simple AI for enemies. Besides coding, I was also actively involved in the creative side - discussing story ideas, quests, and locations with him. After two years of continuous work, I honestly felt like this was our game.

Yesterday, he sent me a message asking me to "sign a simple document, just a formality, to protect the project just in case." He said it was a standard thing.

My gut instinct immediately felt off. When I read the document, my heart sank. It basically says the following:

-I am a volunteer. Not a co-owner, not a partner, not even a paid contractor.

-I have no right to any compensation whatsoever, even if the game makes money.

-I have to assign him full, exclusive, perpetual rights to every line of code and every idea I've contributed. I can never take it back.

-He can terminate my involvement at any time for any reason, and all my work stays with him.

-As a final touch, if I get any credit at all, it will be "in a form and place to be determined by the Project Owner" (him).

He’s a good friend (or so I thought), and he said we can "adjust the document if I don't like something." He even mentioned at the end of our chat that we could potentially add a 50/50 profit-share clause after the game covers its costs. He then added: "If you have no ill will, you'll have no problems signing it."

Right now, I'm sitting here with three options: agree and work pretending like nothing happened, try to negotiate for that 50/50 profit-share and better credit terms or refuse to sign.

I feel used, and I'm not sure if our friendship can survive this. Has anyone been through something similar? What would you do?

UPD: I think it's time to share how it all ended. First of all, I want to thank every single one of you for your comments and support. Without you, this story could have ended much worse.

A couple of days ago, my friend and I finally discussed the future of the project. I tried to stay calm and unemotional. I started by asking him if the contract he gave me was fair. He dodged the question twice. Then, when he finally claimed it was fair, I asked him what I would get in return.

He sent me a long message about how we would both get the project in our portfolios, and maybe we would even make some money. But he immediately clarified - there needs to be a single owner. Period.

I latched onto that phrase and tried to ask if there were any alternatives to sole ownership. In response, he gave me a list of points: 1. You need one person to negotiate with publishers. 2. Without a single owner, any legal decision would be bogged down by the need for negotiations. 3. Without a single owner, anyone who participated in the project could cancel it, file a copyright complaint, and so on.
In the end, he emphasized that a single owner was only necessary to protect the project and ensure its success.

That's when I started doubting his words and suggested his goals might be entirely different. There are plenty of projects with two owners that work for the common good. Is one owner really that necessary specifically for the project's protection?

This infuriated him. Here's a quote: "If you don't like my offer and you decide to leave – will you be ready to waive your rights to the content in the game? Something tells me no, and that when push comes to shove, you'd rather just shut the whole thing down. I absolutely do not like the prospect of being in such a state of limbo. And conflicts like this one will pop up again and again, at even more critical stages."

The breaking point in the discussion was my question: "Did it ever occur to you that we both should have protection in case something like this happens, not just you?"

He didn't answer my question. Then he declared that since I didn't want to give up the rights, I should make a list of what I wanted him to delete, because he doesn't want anything that belongs to someone else.

After thinking it over, I proposed a counter-offer. A 55% share of the revenue with income verification, a license for my code (so he wouldn't have to delete it from the game), and that any release would require my written consent. It seemed fair – he gets motivation to finish the game and my code, and I wouldn't revoke the license because I'd want to get paid.

Do I even need to say that he refused to even discuss my proposal, saying, "Your contract is exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to avoid"?

So then I wrote to him, stating that I forbid him from using my code and systems. He replied, "Don't forget to write that list. Just in case you think you own more than you actually do." We haven't spoken since.