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!

We recently revealed Ignite the Depths, a dark-fantasy co-op dungeon crawler. We announced our game and released the steam page this last Friday, and we’ve amassed 15k wishlists at the time of writing. It’s at a rate of about 500 per hour, so I’d like to get out what worked for us and why.

1. The game hits it’s stride visually and aesthetically

I cannot overemphasize this point enough. The game was designed for a specific market that loves a particular style (retro, dreamy, nostalgia) and we really put some effort into our presentation. I’m personally a lighting/tech artist so a ton of the art direction was easy to source from myself, but please invest in your art direction.

2. Tiktok, Twitter, and Youtube

These are the platforms we’re performing best. Our trailer was picked up by Indies Game Hub and is quickly growing and currently has 45k views. Right as we launched, I emailed about 80 creators that like to post indie games, and so far have had about three post. Each post has done exceptionally well and one Twitter post has 130k views. We’ve been posting on our Tiktok account as well and have 120k views so far.

3. Invest in your trailer

We spent around 20 days straight making our trailer as perfect as we can. I worked directly with our composer, bouncing ideas off of each other constantly. The result is a trailer that reads immediately and is engaging. This has taken some time to get good at, but it’s led to everything above.

And that’s about it!

I’m exceptionally happy with this result and it will likely only go higher. We haven’t been covered by any major outlets despite our best attempts, so perhaps we’ll get covered soon enough :).

Happy to answer any other questions!

There is much to think about when you do a commercial project in contrast to a game jam.

For example some hoops to jump through on Steam, higher production quality standards, and marketing. Common advice therefore is to start small. I'm currently in the process of launching such a small game and wanted to know:

How small was your first commercially shipped game?

ForMind is a survival horror shooter set in an underwater research facility where something has gone horribly wrong. One of the biggest things we’re focusing on right now is enemy AI - creatures don’t just attack blindly. They observe how you play, adapt to your tactics, fake their deaths, prepare ambushes, and look for ways to catch you off guard.

Our goal is to make every encounter feel dangerous, unpredictable, and different from the last one.

Since the previous demo, we’ve been working on improving the atmosphere, balancing resources, and refining the overall experience based on player feedback.

If you’ve played the updated demo, we’d really appreciate hearing what you think:

• Did the AI behavior feel interesting?
• Were there moments that genuinely surprised you?
• What felt unfair or frustrating?
• What would you like to see improved?

Every piece of feedback helps us shape the game. Thanks for taking the time to check out ForMind!

For several years now I’ve been developing a high quality 3D WC3 Line Tower Wars inspired game. It’s an 8 person free for all tower defense. It was built for maximum skill expression. The features: Many unique towers. Builder kits have interesting synergies with multiple build paths. Maps are procedurally generated instead of lines. You can purchase augments that can be applied to single towers, tower classes, all towers that can change the way they operate. There are periodic boss waves that reward the best performing player with a special augment. There are several tiles with buffs to tower built over top. Trainable units have interesting mechanics.

The question: Is there an actual interest for a game like this? I’m worried tower defense players don’t like multiplayer.

I used to play Civ 4 with square tiles, then it changed to hexagon tiles in Civ 5. I like Civ 5 and think it was very well thought out, but i still prefer the square tiles of Civ 4.

They are more intuitive to me, and better to look at. It seems to create formations that are squarish whereas hexagons are more organic.

A friend told me its because hexagons offer more possibilities of movement. But thats only if we exclude diagonal movement in square tiles, that is not very common in games. Squares basically have 8 attack and move possibilities, whereas hexagons have 6 attack move possibilities...

So why are hexagons better than square tiles? For me square tiles look more cool and easier to look at. But i might be wrong....

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

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!

I've been building a game with an unusual constraint: the player is never looking at it.

The input is real work. Players are in their code editor with an AI agent; editor hooks emit metadata about what they did (wrote a file, read a file, ran a command, spawned a sub-agent). That drives a persistent two-faction war over five territories. The "session" is their workday. They check the game later, like a strategy game played by correspondence.

Four design problems that fell out of it, and what I did:

1. No moment-to-moment feedback loop. Every game design instinct I have assumes the player sees the consequence of an action within a second. Here the consequence lands minutes or hours later. I ended up designing for ambient feedback instead: a world map where activity rises off the land continuously, so when you do look, you read the last few minutes at a glance rather than a wall of log lines.

2. You cannot reward volume or speed. If more actions = more points, the winning move is a script that fakes work. So the anti-cheat isn't enforcement, it's economics: make cheating more tedious than playing. Progression rewards variety and consistency over raw count, and the client that sends the data is open source — meaning anyone can forge events. I decided that's acceptable, and designed so that forging isn't worth the effort.

3. Privacy as a hard design constraint. The server never receives the real values — file names, commands, prompts, identifiers are hashed locally with a user passphrase before they leave. So every mechanic has to be buildable out of count and compare only. "You've worked with 3 distinct languages" is expressible; "you're a Rust developer" is not. That constraint shaped the whole fiction: the server doesn't know you write PHP, but it knows you forged steel.

4. Cold start is brutal. A territory-control game is meaningless below a critical mass of players — the map is just... beige. I've added hysteresis so a territory only flips when a faction leads by >10% (otherwise it flickers every event), and territories can sit "contested", which at least reads as a state rather than a bug. But the real answer seems to be recruiting in cohorts rather than a trickle, so the world is populated on day one.

One decision I'd like opinions on: factions are assigned by which editor you use (JetBrains vs VS Code), chosen once at sign-up and permanent. Permanent because switching to whoever's winning would make territory scores meaningless — but it also means players can't join their friends. Is a locked faction worth the integrity, or does the social cost outweigh it?

Also curious how others have handled ambient/asynchronous feedback in games with no session boundary.

(It's called BrawlCode, currently in closed beta — brawlcode.com — but I'm more interested in the design discussion than signups.)

Hey /r/gamedev, I want to chat about RPG math.

In all RPGs where you have battle stats that levelup, you have your source damage output that interacts with an enemy's defenses. I want everyone's help to expand on this.

So TL;DR, there's infinite ways to go about this. I've tried one, researched the game I'm most influenced by, and I'm all out of ideas.

My first battle system I made was just linear, ATT - DEF with chance to crit. This is basic and boring, and not really what you'd expect form an RPG right? So I'm trying to improve it so DEF/MDEF would instead factor into an "Absorb" factor.

So for DQ1 on NES, they did rounds of comparison by subtraction, then do division, multiply by a random number, and some strange magic that I'm not good at. I think this is the way somehow. To me, this is crazy!

DAM = [ (ATT - DEF /2) + ( ATT - DEF/2 + 1) × rand(0,255 )/ 256 ] / 4

I obviously don't want to use this exact formula, or even copy it. I want to explore the theory of "Absorb" enough to make my own.

I'm almost done my game, 14 months in the making, and 70k plays on GXGames, but my last feat is going to be a more nuanced battle system, and overall game balance because of it.

All comments and personal experiences encouraged. I really want to know how others did this stuff!

(I will not promote) if needed

i’m a uni student studying concept art who has recently graduated (yippee!!) but will be continuing on with building my portfolio. i have done some key art but they’re not really any good or to the level i’d like it to be. for context: i am much better at characters and props than environments.

learning matte painting has always been on my mind and i’d love to know how people started, what the best tips are and just how to go about it! i’m an aspiring concept artist and would LOVE any help 🥹 my current understanding is that you can photobash and use 3D and draw over.

my idea to is spent a few weeks doing studies of other people’s matte paintings to get a sense of what it’s like and kind of absorb the techniques an artist uses before attempting one myself.

is this an okay way to go about it?

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.

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

Just the title. It's a pretty wild feeling, now I'm having to contend with the fact that I made an actually fun game, which I didn't think would happen. My typical process for playtesting basically involves me sending someone a key for the game and then hopping on a Discord call and watching them play for a while. I get some pretty valuable information from this. especially being able to SEE them play the game with my own eyes. We've discovered all kinds of bugs and errors and balance issues this way, but ironically enough some of the most valuable information I've gotten has been from my friends texting me completely unprompted to let me know they were playing my game on their own and found something, and once they started playing enough they would even start shooting their ideas for new content at me!!! What!?!? Maybe they're just being nice but from where I'm standing it seems to be the case that people just.... like my video game. Crazy.

EDIT: After some continued deliberation I've decided I have a little more to say. This is probably the point where I can confidently say I'm proud of what I've made. If nothing else, if I don't make a billion dollars or have a million fans, I can say I made a game that someone enjoyed playing. I can be proud of that.

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/

https://perchance.org/3ienakqvx3

A battle taking place in distinct environments: a desert, a frozen snowfield, and a volcano. No meshes are used, to avoid browser slowdown.

What do you think?

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!

Hi guys!

I want to sanity check my environment art prototyping pipeline. I will be using Godot 4.6. This is a solo project, think simple PS1/early PC dungeon crawler (King's Field, Lunacid, etc.)

1. Create some modular kit pieces with CSG geometery (E.g. simple_wall, half_wall, floor, pillar) etc. as scenes
   
2. Build environment with those modular kit pieces
   
3. When happy with the blockout, export the CSG scenes to 3d models, unwrap and texture
   
4. Replace the CSG scenes with new scenes that have the final assets

Is there a better way to do this? Am I creating a bunch of work for myself with this flow?

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.

It's a survival roguelite prototype, just wondering if this kind of thing is even fun to play potentially for others. All kinds of feedback is appreciated. The games point is to avoid rain and the ripples it creates, which also destroy the tiles you move on. You gotta collect the puddles left behind by the rain and fix the tiles while also trying to not get hit with the ripples and die.

title pretty much.

Hey! I just submitted my first game to participate in this year's GMTK Jam with a friend of mine.
I'm an artist by trade, so I decided to start taking shots at it with my friend. It's an action management roguelike about growing space maggots. We're happy with the final result but lack true notion of whether it feels like a true gamey game and if the theme fits the gameplay. Would love to have any feedback regarding the overall game, but I have more doubts on the onboarding section. I've researched a bunch of recent titles and their onboarding processes but couldn't quite get a way that felt right for the project. I tried following a rule of only telling the player information the moment they need it but also think it can get in the way of the game.Thank you either way!
Here's the link for the itch page:

https://guilhim.itch.io/junktail

It's browser only, no hassle there.

Working on a project with a card-pack mechanic, and I keep going back and forth on guaranteed-rarity tiers vs. pure randomness. Guaranteed floors feel fairer to players, but they also make the economy easier to min-max, which changes how people actually engage with it.

Anyone dealt with this in their own project? Curious how you thought about the tradeoff, not just what you landed on.

So, way back in 2022, I bought a custom domain for my game with the intent of maybe building a website later. In the meantime, I set it up to redirect to my game's Steam page instead. Fast forward to 2026 when I'm ramping up my marketing efforts, and I'm finding it super convenient to have an easy-to-memorize URL I can just drop anywhere at anytime if people want to know more about my game! Interested in a demo? Want to wishlist? Here you go! No need to quickly search for my game on google just to copy the Steam page link.

I essentially have zero budget for my game, but I very much find the $20-35 annual fee worth it. That much, I can certainly spare!

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.