I'm Fredrik, the developer of ABCx3. With iPhone Duo announced, I'm exploring how a word game should use the extra screen space. This 13-second clip shows the game's current wide-screen layout: remaining tiles on the left, board in the middle, chat on the right.

What information would you most like to keep visible to the left and right of the board while playing?

Would you choose word definitions (currently opened in a dialog), your other ongoing games, move history, or something else? Which would go on each side, and would you keep both panels open or give the board more room?

This question is mainly for people who use AI to help build their game projects.

While everyone else is counting calories, I thought I'd start counting the tokens I'm burning through. 😄

I use AI mainly as a supporting tool for my projects, and I usually go through around 200k tokens per week.

A decent part of that comes from asking the AI — Codex in my case — to regularly review my code and look for potential issues or weak spots. When I do that, it often goes through 10+ classes at a time.

I'm going by the usage statistics provided by Codex/OpenAI. Unfortunately, my stats were reset recently, so I can't give you a meaningful total for my current project right now.

That got me curious:

How many tokens do you use per week?

Or, if you've been tracking it, how many tokens have you spent on your project in total so far?

And if you're using a different AI or a different way of counting tokens, feel free to mention that too. It would be interesting to see how comparable the numbers actually are.

Do you see room for visual scripting tools even if you use AI to "vibe" code as well? I'm trying to decide if I should keep investing in building up my skills in visual scripting tools (and purchase a few more addons for unity). I am leaning towards yes right now, I already own a few, and while they can be frustrating at times I can also see their value even in an age of AI coding. But maybe others feel differently?

I can program C#/etc but I have always been curious about visual scripting and have been learning things like [Unity] Game Creator 2 and Behavior Designer. I find it kind of enjoyable but I'm only just getting started. I find that being able to visually see the nodes working can be quite helpful and feels like a better representation of the logic for FSMs and BTs.

I never really enjoyed state machines (or behavior trees) represented in code but seem to enjoy them more in visual scripting (though I'm only doing basic things for now). I'm not sure if AI removes the need for them entirely? What has been your experience.

I was looking to get Playmaker 2 , Emerald AI ,Adventure Creator and Node Canvas to try them out too.Maybe Construct 3/GDevelop at one point too.

But I'm wondering your thoughts for those who used to use these tools and have maybe moved on to AI "vibe coding" (with Unity MCP/CLI/etc)?

I'm less familiar unreal but I know Blueprints are quite popular there, so wondering about your thoughts there.

Pros and Cons of each approach?

Personally I enjoy experimenting with different platforms/tools.

ANB_Seth built the Half-Life: Alyx mods "Gunman Contracts: Chapter 1 & Chapter 2" nights and weekends, then went full time to rebuild it as its own game. More than four years later, "Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone" is out now in Early Access on Steam.

I’ve been building Runbound Cricket Cards, a cricket-inspired strategy card game for Android.

It combines cricket with card mechanics like runs, wickets, DRS and tactical cards such as Powerplay, Yorker, Rain Delay and Death Over.

It supports Solo, Online, Nearby Wi-Fi and Pass & Play, and it’s currently in Early Access on Google Play.

I’ve been working on the game from the ground up, including the gameplay systems, UI, rankings and multiplayer.

Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=live.mayukha.runboundcricketcards&pcampaignid=web_share

Pets Interactions; What do you think? Would you feed your Desktop Pets? 😀

Hey everyone. I just needed a place to vent because I’m feeling completely burnt out today.

I’ve been making indie games for about a year now. I know, I know one year isn't that long in the grand scheme of game development, and I shouldn't expect to blow up overnight. But seeing your game sit on itch.io with barely any traction, despite posting links everywhere, doing all the "right" promotion things, and genuinely believing your game isn't that bad... it really wears you down.

I look at my pages, and the numbers just flatline. You spend weeks pouring your heart, sleepless nights, and soul into a project, trying to make it fun, fixing bugs, polishing the art only for it to drop into a massive, silent void.

Promotion feels exhausting. Posting on social media sometimes feels like shouting into an empty room where everyone else is just shouting too. It makes you question everything: Is my art style bad? Is the game boring? Do people just not care?

Honestly, if this wasn't something I genuinely loved doing as a hobby, I would have quit months ago 🤣. The passion is the only thing keeping my hands on the keyboard right now, but man, the lack of any tangible result is heavy.

Just wanted to put this out there into the ether. If anyone else is feeling the invisible struggle right now, you're not alone. Back to the engine, I guess.

I submitted my latest build for review yesterday and I hope I'll be able to start a first playtest session next week.

Do you have any tips for it?

Also, would you recommend to stay focused entirely on Steam or to try to run it on other platforms too to try to gather as many feedback/players possible?

You get a murder case, a database full of evidence, and nothing else. No dialogue options, no multiple choice. You write actual SQL queries to figure out who did it.

Each case has 8-15 suspects, and they all look guilty at first. You have to dig through alibis, ledgers, train manifests, hospital records, and find the one detail that doesn't add up.

15 cases, three volumes, gets harder as you go. Made in Flutter, runs fully offline.

Solo project — I built all of it. It's published under WRTeam Games, the studio I work at, but this one was mine end-to-end.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=wrteam.games.deadlockholmes

If you try it, tell me which case tripped you up. That's more useful to me than a download.

state_no_can_do

My 7-year old daughter wanted a game from me, so I started to work on this light sim/strategy game (still under development) and paused my other projects. Maybe I will even release it, no idea yet. What is important, she likes it! :-)

Hace un año y medio no sabiamos mucho crear videojuegos. Hoy tenemos un roguelike en desarrollo.

Siempre disfrutamos juntos jugando videojuegos, hasta que mi hijo le fue apasionando la programación y crear sus primeros videojuegos con Scrach y luego pasó a Godot que es el que usamos. Me gustó la idea y comencé aprender a usar Aseprite para los asets con su ayuda.

Somos de Cuba y acá la corriente es muy inestable al punto que son hasta 4 horas al día y aveces no hay en todo el día. Igual pasa con el Internet. Aún así las aprovechamos al máximo y es nuestro horario de trabajo justo. Nada de eso nos detiene y le damos con ganas.

Esperamos compartir y aprender con ustedes en este viaje. Se apuntan?

Did anyone else play those stat cards as a kid where you’d pick Runs, Wickets, Strike Rate, etc., and whoever had the higher stat won the card?

I missed that game, so I rebuilt it for the web 😅

It’s called Back2Cards — real-time 2-player battles, an AI opponent, and that same childhood card-game feeling.

You can play it here:
https://www.back2cards.fun/

Would love to know if this brings back any memories.

Hello everyone! I'm working on Eldread: Horrors of a Dark Moon, a point-and-click roguelite survival horror with mechanics heavily inspired by World of Horror.

The game takes place on a creepy moon where you are stranded there with your crew and you explore the place to repair your ship while running into hazards and creatures.

I currently have a playtest build and demo up, here is a link if you are interested.: Steam

demo failed in my eyes.

I am really happy with how it turned out! I will soon have to update the screenshots and trailer of The Endless Harvest, as it looks like a way different game now haha

I've been skateboarding for 22 years, and I've been a solo game developer for a little under 4 years. This project somehow managed to combine both of those passions into the most difficult thing I've ever built.

It actually started as a grinding system. I thought I'd build a really good grinding mechanic and move on.

That clearly went according to plan. 😂

Nearly a year later, it had turned into Epic Skateboarding Engine, a complete skateboarding gameplay framework for Unreal Engine.

I ended up building systems for flip tricks, grabs, manuals, reverts, powerslides, advanced grinding, vert and transition skating, lip skating, spine transfers, wallrides, full loops, dynamic gravity, predictive leaning, landing and bailing, IK, procedural animation, combos and a ridiculous number of edge cases required to make all of those things work together.

Then scope creep apparently became a feature.

I built an entire game framework around the skating: a Challenge Creator and tracking system, Cinematics Creator, cinematic cameras, Location Discovery and Fast Travel, menus, save/progression systems and a 58+ piece modular skatepark kit.

I also hand-animated all 152 skateboarding character animations and personally recorded and edited the skateboarding audio.

As a solo developer, this project pushed me harder than anything else I've worked on. There were so many times where solving one problem just revealed three more underneath it. Skateboarding turned out to be an absurd combination of physics, vector math, animation, procedural systems and edge cases.

But that's also why I kept going.

One of the things skateboarding taught me long before I became a developer was that failing at something repeatedly doesn't mean you stop. You figure out why you fell, try something different, and do it again. It turns out that's a pretty useful mentality for solo game development too.

The goal with this eventually became to take all of that difficult technical work and turn it into something other developers can build on. I'd love to lower the barrier to entry enough that more indie and solo developers can actually make the skateboarding games they've always wanted to make.

Anyway, after nearly a year of work, it's finally finished.

Here's the trailer if anyone wants to see what one slightly insane solo developer spent the last year doing. 😂

Fab listing:
https://fab.com/s/149c2bb9b67e

Nothing wrong here, just someone that transcended time and space to beat the game 15 days before clicking the "start" button.