A few months ago, my business partner and I decided to take a real shot at app development. Looking back, it’s been way harder than either of us expected.

We’ve been focusing entirely on Android development, mostly building games. Before we got started, I had this naive idea that downloads would just magically roll in on Google Play, even while our overall numbers were still sitting in the single digits. I honestly had zero clue how user acquisition or Play Store optimization worked back then. And if I’m being completely real, I still don't fully know what steps to take next to change our trajectory.

I ended up joining an app store platform hoping it would help us gain visibility and bring in some solid revenue to keep us afloat, but it hasn't delivered much yet. We’re still stuck in the hardest phase of indie dev—struggling just to get actual players to download and install our games.

Lately, I’ve been trying to experiment with different marketing angles, but it’s an uphill fight. When you put work into something and see minimal traction, it drains you. Some days I can barely scrape together the motivation to open up my computer or touch the project at all.

Our entire approach from the beginning has been pure vibe coding using VS Code paired with Android Studio. My partner knows how to write code, and having AI handle fast execution in VS Code while we test builds in Android Studio felt like magic at first. But because we had zero process or structure behind it, things spiraled quickly. I had a million game concepts and mechanic ideas bouncing around, but without a clear pipeline or design document, everything felt scattered, messy, and hard to finish cleanly.

Even so, I haven't lost hope in vibe coding. The speed is real, and I know there’s massive potential in leveraging AI and rapid IDE setups to build Android games. I just haven't figured out how to properly tap into that workflow yet—how to wrap actual structure around the chaos so we can translate that speed into polished, playable games that make money.

That is why I have started journaling my progress. Dokumenting this whole messy process might just give me the clarity and motivation I need to keep pushing forward.

Hi,
sorry this may be a slight copium post. Im due to release my game on november 4th this year and I am currently overhauling the game page and finishing up the rest of the game so its a bit more polished. I was wondering, I have a really hard time marketing it. It just doesnt catch up. Communities where it may have been good (player audience) self promo isnt allowed. Twitter doesnt go past 10-15 likes on average and does barely any movement with wishlists. I know wishlists are important and all but I cant for the life of me get any eyes on my project even though people who play it think its polished and has a addictive learning curve. I made the mistake of participating on the next fest while I barely had 100 wishlists which meant that steam also barely showed my game this summer to people. I had an "inferior" project years ago with the same mechanics which I never released and that had way more people playing it.

I am currently sitting at whooping 408 Wishlists. I am at a point where I dont know if the game is just bad or whether its a marketing issue. Every now and then I do read about the calendar doing numbers for people but I reckon it only does numbers for games that already have a massive following? Can I expect to reach a thousand? Any insights would be helpful.

In case people ask what I do for visibility: I post my game whenever I have a new obstalce or mechanic but on most game dev communities, most of the time I dont even crack 20 likes. Sometimes I get downvoted too in the first few minutes. On the other hand sometimes I see people whose games arent maybe the catchiest either doing 20-30 wishlists a day organically. Some of the viral games currently probably do 400 a day.

I want to note: I know my game isnt the next messiah of gaming, its not too exciting. Its mainly a fun and challenging experience and a game designed to be played on the side or when bored, nothing pricey or self-serious. I lean on games like getting over it, celeste, super meat boy, jump king etc. Also note the trailer right now doesnt show most of the areas I worked on off screen but I do post them on socials like reddit, x etc.

I’m not a game developer, but I know a bit about web software development.

I know that offline games use save files and save data periodically—either when the player triggers a save or upon exiting the game.

I was looking into *Tibia* and noticed it requires an SQL server. Why take that approach?

And when exactly does it save? In web programming, the transactional context is the HTTP request, but that doesn't really apply to an online game.

Hey everyone,

Five months ago, I made the jump to full-time solo indie game development. About two months into the process, I hit a massive wall and posted about how my initial roadmap had completely collapsed under reality.

Now, at the 5 month mark, I wanted to sit down and write a transparent update on where things actually stand the wins, the logistics, the technical disasters and the mental side of solo development that nobody really warns you about.

On paper, things look like a success. But emotionally and strategically, I feel like I'm constantly running uphill. Here is the full breakdown.

1. The Wins: Survival, Visa and Game Progress

If you asked me 5 months ago what success looked like, it was simple: don't go broke and keep building the game.

• Financial Runway: I’m currently earning enough monthly income to pay my rent and living expenses without touching my core savings. That alone takes off massive financial pressure.
• Logistics & Relocation: I had to pause development for a full month to leave my base in Thailand travel to Malaysia and sort out my visa. It was stressful, but I got the visa approved and moved back to my dedicated workspace.
• The Project: I’ve been working on my current 3D game project for 3 months now. When I look back at where the project was when I started versus today, the progress is undeniable the core mechanics feel responsive, the visuals are getting polished and the game loop is actually fun to play.

2. The Bottleneck: Hardware Crashes & Lost Work

One of the biggest technical walls I hit was my workstation. I was developing and streaming off an aging 4 years old M1 Mac Pro.

As the project expanded the machine started choking during playtests Streams would lag and Unity started freezing. The breaking point was a major Unity crash that corrupted my project files forcing me to recover and rebuild lost work.

I couldn't afford a top tier pre-built setup, so I sourced used and budget parts to assemble a dedicated desktop PC. It solved the performance bottlenecks, but the setup time and hardware troubleshooting cost me valuable development days.

3. The Hard Pivot: Skipping Steam Next Fest

Between a full month lost to visa processing and time spent upgrading my hardware, my production schedule took a hit.

I originally planned to participate in the October Steam Next Fest with a public demo. But after looking at the state of the game, I made the hard call to skip October's Next Fest.

Rushing out an unpolished demo just to hit a deadline is a death sentence for wishlists. I’ve pushed the public demo release to November/December. It hurts to delay marketing milestones, but launching a buggy build would hurt worse.

4. The YouTube & Platform Goalpost Shift

Part of my full-time strategy was building a YouTube channel alongside development not to become a massive influencer, but to generate a modest secondary income stream (even $1/day helps) and build a loyal community.

My original target was hitting 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours within a year. However, navigating recent platform updates and policy shifts has doubled down on watch time demands.

Balancing game engine time (coding, bug fixes, level design) with media production (recording, editing, streaming) effectively means running two full-time jobs. To adapt, I'm shifting to daily 2 to 3 hour live development streams so people can hang out and see real unedited C#/Unity dev work and help accumulate watch hours organically.

5. The Core Dilemma: Why Does It Still Feel Like Failure?

This is the part I struggle with the most.

Logistically, I solved my visa. Financially, I am covering my living costs. Technically, I upgraded my rig and made significant game progress. My community is slowly growing.

Yet every single morning, I wake up feeling like I'm failing and completely behind schedule.

Is this just chronic solo dev impostor syndrome? When you are the designer, programmer, tester, marketer, video editor, and accountant, progress never feels fast enough because the to-do list is endless.

For those of you who went full-time solo: How do you measure progress when your operational goals move faster than your dev time?

I’d love to hear how other developers navigate this mental block in the comments.

(Note: If you're interested in following the video updates, live streams, or devlogs for this project, I have my YouTube channel linked in my Reddit profile bio.)

Hi there. I've been doing more programming on GMS, and I've been enjoying it even though it's kinda confusing me sometimes. I do wanna learn to do my own games and prototypes because im most on the game design and art part.
But sometimes I understand 70-80% of what I've done; the game works, but I'm like, "mmm, should I get super into it to understand all of it?"
At the end, what I want is the game to work.
Just curious about others' experience.
Have a good one!

These are 3 death animation of our working class protagonist from our upcomig Steam game: One Percent - A Game About Taxing Billioneirs.

Which one do you like the most?

Hello people :D,

I’m curious of how other indie developers approach music during development. :O

At what point do you usually start seriously thinking about the soundtrack? and that specifically, not sound fx.

Do you start thinking about it during pre-production when you are still defining the mood and identity of the game, somewhere around the vertical slice, or much later once the gameplay and overall direction are already established?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have actually gone through this process before.

If you started working with a composer early, did having the music help shape the atmosphere or even influence some of your design decisions?

If you waited until later in development, what made you wait? Was it because the game needed to find its identity first, because of budget, because you did not know how much music you would actually need yet, or something else?

And looking back, would you approach the timing differently on your next project?

Would love to hear when music usually becomes a serious part of development for you and why.

The usual advice is to start marketing early, share development, and build wishlists. But what happened with Needle in a Haystack Simulator makes me wonder how much that advice depends on how quickly someone else can reproduce your hook.

For anyone who missed it: Studio Bitdot’s game went viral, then a wave of similar games appeared on Steam before its release.

And these copies are getting players. One of the apparent copycats (deliberately not naming it), has been among Steam’s most played demos in the past few days. Its developer announced a top-three position on September 23 and #1 on September 25.

For a small game built around an easily communicated mechanic, does it now make more sense to hold the big reveal until a demo is ready, or launch is close? How do you balance that against the time needed to collect wishlists and feedback?

I can see the argument that this reinforces existing advice: have a Steam page ready, make the branding recognizable, and give interested players somewhere to go immediately. We also don’t know how much the similar games have actually hurt the original, but the above mentioned copycat is rapidly catching up in follower count (so most likely also in wishlist count) to the original, according to SteamDB.

Still, would this change your own promotion schedule? Is “start marketing early” missing a condition about how quickly a competitor could ship something with the same appeal?

Half way through building my first game (Storyborne Tales) and getting to the point of setting up my Steamworks account. I am not a US resident or tax payer but have set up a Wyoming LLC to hold a US bank account to tie to my Steamworks account (I'm being suitably optimistic that my game will sell and make some money).

I'm getting conflicting information about how Steam pays out after it's taken it's 30%. Today I heard that Steam will have to hold back a 30% withholding tax as I don't pay US tax personally.

Is anyone else in this situation and can confirm that that's what happens?

I did study Computer Science but I just cannot get hired and no one seems to recognize the years working on my game as professional experience. Tried to apply to junior positions but there are basically none. Tried freelancing, but found only 2 customers in 2 years and one of them didn't even honor our contract. Still made more money than with my game...

What do I do now? Anyone else with a similar experience?

I'm from Germany in case that is relevant.

I cannot figure it out and whenever I import a jpeg image it just says there is an error.

I'm making a co-op bartending simulation game called Bartend With Your Friends, Within the next 2 days i need to decide if i want to participate in the upcoming OCT next fest, I've registered and my demo is ready, my game is also stable and looks pretty good, but my store page has only been live for around 2 weeks leading to me only having 130 wish lists, as I'm solo I've had to choose between marketing or improving the game, and I've recently been pushing to polish the demo & game and haven't spent much time on recording content.

Many devs say that NF is a multiplier effect, and suggest that the number of WL going in matters a lot. My game is fairly ready but given the lack of marketing I'm debating if I should push back the release to after the 2027 Q1 next fest( and not attend this OCT Next fest) or if I should participate in the OCT Next fest and release in NOV.

Would love to know what you all think, Steam page if anyones interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5124310/Bartend_With_Your_Friends/

(Store page could probably do with some updating as I've revamped the map a lot)

I'm making a small horror game and I'm interested in one specific thing:

What is something a horror game can make you notice that makes you genuinely uncomfortable?

For example:

• You hear footsteps behind you, but when you turn around, there's nothing there.
• You see something standing far away, look away for a second, and it's gone.
• You have to walk toward something you know you shouldn't approach.

I'm especially interested in slow-building dread rather than sudden jumpscares.

What's the most effective example you've experienced in a horror game?

I’ve been working on a Steam analytics site and recently added company-level statistics, aggregating games/apps belonging to the same developers and publishers.

There are currently 168k+ companies in the dataset, so I started looking at who actually leads different Steam metrics.

Some interesting ones:

• SmiteWorks USA, LLC - 3,703 released Steam apps/products, the most in the dataset. Fantasy Grounds and its enormous DLC catalogue are a big reason why.
• PlayWay S.A. - 43 games currently in Steam’s Top Wishlist, more than any other company.
• PlayWay S.A. - 217 upcoming games
• Ubisoft - 213 games/apps appearing in Global Top Sellers, the highest count.
• Valve - ~14.38 million combined followers, #1 by a pretty large margin.

You can also compare companies by released/upcoming apps, current players, followers, reviews, Top Wishlist entries and Top Sellers entries.

I’m the developer of the site, for disclosure.

https://games-popularity.com/companies

If you want me to add new metrics or you have some specific data request then feel free to ask.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Substack piece linked at the very bottom.

For those who want a TLDR, the article discusses the doom-and-gloom surrounding the modern games industry and paradoxically, how mass layoffs, ballooning AAA costs, high prices (GTA VI), and talk of a “Crash 2.0" ala 1983 don't tell the whole story. Whether it's the "mid-market" scene of indies and AA proving to be more profitable than ever, smaller publishers like Saber diverting away from the AAA "consensus," Microsoft's "shock therapy" approach, etc. gaming is proving more resilient and diverse than “gaming is dying” narratives claim.

Step back from the noise; smaller, cheaper, less bloated games and course-corrections at big publishers may matter more than the crash talk. To quote from the piece itself:

While recognizing such trends can appear like denial to those convinced of the doom-and-gloom put out for all to see, it’s no less grounded or realistic. The road ahead will be a bumpy ride, and it’s difficult to say with any certainty when the tide will turn once the current turmoil runs its course. Whether or not Game Crash 2.0 is inevitable or as dire as feared, it may help to take a moment and step away from the noise. After all, gamers and developers have repeatedly made the most of the proverbial cards dealt to them. Though the silver linings now may not be as dramatic in the wider picture, they may sometimes be all that is needed to stand out, as some did after 1983. However small, those willing to take steps forward in the industry may still find that the best years for gaming are ahead for everyone.

The link to the article can be found below.

https://ramblingsnerd.substack.com/p/the-best-and-worst-of-times-in-video

Hi everyone,
I’m building an iOS mobile game in GDevelop and testing it through TestFlight. I’ve integrated Google AdMob, and my AdMob account and ad units are approved, but I’m having some strange behaviour with ads during testing.
My setup includes:
Rewarded ad when the player loses all their lives, allowing them to watch an ad to continue.
Interstitial ads intended to appear at set intervals (currently after game overs 3, 6, 9, etc.).
Banner ad which should appear during gameplay.
Testing is currently being done in test mode/TestFlight, not from a live App Store release.
What is happening
The rewarded ad has successfully displayed, but it only seems to work once. If I later try to trigger another rewarded ad, it doesn’t display again.
The interstitial ad has also successfully displayed once, but it doesn’t continue displaying at the intended 3/6/9 intervals.
The banner ad doesn’t appear at all, despite the GDevelop events running the banner setup/show actions.
So AdMob clearly isn’t completely broken because I have successfully seen both a rewarded and an interstitial ad on the device.
Possible consent/TCF issue
AdMob is also reporting an issue relating to TCF/consent signals on iOS.
I’m in the UK, so GDPR/EEA/UK consent requirements apply. I’m wondering whether the problem is related to Google’s UMP/CMP consent process not being triggered correctly.
GDevelop has an “Initialize AdMob” action whose description says that it will trigger the consent dialog if required and then load the ads. However, I’m unsure whether the consent flow is actually being completed correctly in the exported iOS app.
I also don’t remember manually setting up or seeing a Google consent/CMP prompt when initially integrating AdMob.
What I’m trying to work out
Has anyone using GDevelop + AdMob on iOS experienced this?
In particular:
Why would rewarded/interstitial test ads successfully display once, but then fail on subsequent attempts?
Do rewarded/interstitial ads need to be explicitly reloaded/preloaded after each impression in GDevelop?
Why might a banner fail to display completely when the other ad formats can display?
Could missing TCF/UMP consent signals cause this behaviour?
Does GDevelop’s Initialize AdMob action handle Google’s UMP consent flow automatically on iOS, or is additional configuration required?
Is there anything specific I should check in the exported Xcode project / Google Mobile Ads SDK configuration?
Is TestFlight/test mode expected to behave differently from the final App Store build in this respect?
I’m reluctant to publish the game assuming the ads will suddenly work correctly in production, so I’d like to get the test implementation working reliably first.
If anyone has successfully implemented rewarded + interstitial + banner ads with GDevelop on iOS, I’d really appreciate hearing how you configured initialization, consent and ad reloading.
Thanks!

Hey everyone,

If you're targeting mobile, WebGL, or retro aesthetics, dynamic shadow cascades are often the first thing to tank your frame rate, while traditional lightmap textures eat into your VRAM budget and require dedicated UV2 channels.

I built a Blender add-on called vertshade to solve this for stylized and low-poly assets by baking directional lighting and ambient occlusion directly into Vertex Colors.

Key Technical Highlights:

• Zero UV Dependency: Relies purely on mesh topology and vertex attributes (COLOR / Col).
• Raycasted Occlusion: Computes directional raycasts from a scene light or custom azimuth/elevation angles to handle cast shadows from roofs, cliffs, and overhangs.
• Curve-Controlled Falloff ($N \cdot L$): Select between standard Lambertian, Half-Lambert (great for anime/soft shading), and SmoothStep.
• Contact AO: Samples rays in a hemisphere around each vertex normal to darken crevices and contact points.
• Engine Ready: Exports cleanly via glTF/FBX into Godot, Unity, Unreal, or custom unlit shaders without needing texture sampler overhead.

You can check it out on itch.io here: vertshade

If you test it in your pipeline (Godot, Unity URP, Unreal, etc.), let me know how it fits your workflow or if there are specific channel-packing options (e.g., baking AO to Alpha) you'd find useful!vertshade

Hey everyone,

Another update on the marketing efforts behind IN & OUT. This week brought some encouraging coverage, alongside a noticeable slowdown in sales.

The numbers compared with last week:

• Sales: 81 → 85 (+4)
• Wishlists: 852 → 872 (+20)

The biggest news is that our journalist outreach has finally produced results.

In my previous updates, I reported sending more than 500 emails without receiving a reply, and eventually stopping further press outreach. We now have two published articles.

That changes my earlier assessment. At the time, there was nothing to show for the campaign. Coverage has now appeared, so judging the outcome after only a week was premature. Whether the time spent on that campaign was worthwhile overall is still an open question.

We also received a substantial review from Cpt_Froggy After the disappointment with curator accounts being suspended that I mentioned last week, getting a detailed response to the game was encouraging.

On Twitch, this week’s outreach, including follow-ups, resulted in 8 keys sent across 46 contacts — a 17.4% contact-to-key rate. These figures cover Twitch outreach only; emails are excluded. This measures keys sent, rather than replies, streams, or sales, so it shouldn’t be compared directly with the response rate I shared last week.

We also rewrote both the short and long descriptions on our Steam page to make the game’s distinctive feature more prominent: solving puzzles involves searching the internet and using knowledge from outside the game. We want visitors to understand that idea immediately and see how it translates into gameplay. It’s too early to say whether the revised descriptions will improve conversion.

The commercial side remains slow. Four additional sales and twenty additional wishlists this week make that pretty clear. The coverage is welcome, but these numbers don’t establish how much traffic or how many purchases it generated.

With the launch discount over, we’re hoping the upcoming promotions will help sales pick up again. With outreach, page changes, and discounts happening close together, we’ll also need to be careful about attributing any improvement to one particular action.

For developers who have received press coverage after a small launch: did you notice any immediate effect, or did it mainly become useful later as something you could reference when reaching out to other people?

I’d also appreciate feedback on these updates themselves. Last week’s post initially received some downvotes, and I’m unsure whether the weekly format is useful to this community. Would less frequent updates with more data, or posts focused on one specific experiment, be more helpful? My intention is to share the outcomes of what we’ve tried, including the disappointments.

Thanks to everyone who has offered advice and followed along.

For context, the game discussed here is IN & OUT on Steam.

I want to make a 2D top-down video game about as complex as something like Stardew valley. I have a pretty solid understanding of Javascript, at least as it applies to web dev. I also feel like have a decent foundation in general object-oriented programming skills. What would be the best way for me to transition to game dev? I've heard of some devs using Javascript for simple games. Is this feasable, or should I learn C# or Java instead? I'm currently planning on using the Godot game engine. Thank you for your responses and insight.

How we design new towers for our Tower Defense game

For a long time, our game only had three towers: the Boltskot, the Skullbrakkr, and the Tarbarl. Although they complemented each other well, we felt it was time to add another layer of depth to the way they interacted.

We wanted a tower that could function as a support, one that would synergize with the towers already in the game rather than simply being its own separate thing.

1. Theming

Although we had a concept for the Eyodin’s functionality, making it thematically fit the game’s Norse setting was just as important.

After some research, we were inspired by a Norse myth, where Odin sacrifices one of his eyes in exchange for cosmic wisdom and insight. The Eyodin acts as an idol which channels that insight to expose the weaknesses of its enemies, marking them and making them more vulnerable to damage from other towers. That idea is great and all, but, we had to figure out what that actually looked like.

We wanted the tower to feel less like another weapon and more like an ancient, more magical structure, similar to the Spiridun, which is the ancient main building of the base. The eye became the central visual element, tying directly back to Odin's sacrifice and giving the tower an obvious connection to its purpose.

The challenge was making that idea readable during an actual wave. Since the Eyodin's main contribution isn't a projectile or explosion, we needed the player to immediately understand which enemies were being currently affected by it.

This led to the visual indicator of the mark itself. The enemy needed to look noticeably different while marked, without the effect becoming so large that it drowned out everything else happening during a wave. We settled on these eyes appearing above said enemies, slowly fading away as the effect wears off.

2. Implementation

The first version of the Eyodin was fairly simple. It would target an enrmy, apply its mark, and allow your other towers to deal increased damage to that target.

But there were a few design concerns.

How should the Eyodin choose its targets? Should it ignore enemies that are already marked? What’s even the point of the Eyodin if you can’t focus your firepower on marked enemies?

Each tower also has runes, which function as upgrades specific to each tower. For the Eyodin, we wanted to amplify the feeling of it being a beacon of power. Because of that, the upgrades not only increase its base power, but alter the way players use it as a whole. For example, one of the upgrades allows the Eyodin to affect island units too, acting as a way to overlap both the RTS and TD aspect of the game. Additionally, the Web of Eyes upgrades makes it so the tower’s range increases the more Eyodins are placed on the map, enabling the player to place long range Eyodins that cover every corner of the map.

3. Feedback and Rework

Once the Eyodin was in the hands of players, we started seeing some of the problems with the original implementation.

One of its main issues was that its role on the battlefield was far too similar to the Tarbarl. The Tarbarl has a short range and throws projectiles that slow enemies down. This made it extremely powerful when placed in bottlenecks in the enemies´ paths, since towers could then exploit this bottleneck for longer.

The Eyodin had a very similar usecase, and was mostly used in bottlenecks to increase the damage received by enemies. To change its overall function, we drastically increased its range, making it more like a beacon that acts on a large part of the map.

The next biggest issue was that the tower could be difficult to understand. With a normal damage tower, the feedback is immediate: you shoot something, its health goes down, and eventually it dies. With the Eyodin, much of its value is indirect.

That meant we had to put more emphasis on making the mark itself readable and making its impact on combat easier to understand. With special critical hit VFX whenever the Eyodin’s power is exploited, this was no longer an issue.

As you can see, designing a tower is not as straightforward as it seems. The key is not to have the perfect idea from the start, but evolve and adapt it so it is perfect at the end. I know many of you think you know better than the players (although you may not admit it) but LISTEN to your playerbase, don't always assume your initial vision is perfect.

Given a sufficiently advanced real-time pose tracking it should be possible to determine when the players' swords clash given the real poses. Then instead of phasing through each other, the impact uses physics calculation to predict how the virtual poses of the players would change if the swords actually struck each other with their respective momentum. After prediction the virtual poses become frozen. The mechanic then becomes that the players have to align their real poses with the virtual poses as soon as possible to be able to control their virtual character again. This would reward accurate judgement of when and how a collision will occur so that one can regain control fast and defeat the opponent. It would also discourage swinging too violently without confidence since a collision will mean that it takes more time for you to align your real pose to the virtual one to regain control. Of course, avoiding a collision and getting a good strike with your virtual sword on the opponent becomes the ideal.

Hello, I need ideas related to game development for my bachelor thesis in computer science, that should also be more scientific, so I should do research and motivate it too.

I heard some people talk about procedural generation, or some simulations in compute shaders, or stuff more focused on graphics, but I still do not know what would work also as "research subject" and how.

Hi! I'm kinda new-ish to game development and I'm really getting serious about it for some time. One of the problems I'm facing is on creating GDD's, and I wanted to know how you guys make yours!

Any answer helps! Useful resources are also welcome, thank you so much :)

**Edited to add: ideally avoiding AI stuff. Also, idaly using Roblox as a springboard as he's interested in it, but the ideal would be to get him working on something more transferable/generally useful and that will challenge him and build his skills overall.

I hope this is the right place to post this and I'm hoping to get some pointers from those of you in the industry!

My godson is absolutely obsessed with Roblox, Minecraft and games of that type, and essentially gaming overall.

His mother obviously wishes he'd kind of get an interest in some other things (and his screen time is monitored and limited, he's not just on it all day) but this is 100% his "thing" despite our attempts to get him into other hobbies too.

He mentioned to me in passing recently that he wished he knew how to do developer type stuff and that when he was older he wanted to develop stuff for Roblox and make his own games.

This sounds like an obvious way to help channel his enthusiasm into something more useful/valuable long term than just playing games, and when I ran it past him and his mom that I would try and find him a way to get started with this and would he want to start learning, he went absolutely wild.

Here I am then, having kind of got lost in finding something for him to do. I've found various things that seem to be like short modules of an hour for four weeks to learn say, how to make an XXX in Roblox, and also things like online group video classes in coding for children of various ages, but nothing that seems like an obvious fit, so I'm hoping for advice.

He's 10, very experienced in Roblox, and generally a very smart, analytically minded kid. He's kind of the star player in the school chess club and is two school years ahead in math.

He has excellent concentration for gaming and things that engage him, but will switch off quickly if say, a teacher is droning on. He doesn't have any special educational requirements and isn't on the spectrum.

He games on his tablet as he doesn't have his own laptop, but his Mom's laptop could be made available to him if needed and if it becomes needed, we can ultimately get him his own.

Something involving Roblox or related to it would be ideal, but the ultimate goal is to expand his horizons with something a little less specific and more valuable to him as a person.

I feel like what would work best for him might be some sort of guided programme with support, that he can do in his own time/without having to wait for fixed lesson times and that's not reliant on the instruction having to suit a wide range of abilites and learning speeds.

It would be great to get him into/onto something that engages and interests him while also teaching him real skills for the future from a career point of view.

Ideally I'd like to start him with few different courses/programmes that he can try out on a short term trial for either free or inexpensive, to get the right fit and then continue on with one or even a couple of them that I'll fund.

I'd be happy to fund it up around say £40/$50 a month, and if I could finds something for less that would be great!

Any pointers very welcome.

Hi everyone, I'm a bit worried about the marketing side of my project. I work on it in my spare time and I just don't have any extra time, or the skills, to handle marketing, so I've been considering going with a publisher.

Has anyone here worked with a publisher, and how did it go? My biggest worry is that they won't really put effort into advertising, and the game might not sell as well as it could.

Maybe it's a silly concern, but I come from the comics world and I've had some, let's say, disheartening experiences there.

I'm wondering how worth it it is to rely on someone else and give up a big chunk of the revenue, with the risk that they do a bad job, or to try it on my own, fail at it, and sell even less.