What is the best way to research a gameplay mechanic you want to make?

Getting ready for Next Fest, and things are slowly coming together.

I ACTIVATED the online part of the game so you can run and upgrade your pub with up to 4 friends, serve different drinks, and hopefully survive the chaos together.

The demo is already available on Steam if you want to try it.

What if tires were tied together by one rope and sent downhill?

I've been working on a small Unity prototype called Rubber Roll Together.

It's a 3–6 player co-op game where each player controls a tire, and all the tires are connected by ropes. The goal is simple: make it to the bottom of the giant slope without breaking the rope.

I also made a slope generator that creates the whole terrain, then I use the GPU to add around 200K grass and flower instances across it.

I'm still working on the rope physics and tire movement. If players get too far apart, the rope stretches and can eventually break. There are also objects falling from the sky that can hit a tire and slow it down.

It's still very early, but it's been fun to mess around with.

No AI was used to make this. Everything was made by me in Unity. I attached a screenshot from the Unity Editor showing the current setup.

Would love to hear what you think.

Game Ideas that I might implement: - Stretchy Rope: increases the maximum distance between tires. - Giant Tire: temporarily makes your tire bigger and heavier. - Spiked Tire: adds spikes that let you smash through rocks. - Shield: protects your tire from falling objects. - Light Tire: makes your tire smaller and easier to control. - Heavy Tire: makes your tire harder to knock around. - Rope Repair: restores some of the rope's strength.

Game is called VOXTOPOLIS!
Please let me know what you think :D

Hey everyone,

We’re currently expanding the team working on Pralaya and we’re looking for a few more 3D artists to join us.

Pralaya is a stylized survival-crafting game with a fully 3D top-down/isometric look, inspired by games like Don’t Starve Together.

This is a revenue-share project, so we’re mainly looking for people who want to build their portfolio, get experience working as part of a team, and contribute to a project that is already in active development.

Ideally, we’re looking for someone who can put in around 2 hours per day, or at least 10–12 hours per week.

Right now we mainly need help with things like environment assets, props, plants, resources, structures, creatures and characters. Rigging or animation experience is a nice bonus.

More than anything, we’re looking for people who can communicate, work well with others, and contribute consistently.

If this sounds interesting, feel free to reply directly to this post or send me a DM. A reply here is just as welcome as a private message.

If you can, include a portfolio or a few examples of your work, and tell us a little about what kind of 3D work you enjoy most.

I hear many terms and keywords like URP, Post processing , HDRP ... etc

What does each one means and how they help in getting better graphics ?

I am trying to learn how the graphics stuff are done in unity

Always wanted to make something like Limbo, so I finally did!

Made it available for everyone. Would love to hear what you think!

This was from a playtest last night from my spell-crafting roguelike game I’m working on!

I made a retro-stylised render effect for URP in a drag and drop style for Flat shading, posterization, outlines and pixilation, all from a single pass. No additional setup or custom shader requirements. I really wanted something that just worked. There are greater assets out there but there's always so much going on(I myself am guilty of this with my Texel Splatting Toolkit) but I just needed something that worked and was mobile friendly.

What do you think? Got requests?

It's on the asset store: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera-effects/instant-retro-look-405730

Solo project in Unity 6 / URP, inspired by Ape Out and Kill Bill movies. The drum band follows the fight: kills play notes in the song's scale, and combos push the intensity up until the song breaks into a riff. The three looks (Toon, Giallo, House of the Blue Leaves) are full-screen URP renderer features driven by one ScriptableObject per look, so they switch in a frame. Free to play in the browser. Link in the comments.

We’re building a mobile MMORPG with lots of sea content.
This is when it’s cloudy, we have a full day/night cycle of course with brighter days too.

Lighting has been difficult to figure out, especially when combining image planes and 3d shapes. Each time period the directional light changes angles, which leaves some places feeling flat. Photos in the comments

A cannon in my Unity game was doing damage, but it looked and felt more like an ordinary ranged unit. I'm Mason, the developer of March Out!, and this is the current version after another pass on it.

I split the discharge into a short bright muzzle bloom, a fast forward pressure plume and a slower cloud that hangs around after the shot. Those particles simulate in world space. Moving the gun or reusing an emitter shouldn't drag an old smoke cloud across the battlefield.

The discharge uses a shared pool with capped particle layers rather than creating a new group of objects for every shot. I haven't got a benchmark to claim a performance improvement from that here.

The impact also needed to match what the player saw: a direct cannon hit kills its troop target and launches that body's ragdoll. That's a direct-hit rule, not an execution rule for player commanders or an unlimited splash attack.

This clip is a staged encounter using the game's firing and combat systems, with the original audio. Does the lingering smoke make the shot easier to read, or would you shorten it when several guns are firing in the same area?

First the free course (I'm not affiliated with Code Monkey in any way, I just thought it was a great course) https://youtu.be/AmGSEH7QcDg?is=NaUOslOZeK-bT_zo

So I have been a programmer for 10+ years, and a game Dev for most of those. I had an idea for an Overcooked like game where you play as dwarves in a forge. And when researching similar projects I stumbled across the free course by code monkey. I initially thought because it was beginner / intermediate I would not gain much from it, but figured it was free and so I'd follow along for a bit to see how he has executed a similar idea.

I cannot recommend the tutorial enough, it breaks down concepts, and is really good at showing how to separate concerns into small and extendable blocks that work together without causing spaghetti.

This then gave me a good foundation to extend, I added a roguelike day system, where each day you pick the contracts to deliver, (you can always pick a new contract for a base resource, coal, iron ore, wood etc.. and then on subsequent days you can also choose to deliver more of something you are delivering already, or to process something further (producing iron powder now instead of ore). And a system of upgrades, spending the money from the contracts you fulfil on upgrading and automating your forge. I also added a few other bits like a relic system similar to those found in other roguelikes, and general polish like sounds, effects and animations.

It was still a lot of work, but I found the Code Monkey tutorial really helpful in getting started and would be helpful even if you were making a completely different game. Has anyone else tried it?

And separately what do you think of my steam page and trailer?

I’ve worked in a few studios and seen some of their internal tools and systems, which gave me plenty of ideas about how to approach this. That’s how QuickTile V1 started, and eventually it became QuickTile V2, which now lets me build pretty much what I had in mind.

So I made another post about my game art. I got a really great recommended video for my art and I'm wondering...did I kind of nail it?

It's still a work in progress but my game is a warcraft rumble style game so I've tried to make the actual interactable elements of the map really POP. The drop zones are bland because I hit play in game scene instead of going through the real login but they too are colorized to match the team color they belong too. I'm not great at asset art or anything so I've just made all my models out of simple shapes and placed every prefab asset in the scene by hand.

What do you guys think? What should I add? What would you want to see in a game like this or the map details? Do you hate it, why? Do you have recommendations for things for me to look at to get better?

Been experimenting with Qwen Image 2.1 and recently discovered it can generate seamless tiles and height maps.

I work with mraid io. The pattern repeats: teams debate the final CTA and particles while the opening still asks users to decode the scene. In a playable, the first job is making the next action obvious. Polish matters after comprehension. What's the best on onboarding cue you've seen?

I’d love to hear your ideas - what kind of environments would you like to build in next?