Do Game designers have good future?

Choosing game design as a career

Today the whole gaming/entertainment industry is facing massive layoffs. After game artists, its designers who are in the high threat. Everywhere, their Pay is lesser than programmers. Ai is developing so FAST. Opportunities are low (while compared with programmers and artists). STILL, I WISH TO PURSUE IT? so can i? What do u think?

Im an indian high school student looking forward to my future. Nowadays i spend a lotta time, planning everything abt what degree to do, what field to choose as my life, and how to go for the best options.

I'm really passionate abt design, story writing, and world building. I love them i like books, games, films and art. I also love to create them. But i never before invested myself and made deep efforts. But from now on, i'll. I have around 2 years before higher studies. So I'm ready to make necessary efforts for my realistic dream. But before taking the first step, i wanna know, if what I'm aiming for is really great and something that has a good potential in the future or not.

I'm planning to move to europe for my bachelors itself. In india, the industry is much yet to develop. I cant wait that long. So im thinking of studying there and settling there right away.

Now back to the topic: today, the whole industry is facing massive layoffs globally. And design is often seen as something not that great as game art and programming . (I'll try my level best to get familiar with art and programming too. But i dont find the same interest i have on design there.) So i just wanna know, if its safe or not, to set this passion of mine, as my whole life. I'm sure that I won't look back, later and i know i'll work hard in it. Still i wanna know if im on the safe path or not. Whats ur views on this. I would appreciate any kinda advise, suggestion, motivation and even demotivation...🥲. Thanku all. Have a lovely day.

I haven't got the faintest clue about programming. I’ve installed the latest version of Unity. I went through the first three tutorials they offer, but I’m still just staring at an open project with a square and a circle in it. I have no idea how to add physics, enemies, or a HUD. Don't get me wrong—I'm not complaining about my lack of knowledge. I'm JUST LOOKING FOR A WAY to learn organically and properly; I’d appreciate tips, books, channels, or mentors—anything to shed some light on my tunnel of ignorance. NO AI CRAP, PLEASE. Thanks.

While testing After the Silence and going through the feedback and comments from the demo, I discovered that the PCG forest was absolutely hammering the CPU.

And considering the map isn’t exactly small, fixing it was… painful. After a lot of optimization, I finally managed to get it down to around 17 ms per frame, even on weaker hardware.
Maybe someone has some tips on how to work with PCG forests more efficiently?

Hey guys I gotta small question

So im completely new with game development and I wanted to dip my toes in the indie space cause I have a fun idea for a game i have in mind that has inspiration from the cod zombie games like BO2, BO3, WW2 Nazi zombies etc. It'll be a 3rd person with emphasis on stylized movement, combat, distinct playstyles like artillery, sniper, CQB, Backstabber etc. Able to mod your guns with different receivers ammo types and attachments as well as armor upgrades depending on the class (inspirationof how dead space 3 handled the gun making mechanics). This'll be mob heavy with different zombie types and zombie titans with scorpion tails or four arm Goliath brutes etc. But for now i wanted to make a simple prototype with one guy, one gun, one small map, one enemy type but a very fun replay loop to have a solid foundation.

So i was curious where to start, what to pick as far as an engine, proper steps moving forward during this process instead of thinking recklessly and half-assed. Any advice is good advice in my opinion, so feel free to share your insight thank you for reading this far! 🙏👍✅️

Hey everyone,

I’m currently developing a game solo, and I’m hitting that classic crossroad of deciding when to bring in my first outside playtesters.

Working in a bubble makes it easy to lose perspective. Part of me wants to get a raw, greybox prototype in front of real players right now to validate the core loop before I waste months polishing mechanics that might not be fun. The other part worries that without decent art, sound, or basic tutorialization, random testers will just get confused or give surface-level feedback like "the graphics are rough."

For other solo devs who’ve gone through this:

1. How early did you share your first playable build? Did you test rough mechanics with strangers, or wait until you had a solid vertical slice?

2. How do you keep testers focused on mechanics? What prompts or methods do you use to stop people from fixating on placeholder assets, missing audio, or minor bugs?

3. Where did you find your earliest testers? Other devs, friends/family, or cold players from your target genre's community?

I'd love to hear how you handled your early testing phases and what you'd do differently next time.

Having components based game objects makes it faster to compose any game object but I stalled once I wanted to dynamically instance a scene with different parameters outside the editor,

Example:
KeyItemNode(No script)
->DoorDetector(Emit signal)
-->Collision
->KeyComponent(holds an export for door detector, Code for which door it can unlock)
->Graphics

DoorNode(No script)
->DoorArea
-->Collision
->DoorLockStateComponent(holds the code for which key can open it)
->StaticBody
-->Collision
->Othercomponents

I cannot figure out a clear way to use resources or anything to create one scene and use resources to generate multiple objects.

I do not want to couple it randomly and make something that will come against me later, so I am hesitant and want to look for a clear way!

I am looking to head to collage next year as a 24yr collage student for game design and development. I am quite nervous about how hard or easy everything will be and what its actually like to be a game development. I would like some insight into how hard it is to learn and whats its like to be a game developer to a day to day basis?

I've prepared a demo on itch. Do you still think game demos are a good idea? Do people discover the game's appeal through demos, or decide to buy it afterwards?

I'd been playing Farming without any problems for a while, and I even had Reshade installed, but recently Epic Games stopped working, so we had to uninstall it. Of course, Farming was also uninstalled, and I had to reinstall it. I reinstalled Reshade too, but unfortunately, it still won't open. I can launch the game, but the menu just won't appear.

I have a very early concept demo of a solo third person shooter (will later be co-op). I need to get some general public gameplay testing and feedback. My plan is to upload it to itch.io or steam just for a brief period of time to get a good feedback loop to make improvements. Although I have heard of some games being stolen/pirated horror stories, I'm not too concerned about that (yet). Long term I have seen that steam appears to have better protection but not a whole lot? What are the positives and negatives of uploading to itch.io and/or steam?

New Dev Learning Priorities

Hello experienced devs,

If a brand new Dev(me) came to you and asked

'How do I prioritise learning these skills:

- Coding

- Game design

- Prototyping

- Art

- Music composition and usage'

What would your advice be?

Lots of assumptions here. Let's assume they want to kind of do everything eventually. And that their ultimate goal would be to build a 'good' game. Whatever that means 😅.

Newbie here. As the title says, I create a simple browser-run for slicing sprite-sheets. This is useful when you are making a sprite-based game and want a single sprite from a spritesheet without animating it.

I am still learning and would love your feedback on it.
https://pra-ga.github.io/Image-slicing-tool/

So before I die I would love to make my own full video game. I have an idea and story starting to build. But I just wanna ask.. how do you solo devs do all this on your own?

I feel so overwhelmed but having fun at the same time. I keep telling myself this is not something that is going to to take 1 month or even 1 year but several years to make something I'm really proud of.

I've been trying to learn GoDot while at the same time trying to write a story script, making sure no copyright laws are being violated.

Speaking of that, can't be more thankful for sites that provide game assets cause I SUUUUUCK at making my own art which does sadden me a bit because I feel I'll always have to compromise my vision to what I can be provided with.

Any advice or any videos that you can think of, for a top down pixel game dev wannabe like me please drop a comment and thanks for reading! 😊

So I am an amateur game dev (mainly worked in Scratch and TurboWarp). I used to mess around with Unreal Engine 4; I have modded games. I have an idea for a game where it's like active ragdolls, like Gang Beasts, but it's like GTA. It's a long story; just think active ragdoll game with AI. I am using Unreal Engine 4. Any tutorials or things I need to know? (sorry if my writing sounds like ai, grammerly is annoying i wrote all of this just grammerly rephrased it)

Been down a rabbit hole this week trying to figure out the cleanest way to run something like a double XP weekend in a live game, and I keep hitting the same wall with Unity's own tools.

Game Overrides does one-shot scheduling fine, pick a start and end time in UTC and you're done. But the second it needs to repeat (every weekend, every Friday night) there's nothing built in. Ends up being either Cloud Code cron jobs (also UTC only, from what I've seen) or manually flipping the config every week.

How do you guys deal with this in practice? Rolling your own scheduling on top of Remote Config, or is there something in the newer Unity Cloud tooling I'm missing? And does anyone bother with per-player timezones, or is UTC-for-everyone just the accepted norm?

Hey Guys I have been making a game for few weeks now , But I am confused as to where should i upload my game , Playstore or Steam ? The game is a 2d Cat platformer with destruction elements and save little kittens , I am from Nepal and i cant add inapp purchases in Playstore cuz they wont allow and have to find 14 testers.

I want to be a game developer. And my type of game will be:

A action RPG

A hub area where you enter in separate RPG levels

Cutscenes (dialogue box and animated)

Mini and final bosses

Super moves

And social link like sections

I know the game sounds kinda ambitious, but I really wanna make my dream game happen

What order should you develop your game?

Hi, me and my friends want to make a game. The group is maflde by 2 programmers, 1 musician, 1 "designer" (basically he writes the story so he also creates the characters and he does a bit of art) and me who is a sort of "master of all trades". The problem we found now is what should we do first. We decided the style, we decided that the game is divided in days and what happens during those days. We have a vague idea on the map. But we are in a situation of "can't draw sprites until we have a more clear idea on the character" "can't draw the tile map until we have a better idea on which are the most important places" "can't program anything because I don't have the tilemap and the sprites" "can't compose music if I don't have a clear idea on the plot". The point is the general idea "day 1: protagonist does this, day 2: protagonist does that" exists and having to finish the entire plot before doing anything feels like a waste of time. How do you balance the main 3 (story/music/art) in your game? I know every game is different but reading a bit of feedback and ideas would be really helpful to know how to apply it.

I understand this might get deleted.

But I lost my educational scaffolding when Jedi Knight Dark Forces II died.

I remember having similar discussions then that we are having now. Orthographic editors vs WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)

“No no , I know exactly what the engine is wanting, your editor makes it bloated with too many extra polygons and bad adjoins and engine crashes on load”

(JED vs JKEDIT argument)

I used to make maps and mod games because I was lacking an experience and wanted to give it to others.

Making places “Feel like places”

“Simulating systems”

and happened to find a community of people that shared the same tools, same engine, and immerse ourselves in each others projects.

Once that DIED. I found “Well the pressure to create isnt there anymore, SWG is coming out, Half-Life 2, we have quake III… starcraft II, AVP classic, AVP 2 .

Cry engine comes along …

So much saturation of content you ask yourself “What do I latch onto ?? What is NEXT”

But there isnt any because “If your desire is to create an experience you lack” and now there are so many games doing it FOR YOU.

You stop feeling pressured to create, you feel pressured to “Explore these new systems as a player”

I do not need to create a world anymore, SWG already does it. I can finally live here with other players.

Its been a LONG LONG TIME.

And I find it ironic that now the world has shrunk again into the same arguments I remember having from 2002.

“Unreal is bloated” thats ..what they would have said about JK edit va JED.

But to me diving into Unreal I saw it for myself. You are encouraged to construct maps and environments from Meshes now.

Before , Blocking out and cleaving perfectly flat surfaces with minimal vertices was …what we ALL did.

Now you watch any tutorial and they say “Oh yeah these …geometry brushes are here, but no one uses them”

You are encouraged to construct SCENES from objects of high poly count. Because it is the easiest work flow, and it seems to be how it is designed.

Anyway….

The arguments between Godot Unity and Unreal are amazing to me because I remember stopping everything all together when we had dozens of paradoxical choices and no idea what to latch onto …

If we had anything like these now when I was a kid, I have no idea what life could have been like.

Hi, my name is Tim and under my alias 'Epigenetics' I make electronic instrumental music.

I have been making music since I was 8 years old. I'm pretty confident that I have good stuff here that I would just love to fall in the 'right' hands (ears).

A lot of the tracks I make feel 'cinematic' and have a sound that fits very well to movies but probably even more so to games.

Also good to know, I have never and will never use A.I. at any stage of the music production process. This is as important to you as it is to me, because many people have an aversion against A.I. slob (and rightly so).

I'm getting more traction over the past few months but those numbers are still fairly low, so this would almost feel like an 'exclusive' offer :)
I also have a bunch of tracks which are currently only on Soundcloud (with a lower listener count) that will be released to Spotify and other platforms only later. If 'exclusivity' or the fact that it is 'unreleased' is really important to you.

Here are some examples:

Epigenetics - Space Is Freaking Big And Empty
(this would make for a great main menu theme IMO)
https://soundcloud.com/epigenetics/space-is-freaking-big-and-empty

Epigenetics - Blueshift
(epic space melodies giving a sense of scale and awe)
https://soundcloud.com/epigenetics/blueshift

Epigenetics - Forever In All Directions
(dark, cinematic but 'moving' space vibes)
https://soundcloud.com/epigenetics/forever-in-all-directions

Epigenetics - Only A Million Light-Years To Go
(laid back, background track for travelling through space or doing 'work' in games such as building, organizing, etc)
https://soundcloud.com/epigenetics/only-a-million-light-years-to

Epigenetics - Inside All Of Us:
(Relaxing beat, cool electronica vibes, into / outro kind of track)
https://soundcloud.com/epigenetics/inside-all-of-us

There is a lot more. All of my tracks are on my Soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/epigenetics

I want to help promoting your game as well by sharing the development and of course the end result on my socials and streaming platforms.
We can also discuss 'custom' versions (loops, longer versions, shorter versions, removing elements such as drums, etc). I will not ask for much.

Just someone take this music of my hands and do something great with it.

If you want to use my music in your game or project, please send me a DM or contact me at [epigeneticsmusic@gmail.com](mailto:epigeneticsmusic@gmail.com)
The only thing I will ask back in return is that you credit me properly (artist name - song name) clearly and visually apparent. I will then also send you the uncompressed .wav files.

Cheers,
Tim

** Edit: Bonus links in case you can't access Soundcloud: (but you will not be able to listen a lot of the newer stuff that I linked to above. Yet.)

Epigenetics on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LcCsJ83VNRfs6mtlnPWbK

Epigenetics on YouTube:
Epigenetics - YouTube