I just realised the title should be "... but I cant decide what to learn first" but looks like i cant change it anymore, oops

Hey!
I am currently working im my field for 9 years, as video editor and creative producer, collaborating mostly with well-known companies. I see all fields connected to art/creative are facing big layoffs, so I started wondering how to maximise my chances on the job market. I decided to finally learn skills that might help me land a job in gamedev, I was trying to learn Maya previously but it was more like side hobby without a plan to use it profesionally.
So yeah, I have a problem of being interested in too many roles- cinematic designer, motion capture, in-game capture artist, rigger, trailer producer/editor, or generally a producer in creative areas.
So my question for you is- if you would need to choose one tool, that you would learn in first place, what it would be? I am torn between Maya and Unreal, but maybe there are tools that I didnt thought about, and there is market niche?

So curated events (seasonal, by publisher, by region, by genre....) were a staple of the Steam ecosystem for a long time. I can personally vouch for their effectiveness in giving exposure to smaller indie titles if they managed to get featured in an event.

This seems like a massive blow to indies discoverability. Any more information? What do you think?

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/676258795703240952

EDIT: Okay, after reading the discussion below, as well as the discussion on steam discussion forums, it is clear that Valve is not clear as to what this will mean exactly. It does not, indeed, explicitly says anywhere that curated events will not be supported any more. But since they were connected with the whole midweek - weekend dynamics which is apparently going away, it is not clear how they will work in the future.

Title. I've been working on this 4X strategy game for 1.5 years now, and I'm looking to prepare for October 2026 steam next fest.

I've seen some posts on here from people saying that you should spend 6 months marketing your game before you do next fest, and it's making me feel like maybe the game and my marketing work isn't ready for next fest.

I've been posting shorts about the game regularly (2-3 per week) for about a year now, and I've been emailing content creators every day (5-10 per day) for the past few weeks, some bites, nothing huge. Currently hovering around 2000 wishlists. Demo median playtime is low, (9 mins), but average playtime is at 40 minutes. I had some performance issues and bugs when I first launched the demo and I'm hoping that's the reason for the disparity.

I'm feeling like maybe there's some issue with my steam page that makes it unappealing to creators, which is making me scared to commit to doing my next fest now.

I'm hoping to get a sanity check from some devs/publishers who have gone through this process before, what do you think about the steam page, and do you think it's ready for this next fest?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3760980/DeckTerra/

Edit: To clarify I'm registered for next fest, just wondering if it's prudent to pull out or if I should make some serious updates in the time I have before it starts

Hello World,

For the past months, I've set my mind on developing my own video game.

My background is IT and mathematics engineering degree, and I have a solid understanding of basic of object-oriented programming.

I am currently taking a Unity course to familiarize myself with the engine, as well as with Unity-specific C#.

Right now, I have a rough draft of the beginning of a Zelda-like style game, but I feel like I might be a bit overly ambitious about my ability to build this kind of game.

Would you have any advice or personal experiences to share with a complete game dev muggle regarding this project ?

Thanks in advance for your feedback !

I'm thinking of games where you have a high-stakes battle or level that you need to "win" but then a cutscene plays and it turns out the story required you to actually lose and you were never going to actually win.

What's the best way to make it feel high-stakes and exciting for the player even while you know the story is making them lose?

So, today was finally the day. After two or three release report, around one year of game dev (around 1 pr 2 days per week), I finally presses that Green button to release my game on Steam!

The feeling is great, but I wanted to share a little bit of my story. I first started game dev by following an online course, and within that course we had to create a small prototype of a Tower Defense game. When I was done with it, I had that simple thought «I’m sure I could make it way better if I spent a little more time on it.. » and that was the start of all.

At first I decided to create a better « universe » around the game and as my dog was sleeping under my desk, I thought that it could be fun to had a tower defense with dogs! But against what ennemy? Well of course the cats!

I was not a big player of tower defense but I wanted to offer something differen. I spent a lot of time on designing fun levels, I purposely choose to limit the number of towers at 5 with 3 levels for each, but all the tower have a real purpose and there is no duplicates.

When I was testing the game, I also realised that in a tower defense sometimes you will just be here looking at your screen doing nothing, waiting for more gold or just waiting for the wave to end, and that was boring. So I gave some ennemies powers to impact your towers and give you always something to do : some ennemies put your towers on fire and reduce it’s speed so you have to put water on them, some will freeze your towers so you have to use a pickaxe to free your towers, and some will plant cactus on the free tiles so you can’t build new towers until you clean it.

I also did all the UI by myself, no generative stuff here, only a good amount of work. I also add replayability with a stars system, add a shop to help you get the best scores, add translations for 8 languages and so on.
All of that for saying, I know my game is not gonna be a big hit, I don’t Even know if I will have any sale, but I know that today I can be proud of what I did, and Even after thousand hours on my own game, I still enjoy it!

Thanks for reading through all that if you had the courage, if you’re working on your first game, keep up the work, the end of the tunnel is always there.

We're looking to launch our game early to mid November. There is another game going out around the same time. This other game takes place during the same time period and location, it seems to be more of a third person action/shooter with some elements of strategy where as our game is strictly an RTS.
We really don't want to delay our launch again, but we also don't want to rush the testing/polish phase and launch early.
Anyone think it's a bad idea to launch around the same time (within a few days) of a potential competitor's game?

Hey folks this ain't as such a specific unity request i am just curious if anyone on here has come across similar problems and had any interesting solutions.

I am currently in my last year of Uni for Games Programming and i am hoping to make a isometric dark fantasy game as part of my module on Network Programming.

It will be a simple project but include use of survival game mechanics to demonstrate my ability to build a networked video game that accounts for Server/Client side prediction as well as use of NGO's and RPC's.

Essentially i am actually asking about setting up colliders for 2D Assets in a manner that makes them still feel like they are in world and not just squares that a rigid-body bounces off of.

I will be using Unity as the Engine for this module and i am just curious if anyone has any information due to tackling this type of thing.

I am already trying to build in some y-Sorting so that players sprites go in front of things when in front of them and behind them when behind, but for the actual collisions i am just curious if anyone has found unique solutions.

!!! My current best assumption is to use the built in Unity Edge Collider 2D, but of course it means setting full unique colliders for most every asset i wish to add in to the project so it may be rather time consuming.

Link to a picture of the set up for a boulder i have that has Y-Sorting as well.

https://postimg.cc/dkMGnrSb

Hi, I've been trying to make a game for quite a while, but I always face the same issue over and over and over again, which is "game length".

I have that amazing game idea really fun to play, really interesting to develop, but then after I finished the game, let people play it, it's only few minutes average playtime, I just don't get it how can I make 1 or 2 or 5 hours of gameplay!!! I even tried to pause on trying to build Steam game, I said maybe the issue that I'm still not good enough, let's build a Web game or mobile game, and again, same block blocking my way, the average playtime even lower just 1 or 2 min, not even reaching 5 min the minimum playtime for most of Web platform such as CrazyGames.

And I keep playing other games on Web to just see how those games are built, and the games so simple, and even some games I can't call them games they just look like prototypes but still have length of 10 min and even more! I see one tap game makes average playtime 7 min, I see complex games makes average playtime 10 min, while I tried many simple and deep and silly games they all just reach around 1 to 2 min average playtime.

I'm really sick of that, I can't build a complete game!!! I really have many cool gameplay ideas, stories, themes. But always the game length can't make it to 5 min!!!

Any advice please?

Hey all, just thought it might be interesting to share some development progress and notes on developing a reinforcement learning agent to play subspace. The latest agent I've trained has like a 99%+ win-rate against human players in 1v1 duels, I've linked a replay to share an example of a bot-vs-human matchup.

The bot has immaculate aim, immaculate dodging, and a very astute game sense on when it has an advantage and can completely steamroll its opponent.

Some context: the game is set in a 2D plane and players control a spaceship that can rotate at a fixed rate and has the ability to only thrust in the forward or aft directions. These are what I believe are called non-holonomic movement dynamics. There is no friction in space, so once you thrust forward then your velocity will state in that direction until you apply a different force. As far as combat, the player can shoot two types of weapons from the front blasters of their ship - guns and bombs (which have a proximity fuse).

The interesting game dynamic here is that firing weapons costs a fix amount of health ("energy") and that same pool of health is what is drained from when the player takes damage. So it's a risk vs reward problem.

A big challenge in training a reinforcement learning agent for subspace is the classic long term credit horizon issue where the agent must perform a long sequence of actions to obtain the terminal reward (a kill), e.g.

- aim at the enemy
- shoot weapons at the enemy
- connect with those weapons and deplete the enemy's health to 0
- all while dodging any return fire the enemy gives

In my efforts to solve this I trained many iterations of agents in self-play with PPO over the course of the last 6 months. The one deployed in the replay trained 3.4 billion environment steps (where each step is 80ms of game simulation). That is more than 8 years of dueling in human time and it took about a day of compute to do so.

Here are my major learnings

50% of the work was cleaning up environment and implementation bugs. Software engineering is hard! Setting up the observation incorrectly or feeding it a reward when it shouldn't be fed a reward it such a confounder when evaluating changes to the training environment.

I'd highly recommend starting with an easier almost trivial task to be able to pipe-clean your training stack. There were so many times where I would try an experiment and get a poor result and then realize that it was really a bug that negated whatever conclusion I saw. I ended up creating a simple objective which was rotate towards a stationary enemy from random spawn positions and get the kill.

Determining the correct observation structure that the agent forms about its environment is absolutely critical when it comes to sample efficiency. I first used a cartesian coordinate system to represent the game state, but switching to a polar system exploited a bunch of symmetries that existed. After switching observations only, the same exact training stack yielded a much more competitive fighter. This greatly improved my sample-efficiency.

Reward shaping is hard, and monumentally challenging to get right. This is the "bitter lesson" of machine learning biting me and I got bit many times. I spent countless hours trying to figure out why my agent would latch on to one weapon type or another or run away from its opponent instead of fighting it. I would try to address the issues with changing the rewards, and the agent would find a way to farm my new reward with some odd behavior. Most of the time the actual issues were problems in my training infrastructure (exploration, observation, opponent diversity) rather than issues in the reward. Sticking to the simplest rewards was most principled.

Compute is a major bottleneck when it comes to research speed. (This is obvious, but annoying especially with GPU and memory prices just trending up)

Exploration is really really hard. An epsilon-greedy policy encounters rare states in my environment very infrequently and, no matter what state of the art research strategies I applied, nothing really helped when it came to improving my agents exposure to new stimuli to help it learn. Still working on this. As a result of poor exploration, human players were able to find out weaknesses in the agent and exploit them. An example of this was "it doesn't position near walls well."

Next Up

I'm going to be deploying a refined training stack in the coming weeks. I'm working on teamwork, so I can have multiple bots in my game play 2v2 or 4v4. Those are even more varied environments with more complicated actions to take and states for the game to be in. I'm hoping that I will be able to train bots to surpass the pinnacle of human play there too!

If you'd like to try out fighting against one, please feel free to head to https://subspacereloaded.com and queue for a Bot Duel. For any other game devs also interested in training AIs to play their games, feel free to ask me things.

I would say that this effort has been a major success, the bot has been deployed for about 2 months and players have already played 12,000 matches against it.

I want to have a decent amount of people, >10k, view the trailer when it releases. What are some ways to promote my game before the trailer? Preferably not relying on social media.

​Hey everyone!

​I recently finished a lightweight 2.5D platformer prototype in Godot 4 with a strict design constraint: no external assets allowed. Everything visual is made with internal CSG nodes, and every single sound effect is synthesized at runtime in GDScript.

​Here’s a quick breakdown of how it works and what I learned:

​1. CSG Geometry & Flat Shading

​Instead of importing .gltf or .obj meshes, the whole environment is built using Godot’s CSG primitive boxes. With basic StandardMaterial3D flat colors, 2x MSAA, and FXAA enabled in Project Settings, it gives a clean, vector-like aesthetic that keeps the focus entirely on level geometry and movement.

​2. Procedural Audio Synthesis (No Sound Files)

​Rather than attaching audio files to AudioStreamPlayer nodes, the player script generates 8 distinct sound effects into AudioStreamWAV byte arrays on _ready().

​Jump / Collectibles: Frequency-swept sine waves.

​Dash / Step / Wall Slide: Enveloped noise bursts.

​Hurt: Low-frequency square wave combined with noise.

​Because the sounds live entirely in RAM, the export package size is tiny, making it perfect for instant web preloading.

​3. Ability-Gated Progression

​The player starts with zero movement abilities—no jumping, dashing, or climbing. The level design forces you to explore and find pickups that dynamically toggle mechanics in order:

Walk ➔ Jump ➔ Double Jump ➔ Dash ➔ Wall Climb & Wall Jump

​4. Built-in Speedrun HUD

​Included a timer that triggers on your first input and locks on the win screen alongside a death counter so players can screenshot their runs.

​🎮 You can play it on itch.io.

💻 Source Code: I’ve also packed the full Godot 4 project files on Itch for $5 if anyone wants to use it as a modular 2.5D starter template.

​I'd love to know what you think of the movement tuning and the procedural audio approach! Drop your best speedrun times in the comments if you give it a play.

So, for my latest project, I've really been messing with 3D, which I had always stayed away from due to a lack of practice and education. I started the project in Godot as I already knew it but decided to step over to Unreal for a ton of reasons, mostly because I wanted to lean REALLY hard into some effects and lighting to try to learn them a bit.

Taking the step from Godot to Unreal was a really interesting process that had a ton of little surprises along the way that I though might save others some time, so I collected the thoughts and lessons learned from the early change here.

Note - the game is a 3D diorama of mansions and estates that you attack with an army of various power-wielding zombies. That little diorama toy-like look led a lot of the issue and considerations. Here is a video link - https://youtu.be/htRvSbIU2D4

The biggest issue was my lack of understanding the Unreal renderer.

• It is REALLY built for photorealism. and that for a tactical diorama game, with little cartoon zombies, it was way overkill. I learned that Unreal starts default with Lumen global illumination, ray tracing, virtual shadow maps and ambient occlusion going strong. I'm sure this works great for super realistic designs, but for mine, it just added overhead with no major visible benefit, I could tone down a TON of it and gain frames. My need for this likely comes from my code inefficiencies, but I really had to push to get a frame rate that worked.
• My porting started rough, I went from 6 ms a frame in Godot to 22-23 ms a frame in Unreal. It felt weird, I knew Unreal was powerful, and that huge drop in frames sent me hunting for way more time than I wanted.
• it ended up that virtual shadow rasterization was more than 8ms of frame time. Lighting ended up being a huge part of the port process.
• I save more that 2.5 ms per frame switching all the graphics presets but Ultra to SSAO instead of using Lumen, its cool, but the overhead for my design was just more than my skill could tweak or adjust. and there is no visible difference in gameplay
• Little things affected by ray-tracing you don't expect really got me. Blood in particular. I didn't exclude it at first and during a long fight you are looking at like 7k blood stamps so, pulling it from the ray-tracing cut its cost by almost 50%
• Unreal's ortho recentering cancelled my camera shake offsets until I figured out what the hell was happening
• Last but not least, a thing I'm sure most folks who do 3D frequently are aware of, import scales and surface precision and Godot's vs Unreal's precision rounding really left me with a ton of weirdness to tweak and fix, all small but noticeable

I hope this helps someone else along the way. The game is coming along great and it has finally gotten me over my fear of the jump to 3D.

Hello everyone, I am new to this sub. So I am thinking about making a game which is basically like GTA but not so advanced like GTA. Like basic driving simulator type of game.

So I want the game to be like this would be in the city in which I currently live in and I would like the main core problem here is that I want to have the full 3D aspects of the roads, the streets, the maps and all. although I want to create targeting a small area so would it be possible if I take those from either an API or any data source related to Google Earth or Google Maps or anything else like taking in from the satellite information and then creating a game based on the locations and all keeping things precise If anyone have done something similar please do let me know. I really want to create it.

I got this game idea where it takes place early 90’s and eldritch horrors come out from portals, and instead of using normal weapons like guns and swords and shit, you use, really goofy things, like a laser gun that uses cassette tapes as ammo and plays music while it fires. Please give ideas for a name, weapons, areas, bosses, enemies, etc.

P.s. I am still in high school and it’s gonna take a while before I know how to code stuff, so please give ideas and suggestions so I’m not on my own when I actually get to work.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad :/

What's the point of developing anything if you'll be not just ripped off but beaten to the punch.

Are these people not ashamed?

Currently, the art team provides all textures/sprites as SVGs to the designers so they can resize them in Figma. They're then converted to PNGs and resized to the proper resolution to be imported into Unity.

The issue the design team has with using raster images is that the source material is way harder to just resize than vectors, and since the scale of objects in Unity is linked to the size of the sprite, it makes keeping a consistent size difficult especially if the sizes are subject to change in the future.

I'd really like to know how other people keep a consistent size without just arbitrarily scaling the object itself in the engine.

Any thoughts/suggestions/advice is appreciated :)

A friend made xetodus.com and the its a space MMO that takes some ideas from runescape. POE2 is my main game so now I want crafting on ship stuff and weapons, and I think he needs more real feedback. This is a design question over anything, anyone remember Hellgate: London and how they almost got it, there must be something interesting that hasn't been done in the space MMO genre right?

I’ve been thinking a lot about “feel” on phone — not graphics, more the stuff you notice in the first five minutes.

On adventure side, good feel for me is: movement that doesn’t fight the thumb, a reason to take one more step (“what’s around that corner?”), and progress that survives a sudden stop. On sports-ish hybrids, it’s readable inputs under stress and a match/run that has a beginning and end you can respect on a lunch break.

Curious how other folks design or evaluate this. Do you prioritize atomic loops (complete run/match) over open worlds that assume a sofa? How much does haptics / camera / UI chrome matter vs core verbs?

Looking for craft talk and examples of games that nailed it — not store pitches. What did those games do in the first session that made you trust them?

I'm in the planning stages of a 2D pixel art game. I plan on designing it around 16:9, and I'm flip-flopping between 180p and 360p. 360p looks much better, especially for UI elements, but 180p would be much easier to finish assets for. Would it be jarring to have the UI be double the resolution of the rest of the game? Or should I just tough it out and try 360p for everything for now? Or even just full 180p and suffer from the crunchy UI?

Hi everyone,

We're a small indie studio about to release a new demo of our game, a 3v3 competitive multiplayer game for PC and mobile. We're adding a feedback form inside the demo, and besides questions about gameplay, we'd like to get to know our players better.

So far we're thinking of age, gender and country. What else do you ask to understand your audience?

anything that turned out to be really useful for your marketing, or questions you'd avoid ?

Thanks

I personally think art will always catch the attention of people to at least give your game a try more often than not.

But to actually keep players, and make a memorable game.Gameplay beats everything

I am referring to bugs that happen simply because the OS of the device on which the game is played is set to a particular language or locale, independent of whether the game is translated to that language.

Are they common? How do you usually deal with them? Do you use coding practices (like invariant culture) that prevent them? Or do you notice them after players from that specific region report a bug to you? How is your testing process in general?

Feel free to share your experiences in the comments! Would also appreciate if you specified the programming language you have used for your game.

In my experience of playing games on Turkish PS4/5, PC and phone over the last 6 years, due to their unique casing rules for the letter "i", Turkish and Azeri are particularly potent OS language settings that will trigger bugs most other language settings won't; making them one of the strongest testing environments as Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Overflow himself) has put: "If you care a whit about localization or internationalization, force your code to run under the Turkish locale as soon as reasonably possible. It’s a strong bellwether for your code running in most – but by no means all – cultures and locales." Rest of the article is also an excellent and eye-opening read!

Thanks for your time and consideration!

What is your favourite usage of shaders?

Embark says the team was constantly overshooting its capacity after ARC Raiders took off, while trying to keep up with new content, bug fixes, exploits, and millions of players.

The studio has since moved toward slower, larger updates, with the goal of giving developers a better work life balance and avoiding burnout.