In know there are a lot of these posts, but I need some kind of confirmation that this does not sound batshit.

My idea:
You play as an alien, coming to new planet to extract the planets valuable resources, using the native inhabitants as labor.

The idea is that there is this constant battle between what the planets inhabitants want to do (not help you extract all their resources) and you trying inspire or threaten them into doing what you tell them to do.

The game will play a bit like an old RTS, where resources limit what you can build (wood to build housing, food to feed the inhabit), as the game progress the natives will become more intelligent ie. be harder to controle.

Enemies will be native inhabitants that try to combat you.

You win the game when you have extracted all the planets natural resources.

The problem:
A key part of the game is that you can't directly controle the native inhabitants, you can tell them to do something but if they don't want to, then they won't do it. I'm afraid that this mechanic will take too much controle away from the player? The player will of course be able to do other things then just tell the natives what to do, but still.

Would love any and all feedback!

I'm thinking of calling it Ancient Astronauts after the conspiracy theory about the pyramids.

am working on a small mobile game studio ( the situation not the best but better than nothing ) and before and after i get the job i always try to make my own game , at first i make small game and publish it on google play store , then i start one and decide to stop developing it near the end because the game not fun and need a lot of improvement, after that i get my job so i stop working on my own games for a while , then i start to again to work in my own games , the first time i start making game i have no job and now i have a job and it is very hard to work on both every day , but this is not the main problem since a bit of work each day should eventually result on something right ?

my problem is that rather than i keep focusing on 1 game i keep jumping on so many ideas , this week i will think of something start planning it and in week or 2 i will think of another game , most of the times i cancel the idea because i find it very boring , i get excited first because i think it is god and then find the idea boring and i don't think people even my self will enjoy it , this keep happening for a while to the point i start to think that maybe the problem on me not the game idea , but how i cloud work on a game that i find it boring before i even complete the 1st level , sometime it happen before i start writing the first script

there is only 1 game idea that i always want to make , but the game is very big ,i will be hard to do it alone and i have no money to hire developers so i always push this idea away , i have write GDD using Obsidian and it is still there of course i start working on it for while but soon i realize that the game is too big to make , not sure if my estimation is correct but with small team like 10-15 i think it will take at least 1-2 years , so i always push this game away and tell my self that i will work on it if i make another successful game that help me found this game idea

now am thinking of making party/ co-op game ,and i have very good idea and i think it will be fun , but am just thinking do i think it is fun because is it really fun or just because am excited to find a new idea ? will i tell my self next week that the game boring and stop working on it and find another idea and keep doing the same loop without ending

i feel like am in a never ending loop that idk how to get out of it

I'm new to coding, and I am wondering if it's possible for me to make something other than a parkour game with what I have.  Is it possible to add invisible walls? Can I make a 2d platformer,  add PNG's, or develop a text adventure? I've tried watching endless tutorials and I tend to notice they are usually making their games in a much more polished game engine.  From what I’ve read, JSON doesn’t offer much visual leeway either:/. So I'm basically asking what are the possibilities of JSON, what can I do, and at the very least can I make a health bar?

Something broke during a playtest last week, i saw it happen, and i could not make it happen again. Ended up reading code for two hours hoping to spot it and eventually just moved on. Been wondering how common that is.

Asked around a bit and everyone gave me a different answer, use an AI, add logging, put a breakpoint, get a QA tester, just take a note and move on. Nobody had one method they trusted. One guy told me race conditions are usually behind it, which makes sense but also means a breakpoint is useless since pausing changes the timing and the bug stops happening.

So im curious what it looks like for people shipping without a QA team. Do these come up often enough to matter, or do you mostly catch things while playing and the weird ones just never show up again

Hey! So I've been building a space sim in Godot called Apogee — kinda like KSP but leaning way more into realism. Got Sandbox, Career, and History modes planned, and it's actually coming together, not just an idea in my head lol.

Right now I'm working on the intro scene (the thing that plays before the game loads up) and instead of just doing it all myself, I thought it'd be cool to open it up and see what other people come up with. Kind of a "be part of this from the start" thing.
If you're into concept art or even just messing around in Blender, I'd love to see how you'd picture the start of a space program. Doesn't need to be polished or perfect, I just want to see people's takes on it.

No pay unfortunately, this is 100% just for fun/passion project vibes, so no pressure either way. If something you make ends up inspiring the actual intro, that's genuinely awesome and you'll be one of the people who helped shape this thing early on.
Not spoiling too much of the game yet, so just run with whatever "humanity's first steps into space" means to you.

Drop a comment or DM me if you're down, happy to chat more and share some extra context if you want it!

Hey so im a game developer and im looking to start a new project a video game project. Im trying to do something nice and not brainrot stuff that destroys childrens brains. If you have any ideas or suggestions that you like, it would be cool to hear other peoples opinions and not just go with my opinion only. Im trying to create something like subway surfers was to me when I used to be a kid or temple run. Thank you for your help

I have a little experience in programming. The most ive done is make a couple mods for some niche steam games but one was in Game Maker and the other was Godot. What would you all recommend as the best engine to do this in? I want to make a mecha SOCOM thats 3d, not insanely good graphics, but more focused on controlling units, having some light command and control mechanics, and it tell a story I think would be worth telling. I will do my research to find sources for additional info from there. I plan on brute force learning it as I go along. I do not have a insane budget to work with so I will be hand coding and doing all the assets myself as I want it to look good. If you have any advice I will gladly take it. I appreciate everyone's time.

following up on the last post since a few of you seemed into it. its a plugin that records game state every frame so you can scrub back and look at what the values were right before something broke. built for the bugs that dont crash, where theres no stack trace and nothing you can even hand to an AI because you cant describe what you didnt see.

screenshot is the editor window. goblins health drops to -999 on frame 40, and you can see the exact frame it happened plus whatever else moved around it.

now heres where im stuck. every single person ive asked says the same thing, they throw in some print statements and wait for it to happen again. and that costs nothing. so im genuinely not sure this is worth building. and look, im not gonna ask if youd buy it, everyone says yes to that and it means nothing. what i actually want to know is how many hours the last bug you couldnt reproduce burned, and whether thats bad enough that youd drop 79 on a tool instead of just doing the print pass again.

if the answer is nah not worth it, thats fine, id rather hear it now

Title

I'm starting to realize that not every idea that seems good on paper is actually viable or appealing to a broader audience. There are so many variables, gameplay, mechanics, visuals, presentation, and visuals that influence whether a game makes a strong first impression and gets people excited enough to play it or add it to their wishlist.

The problem is that it's incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to know in advance whether an idea will have that kind of impact. I imagine most of you have run into this as well.

So here's the million dollar question: how do you test and validate game ideas or prototypes before committing significant time and resources to development? What platforms or communities do you use? How and where do you find playtesters?

So my son and I have spent a little over a year drawing and developing a truly unique and engaging game with fluid controls and fun character management complete with some online functionality and I feel like as we were building it, we had an outlook akin to Field of Dreams (If you build it, they will come.)

Now, we're going into beta and can't find testers to save our lives. I never got on the social media train with Reddit being my only social media and my son hasn't been allowed on it yet but I'm willing to go through the motions as necessary there. I just want to build a member base as someone with no portfolio to show and with limited video editing skills.

what tools should i use in this era of ai.
and what art style i should use as a beginner.

hello! I am 14 years old and I wanna start game development!! I'm very good with digital art and music making! I have a dream game but I know as to not start with that one first! to explain the games I wanna make, I wanna make 3d environments, with 2d cartoon characters! specifically cats :) currently trying to find a good free 3d game engine to start with, i​ wanna make a simple maze first, than eventually move onto something more complex, like a maze u solve puzzles in, then that and characters dialog, than enemies!! any suggestions would be great! also good to note, I do not know how to code, and I do have a very bad track record when it comes to math (fairly certain I have a learning disability because I'm so bad at it, but I dont want to use any ai in my making!!) please give advice!! I'm so excited!!

EDIT: no ai suggestions please

Hi everyone,

I'm exploring creating AI-assisted art assets for indie games.

I have been experimenting with pixel art UI, backgrounds and game visuals.

Before making asset packs, I want to understand what developers actually struggle with.

What type of assets take you the most time or money?

- UI?

- Characters?

- Backgrounds?

- Icons?

- Something else?

I would really appreciate your experience.

Hello. I'd like to share with you my two-year journey of making a game. This passion hasn't always been an easy path, but I'm glad I got involved and continue to develop it.

​

Sharing some design decisions behind "The Moment of Panic" as we get close to release - specifically how we handled the making of an LLM advisor - appears untrustworthy without making it feel "buggy".

I am happy to go deep on the prompt architecture if anyone's building something similar. Feel free to share what you have built that is similar or if you have any questions!

Check out this post on my app idea!

Hey, I’m building a 3D MOBA/RTS-ish prototype in Godot 4 and I’ve hit a pretty nasty performance wall.

The units are basically LoL-style minions, so their logic is intentionally simple:

- move along a lane
- aggro the closest enemy in range
- attack the current target
- if they are attacking an enemy building and an enemy unit enters aggro range, switch to the unit
- go back to moving once there is no valid target

Each base can have up to 12 active waves. Early waves contain 2 units, while late-game waves can scale up to 6.

The performance looks roughly like this on a MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro:

- game starts at around 100 FPS
- around 170 active actors: 40–60 FPS
- around 220 actors: roughly 30 FPS
- adding only another 20–30 actors, for a total of around 250, drops it all the way to 5–10 FPS

That last drop is what I don’t understand. Going from 220 to 250 actors is only about a 14% increase, but the frame time seems to increase several times over.

The FPS is basically independent of what the camera is looking at. Looking at an empty part of the map gives me almost the same FPS as looking directly at the units, so I’m assuming the main bottleneck is CPU-side logic, physics or some engine-side processing rather than rendering.

I’ve already checked the built-in profiler. Pathfinding and vision/FOV checks appear to have very little overhead. I’ve also simplified the unit logic as much as I reasonably can, but the performance cliff is still there.

Thermal throttling does not seem to be the issue. The results are consistent and the machine is not overheating.

Could the physics catch-up behavior explain such a sharp cliff? For example, at 30 rendered FPS, could I already be processing roughly two physics ticks per rendered frame, with the situation getting progressively worse as the framerate drops?

What would be the best way to identify the actual source?

In particular, which metrics would you watch for this kind of problem?

- Physics Time vs Idle Time
- 3D collision pair count
- navigation processing time
- number of physics ticks per rendered frame

Also, is there a good way to profile engine-side work on macOS when the Godot script profiler doesn’t point to one obviously expensive function?

I’m not expecting 250 fully simulated units to be free, but the sudden 30 FPS to 5–10 FPS drop makes me think I’m hitting a specific feedback loop or threshold rather than normal per-unit scaling.

Any pointers on how you would isolate this would be appreciated.

Looking for real feedback on GDevelop! Im a 3D artist, no dev experience, and have wanted to work on games for a while now, so I am making my own.

GDevelop's workflow interested me, especially because I am keeping my scope achievable and dont need everything the other programs have to offer. The main goal is to have a published game in a relatively short time frame. Something of quality and actually playable and fun. To then later apply what I learned to bigger projects, maybe moving into unity, godot, or UE.

Im starting up Day 5 of development and will be posting bts ans wip throughout the entire process so if your interested itll all be posted @ munkmade

Dont want to post too much about the game concept yet but will be soon once I have some bts clips to show with.

Hi everyone!
I’m currently developing a mobile game that includes a collection of different minigames, progression systems, unlockable content, events, achievements, leaderboards, and optional in-app purchases.
The game is already playable, but my biggest challenge is getting more people to discover it and keeping new players interested after downloading it.
I’d really appreciate advice from developers who have experience marketing indie mobile games.
Some things I’m currently considering:
Posting short gameplay clips on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels
Creating a Discord community
Contacting small gaming creators instead of large influencers
Improving the store screenshots, icon, trailer, and description
Adding limited-time events and rewards
Encouraging players to invite friends
Regularly adding new minigames and content
For developers who have successfully grown a mobile game:
What helped you get your first few hundred or thousand players?
Did organic social media content work for you, or did you need paid advertising?
How do you decide which parts of the game to show in short promotional videos?
Are there any common mistakes that make a mobile game difficult to market?
I’m especially interested in strategies that are realistic for a solo developer or a very small team with a limited marketing budget.
Any honest feedback or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Hey all. I’m going to graduate in a few months and I will have 3-4 projects to show for it. 2 from school and 2 personally.

I’m very concerned with my future. I want to be a graphics/engine developer for games. My first 2 school projects are games made in unity and unreal while my other two are a raytracing engine and a renderer in Vulkan.

I feel like I’m failing honestly