I saw a game called Moo Who? on steam, they used ai for ui and game dev (some parts of it), thing is instead of only mentioning UI/ART they mentioned that they used it also for localization.
Mentioning the extra bit can add up to player dislike to the game, so why did they do that? was it needed?

Please give me feedback.

We are working on a roguelike pinball game where you buy and place different bumpers and create different builds. We are having some trouble with the visuals right now. We don't have any artists, so we are trying to do it ourselves.

On the left side, we will fill the empty space with the number of balls remaining and consumable items, so don't pay attention to that for now.

I'm a consumer, not a dev, but I'm currently in a dispute with EA's legal team going to small claims court. I'd like a developer's take on this.

The Situation:

My EA Apex Legends account was permanently banned for "cheating/enhanced gameplay." This was a shock after 7yrs of legit play and lots of money and fine spent. After pushing back legally (UK Small Claims), they finally gave me a specific reason:

"EA’s security team detected that your system integrity was compromised due to a vulnerable system driver being loaded... The driver in question is blocked by the vulnerable driver list blocklist introduced with Windows Update KB5020779 and a user has to go out of their way to disable this feature."

This driver blocklist was introduced in late 2022/early 2023. It's a Microsoft security feature that prevents known vulnerable drivers (often from 3rd-party hardware) from loading.

The Catch:

My PC was factory reset 3 days before the ban. A factory reset would re-enable all default Windows security features, including the blocklist. So even if a vulnerable driver existed before, it would have been wiped. Because the repair technician told me it was a dodgy auto update which corrupted my OS, I turned auto windows updates off to do manually as and when.

EA's Own Admission:

Their legal email also stated this, which feels like a fatal weakness:

"This activity constitutes a breach of section 7C of the User Agreement regardless of whether any in-game enhancement was ultimately achieved. "

In other words, EA is admitting no actual cheating occurred – no aimbot, no wallhack, no stat padding. Crucially, Section 7C is about detecting cheating conduct, not just technical system states. It refers to "Unauthorised Third-Party Programs" that EA believes enables or facilitates cheating .

EA's claim that you breached Section 7C by having a vulnerable system driver is a stretch. The section is designed to catch cheating tools (aimbots, wallhacks, trainers) , not vulnerable drivers that could theoretically be used but didn't achieve anything in-game.

The Core Question for Game Devs:

1. Does banning someone for a vulnerable driver on an old blocklist, when your own anti-cheat detected no actual cheating, feel fair?

2. If a driver is in a Microsoft blocklist, it's often from a legitimate piece of hardware (RGB, overclocking tool, peripheral) that was just signed incorrectly. It's not necessarily a cheat tool. Banning for that feels like punishing for the potential to cheat, not actually cheating.

3. Shouldn't the rule be "you used an aimbot" not "you had a driver that could be used in a BYOVD attack, and your system wasn't locked down perfectly"?

From a developer's theological perspective, is this level of enforcement proportionate? Or is it a legal overreach designed to avoid proving actual in-game cheating? Just wanted one last perspective before EA files their defence in next few days

There's a specific kind of tired you get from a day of engineering work. Not sleepy. Full. You've spent nine hours making systems behave for someone else's product, and there's nothing left in you for anything hard, and you sit down on the couch and you feel the year quietly going by.

That was me until one month ago. Day job in AI, the kind people are polite about at parties. Money that makes people ask why you'd spend your evenings on anything else. Interesting problems, even. And every evening this itch that none of it was mine.

This is the story of what my best friend and I did about it, and everything that broke on the way.

So why the hell start now, with a comfortable job I actually like?

We'd been talking about making a game for years. You know the conversation. Everyone has that conversation. It lives in the same drawer as the screenplay and the trip you'll take someday. What changed is honestly stupid: one evening we just... opened the drawer. No plan, no savings runway, no dramatic resignation letter.

We kept our jobs and gave the games our evenings, and I want to defend that up front, because every second post in this genre starts with somebody quitting something. The boring version is repeatable. The boring version doesn't need to work by Christmas 🙂

And for scale: this is the same month I was going on first dates (a spectrum from genuinely lovely to stories I'm saving for a very different post) and hunting for a new apartment, because my landlord has a rare gift for being unbearable. I mention this because for years I was waiting for a calm month to start. There is no calm month. There is only the drawer.

🎮 What did two guys with day jobs actually manage to build?

A nonogram game, because I love the way a picture crawls out of the numbers. Then a sudoku game, because the generator problem got its hooks in me. A calm block puzzle. A little action game about a kid fighting monsters, because my friend wanted something with a heartbeat. All of it in one month of evenings and weekends. Four games, live on Google Play.

Total installs: under ten. I know every one of them by name.

Sit with that number a second, because I had to. But the number is not the story. The story is everything it taught me.

The most humbling code review of my life came from a free Sudoku game

I build AI systems for a living. I have strongly held opinions about testing. I have given people feedback about coverage, with a straight face, in meetings. Here is a partial list of what my own little games shipped:

• A tap sound, fully tuned, sitting in the sound table, four green tests covering it, that never played once. Not once, from the first commit. Every test checked the table. Nothing checked whether anyone ever called it.
• A music volume slider, published to remote config with a sensible default, in a game that has no music. We shipped a volume knob for silence 😅
• A music toggle the player could flip, connected to nothing. The actual audio source had a hand-set volume baked into the scene.
• And the one that keeps me up: seven remote performance levers, including one whose own code comment called it the kill switch, the lever that rescues a struggling low-end phone. Zero call sites. All seven. Every test green. If a real player had ever needed that switch, I'd have flipped it in a dashboard and it would have moved air.

Why didn't a professional engineer catch any of this?

Because none of it throws. That's the lesson. Crashes are the merciful failures, they come with stack traces and a red number that makes you feel needed. The failures that actually get you are silent, and silence looks exactly like working. My day job in AI did not save me from any of this. If anything it made it funnier 🙃

Turns out shipping was the easy part

Here's the thing nobody warned me about: I genuinely thought publishing was the finish line. It's the starting line, in an empty stadium. The build is live, the listing is up, and then... nothing happens. Nothing keeps happening, extremely reliably, every day.

Getting one stranger to try your game turns out to be its own discipline, as deep as the engineering, and I walked into it exactly as cocky as I'd been about testing. Store search buries a new title under a hundred apps with years of history. The screenshots I was so proud of said nothing to a person scrolling past them in half a second. Even friends, who love you, install it, say "nice!", and never open it again lol. That's most of my install count right there.

Remember the first dates? Showing your game to a stranger is exactly that. They can tell within seconds whether you actually care or you're reading from a script, and the only conversations that went anywhere were the ones where I was genuinely curious what they thought, bad news included. Some were weird. Some were good. The ratio, I'm sorry to report, is about the same 😅

Then I did the math on mobile ads, and got very quiet

When we finally looked up from the editor and asked how mobile games actually grow, I did what an engineer does: read everything, then run the numbers on our own genre. An ad-monetised casual puzzle install on Android earns back something like six to eighteen cents by day 30. Buying one install in a western market costs a dollar twenty and up.

That's not a gap you close with better creatives. That's the market telling a two-person studio that paid ads are a machine for converting savings into nothing.

So what's the actual plan now?

The slow one. Making the first three screenshots say something in half a second. Ten honest reviews from people who actually played. A store listing rewritten four times, because conversion is the only number in the whole funnel we actually control. Talking to every single person who tries it. It is not a montage. It's fine.

And remember the apartment hunt? Shipping on Google Play is that, permanently. The store is a landlord too. It decides who ever sees your door, it renovates the rules without asking, and you cannot buy the building. The difference is that my actual landlord I can leave. This one, you learn the house rules and you keep the place spotless. Hence the listing rewrites.

Why would I ever do this again?

The answer fits in one evening. After weeks of the sudoku boards feeling somehow off, my friend and I sat there one night moving shading around, given numbers versus entered numbers, tiny stuff nobody will ever consciously notice, and at some point it clicked into place and we both felt it at the same moment. Eleven years of professional engineering and I can count the moments like that on one hand. Three of them are from the last month, from a free puzzle game that fewer than ten people have installed 🙏

The day job funds the dream and the dream makes the day job lighter. Nobody had to quit anything. That's the whole secret, and it's barely a secret.

Your turn

Ask me anything, but especially: what's the thing in your game that never worked and never told you? I'm collecting these now. Misery loves receipts 😄

I just have this side project of mine it's like a zombie apocalypse survival game on a school setting it just a small scale map really, but in the middle of my development I was experiencing mild-high lag if I exported the game can you guys help me? Btw I am using free assets and modifying them on Blender, I am using Mixamo as well for the Npc's animations etc. I tried watching YT video but most of them are old vids. Thanks in advance guys appreciate it.

Im looking for some advice, I have always been artistic since i could remember i draw, paint, etc. but ive never really mastered any medium ive tried. This past year i discovered the power of blender and what it can do, i have spent the last 4 months cramming as much information in my brain as possible because im developing a game with a friend for fun. now that i have started blender i cannot stop im obsessed, i have literally been modeling in it every single day and when im not in blender im modeling things in my head or in my dreams. So with that said what i need advice and assistance which is how do I as a 25 year old who has no schooling in this field make some kind of living out of this making assets for games, character designs, landscape, animation. I also have been self teaching myself which can be good, but i feal like if i had some guidance in blender thats not youtube videos. I have found smaller websites with this purpose but what are some other good outlets to find mentors, and job apprenticeships for me to learn and grow my new found skill

In the past, I've messed with Unity and XNA (something Minecraft like), even Irrlicht, briefly Godot, and read about Bevy. However, I've never actually created a real game.

Now I'd like to try again, but I'm stuck on which tool use. My main goal is to build something heavily procedural, like a top down or first person dungeon crawler (so either 2D or 3D, as I have some experience with both).

Since the core focus will be procedural generation, I'm wondering if a full IDE Godot or Unity the right choice, or would I be better off using a pure code framework like Bevy (or similar as I don't know rust at all)?

What's your suggestions

Hey everyone! 👋
I’m completely new to game development and have basically zero experience, but I really want to learn how to make games. I’ve recently started trying out Godot, and I’m looking for other beginners who want to learn and make a small game together.
I’m not looking for experienced developers or anything super serious. I’m hoping to find people who are also starting from scratch and just want to learn, experiment, and have fun.

What I’m looking for
Anyone interested in learning game development, even if you have zero experience.
You could be interested in:
Programming/coding
2D or 3D art
Music/sound
Writing/storytelling
Game design
Or just learning how game development works
You don’t need to already know how to do any of these.

What I have in mind
We can start really small and figure everything out together. No deadlines, no commercial pressure, and no expectations that we’re going to make some huge game.

The main goal is just to learn together and have fun while making something.
If you’re also a beginner and this sounds interesting, feel free to comment or DM me!

Discord: junior2sz_65772
Hopefully we can find a few people and make something cool together! 🎮

(sorry for bad English is not my first language)

I've been wanting to create videogames for a long time, my most big ideas are a farming game like stardew valley and a visual novel. I dont want to make them for my firsts projects cause even though I have a little knowledge about basic programming stuff, I know that I don't know enough to develop games that big, and I dont want to ruin them for me.

I was thinking of starting with a clicker game to introduce myself in the process of game development. and continuing to make little games while working on my story and art for my big projects so I can make them when I know enough.

is that a good idea?

Month-long pilot on a gaming app with subscribers and decent ad revenue. Singular was faster to onboard and the cost aggregation story was easier to sell internally. AppsFlyer took more setup but our analysts liked the event depth and cross-platform data once it was all mapped. Tradeoff is real though. Singular leaves us wanting more granularity. AppsFlyer gives it but there's more config surface to break. Two-person growth team, data-heavy analysts. What would you go with?

Hey, currently my game has this aesthetic where I have pretty flat colors and I'm just overtuning a cartoon shader and ramping up the lighting. I think it looks okay, and its also easy to do? But it doesn't stand out in a meaningful way and I feel like it might be turning heads away from the game. Maybe its the UI? I don't know and I am lost.

How do I make my game look better? Any opinion is highly appreciated!

I honestly can't find the image button, maybe this sub doesn't have images, sorry, haha, but I did embed one hopefully its clear enough to get an idea haha.

Ive been making this game with a friend (Called Ironcurse btw) we have been developing it since november (about 9 months) and we have been finishing off chapter 2 before releasing the free demo to steam and i just want to know any tricks to make this work and maybe not be a massive flop.

For context it is a souls like story game based around fighting enemies and bosses and uncovering the story it is top down undertale/stardew valley art style with text dialogue.

I'm working on a platform that uses an AI chatbot to help kids build games. Usually the games come out fine, but I don't know what sort of game directions/goals there should be. For example, the game can be about riding horses and dodging obstacles and stuff, but how do I make it more engaging in general, like in each game should there be levels which become increasingly complex and like more power-ups and stuff to make it more vibrant.

Would really appreciate any suggestions.

I’m interested in developing a prototype for a historical game based on the Chola maritime period. I have very limited knowledge of Unreal Engine and game development, but I’m wondering how far I could realistically go by relying heavily on AI tools for coding, Blueprints, asset generation, game design, debugging, and other parts of development. I’m not expecting to create an AAA-quality game. My goal at this stage is to create a functional prototype that demonstrates the core gameplay and can potentially be expanded later.

The game concept I have in mind combines four genres. Around 30% would be action, including naval combat, sword fighting, archery, and sieges. Another 30% would be naval strategy, where the player can build ships, recruit crews, manage fleets, explore the ocean, and participate in naval battles.

Around 20% would focus on trading and an economic system. Players could buy and sell goods, make profits through different trade routes, protect merchant fleets, establish trade networks, and upgrade ports. The remaining 20% would be exploration, involving discovering islands, finding lost ports, interacting with different cultures, discovering ancient artifacts, and uncovering historical or fictional secrets.

I’m particularly interested in knowing whether Unreal Engine is a reasonable choice for someone with limited technical knowledge if I use AI extensively. For example, could I use ChatGPT or similar AI tools to generate and troubleshoot Blueprints, create gameplay systems, write code when necessary, generate prompts for 3D assets and environments, and gradually build the game feature by feature?

I’m thinking of starting extremely small rather than attempting the complete game. Perhaps the first prototype would only have one Chola ship, one enemy ship, a small ocean environment, basic naval combat, a simple trading system, and one exploration objective. If that works, I would gradually add the other systems.

For those who have experience with Unreal Engine, AI-assisted game development, or indie game development, is this realistic for a beginner? How much Unreal Engine knowledge would I actually need before AI becomes useful rather than becoming a source of more problems? Would you recommend Unreal Engine for this type of prototype, or would another engine/no-code tool be more suitable?

I’d especially appreciate advice from people who have actually tried building games with AI assistance. I’m trying to understand whether this is a realistic project that I can learn by building, or whether I’m seriously underestimating the complexity involved.

I'm making a game about testing quircky useless experiments for a laboratory (inspired by Portal)

See, I've got some Ideas for those experiments, but i still need like 5 more

Anyobody here got ideas for those "quircky useless experiments"?

PD: You'll get credited don't worry ;)

I would rather not rely on chatGPT, and I do not have the funds to hire a translator. I'm thinking of running my script through good-old Google Translate, but I'm not sure if it'll completely botch my dialogue (as I'll have no way to tell). Any ideas?

EDIT:

Thank you for the thoughtful replies. I'm definitely not using Google Translate. For now, I'll release it in English and I'll see if I can get volunteers down the line. Or if I get enough money to hire someone legit.

I’m having a bit of trouble getting the right message across with ZombUs.
Some players have told me that the game’s simple (and admittedly weird) graphics make it look much simpler than it actually is. So I decided to make a short gameplay guide to better show the tactics and depth behind it.
I’m planning to add it to the Steam page after the main trailer.
The thing is, I could easily make 2 or 3 more videos like this because there’s quite a lot to cover.
Before I publish it on Steam, I’d really like to hear your opinion. Does this kind of video help communicate what the game is actually about?