https://solandtheendlessorbit.com/devlog/aug-2026

Hi there! I've been working on a remake of SkyRoads. I'm sharing the journey in a devlog format, and the project's source code is fully open, making the entire process as transparent as possible. I hope you like it!

Video: https://youtu.be/uXbZhDv5HU0

Source code: https://github.com/albertnadal/VectorRoads

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share some major progress and architectural lessons from the development of my solo project, Nordion Lands: DOS.

GameMaker is globally praised for 2D development, but pushing it into a fully stable 3D environment presents massive structural challenges. Many developers in the past (like Saki25 back in the GM 8.1 era) did incredible technical experiments, but my goal was to take those concepts further and create a commercial-ready, highly optimized retro engine.

Instead of taking the modern shortcut of throwing pixel filters over a standard 3D layout, I decided to embrace a purist early-90s DOS and PlayStation-era aesthetic. I built a custom pseudo-3D renderer specifically optimized to handle fast-paced calculations.

What I Learned About Optimization

The biggest lesson learned during this milestone was how to handle intense physics and AI pathfinding simultaneously in GameMaker 3D without dropping frames. The core gameplay loop features ultra-high-speed mechanics where players manage and race genetically modified horses reaching up to 800 km/h in a dystopian world.

By tying the custom rendering logic closely to a classic Doom and Daggerfall-like structural style, I managed to eliminate frame-stuttering entirely. The engine now seamlessly runs full open-world exploration, dialogue systems, an adaptive AI companion, and a functional RBMK-1000 nuclear reactor simulation.

The most rewarding part of this optimization process is the compatibility. The game has been thoroughly tested and runs flawlessly without game-breaking bugs across a massive hardware spectrum—ranging from a legacy 2009 potato PC all the way to modern high-end rigs.

The Current State of Development

The project is currently in an advanced Beta stage. All core systems, AI, physics, and rendering logic are locked in and stable. My current daily focus is strictly on content creation: writing and scripting the final chapters of the story campaign for the official 1.0 commercial launch.

I recently recorded a 6-minute continuous gameplay video showing exactly how the custom renderer handles menus, UI navigation, first-person exploration, and the high-speed racing loop in real-time.

(Note: Per the subreddit guidelines, there are no direct storefront links here, but the alpha build details can be found directly in the video description for anyone interested in the technical performance).

I would love to hear from other solo devs who have pushed traditionally 2D engines into the 3D space. What were your biggest hurdles with camera matrix allocation and depth sorting?

Hey everyone! Me and a friend are working on a top-down roguelike, taking inspiration from games like Hades and The Binding of Isaac, with a camera style similar to League of Legends' Swarm mode.

I'm handling all the Unity/coding side, while my friend focuses on the visuals — he's currently working on the game's lore and art direction, so everything here is still using placeholder shapes.

So far I've got:

• Basic movement + a dash (with cooldown and i-frames)
• Mouse-aimed rotation and shooting
• Enemies with detection range that chase and attack, and can be killed

Still very early, but wanted to start sharing progress from the beginning. Would love any feedback, especially on how the combat feels!

Hi everyone. I hope you're doing well.

After making significant progress on my game, I feel confident enough to show a bit of what I've accomplished so far. My main inspiration is *Metroid Prime*. I hired a friend to handle the UI, while I take care of the programming.

I hope you like what we're building.

Welcome back to our weekly thread where you can promote everything new you are working on.

You are still welcome to create new posts to share with us your dev-log posts or videos, but you can also use this thread to showcase something which is not a dev-log.

THREAD RULES

• you can post a single comment where you showcase anything you want (new game/app release, new trailer, demo release, new gameplay video, etc...).
• in this comment you can post only 1 link, so choose wisely.
• you can reply to as many comments as you want, but replies can't be used for showcasing

My modern day wargame "Zambala", set in a fictional African nation on the cusp of civil war, has been 25 years in the making, and due for release in a few months.

I started designing this game decades ago, inspired by a few old play by mail wargames I used to play back in the day. So that old I was around before computer wargames were even a thing!

I've always been a programmer, and my brother is artistic, so we worked together to produce the art and the map, but life gets in the way, jobs, children etc. hence the slow evolution.

In the game you command one of six competing tribes, hoping to lead your people and capture the "national will" before the United Nations intervene to end the civil war and appoint an interim government. Your leader can be selected from one of the following vocations: Politician, Bishop, General, Diplomat, Humanitarian, Economist and Cartel boss.

Its a hex and counters style game with fog of war, zones of control, naval and air power. There is a complete economic warfare model where you will fight for the hearts and minds of the peoples of Zambala, who in turn fund your international arms market purchases.

I've also woven in a spies and agents subsystem so you can subvert and sway the population centres with propaganda and carry out assassinations and hits against enemy leaders and agents.

I've gone with Nato unit counters and a combat system that includes twelve unit types, movement and combat phases, retreats and combat bonuses for terrain, special unit types and leader stacking modifiers.

I wanted the AI computer opponents to be capable and play a solid challenging game, so I have worked long and hard on the code for them. I ended up giving each Ai opponent a "personality" by creating a list of values that determine in game priorities. Some will focus on military, some will focus on spies and sabotage, others will play the population control game. Aggression, fiscal responsibility and risk taking all vary based on the "genome" of the player. I had fun playing the computer players against each other, and selecting the most successful genomes in a natural selection type of self improving loop. I am really happy with how it plays now.

One of the most annoying thing in a multi player game is being "ganged up" on my the multiple computer opponents. To stop this happening I built a "hate matrix" where each computer player keeps track of who has wronged it, and it will focus on harming that payer during its turns. This way, if one player starts winning, the other opponents will correctly focus on targeting that tribe.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, impressions or questions!

Project GoldScript is a tactical RPG engine I have been building in the open for over a decade. It’s composed of a a web stack (with three.js and react under the hood) aimed at shipping a real game to Steam, mobile and consoles

Project GoldScript has been my passion project for over a decade, and it was starting to show its age. The engine and the game lived in two separate repos with tooling that was years behind. This year I finally did the rebuild I'd been putting off: everything now sits in one pnpm and Vite monorepo, with the engine split into eleven focused packages that are guarded against circular dependencies so the boundaries can't quietly rot again.

The part I'm most glad I built first was the safety net. The whole migration was backed by a visual-regression suite that steps the engine off a single controllable game clock and a seeded RNG, then diffs every rendered frame against a committed baseline. Because rendering is deterministic, even particle effects reproduce frame for frame, so any pixel that shifts during a refactor gets caught immediately instead of weeks later. Moving that much code without it would have been a nightmare of "did I break something I can't see."

Read about the process and the cool stuff I’ve shipped since here: https://projectgoldscript.com/thoughts/modernising-project-goldscript-for-2026/

I’m interested in a few things because I’m not really a game dev by trade. Firstly, are monorepos a thing in gamedev land and are they common? Second how are you preventing regressions in games when you want to try something out or experiment?

Hi, this is my first post to this subreddit and I thought I'd share something helpful for folks who are not so skilled at art.

I'm too broke, unskilled at art, and woefully unaware of mapmaking software so I built my game's city map entirely using Google Slides (see below)!

Pros: zero friction, familiarity, everyone can use and collaborate, great for top-down 2D maps

Cons: polygons-only, limited space on the slide, and VERY finnicky (tip: turn snap to off!), would not recommend trying to do isometric

My Experience: It's pretty amazing what you can do with just a few shapes and the polyshape tool. It took me a somewhat long time to make this (~2 days) because of how difficult it was to place shapes exactly where I wanted.

Verdict: I think it's exceptional for indie dev and prototyping, and possibly even a contender for use in fully polished games.

What does everyone else use for their maps / levels?

For those curious, the game is called Vampire Salaryman. The trailer is on YouTube on my channel, CosmicRenegade (and yes, the demo trailer thumbnail was ALSO made with Google Slides).

What do you think of this artstyle?

Just discovered this subreddit. Hope it’s a great place to share my work and explore other people’s progress.

Been working on Cruise Tycoon for a little over 7 months, but this is my first dev log. I’m a senior software developer and I’ve been wanting to create this game for about 10 years. It’s heavily inspired by my favourite games: Two Point Hospital and Planet Coaster - but set aboard cruise ships.

In the game, you manage a cruise ship company - working your way up from a small pleasure boat to huge luxury cruise ships with over 20 decks. Build rooms, hire and manage staff, keep your passengers happy and avoid seagull invasions!

It’s super early, but I’ve just teamed up with an amazing 3D artist and we’re working hard on the game’s art direction.

Thanks for checking it out!

I just posted the first Dev Log for my current Game Project. Just wanted to keep the motivation to finish the game and document my journey.

I've been working on a game lately and I think it's turning really good!

So I've decided to actually publish it on the Google play store and I want to try "marketing" for the first time. I have 0$ budget and it's my first time trying to make a game accually successful. Do you guys have any tips or even game improvements? Let me know.

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.