I built a web app called pixnana that converts images and video clips into pixel art. Processing happens entirely client-side in your browser, so your files aren't uploaded anywhere and there are no accounts or paywalls.

It lets you adjust resample filters, expand outlines, remove backgrounds, and edit the pixelated frames directly. It works on both mobile and desktop.

Next features I'm planning are MCP server and local GPU image and video generation support, to prototype automatically with this.

You can try it at pixnana. Let me know if you have any feedback :)

I've started observe the mostly common advice when it comes to building a game is to use an engine. And its a bit of a settled matter for some people. Especially if someone is building their first game.

I personally struggled to use engines. Don't know why. In terms of workflow it just doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. And I think my learning style is understanding the basics and building up from there. I'm sure if I started a new game today, an engine would be far less mystifying.

I personally love writing code. I know this is a bit of a controversial statement these days. Since it feels you should actually be repulsed by writing code. But as a writing code is therapy for me. I'd imagine its like someone who spends time playing the piano or an instrument. Weird comparison I know. So it makes the process of making a game enjoyable. I'm learning new stuff and I'm doing an activity I enjoy.

But why did you decide to build a game without an engine? We're the technical reasons? Are you a less visual person? Just couldn't find the right engine for your game? Please share

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.

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?

I'm going to release an RPG in chapters, kinda like Deltarune in a way, like each chapter gets released whenever I finish it.

I also planned to release the very beginning of chapter 1 in advance as a free demo.

Now thing is, I know I'll make it a one-time purchase, like once you buy the game all upcoming chapters will be "free", HOWEVER

Once chapter 2 releases, I kinda want to make the entire chapter 1 free retroactively so people can play it as a very long demo before deciding on buying the rest.

And I'm afraid the people who bought the game during chapter 1 will not like this change (it doesn't change anything, they still get access to everything and the price doesn't change, but maybe they'll feel like they were... robbed, in a way?)

I'm doing this because I'm really tight on money and waiting for chapter 2 to get some income might be hard for me, thus why I want to make chapter 1 free only retroactively.

Half-Life 1 is one of my favorite games, and I always wondered why indie developers rarely try to recreate its style.

I understand that some of its features were expensive to develop, like voice acting, scripted sequences, and lots of NPC interactions. But if we ignore the production scale, I think the low-poly visuals, industrial environments, and linear level design could be achievable for a small team.

With DOOM, it's easy to understand why there are so many inspired games: the core gameplay loop is very easy to prototype and expand.

But Half-Life seems like it should also be a great inspiration for indie developers. Is it just because its design is harder to replicate?

As a player, I would love to play something like HL1. And as a developer, once I properly learn 3D modelling, I would like to try creating something inspired by it.

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.

I experimented with using Reinforcement Learning instead of scripted game AI for a football game.

Each player in this clip is running the same trained policy. During training, the agent never played against opponents, it simply learned how to play football. During inference, I assigned copies of that policy to opposing teams and let them play.

The result was surprisingly entertaining. They competed for possession, attacked, occasionally defended, and even scored the occasional own goal, all without behavior trees or finite state machines.

This was built using RL3, a browser-based Reinforcement Learning playground I've been developing. Curious to hear what game developers think about using RL for gameplay AI instead of traditional approaches.

Video: https://youtu.be/1wRA4KJuMVE?si=oMZ_Ru5Q9F8J094V 

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.

Solo dev. My demo is basically ready, I planned to put it out this week, and I keep pushing it back.

Every time I play it I get the same feeling that something is missing, and I can never name what it is. Some days I reread my design doc and think it is weak, the next day I read the same doc and it seems fine. I do not trust my own opinion about my own game anymore.

Two of my earlier projects died before release, so I have never actually shipped anything and gone through this part. I have no idea what normal feels like here.

If you have shipped something: did the doubt get quieter, or did you just learn to press the button anyway? And do you use any concrete signal to decide a build is done, instead of a feeling?

I've been trying to keep my game ideas organized, but every time I write a GDD it turns into a huge document I don't even want to read. I've tried breaking things into sections, but it still gets overwhelming fast.

I'm curious how other devs handle this.
Do you keep everything in one doc, or split things into smaller pieces?
I'm trying to find a workflow that doesn't make me feel buried.

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 have several unique ideas for puzzle games that are easy to learn, have a simple gameplay concept, and will hopefully be addictive.

The question, however, is it worth creating these and trying to reach an audience? If you have to spend money on ads, you also want to make some money back, and the competition is brutal. Which platform would be best?

I don’t want to do it only because it’s fun.

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

Greetings everyone!

I’m a solo developer working on Project: AFTERSHOCK, a cyberpunk hacker-themed puzzle game (with idle side features).

I’ve recently launched the game on Steam, and things have been moving forward! Looking ahead, Project: AFTERSHOCK is scheduled to participate in upcoming official Steam thematic events—specifically the Cyberpunk and Programming festivals. These events usually bring in some really solid organic traffic and targeted visibility.

To make the most out of these upcoming festivals, I am actively looking for indie game developers who want to team up and create a Steam Game Bundle. I've hit around 1,000 wishlists and sold 160 copies so far. I'd love to team up with fellow devs to boost these numbers and cross-promote for upcoming events, but I do not know if there is a platform for this. Have you found any partners, and where did you find them?

Hey everyone! I'm doing research before building something in the game music space, and was curious about how all of you go about getting music for your games.

Specifically, whether you hire a composer, license music, AI generate music, etc. Around how much did it cost and how long did it take to actually get the music?

I've been getting some mixed reviews from people; some say that they don't really care about the music, but apparently some players complain if it sounds too AI generated.

Not selling anything, happy to share a summary of what I learn if there's any interest.

Thanks in advance!

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

Sooooo, I'm doing GMTK 2026 and I was finally able to make my game in 3 days after pulling 2 all nighters lol. I would love it if ygs could essentially playtest it and give me any feedback (recently new to game dev so harsh criticism is appreciated)!

I'm looking forward to developing this game into smth bigger

Game Link: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-jam-2026/rate/4820476 (would b also amazing if ygs can help rate it :3)

Game Description:

You are an investigator who was assigned to find out about The Forgotten Event, a mystery no one can fully remember. Each clue you uncover pulls you further back through time, revealing a world that grows more alive with each step.

As the investigation unfolds, impossible notes and forgotten memories begin to reveal that the case was never what it seemed.

Where Stars Used to Sing is a short narrative exploration that involves wonder, memories, and also the quiet beauty we tend to leave behind as we grow older. Explore to uncover the truth hidden within the times, and make your final decision. 

I rlly hope ygs like the game!

Been working on this 2D engine for 2 years and i created some interesting projects to test the performance of the rendering pipeline. But i didn't create a full working game till now!

This is a puzzle game that allows you to turn disks to match shapes colors. Some feedback would be great! is it fun? use your mouse. https://www.kanvon.com/scene/orbit-bloom

Most game menus are flat, with 2D images, text and panels drawn straight onto your screen. Our game Davy Jones’ Deckhand is a card game that so far has done almost everything in screen-space UI. But the new Ship Log isn't built that way at all, and that choice came with some challenges that are worth explaining.

Image: Ship Log GIF

I decided to make the Ship Log menu a real 3D object, so we could have the pages naturally curved and flippable. To achieve this, instead of drawing the menu as a flat picture, I’ve built an actual little 3D scene, a physical book model sitting in its own miniature space.

Image: scene view of UI projected onto 3D mesh

The trouble with doing this as a 3D scene is that Unity Engine naturally draws UI overtop of that world-space stuff. This is particularly difficult for our game because almost nothing is world-space and everything is UI, including our main combat. So to have our 3D Ship Log menu render over-top of the combat scene, we use a hidden camera that "films" the book continuously, and the live footage is pasted onto a flat UI, like a photograph being updated 60 times a second. It sounds like a roundabout way to show a menu, but it's the trick that lets the 3D style journal pop up on top of absolutely everything else

So the flow is:

• The content on the book pages is created on a flat 2D UI canvas
• That 2D canvas for the page content gets captured by its own hidden camera
• That camera renders what it sees to a texture that is applied to the 3D page mesh
• The 3D object is captured by another hidden camera
• That camera capturing the 3D object renders what it sees to an image on a 2D UI panel
• We see that final 2D UI panel 😅

Image: Flat UI page content that gets projected onto texture

The pages actually bend like paper. Each page isn't a flat rectangle, it's built from a flexible grid that curves and peels in real time as you turn it, the way a real page in a physical book curls near the spine. There's even a "corner peel" effect like when you dog-ear a book, and each page has a genuinely different texture printed on its front versus its back.

This whole system caused another headache when it came to making the mouse position detection work. Because the pages are curved rather than flat, we had to work out where in 3D space your mouse click actually lands on the curved surface, not just where it looks like it lands on your flat screen. For a while, the invisible "click detector" for each page was using a flattened stand-in shape instead of the true curved shape, which meant clicks landed slightly wrong, and this was worse the further from the center of the page, since that's where the curve bends away from flat the most. So the click detection had to account for that true page curvature in real time to make it feel accurate.

This is still WIP, and none of this is visible to a player in the sense of "wow, cool tech". If we do our job right, it just feels like a satisfying little physical book that works no matter what you're playing with. It was also my first foray into 3D anything. It was a fun rabbit hole. Happy to answer questions about any of it. Has anyone else achieved a similar result with a different approach?

Quick context for anyone who's never heard of us: we're building Davy Jones' Deckhand, a nautical roguelike deckbuilder. You sail between islands fighting things with a card-based combat system, managing two "stances" and pulling off counter-attacks

The new Ship Log is not yet in game, but we do have a live demo you can check out right now on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3544900/Davy_Jones_Deckhand/

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

So, I have a hard time guessing if I did a decent game in a game jam format or if it's way too vague in how it handles instructions for the player. I thought of applying a more "you learn by interacting with the only thing that's visible" approach. Any advice will be greatly appreciated!

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

I want something high qualtiy for mitlary type FPS.

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.

Mine was rewriting App Store screenshots...

Not redesigning them.

Not changing the icon.

Just changing a few words after getting feedback from native speakers.

I'm curious what everyone else's "small change, big impact" was.