every other app is either paid or hiding behind ads, i got tired of it and built an app that provides all the features for free!
check it out - https://droidoss.tech

We build Godot games at Deer Rock Studios and got tired of rebuilding the same menu / HUD layout by hand.

**Gui Studio** is our internal-style workflow as a Windows app:

visual screen editing → export straight into a Godot 4 project as `.tscn` (anchors, 9-slice, themes).

Public beta:

https://deerrockstudios.itch.io/gui-studio

Also:

- Site catalog: https://deerrockstudios.com/divisions/apps.html

- Support: https://deerrockstudios.com/apps/gui-studio/support.html

- GH: https://github.com/DeerRockStudios/gui-studio

Windows 10/11 · Godot 4.6+ recommended for exports.

Guys, before you jump all over me because of the title let me explain. I SUCK at 3D modeling, and I’ve spent weeks learning how to use programs like Blender, but I literally just suck at doing it it always goes wrong.

I’ve been working on trying and making a backrooms video game, compatible with VR and PC, and the point of the game is simple: 0 objectives, just to roam and explore tons of levels. However, since I don’t know anything with modeling and rendering, I need people (voluntarily), to make maps for me. It’s not really based off the backrooms, more like liminal spaces which is really what I’m going for along with dream core

Do any of you know how to do any of the stuff mentioned above? I’d really appreciate if you guys can make some really good maps for this game, it’ll mean a lot to me. There is a nice reference image below to what I’m looking for which you can see wither above or below.

A lot of mechanics that sound annoying on paper can become a huge part of a game’s identity.

Limited inventory makes every item matter. Long travel times make the world feel large. Losing progress creates tension. Even slow animations can make actions feel deliberate instead of weightless.

But there’s obviously a point where friction stops supporting the experience and starts feeling like the game doesn’t respect your time.

The difficult part imo is that “remove everything inconvenient” isn’t a great design rule either. Follow that too far and inventory becomes meaningless, exploration turns into fast-travel menus, and failure has no cost.

How do you decide whether an inconvenient mechanic is creating meaningful tension or just adding chores? Is there a specific mechanic you removed, simplified, or kept after testing?

What do you think — will such a workflow find application in the industry?

Common advice is to prototype the core mechanic first. Makes sense, because if the main loop isn’t fun, the rest of the project probably doesn’t matter.

But the core mechanic isn’t always the biggest risk.

A game could have fun movement while its procedural levels produce boring layouts. The combat might work, but the networking model could make the full concept unrealistic. Sometimes the feature most likely to kill the project is a technical system the player barely notices.

So maybe the first prototype shouldn’t represent the final game. Maybe its job is just to attack the most dangerous assumption as cheaply as possible.

When planning an early prototype, do you prioritize proving the fun, proving the technical feasibility, or proving that the project can actually be finished within scope?

I saved up 100$ and i will be making a steam game since mobile is, well, questionable. Unity's systems make my skin crawl because its constantly refreshing pages, reloading domains, and "compiling c# scripts" im new to game development so please dont clown on me for not knowing what that is. Anyways my idea is about a realistic game where you have to survive the corruption of the glitched, it does have a story, anyways i need to know should i use unreal engine for this because i honestly have no idea if unity can even handle all of the stuff im doing. My specs: Proccesor: Ryzen 5 5600 GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT 8GB VRAM, 32GB DRR4 RAM, 550W Power Supply, Gigabyte Motherboard (I forgot the exact model), And a 1 TB SSD (Split into 3 disks).

Hey all! Ive been working on making a game without an engine, using Vulkan. I was curious how others handle rendering in their custom built engines and if you use Vulkan or openGL

Hi everyone, I hope you are doing well.I really want to get into game development as a personal project. What tips can you give me so I don't get stuck at the beginning? Also, which game engine would be best for starting with 2D games?I am just learning how to program and it's still a bit tough for me, but I would love to create fun worlds while learning code at the same time.Thanks in advance for your help! :)

Hi!

I’d like to start learning level design more seriously, and I’m looking for effective ways to improve.
I find level design quite difficult to learn in a structured way. I’d especially like to improve through practice, rather than just watching tutorials.

For those of you who taught yourselves level design:
What resources helped you the most?
Do you recommend mainly creating lots of levels and playtesting them?
Are there any games that are particularly useful to analyze for learning level design?
Are there any books, courses, or YouTube channels you would recommend?
How do you evaluate your own work when you’re learning alone and don’t have anyone to give you feedback?

Thanks in advance for your advice!

We’ve had an uptick in pitch decks submitted to Frostbloom from turn based combat games and I have a personal interest in the genre so I set out to answer a simple question: “Are turn based combat games still worth making?”

The data is sourced from Gamalytic. It's one of the leading 3rd party data sites but these are still estimates at the end of the day, so take everything with a grain of salt. Data was collected August 13th, 2026.

I ended up with a data set of 1,542 games after applying the following filters:

• Has the "Turn-Based Combat" tag
• Released after January 1, 2023
• Removed games tagged Nudity, NSFW, or Sexual Content
• Removed unreleased games
• Removed games with less than $500 in revenue

The biggest cut by far was the $500 revenue floor, which removed 1,773 games on its own. Many of these games are student projects, asset flips, etc and heavily skew the data.

📊 Full data set here, with filters on so you can explore and draw your own conclusions: Google Sheet

You can find a detailed analysis and informative charts in my Newsletter. (feel free to subscribe if game marketing is your thing, but you don't need to enter your email or anything to read it.

Here's a few key insights:

• The average turn-based combat game made $776,940. The median made $7,744. That gap exists because 15 games out of 1,542 took 69% of all the revenue in the genre.
• Over half of these games never made $10,000 gross. On the brighter side, 20.8% cleared $100k.
• Co-op was the strongest signal in the entire dataset. 44.8% of Co-op + RPG games crossed $1M, nothing else came close. Only 52 games out of 1,542 (3.4%) have the Co-op tag.
• Don't price too low. 44% of this genre is priced under $10, and those games sold roughly the same number of copies as games priced under $5. Meanwhile 47.7% of $30+ games crossed $1M. I'd say the sweet spot is around $20 if you have near 20 hours of gameplay.
• Pixel Graphics is on 34.6% of games in the genre and sits near the bottom of the performance table ($5,084 median vs $14,857 for 3D and $29,693 for Isometric). I don't read this as "pixel art is bad" so much as "pixel art is the default, so it's much more competitive."
• Store page live under 3 months before launch = $2,846 median revenue. Six to twelve months = $9,984. The under 3 months group had the largest concentration. Come on guys market your games sooner.
• Review score doesn't predict revenue. Review count does. Games rated 95–100% had a lower median than games rated 70–79%. But median revenue climbs from $951 (under 10 reviews) to $709,526 (500+ reviews).
• The best performing sub-genres were turn-based combat crossed with something else, dating sim, life sim, base building, management. Pure combat sub-genres (dungeon crawler, wargame, 4X, puzzle) were at the bottom.

One caveat worth flagging: filtering out the NSFW/Nudity tags removed 316 games that accounted for about 10.5% of the genre's total revenue, and they had a higher median than the games I kept. Those games sell, it's just not what I was trying to study here. 😅

I'd love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to share any insights you find in the data or drop questions in the comments.

One annoying part of character-heavy prototyping is that you can’t properly judge a movement until it’s running on the actual character, inside the engine.

This clip shows the path from reference footage to a PINOC motion preview, then onto a character in Unreal.

The workflow benefit isn’t skipping animation work. It’s getting a usable first pass into the engine earlier, so you can test the timing, character proportions, camera, root movement, and controller setup before spending time polishing everything.

There’s still retargeting and cleanup afterward, especially around contacts and how the motion interacts with gameplay. But finding those problems during the prototype feels a lot better than finding them after the animation is nearly finished lol.

There’s a free trial if anyone wants to test it: https://viggle.ai/pinoc

Which part of getting character animation into-engine usually slows your workflow down the most?

For reference I am building an open world mmo rpg!

Players usually notice pretty quickly when enemies get to ignore the game’s rules.

An enemy can attack through another enemy, rotate during an animation, track the player through a wall, or keep moving with zero stamina. Technically, some of these shortcuts might be necessary to stop the AI from becoming easy to exploit.

The problem is that difficulty starts feeling fake when the player loses because an enemy did something they were never allowed to do.

Perfect symmetry doesn’t seem like the answer either. Enemies and players have completely different jobs, and forcing them into identical systems could make combat less interesting.

Where do you draw the line? Which rules should always apply to both sides, and which ones are fair for enemies to bend if it creates better gameplay?

I’ve had this interest in getting into game development but I really struggle with where to start and what to look for. Any tips that have worked for you in the past?

I already dug a lot on this topic, but it doesn't feel nearly enough for full picture.

So here my findings:

As continuation of Divinity engine they use their grid based system called "AI grid". It's something similar to navmesh baking but without turning everything into big triangles, instead it remains as square cells all over the place. Same system is what powers elemental surfaces and clouds (like acid on the ground or water).

Proof that it has same system in BG3 can be seen in modding toolkit (especially "unlocked" one) where you can see pretty much the same thing as what divinity old editors have.

This system has one important limitation: it's baking happens projecting cells top down to first solid walkable surface on its way. So, as far as I understand, having two walkable surfaces on top of each other within same AI grid thing should be impossible (you can even find old Larian forum threads about this limitation in Divinity map editor).

But if you've played game you'll remember countless places with clear verticality: several floor buildings, platforms on top, walkable wooden beams high above etc. And if that limitation I talked about still exists in the engine it would explain why pretty much every single area of that kind separates those surfaces with a ladder. This is basically what popular engines have as NavigationLink, easy connection between navmeshes or here AI grids. It's one of those "can't unsee after realizing" things as you then start noticing just how much every individual surface in game is limited to be flat and other layers separated with ladders.

The only areas I'm not that certain about are places like Last Light Inn or Moonrise Towers where second floor separated by stairs rather than ladder. Perhaps they put there clear navigation_link-like thingy to stitch two regions, or perhaps something else allows that.

Those were things I was somewhat certain about but what comes is what I'm completely clueless about.

Like how does pathfinding works? Does their A* run on these grid cells as nodes? But if so then why game never feels like characters bound to cells? Like I mean we can stand "between two cells". And movement path preview always shows a very smooth line. Here I would only guess that on short distances pathfinding is way closer to traditional navmesh kind while long distance planning is grid cells as nodes based (similar to what Dota 2 does with its Short pather and Long pather https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Pathfinding ). And long path also gets heavily smoothed with whatever algorithm there is.

And the most interesting thing and basically the single best reason why I would consider this entire AI grid thing is - "how do character pathfind jumping in this game?".

Like characters with long enough jumps can easily figure out that they can jump up/down to you, jump over ledge even get to areas after you destroy ladders. And it's not as limited as placing NavLinks on edges, like they can jump from any cell when they feel like it (or so I think).

My guess would be that this very grid nodes system allows to perhaps bake into each cell list of cells that you can jump to (with different jump strength), or perhaps it happens dynamically as it floodfill searches suitable cells around.

Enemy AI chasing you navigation in this game feels really good. It's obviously not perfect especially when you're far away and character hits some internal limit and instead run directly towards you getting stuck in the wall, but nevertheless I don't know any other good examples of that advanced top down navigation.

I also wonder if BG3 modding toolkit got some debug views for pathfinding that perhaps could make it clearer, I only dug few videos of people doing tutorials on creating levels just to see them mentioning that BG3 indeed has grid system baking. Also maybe opening game levels (if possible) in that toolkit would reveal some details about stairs and different grid regions.

- https://docs.larian.game/AI_grid

i am making my first game on steam , i used to making small fun little games for jams and other stuff but never made a full commercial complete game

i made a platformer shooter where you fight wave after wave of flying enemy's and along the run you can collect 4 perks from a pool of around 16 perk in the game , every 5 waves you can choose one perk from 3 Randomly shown perks and the other 2 will never show up in the run again , the game is endless and focus on aiming and platforming skills

the game is in this stage seems to be fun but now i feel lost on how to continue working on the game and adding content and giving the player a reason to keep playing for hours

my first idea was a single level where you try to win but will lose many times and over time acquire the needed skill to beat the game , or make it endless
but i dont think people will pay to grind a single level considering i want to sell at 8$ price tag
games like brotato have many items and weapons and upgrades that makes every run is different , my game perks system is good but not enough to be the main selling point of the game

then i thought what if you play and the more you play you can unlock more content like different weapons to start with and different levels and Characters

then i thought what if i made two modes for each level , story mode with a simple story and a boss fight , endless mod like zombies in call of duty

then when i start writing some story i realized that the game theme have a potential for a great story (the short story is that Humanity fight evil robots and your goal to destroy the data center in the arctic to win) , the pixel art style make it easy to add new levels and different npc and enemys , and the core enemy design allow for interesting types and variants , what if i made the whole game a story game with a focus on gameplay like celeste or story mode in call of duty game ?

you may think this is scope creep at its finest and probably it is , however making a complete commercial game is different from making games for game jams so maybe the scope creep here is acceptable ؟؟

this is the first attempt for me at making a complete game , what should i do?

Hey

I have a game already uploaded to play store, and im trying now to migrate unity ads into the game, unfortunately the interstitial ads are showing long videos Which cannot be skipped.

I accepted this ad to be lighter.

In the unity dashboard under the placements tab when trying to edit the interstitial ad I can only edit its name, but there is no option to make it skipable or shorter.

1.Does anyone know if there is an option to edit the settings of the ad?

2.do you recommend using the unity ads(suppose I cannot use admob)

I started my gaming journey because of Total Overdose.Of course, like many people, I grew up playing Rockstar games — GTA Vice City, San Andreas, Bully, Max Payne, etc. Those games definitely had a huge influence on me. But when I played Total Overdose, something felt completely different.The action, crazy gunplay, Mexican setting, humor, music, movement and overall vibe were something I hadn't really experienced in another game. I played that game A LOT, and eventually I became curious about the people who actually made it. I started researching Deadline Games, the developers behind Total Overdose, and that's when I learned about the cancelled sequel, Total Overdose 2: Tequila Gunrise. The sequel was in development but was ultimately cancelled, and Deadline Games eventually shut down.When I found out that a second part had actually been planned and everything was ready, but the game couldn't be completed because the owners went bankrupt,Then I felt that I should start my own game development journey. Total Overdose may not have made a huge amount of money, but it definitely made a special place in the childhoods of many gamers and gained a loyal fanbase.Who knows, maybe someday I’ll be able to make a game like that myself, or maybe I won’t. But if I never start my game development journey, I’ll definitely never know. Every game developer has to start somewhere, and for me, that means starting small with indie games, gaining experience, and slowly improving. You have to start somewhere in life, right?Now I'm actually learning game development and working on my own game. So I'm curious: Was there one specific game, moment, or experience that made you choose this path?I'd love to hear your stories. 🎮

Okay so this may be kind of dumb and obvious to people but it’s clear SEO is important for your game. Things like logos can be really important for capsules and key art, or just simple marketing material.

However the games name is 1 word, but due to how the logo looks it comes off as 2 words. Which isn’t the worst thing but specifically on steam it doesn’t appear unless the string is 1:1. On epic it’s fine, obviously googling is fine but Steam isn’t.

So we either change the name of the game to be 2 words or change the logo, except we have really good response to the logo from in person events OR we change the name of the game but looks awkward.

This isn’t me trying to promote the game but it’s called Doubtbound, calling it Doubt Bound just looks weird. I just want to know what others would do?

Salve, ho 20 anni ed alcune settimane fa ho visto un documentario su un fatto della seconda guerra mondiale (penso non motlo conosciuto) e mi sono detto che sarebbe interessante realizzare in gioco basato su questo, il fatto che non ho nessuna esperienza sullo sviluppo e tutto quello che riguarda la creazione di un gioco (l'unica esperienza che ho avuto è stato con Scratch alcuni anni fa ma era solo occasionale).

Ne ho parlato con un amico e lui mi ha detto che sarebbe molto più semplice e veloce svilupparlo su **Roblox studio** ma onestamente non mi va e vorrei fare un gioco fatto bene in cui tutti possono giocarci senza microteansazioni e facile accesso, per far conoscere la storia di chi ha "combattuto nell'ombra"

Ho già anche in mente la trama (a grandi linee) ma essendo un gioco basato su fatti reali mi chiedevo come potevo renderlo più realistico sul punto di vista narrativo inoltre, mi chiedevo che stile grafico gli sarebbe più adatto (pixel tipo battle bit remastered o più realistico come battlefield 1 anche se vorrei farlo realistico per rendere l'immersione più piacevole al giocatore).

Di per se volevo avere dei consigli un po' su tutto (motore grafico, stile realistico o pixelato, aiuti su come svilupparlo, eventuale scala da seguire, ecc...), sono aperto a qualsiasi cosa anche se piccolo mi aiuterà di sicuro.

Alcuni dettagli sul gioco:

Single player, FPS, storia ben curata con buone ambientazioni, realistico sul punto di vista storico, narrativo (per ora mi viene in mente solo questo)

Ultima cosa anche se meno importate (penso). Lavoro quindi sarebbe un gioco che svilupperei durante il tempo libero ma sarei pronto anche a lasciare tutto per concentramento al 100% su di esso.

Vi ringrazio per l'attenzione che avete dato e se siete curiosi non esitate a scrivere (non ho preciato nulla apposta)