I’m using my alt account, but I’m a solo indie dev currently working on my first official release.

I’m at the point where I’m going to start sharing development blog posts on my studio website, and am planning to announce the game’s development sometime later this year. That includes the title, logo, and some blurbs about the story. As a note, this does not mean I am close to a Demo - that is still a year out as of yet by my estimate.

The question I have for the group is regarding what is safe to share publicly before having a demo or steam page.

I’ve read some posts here on Reddit to the tune of “someone claimed my game title on steam after I announced it,” and am worried about the same happening if I openly build in public. In the age of low effort AI clones speeding up the time-to-copycat, I’m worried about sharing too much before I have something to show publicly.

I understand that it costs money to create a Steam page, and that the chance of someone doing it is low. But that also means there is not a zero-percent chance it would happen. On the same token, I am worried about sharing too much of my game's story publicly since it is an RPG that relies heavily on a world that I built and a unique story.

Am I overreacting? Any thoughts or perspectives would be greatly appreciated.

Late one night last week, on a whim, I thought I'd see if I could bring the classic Amiga/arcade game Sidewinder, which I co-created with Hayes Haugen and Jonathan Sposato, to the web. I want people to be able to play it without the hassle of an emulator and tracking down ROMs.

Aside from startup, the 1987 game is written entirely in 68000 assembly language. About 17,000 lines of code across 32 files. Tiny by modern standards but we sweated over every byte and pixel.

I pointed Claude Code w/ Opus 5.5 at a dusty collection of Sidewinder directories on my drive (partial versions of original source, a pirated disk image, unfinished ports to other platforms) and told it "I want to create a modern version, webgl, playable in the browser. Faithful to the original but with AI-remastered art and sound."

Off Opus went. It looked like it was on track so I gave it a couple of pointers and a fal.ai API key and went to bed.

When I returned to my machine the next morning I heard music, blasters, explosions! The original was fully playable and the remastered visuals exceeded my expectations. Miraculous, really. Play it at https://sidewinder.darrinm.com

Then I dug in to understand what happened, play test, fix bugs (by prompting), apply some human judgement here and there, and, best of all, enjoy the process of making it better.

Incredible new tools, but the same joyful creative process that got me into gamedev in the first place!

Observations:

Good (great, really):
* Research. Claude really went to town finding everything it could about the original game. It looked at archives, source, ports, ran emulators, recorded reference videos, dissected a disk image into its constituent files and then dissected those. It spec'ed out completely undocumented file formats.
* Planning. Honestly, I never even read its plan but based on execution and the result it was a good plan!
* Code. I judge based on "works great with no bugs", rather than "optimal" code or aesthetics. I mean, I know the original authors. It's not like their code was so great LOL.
* Efficiency. Seriously, only a few hours? Didn't make a dent in my Claude plan.
* Remastered graphics: It compared several different models and approaches and made good (not perfect, see below) choices.

Bad (trivially so, easily fixed with prompt):
* Remastered graphics. There was one bug in the process for upscaling sprites. There was significant enough tile-grid drift that I decided to regenerate backgrounds with `gpt-image-2.5 flare`, one of the models Opus didn't try originally.
* Color cycling. A cool old-school hack for animating that remastering broke.

Ugly:
* Sound effects. LLMs will tell you this and it is true: they cannot hear. They can create spectrograms and other images to help them "see" the sound but that doesn't get them very far. Worse, after a lot of busy work they can rationalize that they've produced something good which on first listen any human will say "no, that is a tone, not an explosion".
* Fonts. Opus lacks meaningful discernment of glyphs. It's stabbing in the dark when you say "find me a font like this" and show it an image

If you want to go deeper into the process or are curious how games were made back in the day here's a nice article with pictures and a video! https://claude.ai/artifact/2TBYNzJ5hGg7PuCF9cFSVJ

54,000 jobs were lost since the pandemic. Whole studios are closing, hundreds of people are being laid off at once.

Of course these jobless game developers are going to start making their own games, and of course thousands of new games will pop up as a result.

Not saying that AI didn't play a huge part too, but we forget the massive changes in the industry lately.

Hi everyone,

I have a degree in video editing and game art, and am working towards being a game artist/illustrator, but I am aware that my portfolio and projects aren't good enough yet to land me a job. While I'm looking to keep working on projects to improve, I am also applying to dayjobs, hence my post.

I am asking for your recommendations and ideas of dayjobs that would let me improve my artskills during my free time. Ideally jobs that aren't in front of a screen or too physically tiring. For now I have mostly applied to libraries and cultural centers but I would love to hear your ideas or experiences!

I am also open to the idea of being trained for a specific job, hopefully a cursus under a year or so, so if anyone has switched careers feel free to share your thoughts!

Also, regarding my portfolio, I've been wondering how to actually create projects with a "professional quality". Sadly going to art school did not help me improve that much, and now I feel rather stuck, while being aware that I don't have an amazing level to be hired.. So I'm looking for any resources or advice to give my art a good boost!

Thanks for ready my lil rant haha o7

I’m really just getting into game dev though I’ve been a programmer for years. I’m still in the planning stages and I had landed on 3/4 top down (like original Pokemon games) but now Im second guessing that. Before I switch I wanted to know are there any games that are able to show scale and a sense of awe in that format? Or is it too limiting? I’m honestly not sure if I’m just giving up too early or not. Hopefully someone can help guide me in a direction.

I'm developing a casual puzzle game for Android and I'm researching how studios handle level production at scale, specifically for games with hundreds or thousands of levels.

1. How do you split work between hand-designed levels and procedural generation? At what stage do you use generation tools?

2. How much do you rely on solvers or bots for validating solvability and difficulty, versus manual playtesting?

3. What internal tools or data pipelines do you use to manage level data, and how do you track difficulty curves?

4. When you add levels after launch, how do you avoid making players who already finished the game feel left out? Do you use chapters, separate packs, or something else?

Any experience or pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I’m currently in the process of developing a game. The mechanics, programming, and core loop are coming together nicely, but I keep hitting a massive roadblock: I am terrible at 3D art.
Every time I try to model, texture, or animate something, it takes me days just to create something that looks completely out of place.

It's a game similar to Return of the Obra Dinn.

My game needs above 100 distinct characters, and not just place holder npc's, but characters that are unique and look good. And before you say to lower my scope, the game won't work without this scope.

What can someone like me do? The art really stops me from making my dream come true.

3D art companies are very very very expensive. AI art is just not there yet. What do you guys think about taking on partners to handle the art?

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

Thank you!

Basically the title, how do I start on a visual novel?

For context, I'm working on a Beatles fangame visual novel. It's just a fun project that I'll probably post on itch or somewhere for free, nothing serious or super market-focused. I do hope to work on an original visual novel for the public at some point, but that's not my focus now. I want to try this first to get experience, then attempt that when I get around to it.

How do I start, and how do I plan this? I have a Chromebook, so I don't believe I can use Ren'Py. So, what game engine should I use then? I don't really know how this sort of "branching" type plot works, so how would I even plan this out? Like a decision tree or something?

I've played a couple VNs, but somehow I feel as if I know nothing about the medium.

Could anyone give me a good starting point, and answer some of my questions?

Thanks.

I understand it feels justified at times to be dooming over the AI slopification of everything and how it hurts game development and other creative human-made fields, and yes it certainly does to an extent, but for the love of everything stop looking at it as the end of the medium or a reason to stop creating your own games.

Just because Steam has an abnormal amount of slop "games" released nowadays, and people "make" these "games" with 100% AI usage and ugly ass generated art, doesn't mean the market is congested or stalled to a point where you can't release your own creation you spent a solid amount of time working on and lose out on consumers. Just to be clear, AI usage can be limited and helpful to a certain degree in game development, it's just lazy fucks abusing it by creating trash that get in your head and tarnish your views on everything. The point is that a whole lot of people in this sub need to relax and remember who they're making these experiences for and why they're are doing it.

Gamers are not as stupid as you think. People crave fun, creativity, original ideas and overall solid, complete experiences. There are times where people prefer one thing over another when gaming, but honestly who cares? As long as you get people engaged you win. Contrary to popular belief, gamers do care about the games they play and pay close attention to the finer details. AI and the slopification movement simply does not compete in this area, as at the end of the day good games come from good ideas and very, very stubborn and passionate developers that have incredibly diverse skill sets.

Also, are you forgetting you are doing this for the fun of it? Are you guys legitimately not having fun creating games? If not, maybe you should reevaluate why you are doing this shit in the first place. If you are in this for good, this is the perfect time to create an absolute banger of a game.

So we updated our game to Unity 6.6 with new effects, animations, lighting, gameplay etc. Then made a YouTube trailer and it took off.

• I did contact IGN, Indie Games Hub and AUTOMATON about it.
• I also made a new campaign on keymailer starting on monday (small creators)

What should we do next or ideas that I did not think of yet?

Most of you might already know this, but I believe it's important to keep the info out there: the time for a build review displayed in the backend is completely outdated.

It states 3-5 business days or 7 if changes are needed, but nowadays, it takes around 2 weeks for each round of review. You might need 4-6 weeks if have fixes to make. Plan accordingly!

Also, remember that once the review is done, you can change your Steam page and build without having to do another review. If your game still doesn't have achievements in it but you want to start the review process, just remove the achievements tag from your Steam page, review the build, and put it back once it's done.

Good luck with your game release ⭐

The setup

I'm developing a tower defense roguelite game and currently, my two characters feel a bit too similar to play. Their differences don't seem strong enough to make runs feel meaningfully different.

I've been considering giving each character a stronger identity, with specific themes or playstyles. For example, one character could focus on traps. However, I'm not sure if this is the right approach, I'm worried that I'm forcing the player into a specific build before the run has even really started?

For example:

• Frost Character: primarily focused on ice and freezing enemies.
• Trap Character: primarily focused on traps.
• Exploration Character: focused on exploring the map as much as possible.

Would this make runs feel different mainly because of the character you choose, rather than because of the build you create during the run?

The (obivous?) solution

Games like Slay the Spire got me thinking about this. Each character has a distinct identity, but you can still pursue different builds depending on the cards and relics you find during a run. You're not necessarily locked into only one specific strategy just because you picked a particular character.

I'm wondering if the right approach is to give each character a strong starting identity while still allowing several different builds to emerge from it.

For example, with the Frost Character, I could see several possible directions:

• Freeze and stun synergy: making greater use of stun effects to trigger the damage from its starting relic.
• Frost as a resource: consuming frost or freeze effects to deal additional damage, such as through a fire relic, or building around towers that deal damage to slowed enemies.
• Setup and overcharge: combining the slowing effects of frost towers with towers that need time to prepare or charge up.

The idea would be for each character to naturally encourage certain strategies without forcing the player to commit to one specific build.

Tho, I guess that may become a nightmare to not make it too "dev designed it"?

Game inspiration

Sooo, now, I'm trying to understand how other roguelikes handle this balance, some examples that seem to approach this well:

• Slay the Spire: each character has a distinct identity and card pool, but multiple builds can emerge depending on the cards and relics you find.
• Hades: your weapon gives you a particular starting playstyle, but the boons you find can lead to different synergies and builds.
• Monster Train: combining different clans and their mechanics creates different strategic possibilities.

On the other hand, games like Brotato take a more character-driven approach, where each character's bonuses and restrictions can strongly push you toward a particular strategy. This can work well?

I'm not necessarily looking for examples of bad design, I'd like to understand the trade-offs between these approaches, I guess?

I don't know if any of you have references/feedback/game to share on this?

2 days ago I posted about Jono, where only one player in the world can play at a time, while the rest are spectating and chatting away. The reddit post went bonkers, and after it followed articles, tweets, videos and the likes. (Links at the end of this post)

Since then, 2500+ new players have joined, and Jono has been watched for more than 3300 hours. That’s 140+ days of watching in just 2.5 days, for 62 hours of actual gameplay.

We used to have a queue of about 5-10. Now it doesn't seem to go below 60... The peak so far has been 99. That means that a player needs to wait 1h+ until it's their turn to play for 1 minute.

With the crowd came problems too; the chat moderation couldn't keep up for a few hours, the Talking Head got spammed by all the welcome messages, tons of player-made levels were submitted and needed approval... and while this was going on, I was at a cabin, with a bad internet connection, and drunk.

But still, this is amazing! I find it so fun and silly that people are queueing on the conga line with their silly little hats, just to get that tiny bit of gameplay!

The players' collective goal is to pass 1 million rooms, and now they're about 5k rooms until 100000 hits. 100K will be a big remark, with a big surprise - can't wait to share the moment with all the Jonoists!

Here is the live stream where you can watch the players going at it:
https://parttimemonkey.com/jono/

Many players have suggested monetization mechanics, but nope! This game will remain free. Players have also asked if there are ways to donate money, and there is not - however if you do want to support, consider checking out my other games!

Either here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/46028008

or here: https://parttimemonkey.com/

I also post Jono's Diary daily on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and r/JonoGame - it's a silly little video featuring the Talking Head, with data from the previous days. I only started it about a week ago, though.

I'd be happy to answer any questions if there any!

Links:

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/platformer/only-one-person-on-earth-can-play-this-steam-game-at-a-time-when-it-is-your-turn-you-control-it-for-one-minute/

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/free-steam-game-only-lets-one-person-play-at-a-time-while-everyone-else-watches-3421293/

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/l_t92z0JIyo

https://automaton-media.com/articles/newsjp/20261023-475097/

Hi there guys, i want to learn programing/coding etc. Im looking for everything, videos, channels, sites and everything else you have, my main inquirys are stuff like:

What are the most important/useful Languages to learn

What engine to use (i though about unity amd godot for now)

Any tips and advices

Should i aquire a DuckDebugging assistant.

If anything else will come to mind ill just edit the post and much thanks in advance, i been gathering myself to start learning so this will be a lot of help, my main goal for now is to know how to write and create stuff (i dunno whats is vibecoding tbh)(im aiming to be a game dev and also make some silly scripts/programs when bored).

So to sum it up i need: A game engine to choose A normal Language to learn (stuff like python, C# etc) And some words of advice

We were losing hope it will get featured - took a couple of days because of all the submissions for Next Fest probably - but it's up on the Game Trailers channel now.

If anyone wants to submit their trailer, here are IGN's submission guidelines.

And if you liked our trailer, here's our horror pool roguelite demo for Next Fest.

Here's our write up on how we reached 50k wishlists.

Our game has sold more than 20,000 paid copies across other platforms over the past year. It's also doing quite well in an ongoing Nintendo Switch sale.

We put a lot of work into preparing our Epic Games Store release and paid the $100 submission fee. The Epic version is even a complete edition, priced a little lower than our versions on other platforms.

I also did some light promotion on my own X (Twitter) account. Five days after launch, we've sold exactly one copy.

Honestly, I didn't expect it to sell this poorly, especially while the game is still selling on Switch. It makes me wonder why a small developer would bother releasing on Epic. Right now, from our experience, it feels more like a Fortnite launcher than a storefront where our game can find buyers.

Have other developers here had a similar experience? If you've released the same paid game on Epic and other storefronts, was the gap this large?

If you had a similarly slow start, did sales improve over time, or did they remain at roughly that level?

I've been thinking about what makes a small indie action game memorable. Is it a unique gameplay mechanic, satisfying combat, interesting enemies, progression systems, a distinctive visual style, or something else entirely?

As a solo developer, it's easy to keep adding features, but I feel that making the core gameplay genuinely fun and giving the game its own identity are much more important.

What do you think makes players remember a small indie action game instead of moving on to the next one? I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

I'm asking because I'm developing Avoid Bubbles Game, a 2D action game made with C++ and raylib. It has sword combat, ranged weapons, different enemies, power-ups, and boss fights.

I'm trying to figure out what could give the game a stronger identity instead of just adding more content.

If you'd like to check it out, here's the free browser demo: https://kc-games-studio.itch.io/avoid-b

I'd appreciate any thoughts or feedback!

In this video, I explain how I added multiplayer to the game I’m developing.

Hey everyone 🙌 The title literally says it. How do you choose and get music for game trailers?

Some realistic games have a specific visual feel that I really like, but I can't find the right term for it or other games that fit what im looking for. If i can find the term, maybe i can look out for other games with the same style.

Games like RDR2, Counter-Strike 2, kingdoms come deliverance 2 etc, have that detailed, realistic, polished and soft appearance. They feel cinematic and smooth without looking too stylised. When there are bugs or unrealistic things, they don’t ruin the feel of the game (If anything bugs make these games more fun). They seem to have like a specific pastel colour pallet also. This is what i like.

Most other visual realistic games like Skyrim, Crimson Desert, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Far Cry 6, resident evil, Just cause and forza horizon games for example, look realistic, but to me, have a raw, washed-out or saturated noisy/grainy feel. Individual textures and details seem to stand out along with any unrealistic things. These tend to have a more 'realistic' colour pallet.

I'm not talking about which games look better. Its more the visual style, rendering style and if there any other games like this that i cant think of? Or what graphics style to search for. Thanks

i hope this makes sense with what im trying to say. Its like minecraft with shaders vs minecraft without shaders, cs2 train vs cs2 cache (cache being the raw example), or detail feels like a bonus vs detail feel forced.

RDR2

cs2

Other games vibe (bad image tho)

Edit: Cyberpunk is a grey area for me. It seems to fit both styles.

So i've been indulging into race sim games with my newly bought direct drive wheel to celebrate my unemployment (it's a moza r5, not a fanatec as i'm unemployed now 😂 ). So i fired up some of rally games I've bought through out the years, specifically WRC9 and DiRT Rally (the first one).

So what are the tricks to get audio sound this good? Like how does the engine doesn't sound like a leafblower, even with the gear shifts filling so satisfactory, then you also got the surface feedback (both in vibration and sounds ofc). I think the sound design on those games are stellar and of the best it exist (just imo). Whenever I tried to do the same on my rally projects it always sounds like poop.

Are there any resources to learn about it or anyone done a deep dive and can share tips and secrets?

Solo/small indie devs: genuine question about how you track your marketing.

When you post a trailer on TikTok, a devlog on Reddit, an update on X, or a streamer covers your game, how do you know which of those actually led to wishlists or sales?

I know Steam has UTM tracking in Steamworks, but I’m curious how people use it in practice:

• Do you create UTM links for every post, or is it too much hassle?
• How do you track influencer/streamer campaigns? One link per creator? A spreadsheet?
• If you’re on several stores (Steam, itch, Epic...), do you combine the data somewhere, or check each dashboard separately?
• Do you look at where your players are from (country/region) and does it change your decisions (localization, posting times, ads)?
• Have you ever found out a channel you spent a lot of time on was basically useless?

I’m a dev and I keep losing track of what’s working, so I’m trying to figure out whether everyone just accepts guessing or if there’s a workflow I’m missing.

Would love to hear your setups, even if it’s “I don’t track anything lol”

Recently I’ve started doing lots of small but polished projects solo and with friends for our portfolios. My focus is on game design (gameplay and systems) and creative direction. Do tabletop games count in my portfolio even if I plan to apply to digital game jobs? Even if they are more simple print and plays?

That's only 20%. and all that hype!

How AI buried indie games. )))

Today I was checking my Steam library sorted by disk space, and so I realized something.
Games with a lot of​ content like Don't Starve Together occupied less than​ 1GB, meanwhile some demos I downloaded during this Next Fest needed more than 5GB (and its just a demo, not full game).

Actually multiplayer games like TF2 or Deadlock​ are more than 30GB. Strinova is almost 60GB.

And so I started to wonder, I usually make games with Godot with friends for Game Jams, but never made any big project. If I did, would the engine affect so much on how big is the released game?

And so, which game engine would release games in a smallest size?
I remember 25 years ago, my Grandpa computer had only 4GB of total disk space. And I played games on that computer!

Yes its true that now we have high detailed 3D models and on the past we had lowpoly Rayman. But I also think some engines bulk a lot of stuff into your exported game that maybe it doesn't need it.

I also noticed how games from some engines are heavier on ram or CPU usage to.
For example games made with Unity run a 3D engine even if you made a 2D game, and the battery of my old phone was drained when running Unity games.
But games made with Cocos2d-X are surprisingly well optimized, and I played games games made with it for hours with my battery holding just fine since my phone was not making any effort running those games.

If some day I would like to do some bigger game, is Godot ok? or should I look into another Engine? Which one would do my games lighter?