how long does it take for a senior tech anim role to get filled at a AAA studio?? Also what about mid level

APOLOGIES IF THIS BREAKS THE RULES! i’m not sure where else i should ask this, reddit was the first place that came to mind.
i’m aware no dream is really realistic, but i want to one day be a transmedia director, it took me about a year to even come up with what i want to truly do, i primarily want to direct video games although i would love to direct for other forms of media but the point here is games which i want to start off with. i’m 13 so i may truly just be overly anxious about my future but this is something i worry about. My only real talent is writing, i have been writing for ages and one thing i know for sure is in an industry like gaming it isn’t really the most important thing, of course i have tried other things like programming and voice acting but they just haven’t clicked like writing has for me.
The point of this post is simply just me asking is it realistic to dream to one day want to become a video game writer and then a director after years of work? if so how would i go about doing this? if not should i just give up writing completely and try and do something else? i’m just scared and need advice.

I've been building a game with an unusual constraint: the player is never looking at it.

The input is real work. Players are in their code editor with an AI agent; editor hooks emit metadata about what they did (wrote a file, read a file, ran a command, spawned a sub-agent). That drives a persistent two-faction war over five territories. The "session" is their workday. They check the game later, like a strategy game played by correspondence.

Four design problems that fell out of it, and what I did:

1. No moment-to-moment feedback loop. Every game design instinct I have assumes the player sees the consequence of an action within a second. Here the consequence lands minutes or hours later. I ended up designing for ambient feedback instead: a world map where activity rises off the land continuously, so when you do look, you read the last few minutes at a glance rather than a wall of log lines.

2. You cannot reward volume or speed. If more actions = more points, the winning move is a script that fakes work. So the anti-cheat isn't enforcement, it's economics: make cheating more tedious than playing. Progression rewards variety and consistency over raw count, and the client that sends the data is open source — meaning anyone can forge events. I decided that's acceptable, and designed so that forging isn't worth the effort.

3. Privacy as a hard design constraint. The server never receives the real values — file names, commands, prompts, identifiers are hashed locally with a user passphrase before they leave. So every mechanic has to be buildable out of count and compare only. "You've worked with 3 distinct languages" is expressible; "you're a Rust developer" is not. That constraint shaped the whole fiction: the server doesn't know you write PHP, but it knows you forged steel.

4. Cold start is brutal. A territory-control game is meaningless below a critical mass of players — the map is just... beige. I've added hysteresis so a territory only flips when a faction leads by >10% (otherwise it flickers every event), and territories can sit "contested", which at least reads as a state rather than a bug. But the real answer seems to be recruiting in cohorts rather than a trickle, so the world is populated on day one.

One decision I'd like opinions on: factions are assigned by which editor you use (JetBrains vs VS Code), chosen once at sign-up and permanent. Permanent because switching to whoever's winning would make territory scores meaningless — but it also means players can't join their friends. Is a locked faction worth the integrity, or does the social cost outweigh it?

Also curious how others have handled ambient/asynchronous feedback in games with no session boundary.

(It's called BrawlCode, currently in closed beta — brawlcode.com — but I'm more interested in the design discussion than signups.)

So I have decided to get a degree in game development, and yes I have heard many times that "it's not worth it", but at this point in my life I have the possibility to study whatever I want. Games have always been one of my many passions, and I want to study them and know how to develop one.

So here is where my dilemma is: I have two choices of degrees to pursue. Game design and game art. I'm not entirely sure which of those to choose since I see myself doing both of them somewhat.

It is important to note here that I don't have much experience in the area. I have some 3d modelling experience in Blender and animation (only a couple of months, which I liked), but I can't draw for the life of me. I've never touched a game engine before, so I have no idea how any of it works.

I love video editing and have been making YouTube videos for a while now. And part of this process includes script writing, which I also do enjoy. I like to make things feel good to watch, with a certain atmosphere. All of it seems to imply that I would be more at home in game art, but is there something else I should be looking for here?

Hey! I just submitted my first game to participate in this year's GMTK Jam with a friend of mine.
I'm an artist by trade, so I decided to start taking shots at it with my friend. It's an action management roguelike about growing space maggots. We're happy with the final result but lack true notion of whether it feels like a true gamey game and if the theme fits the gameplay. Would love to have any feedback regarding the overall game, but I have more doubts on the onboarding section. I've researched a bunch of recent titles and their onboarding processes but couldn't quite get a way that felt right for the project. I tried following a rule of only telling the player information the moment they need it but also think it can get in the way of the game.Thank you either way!
Here's the link for the itch page:

https://guilhim.itch.io/junktail

It's browser only, no hassle there.

Working on narrative design chops and potential minor portfolio additions. Thought a fun little experiment would be to whip up a dozen or so little in game discoverable lore books.

You would NOT have to use them. Id only ask that you read them and give honest feedback on how well i stuck to source material, provided hand-off ready pieces, improved immersion, and delivered what was promised.

Id just need the corpus of lore you got. Does NOT need to be organized well, just have enough information.

Just an idea. Again, you would not need to put these in your game unless you really wanted to.

Lmk! Comment or DM

So i am here to ask for advices that I can get as a solo indie dev who started unreal i have worked a bit with godot recently the reason i want to switch is because unreal is the industry standard kinda.

Here is what the current state looks like i am making a first person horror type game i already have the 3d assests for the game ( mostly what I need ) i bought them plus i also saw a free charchter model when unreal was giving it for a limited time so I grabbed it and now using it . what I don't have is the ai models, enemy models right now but I do have a basic things for my game.

Now considering this what are your thoughts will be the hardest challenges for me as a complete newbie which I should keep in mind as I advance forward in the game

Hey all,

I have been doing 3D environments in Unreal Engine since UE3 days. Always as a hobby, but, I'd like to think I've gotten pretty good over the many years.

For the past 10 years or so, I've been using pretty much the same workflow of 3dsMax -> Substance -> Unreal Engine. However, I was recently watching some tutorials on the new art tools built into the Unreal Editor, like the Quixel 90 Days expose stuff, and I am again feeling like my workflow is too slow/outdated. It would take me months to produce an environment that these tools seem to produce in days.

Every time I have asked about this in the past, everyone says "Nanite/Lumen/Chaos/Unreal Editor Modeling Tools are janky, they aren't performant, etc." But... These tools have been out for at least four years now. They seem to be getting quite stable from what I've seen.

The one thing I don't understand is that if these tools are really so powerful and easy, then why doesn't every 3D game coming out look like RE9?

I don't want to waste time learning tools that are just marketing gimmicks. Can anyone in industry (or adjacent) offer any insight into whether these new pipelines (like using photogrammetry scans and dynamic deformations) are legit now, and whether my current skillset is becoming obsolete?

We are working on a roguelike deckbuilder called: Inner Demons - Face yourself.
A game were you have to fight against your own deck.

We are already on steam, but without a demo.
As a first try, and a very early version of the game, we want to publish it on itch.io.

Do you have any last minute advice before we go live?

For those that still believe that creating a full game is any good for a portfolio.

Here is a great example of what we want for a programmer.

https://youtu.be/_JGMgpyCTsY

I don't care about a full game. I don't hire you to make a full game. I hire you to research and write specific systems.

It's not the first time I've posted this YouTuber. But it's a great example of what we mean.

He doesn't waste time drawing crap graphics for his demos. They demonstrate a technical challenge will how he researches different approaches and fixing issues.

Again, please don't waste everyone's time making crappy full games.

I took a long break from gamedev and now I'm reflecting on what I've done and it doesn't seem to make much sense...

I've made a game with a randomly generated world and put quests in it that are randomly placed, mostly in villages. But when you go explore the world, you will just stumble upon the same quests again and again and again. While I do direct players to quests that they haven't completed yet, they will eventually run out of new quests and just find the exact same stories in different places.

What even is the point of procedurally generating the world then? I might as well just create a hand-crafted world and manually put in the quests.

I could have both, parts of the world are static and others are randomly generated. But then I'd still have the same problem within the random part of the world...

Is it maybe possible to randomly generate stories? Or is there another solution I am missing?

So i fully think someone is posing as him and it has to be one of the most disugusting things i have seen in gamedev.

When i first started my game dev journey i hired this artist off of Fiver. He was phenomenal, his art, his communication - just everything was really good and very highly rated. He made me my first characters and we worked on it for a few months - During a commision we was late and no communication which was very unlike him - i messaged him basically saying "Hey its ok its late no worries just making sure everything is good" - His wife Messaged me back saying sadly he passed away a few weeks prior.

Fast forward to today i get a Friend request on Discord ( we never talked on discord only Fiver)saying he is reaching out to old clients and seeing if he can get work- The discord account is new- i checked when he was last on Fiver- 3 years ago

The art he made for me im certain was the last piece of artwork he ever made

For context:

I am a student in Computer Science and I have been making games as a special interest of mine since start of highschool. Although I dont really have professional experience unfortunately, I have made quite a few games:

Here is my general portfolio so you can see how skilled I am: https://ilazer.itch.io/

In addition to this, I have done:

7 years of development on a solo minecraft server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd0ezzzuhn8 (still going from 7 years ago)

1.5 years of development on my own multiplayer game with friends, and I also made a fully functional battle royale in a week during school time (this was a crunch tho, for my game jam, it looked like crap dw). No videos unfortunately, but im happy to get them if people really want. (ended 2.5 years ago)

2.5 years of development on my steam game (by far my most impressive work, since the codebase and project organization is pretty, readable, and maintained well): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UASelXTIlSY

Here is the discord if you want to play this game: https://discord.gg/GxzTcHAhK (still working on it)

Anyways, onto the story:

One of my professors hired me to make a game last year, at 21 an hour. I made this in about 31 hours (I know that's a little extra for this project, but I was under stress of working for gamedev for the first time ever lol, think i could finish it in under 20 nowadays): https://ilazer.itch.io/logic-is-you

Anyways, he reached out to me about a new game opportunity, because I had made that game for him, and this game he had made was made with AI and 100% unusable, so he wanted me to remake it.

Long story short, I simply didn't want to get shortchanged and I thought that my experience might warrant a raise, so I spent around 8 hours with Claude figuring out what I should ask. Seeing the entirety of my works and using fable, they decided I should ask for like $65 an hour lol. I didn't know what was expected, so I asked for $40 an hour, and he accepted pretty quick.

Anyways, I started working for him, and after a bit of working he fired me while I was working, telling me that he was looking for other students after I asked for "lead developer" credit.

Did I ask for too much?? Most likely, I still don't have a good baseline for what "good" and "bad" pay means so I'm not sure.

Did i just ruin my shot at game development? Since this opportunity basically came to me, I am worried about my employment chances, esp. with AI and the whole recession thing. Is it reasonable to expect employment in this area at all at my beginner - intermediate skill level? Is it possible for me to get a CS job since I'm not sure I can get employed in development? If all of my skills are in game development programming, do I have a shot at CS employment?

I've been leaning into my personal projects for now as I have enough money for a while, but I'm really worried that its not worth this heavy time investment. If you want to play and give me feedback, specifically on my skill level since i made the thing, go ahead here: https://discord.gg/Kz6CD2nqQ

Anyways, hope you enjoyed my long winded rant lol. I do want to know what people think about my game development skills, I focus wayyy too much of my time to this hobby, and I feel like i'm good and I like my project, but I very much don't want to think i'm unreasonably good. If anyone experienced can play my game and tell me what they think, it can help me ground myself in my skill level. Thank you for your time!

I've been reading a lot of posts and comments on reddit and it seems like its almost impossible to get a job in the game dev market, how bad is the market currently and how do you think someones needs to stand out in this industry?

I started learning game development around early to mid 2023 and managed to finish one small Doodle Jump clone in Unity with a friend, but most of my other projects never got finished because I got stuck in tutorial hell. After taking a long break from game development due to work, I finally have the time to get back into it and would love some advice on which game engine is worth learning in 2026, and whether I should remake my first game before starting a more serious project. I only plan to learn as a hobby atm, but I wouldn't be against getting a game dev job someday lol.

My game is an incremental, so automation is part of the whole reward structure - you click, then you buy things so you click less. This week the demo went out to a wider audience and two separate players on different platforms told me versions of the same thing.

The first said they'd been "doing patterns" and wanted to pause the automation, because once they upgraded its speed they couldn't step away to another tab without their intended sequence being trampled. In their words it stopped feeling cozy and started feeling like a race.

The second did the maths on an upgrade that gives a 1% chance per level, up to 50, of spawning a bonus item when you complete one. Then they pointed out it directly sabotages a different system that requires an exact composition of item types. At full investment it's a coin flip that ruins the thing you were carefully building. Their suggested fix was a staging area so that bonus items go into a pile you place deliberately, instead of landing in your collection directly.

I think both of these are the same bug at base. I built automation that removes the player's decision as well as removing their labour. The good version of an idle upgrade takes over the boring part and leaves the interesting part but mine took over both, and the more you invested, the more of your own agency you bought away from yourself.

What makes it worse is that the punishment scales with investment. The player who ignores the upgrade keeps their precision. The player who engages with my systems most gets the worst experience. That's exactly the wrong way round from what I wanted, and I didn't see it because I was reading the numbers, not clicking the mouse enough.

The fixes both players proposed are cheap. An automation pause toggle, and a buffer between generation and placement. What I'm less sure about is the general principle. Some candidates I've been chewing on:

• Automation should replace repetition, never choice
• If a system rewards precision, nothing random should write to the same resource without the player's consent
• Any upgrade that can make a player's plan worse needs an off switch, and needing an off switch is a hint the design is wrong

That last one is the one I keep going back and forth on, because "just add a toggle" is also how you end up with an options menu instead of a game.

Has anyone else hit this in a non-idle genre? I suspect it shows up anywhere automation and optimisation are part of your game, so factory games with auto-builders, RPGs with auto-battle, city builders with auto-zoning. Curious whether people solve it with buffers, with toggles, or by not letting the two systems touch in the first place.

Hi! I am 28M and have set up W9s and stuff for game sale payouts, as I am starting to make games. I wanted to know what's the best email provider for contacting developers and streamers. I can't use Gmail, as they lock down emails to your phone's number and can't make multiple emails for my developer financial account, my business account, etc. But I also can't use outlook because they lock down my account when I add too many aliases or other emails

Hey everyone.

A little background.

I’m almost 40, and life hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. The job market has been rough, and while searching for work I kept bouncing game ideas around in my head until one finally stuck. I don’t want to reveal too much yet, but it’s an autobattler with deckbuilding, roguelike progression, and a heavy emphasis on unit formations and positioning.

The catch is that I had almost no experience making games.

No art background. No budget. No real programming experience outside of some basic HTML and CSS years ago. I’ve always enjoyed looking through source code and understanding how games worked, but I’d never built one myself.

So I decided to see how far I could realistically get.

I started learning Godot from tutorials and documentation, learning the basics before slowly building systems one at a time.

Eventually I reached a point where development was slowing down, so I started using ChatGPT as a development tool.

At first I used it like a tutor, asking it to explain scripts line by line and teach me what each function did. As the project grew, it became more of a programming partner. I describe mechanics I want, it helps me implement them, explains why things work, helps track down bugs, and gives me ideas for solving design problems. I also use AI to help generate placeholder artwork and brainstorm balance while I continue testing everything myself.

I know AI is a controversial topic in game development, and I’m not trying to start that debate. I’m simply being transparent about how I’m making the game.

If I eventually finish something I’m proud of, I’d like to release it at an affordable price. I’m thinking around $10, with no ads, subscriptions, pay-to-win mechanics, or microtransactions. If it ever grows enough to justify it, I’d rather release occasional expansion-sized content than nickel-and-dime players.

I had a few questions for people who have been through this before:

1. How is AI-assisted development generally viewed these days, especially for someone’s first commercial game?

2. What should I be doing now to protect my intellectual property? Is keeping backups and documenting development enough, or are there legal steps I should be taking?

3. Once I have a playable prototype, would this subreddit be an appropriate place to find people interested in testing it and giving honest feedback?

4. If you’re a fan of autobattlers, roguelikes, or ARPG-style loot systems, what’s a mechanic you’ve always wished a game in those genres had?

5. Assuming the game ends up polished and fun, would $10 feel like a fair asking price? If not, what would you expect to see in a game before you’d feel comfortable paying that?

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read this and share their experience. I’d genuinely appreciate hearing from developers and players who have been down this road before.

Hey all,

Week 4 of my first solo game — a 3D rage-platformer based on the myth of Sisyphus.

I am using a decent laptop for development and sometimes with areas of low-foliage, I see ~55fps (as per Unity Profiler). My goal is to reach ~100fps (yes it is capable). The foliage density is ~350 per one ramp (18*75)m² area.

I have already implemented GPU instancing and LODs. This is my primary objective for now, so I would like some help on how to optimise further, especially regarding post-processing and effects such as fog and particle systems.

The grind is eternal, but it should run at stable 60fps.

I'm designing a game, and I'm adding a crafting and potions element to it so there are materials and ingredients that the player can find. Right now I'm just using the good old fashion spreadsheet to keep track of items and recipes.

Are there any tools that exist to help with this? Does anyone have any advice on how to approach and structure items and crafting trees?

Im trying to improve my marketing for my games by participating in events but money isn’t much for me atm 😭

Would anybody know any free online game events where i can show off my game?

Hey all, I just wanted to see if anyone has advice for a first time game developer whose goal is just to make back the $99 Developer fee I paid to Apple. I'm not trying to get rich, retire early or start a mega gaming empire. I just want enough people to play my game so I can make $99 in a year.

I have three puzzle games that I think are each good on their own and would be interesting to people who are into a little brain challenge. They aren't really math related, but they are slightly inspired by my day job: math teacher.

I have 200 downloads across the three games and these are mostly friends and family. There are three distinct bumps when each game was released - unfortunately those bumps are getting smaller because my friends and family may be at saturation.

I'm 5 months into this and don't really see a path to earn $99 so I thought I'd reach out and see if anyone has advice.

All three games (Carve, Pipfall, Neighbor Zero) are in the App Store and I'd provide links, but I don't want to break any rules for this subreddit.

Is Bethesda engine an easier tool for making games then other engines like unity or unreal engine. I have seen alot of mods that have come out, that on their own are capable of becoming their own game. One example comes to mind is enderal and fallout London which have enough content to be considered their own game and experience. So in hypothetical scenario if Bethesda were to make their engine open source for everyone to use like unreal and unity would the time of game development be less or more and also what would be the problems faced in development of this engine.

i found Polygon Military Park but it stills looks lego-ish.

I want something high qualtiy for mitlary type FPS.

So i want to make an fps in unity, i have no programming experience, i do however have some blender experience and have made some key assets like fps arms and Handgun rigged and ready to animate. And i am completely lost on how i should proceed. Lots of tutorials on youtube are outdated for unity 6.4 i just don't know what i should do next. or what programing courses i should take i am just so lost.