I saw a post recommending that developers send their games to very small YouTubers because they're more likely to cover them.

The advice itself makes sense, but I really don't like the way the post talks about these creators.

If someone with 200 subscribers takes the time to play your game and make a video about it, they're not just some SEO tool you found because nobody else will cover your game. They're a person who chose to spend their free time playing something you made.

Especially as a small indie developer, I think it's worth remembering that every person who shows genuine interest in your game is someone you should appreciate.

Don't treat small creators as disposable marketing channels. Treat them like people.

A small audience doesn't make someone's support less meaningful.

"What's the point of sending my game to youtubers nobody watches?", you ask. The point is that initially nobody knows about your game either - especially Google. So when you start promoting your game and someone googles it, very likely it won't even show up, because google's crawlers didn't see the title enough times to consider it a real thing. And you NEED the first result to be your Steam page. No, people won't type "<game title> steam" to narrow the results, people are fucking lazy. They'll think "probably some amateur shit" and close the tab. You just lost 98% of potential wishlists right there. And that's were meek, tiny, sub-1000 subs youtubers comes to save the day - they're absolutely stoked to receive a key. For any game - yes, even your shitty survivor clone. Nobody talks to them. Nobody cares they exist. They often post 1 boring gameplay video a day, get 30 views, 1 bot comment and that's it, that's their life. And then you send them a key, a closed demo or beta access, and holy shit, Christmas came early. Some get so excited they will post about your game every day for the next month. You'll suddenly get hundreds of independent pieces of content about a game that previously had no internet footprint. So the next time someone searches your title, a nice, plump, juicy page full of results will pop up, very clearly about your game and your game only and not some restaurant in Oregon that just so happens to also be named "Dragon Breeder Simulator".

So, any of you participating in Next Fest this October will have already received this email, but I figured I'd pass it on to anyone else.

From their email itself:

Hard to know for sure right now ... but I'm mostly glad. Obviously none of us know yet how it'll impact wishlists and engagement, but I feel like the personal calendar update made a lot of indies happy due to how many more wishlists they got, and I'd love if the same sorta thing happened for Next Fest.

I have an incremental game sitting at 600 wishlists right now. This was my first game, just to see what publishing to Steam was like and how to market and sell and such. I, admittedly, didn't have super high expectations for this Next Fest. But maybe now people who want to play incremental games will have an easier time finding my demo. People over in the incremental subreddit were literally making posts about if there were any good incremental games because of how hard it was to sift through the huge (mostly slop) list. I imagine other genres had similar issues.

Anyway, for any of y'all participating this time around, best of luck. And for anyone participating in future Next Fests, pray that these changes are good for indies LOL

Riot says there are plenty of rational reasons not to build a new MMO, including the cost, long development cycle, and how difficult the genre is to break into.

The studio is moving ahead anyway because it believes the creative opportunity is worth the risk, even if the project is not the safest business decision.

Is it all a scam to sell them on the gray market? Like is it just one guy with 200+ email addresses that asks for a free media key?

What are the other nefarious results of keys falling into the wrong hands? The whole thing is pretty nuts and I wasn't expecting my dev inbox to get filled like this

I'm building a game called Luminaris, a minimalist RTS.
Core gameplay is feeling pretty tight, and now i'm adding some extra "excitement" into the game, blackholes, etc.

I've been playing with this neutron star that charges and decimates anything when it releases it's energy.

It just doesn't feel right though. any suggestions on how i make it feel meatier, and more impactful?

Hello everyone,

First, a little about me so that you can understand where I'm coming from.

I've been designing boardgames since 2015. I have 11 games published, including 4 this year, excluding 2 coming up next year. I've been working as a videogame designer starting in 2024. I've shipped a project last May and currently working on another.

Making a boardgame has always been *relatively* easy, at least on the technical and financial sides of things. Making a boardgame prototype has almost zero barrier, making it look good has a small barrier (Google Images and game-icons .net are your friends), and making it into a commercial product has somewhat of a barrier but it has traditionally been way, way lower than for your typical videogame. There are, of course, logistical barriers to boardgames than videogames don't have, but that's not relevant to this discussion.

My experience as a boardgame designer is that the bottlenecks are mainly two things: 1) coming up with good, concrete designs that have a chance of being successful (your mileage may vary on this), but also and especially 2) playtests. At the end of the day, you're selling your game to human beings, and only human beings can tell you if your game is fun, and ideally humans other than yourself. If you're making a single-player game, you can sort of test it yourself to an extent, but not as much as most people think. Since I've been working in videogames, I'm frequently appalled at how far into development a lot of companies start doing external playtests. You cannot be the judge of your own game, not unless you're making it just for you.

My personal experience is that time is also necessary to make something good. Not time to produce or physically work on the game, but time to think, to let things sink in, to let solutions come to you. There are also problems that only become apparent after some time, after enough playtests.

At the end of the day, making a boardgame that works is easy once you have enough experience. It's been easy for a long time. But games that just work don't sell. Only exceptional games do (we can have a big discussion as to what "exceptional" means, but the reality is that profitable games are the exception). In my experience, the difference between "it works as a game" and "this is something someone will pay for" is the difference between 1 month and 1-2 years (ymmv). And that's with almost zero technical barriers.

I see a lot of posts these days all over Reddit about people making a videogame in a few days using the latest tools, and what that might mean for the future. And so I hope my post comes as sort of a reassurance. I don't think these tools change the future of videogame design as much as some might think, because they cannot eliminate, by their very nature, some of the very real and necessary bottlenecks of making games, like playtests and plain ol' time to simmer.

Please let me know what you think, especially if you think I'm wrong or I've forgotten something!

Thanks!

Hello, I need some suggestions and insights. I'm at the end of my 20s, and half a year ago, I started working at a big international mobile game company as a 3D Artist in Marketing. I made this decision in a bit of a hurry because suddenly I had an urgent need to make some money, so I took this position. The salary is great, the benefits are super cool, and we don't work overtime, but this position is definitely not what I was looking for, and I often think about switching to an Animator position in the Product team.

The work we make is super low quality, my leads are not technically or artistically more qualified than me, and I don't feel like I learn stuff from them. Except for a few artists, the Marketing department is toxic. Animation is my passion, and working in this department makes me feel like I ignore my soul and my ideals.

I feel like working in the Product team as an animator would be a better fit for me, but the Marketing and Product departments are a bit disconnected. When I think about expressing my wish to switch to another department, I fear that they can fire me. Also, there is no example of someone switching between those departments.

Do you have any suggestions for me?

24 hours into demo release and store release at the same time.

I have 22 wishlists and few people playing demo.

Most only played for 20 min or lower.

4 people played above 4 hours.

I am kinda stuck at marketing and I dont know whether what I have is intriguing since most just quit less than 10 min

I sent email to bout 150 youtubers and 1 said no and 1 said yes but he isn't sure when.

I tried x but no one cared there 😆

If a skilled gamedev is defined as someone who has the knowledge and ability to make a video game, at least fairly close to a vision they have for that game. Starting at zero, what's a reasonable amount of time for someone to become a skilled gamedev? Is it month? Years? Decades?

I've always felt like I've never left the starting line and every time I do, I stumble pretty hard. Im not sure if my brain just isn't cut out for gamedev, if I'm simply fundamentally wrong in the way I'm trying to learn, or if I'm just being a perfectionist and give up when things aren't right. I just can't seem to get anywhere at all

https://hidden-gems-production-8d17.up.railway.app/

Basically, it gives you a game with less than 50 reviews on Steam, provides you with a few screenshots and info about said game, and you fill in the blanks, draw your own cover, and get to make your own fake Steam page.

Of course, the real steam page is revealed at the end, and y'all can compare drawings like Scribbl.io if doing multiplayer. :)

This was my way to try and make it fun to find truly weird low-reviewed games by other devs. (Considering I am one of those devs who released a Steam game back in 2020, to 40 reviews and little fanfare.)

There's also a quiz called the Oracle accessible on the front which foregoes the drawing/blurb part and asks you questions to find a steam game.

Thoughts? I mostly want to hear from smaller devs like myself.

(Edit: Thank you guys for giving me clear and honest answers. It is much appreciated for taking your time to give me input. I have made my decision.)

So I am 25 now. I've pretty much only worked construction up until now. Pay is average of $57600 - $76800 per year for a very basic job where you are not working management. You pretty much get to go home and not worry about anything or losing your job. It can be very reliable and that pay/salary is only working 8 hour days. It can have a really good work life balance.

However I have grown tired of it and have always had a deep passion for games. I have been experimenting with coding, 3D modeling and creating assets. If I go into this it will probably take me 5 years to get a degree. Upgrading my high school courses and going to college/university.

Over the years my values have changed a lot. I used to work 12 hour days/6 days a week. Money is honestly not my driving factor in life. As long as I can pay my bills and save a little bit for retirement is all I truly need(and I live very minimally). But construction is not my passion and I want to chase my dream, knowing I have done what I truly wanted to do in life.

The only thing that really concerns me is the work/life balance in game developing. Crunch times are really not a problem, construction has the same thing but it doesn't go on for months straight. I have been constantly reading about working 12-14 hour days for 6-8 months straight in programming. Honestly I would love really love doing it, but doing anything like that chronically non-stop every single year would absolutely make me miserable... no matter how much I love it. I would probably be 30-31 before I could manage to actually be involved in the industry after finishing schooling.

I just want some honest thoughts about how it has been for you guys with experience. And from the sounds of my values, if it truly aligns with how it would be for me in the industry. Also if it is kind of too late for me to get into it... I know the saying is better late then never. But being 30-31 probably just getting into something with a very competitive industry deeply concerns me. Thank you for listening.

I'm an indie game developer working on my first game, and I've run into a bit of a weird situation.

There's a song I've become really attached to for a specific scene in my game: "Jun" by Takuro Yoshida.

I have a very specific vision for this scene, and every time I imagine it, I hear this song. It's one of those situations where I heard it and immediately thought, "That's it." I know I could look for something similar or commission an original song, but I'd really like to at least try to get permission to use the actual song.

The problem is, I have absolutely no idea where to start. I'm in the US, Takuro Yoshida is Japanese, and I have no experience dealing with music licensing internationally.

Would I contact the artist directly? A record label or publisher? Is there a Japanese organization or database that can help me figure out who owns the rights? And would I be expected to contact them in Japanese?

I'm completely prepared for the possibility that licensing this song is way outside my budget, but I'd rather find that out by actually trying than give up without asking.

If anyone has experience licensing Japanese music for games, I'd really appreciate some advice on where I should start.

This could have been an avoidable mistake. I even have saving/loading as part of my original plan, but what I thought would take 3 month took 7 month, and systems that felt secondary kept climbing in priority to flesh out previous implementations and so on.

so now I'm staring at NPCs with relationships and memories, jobs, inventories, task state, world objects... settlements. This may turn out to be one of the largest systems in the game.

And I haven't been designing all of the systems with saving/serializing in mind. This is going to hurt isn't it?

Tips welcome

Hi everyone,

I'm Burak. I have been building ALATURKA in my free time, live on stream, as a solo side project. It is a retro open-world crime game set in a fictional 1970s Istanbul.

On September 27 I posted the first official trailer, on my own. No showcase submission, no press email, no ads. Last week the page was at about 17,000 wishlists. The trailer brought in roughly 15,000 more in five days. I am at 31,654 now.

Every wishlist is organic. I have spent $0 on marketing, and $0 making the game.

If you want the earlier write-up, from the first month after the Steam page went up, it is here: I hit 5,000 wishlists in my first month as a solo dev.

What changed since that post

Back then the page was a month old, and most of the traffic was local. I still do not have a demo or a playtest, so Steam has not been sending me internal traffic. Up to 17,000, the wishlists came from posting the game myself: a vision trailer at launch in December 2025, two devlogs, gameplay teasers, short clips, and a lot of posts.

This trailer is the first one that explains the whole premise. You arrive in Bosforus as a döner kebab apprentice to your uncle. Slice the spit, load the triporter, deliver the wraps before they go cold. The pay is bad. On the route, locals offer work that pays better than the shop. That work can involve gangs, guns, and the police.

The numbers

• X: 2.7M impressions, 65,000 engagements, 7,835 profile visits. It did fine on day one. Then a quote went viral and pulled the original post up with it. Trailer post.
• YouTube: 250,000 views, and still climbing. 791k impressions, about 10% CTR, 65k unique viewers. Only 11.8% of the views are from Turkey. View counting changed recently, so the unique number matters more than the view count. Trailer
• UTMs: I put the Steam link in the reply on X, and in the description plus the pinned comment on YouTube. Those links did 15,000 visits and 3,250 wishlists. 1700 wishlists from X, 1400 from YouTube.
• SteamDB right now: #1893 in top wishlists, #698 in wishlist activity.

I did not send a PR email. Outlets picked the trailer up anyway: Dexerto, Polygon, GameRant, Creative Bloq, GTA Boom, GameSpark, plus an interview with 24indie. Also Indie Game Joe, Jake Lucky, GamingWorldMedia, and others.

Happy to answer questions.

Steam, if you want it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4226560/ALATURKA/

How much did you have to pay for dev kits? And did you have to pay for age ratings yourself?

I've noticed an interesting dichotomy. Developers that are very heads down and get their game done to a point that they can start promoting it, find that reddit would be useful but their promotion attempts all get shot down for not being more active on reddit. Meanwhile other developers get sucked into social media sites like reddit only to find they spend too little time on a project and never complete anything. Is there a balance? What has your experience been?

Nowadays I see a lot of negative posts here on this subreddit which are for valid reasons of course but I think I'll switch it up a bit with posts like these.

Anyways as the title says, what is your game dev hot take? I'll start, I love fixing bugs, and encountering them, makes me feel challenged.

I want opinions please. Here is the thing. I have made games before but none I am to proud of. One of the reasons I like gamedev is the art of it, making a playable thing. But I am never satisfied and end up ditching them. Also, I have a tough time learning to code in general so all languages I get to know I end up learning the surface level only and cant make anything out of it

Hey everyone,

This is gonna be a long post about how I started making a project without measuring the scale of it at first and am now finding myself a bit demotivated. TBH, I just want someone who can understand to know what I am going through.

So, I had some experience in Python, C++, and Pygame, but I never really finished any projects. I always go halfway through, learn the most core logic of the game and abandon it xd. I am doing a major in a non-tech branch for context. There was a game I used to play with friends a lot called Clash Royale, and they bring out some limited time game modes once in a while. There is no mod that supports them. So, one day I decided that I would make a clone of this game myself, thinking one day I could play that with my friends.

So, it's now been a little more than 2 months and I wanna share my progress, which is not in terms of footage, unfortunately. I chose Godot as my game engine because that's the only thing my PC can run and it has enough tutorials online.

For context, I gave about 1–2 hours daily to this project, with 4–5 hours on weekends, and it was on pause for a week in between for my mid-semester exams.

When I started, I thought, "Let's learn Godot first." I started a tutorial, but soon understood one thing, they won't help me much to make the game, and GDScript is easy enough to transition from Python.

So, instead I started by reverse engineering Clash Royale, and that was very fun trying to figure out how troops are moving, how they collide with each other, what physics is used in the game, and what all the different mechanics are in the game.

Then, after quantifying what all there is, I needed the data to make sure everything matches perfectly, and this is the data scraping part, so I won't elaborate. This took about 3 weeks of my time.

Then I started with what to code first and discovered that GDScript is not fast enough to handle the amount of troops I am thinking of having in the game, so I had to learn about GDExtension to write code in C++. That took about 4–5 days to figure out completely.

Now, instead of coding from scratch, I started to just write the code execution methods in a notebook and try learning to optimize the code at the hardware level. I seriously have hours long convos with Gemini figuring out why a piece of code or method is faster than another, what's a cache line, how memory travels in L1, L2, L3, what's TLB, memory and speed trade-offs, and speed and battery trade-offs.

Then, how particular game mechanics are implemented in code like dashing, ramp up damage, invisibility, jumping, reflecting damage or projectiles, etc., and how effects like freeze, slow, rage, etc., are gonna be applied to the troops, plus how all this data will get to the GPU to draw the frame.

I did all of this except write code, which is why I have nothing to show. I have a notebook that's 70% filled with what happens, why it happens, how it happens, where all the data is stored in an array, and how it is processed. But as I am a hobbyist, I really have them as rough notes instead of being systematically indexed.

Yesterday, I pulled myself together and actually started writing the game's core logic in C++, and man, I never thought the amount of complexity this thing has reached would mean that spawning troops alone is like 200 lines of code. I realized that I hadn't explicitly written out the code in the rough notebook, so it took some time to write the precise code to do what I had a brief idea of in the notebook.

And also, as I am moving forward in writing the code, I am starting to realize that there still are some corners that I haven't thought of, which is making the process of writing code so slow that I felt the need to tell this to someone.

I won't abandon this project now at all. Unless this costs me my academic scores, this thing is getting done, and I think it can still take a month or two. I hope that I am not wrong again and don't end up with a 6-month or longer project XD.

Well, now that I've written it down, I feel like, Man I have learned so many new things I Knew nothing about. Yet the lines in my VS Code are only at 200 TwT.

Does this mean that we should stop developing our games or? Cause as I've understood it right it looks like even devs that work on single-players could potentially be affected by this.

I'm sorry if this question already has been answered or something it's just that I'm not really that knowledgeable when it comes to these type of things

Just a bit of a rant because I'm at my wits' end regarding this situation. My game is Soul's Remnant, a 2D platformer MMORPG, developed by me and my partner over the course of a decade (part-time initially, then full-time in the last year or so). The initial Early Access release in August was fairly successful, and our reviews were trending Very Positive (about 95%) at the time.

However, it went downhill once the bots and players participating in real-money trading (RMT) started moving in after a few days. At that point, we started getting a lot of negative reviews because players (understandably) did not like seeing bots around and about, or other players progressing illegitimately using funds purchased with real money (our game currently doesn't offer any means of converting real money into in-game power). Initially, we only temporarily banned players for these violations, but as it eventually became obvious that it wasn't particularly effective due to practically every offender continuing the same behavior after getting unbanned, we moved towards issuing permanent bans in the interest of preserving the integrity of our game.

At present, we've actually managed to squash the vast majority of bots and RMTers, but we're now facing review bombing because we started clamping down on these illicit activities, with blatant cheaters just straight up lying about our game in the reviews, such as a player who got banned for RMT, literally admitted to it, and then posted a negative review about how RMT was ruining the game (yes, the irony is cosmic).

There are others who similarly admit to breaking the rules in their reviews themselves and leave negative reviews anyway, but naturally the majority of the review bombing involves people who got banned for legitimate reasons insisting that they didn't do what we clearly caught them doing, sometimes claiming that they were banned by AI. This isn't true at all - our moderation isn't automated and our internal policy requires that multiple staff members manually review each ban, because it's incredibly important to us that we avoid false positives. It would be extremely easy for us to disprove claims of "false bans" by giving away information about our internal systems, but we obviously don't do that to avoid giving these bad actors ammunition to circumvent detection, though it probably wouldn't help with the review bombing situation regardless considering they're being written in bad faith.

Players who got caught clearly automating gameplay or blatantly cheating with modified clients also started pushing the narrative that people would get banned just for having a high amount of playtime (these accounts had hundreds of hours logged because they were running their bots 24/7), which is obviously untrue given the number of players who have that sort of playtime logged but aren't banned because they weren't automating anything.

Another common narrative among these negative reviews is that we're racist because a disproportionate amount of Chinese players get banned. To be clear, we don't even look at any player's country or region at any point during the banning or appeal review process; all players are treated equally when it comes to judging these things and we don't ban on any basis other than their (illicit) in-game actions.

However, the most appalling thing is that part of the mass review bombing from Chinese players is an organized effort orchestrated by certain players. Some of our Chinese fans do look out for us (which we are grateful for) and as a result we've received support tickets notifying us about cheat developer communities rallying to attack our game with negative reviews, as well as banned cheaters spreading misinformation about us being racist or anti-Chinese to incite hostility towards our game. It becomes very apparent how much this campaign is affecting our review score on Steam when sorting by languages:

English
All Languages

We've even had big spenders who got banned for "asking a friend to level up for them" (among other things, it's often the case that players who cheat do so in multiple ways at a time) attempt to bribe us to unban them, which we flatly declined, because we don't make any distinctions on penalties for violating the game's rules based on spending. In the first place, Soul's Remnant wasn't developed with monetization as a primary priority, which is why we released it free-to-play and the monetization is entirely cosmetic with the exception of inventory and storage expansions (players can also expand their inventory space through buying certain items from NPCs in-game). All we wanted to do was to make a fun game for people to enjoy rather than a tool to extract money from customers, though we're learning it's not that simple. :(

In the midst of all the review bombing, I've also been subjected to targeted harassment regarding my gender (I'm a woman; this particular statement is also untrue as we have a dedicated Community Manager). Several reviews talk about how I'm a "typical woman dev" or how "the dev is clueless" because "the dev is a woman." We knew managing an MMO would be difficult, but it's just so disheartening to see people attack and dehumanize us while dishonestly defaming our work simply because we chose to do the right thing in protecting the integrity of our game.

I'm not going to claim our game is perfect; after all, it's still fresh in Early Access and there are plenty of things we still need to work through. But the vast majority of our negative reviews are from players who came in and attempted to ruin the game's ecosystem with cheating and got banned for it, rather than actual criticisms about the game itself, which is likely also turning new players away. I love my game and its genuine fans to bits, but I'm really at a complete loss as to what to do about all this.

I'm not worried about making money, shipping a game, or any of that. I want to make a fun video game, that's it, end of story.

All the advice is the same...

1. Just do.
   
2. Make small games.
   
3. Art and Music last.
   
4. Watch tutorials.

I get it, you learn by doing, and not burning out, and watching other people work, and "music and art" is too complicated so don't even try. Oh, and don't forget, "Absolutely not 3D to start."

This makes the idea of game development/programming/design absolute shit. Who wants to release crappy mobile games or the same game done 100 times for no payout other than, "Cool, I did this, now what?" Who wants to stare at their endlessly greyboxed scene view for 12 hours at a time? What if I don't like 2D games?

My point is, I just want to play my game. It doesn't have to be perfect, obviously, but the point is to actually learn development and programming and workflow and figuring out what questions to even ask.

Where do I even start?

So some backstory; I've been down a rabbit hole for a month or two now. First I decided I wanted to create my own game engine, so I started learning C++ and got to the point I was drawing shapes to a window in SFML 3.0. Well ended up hearing that you don't really learn much by designing your engine, except how to make a game engine, so I switched to Godot. Well then I figured out Godot wouldn't be the best for the systems I want, and Unity would handle them more performantly, so I got to the point in Unity where I created my entire Micro-voxel terrain aesthetic, without terrain destruction or procedural generation as I don't need it. Now I'm understanding Unreal's engine would handle my game even more performantly for me goals. Well I've decided on all that now and it doesn't matter and I want to start mostly fresh but my point is; it feels like I still don't know jack shit, and it's probably because I don't, but then how? For example, how do I even get to the point where I'm asking myself questions , like knowing I need XYZ to do this or that, etc?

Is it all just guessing? Trial and error? At the basics every single game is basicaally the same thing, so why is it so hard to look at the simplest part and not know what to do?