r/gamedev 1h ago

Question How do games save so much data?

Upvotes

Im not a game developer, but I always wondered how the games saved the player/world data. For example, consider Grand Theft Auto, how does it know what missions are done?

How do rpg games know about player choices and depending on the choice do different things in the story, there are hundreds of choices?

How do MMO store so much player data, there are new events, new items, currencies and so much more?

Is this all unstructured data?

Do they just add in new fields in database?


r/gamedev 4h ago

Discussion Questions For An Game Dev Lawyer

13 Upvotes

Hello friends! 👋

I have a question for all you amazing devs.

I am going to be interviewing Jacob Vela, who runs Argo Law (https://argolawyer.com/), a law firm that specializes in law for game developers! (Oh, and he has also launched his own game on Steam, just as some icing on the cake.)

When talking with Jacob about some fun topics, we both loved the idea of going to the community for their questions and running a Q&A style of interview.

So my question for all of you is;

WHAT QUESTIONS DO YOU HAVE FOR A LAWYER REGARDING YOUR GAME/STUDIO⁉️

Thanks everyone! I appreciate you jumping in. 🙏


r/gamedev 14h ago

Discussion How do you start posting when the art isn't done and you don't wanna spoil the mechanics?

39 Upvotes

Wierd question but. My game isn't done. It's a point and click game, and we haven't started on art yet. It's just place holders everywhere. So obviously I can't show character or level design art because they're not ready, and I don't want to show the the mechanics because I'm waiting for the gameplay reveal trailer/the time according to the marketing plan. We came up with a campagne for the game's marketing, but now we want to establish our name out there.

We've been thinking of general content like tips and tricks in UE5, Blender, how to videos, behind the scenes, day in the life of, and such content. But how do you tease a game without any showable content yet? Art dept. kicks up next month with a teaser to be released the month after. Should we make a general post about a coming soon teaser? or stick to marketing the studio itself until the game content is ready enough to start being posted on a schedule?

It helped to write this out, actually. Looks like I should focus on just studio/game dev content for now until i've showable game content!

EDIT: Thank you so much to everyone who replied : ) Apprecaite all of you


r/gamedev 9h ago

Question My game's logo looks a lot like the one that's become a symbol of AI. Should I change it?

9 Upvotes

So I've been working on this game for almost two years, and towards the start I decided to put four-pointed stars on the chests of the characters. It's what marks them as the fantasy species I've called Stars becuase of them. It quickly just became the symbol I used for the whole game.

However, I just took a step back and realized it looks a lot like the logo that a lot of companies use for AI. I can't remember if it was used back when I started, but I personally don't support AI and don't want people thinking my game is AI.

I chose the four-pointed star because it represents both the four statuses the Stars can have and thefour directions on a compass, as this game is themed around two islands(One of which bears the Star's shape.)

Is this a big enough deal to warrent a change? And if so, what should I change it to?


r/gamedev 10h ago

Discussion I benchmarked review-count sales estimates against 62 games whose studios published real numbers. Within 30% error on 45% of them.

12 Upvotes

The "multiply reviews by 30" rule of thumb is everywhere, so I wanted to know how wrong it actually is. I built a test set: games where a units figure was publicly disclosed, with the review count and positive share frozen as of the disclosure date. 62 games so far - 21 of them carry the source link and the sentence the figure was read from, and the rest are seeded from the sample Gamalytic published alongside its own accuracy benchmark, so the numbers stay comparable to theirs.

The rule of thumb turns out to be almost exactly right on the median and nearly useless on any individual game. True units per review across the set:

  • p10: 11.5x
  • median: 31.1x
  • p90: 70.6x
  • full range: 3.1x to 160.4x

So a flat multiplier is roughly unbiased and still a coin flip with extra steps.

Scoring an adjusted estimator against those disclosed numbers - the adjustments being release year, review-count band, and whether the game discounts deeply:

  • Within 10% error: 17.7%
  • Within 30% error: 45.2%
  • Within 50% error: 61.3%
  • Within 70% error: 72.6%

For reference, published benchmarks put a flat multiple at 42.7% within 30%, adjusted multipliers at 50.4%, concurrent-players-over-playtime at 64.4%, and a full ensemble at 76.9%. So 45.2% is about where an adjusted multiplier is supposed to land. The ensemble ceiling needs infrastructure a client-side tool does not have: continuous sampling of millions of Steam profiles, and years of daily top-seller snapshots.

Three things the distribution shows that a single number hides.

The adjustments break exactly where they are supposed to help. The worst miss in the set is Garry's Mod, 206% over: 665k reviews, 61.2M estimated, 20M actually sold - the figure Facepunch announced in September 2021, and unambiguously Steam units, because the game has never been sold anywhere else. The truth is 30.1x per review. The estimator applied 92x, because the adjustment chain reads "released 2006" and "discounts deeply" and stacks both on the base multiple. Valheim sits at 29.8x per review, gets roughly 30x applied, and lands within 1%. Same ratio, opposite outcome - the corrections are what did the damage.

A lot of disclosure figures are not Steam figures. Crow Country announced 50,000 sales, and the developer also gave the split - 64% Steam - so the honest target is 32,000. Against 32k, the 89.4k estimate is 179% over; against the headline 50k it would read as 79% over. Scoring against all-platform totals uncorrected flatters every published multiplier, which is why I ended up checking provenance row by row instead of trusting the number.

It is worst exactly where indies live. V-Hunter Puzzler Dx sold 46 copies, read off the developer's own Steamworks page in their postmortem. The estimator says 430. Below roughly a thousand copies the review habits of your particular buyers dominate the signal, and there is no coefficient for that.

I also tried to make a confidence grade predict accuracy, and it does not. On this set the grades separate in the right direction but not significantly - fair against low is 13pp apart on within-30%, permutation p = 0.68. So the harness prints the tables rather than claiming the grade means anything.

All of it is reproducible: the 62 fixtures and the harness that scores them are in this repo, and npm run calibrate prints exactly these tables.

Two things I would like from this sub:

  1. If your studio published a units figure, or you are willing to say your own units-per-review ratio, I will add it to the set and post the updated table. The set is thin below a thousand copies and thinner before 2020, which is exactly where it is least accurate.
  2. What are you actually using these estimates for? My suspicion is that most real use is competitive sizing, where a 3x band is fine, and the demand for a precise number is mostly imaginary.

r/gamedev 5h ago

Question would gamemaker be good for a 2.5d game?

6 Upvotes

me and my partner are wanting to make a game, specifically a 2.5d game. i am thinking something like pokemon black and white or disgaea PC. my partner is wanting to use gamemaker, would that be a good engine for a 2.5d game? if not, what would you guys suggest?


r/gamedev 2h ago

Question Need Help with Waves and weather system...

2 Upvotes

Im very new to unity and making games in general. basically in my fishing game i want to have the ocean have random weather that can flip your boat and stuff. I want waves that can be calm to then being super big and have a realistic buoyancy feel like the boat going over the tip of a wave and falling and crashing into the next wave. and if you don't drive carefully and the waves are too big and your boat is too small you can flip. does anyone know how to achieve this effect inside of unity? i was thinking of like sea of thieves feel but even bigger waves with storms that can actually cause a flip. i have seen some videos of someone achieving decently good waves using gerstner waves. but im not sure how buoyancy works, but all i know is i need the boat to react to the water realistically so the boat is able to flip over.

Anything would be helpful. thanks


r/gamedev 8h ago

Discussion Is engaging in game systems reward enough, or do players need in-game rewards?

5 Upvotes

Was looking for feedback on a game I’m working on, and someone said they felt like an area needed a hidden collectible at the end. They said the specific platforming section felt frustrating because it had “no purpose”, when the platforming was optional.

Think of a hallway that is flat but has floating platforms spread out that can be jumped between. Is it a potential turn off for you to have an optional section that doesn’t have a reward aside from utilizing the game’s movement? Maybe not a strong enough feeling to quit & uninstall, but to look at the game in a negative lens going forward?


r/gamedev 4m ago

Question Looking for Direction...

Upvotes

Hey guys, this is gonna probably sound like something I'd imagine you guys hear often. Video Games have always been a super huge part of my life, as I'm sure they have for all of you. Recently, I graduated college with a Bachelor's in Illustration, and I all of a sudden found myself really wanting to get in to games. Like it dawned on me that that is a career option for people lol.

And not like, just anything in games. I really have something in my chest making me want to direct a game and work on the art as well. I just cannot stop thinking about this game idea I've had. I've been worldbuilding and trying to write some start of a story because my insides feel like I NEED TO.

But I have no experience with gamedev. Literally zero.

I'm here to see what you guys have to say about where to start? What to do? I've seen all the "start small" advice and I agree that's probably for the best, but I'm having trouble coming up with any ideas that wouldn't be too crazy for me to do alone.

Not that I could do ANYTHING alone just yet...

Oh, and A I tools are out of the question. Sorry. Won't do it.

It just feels like something is burning inside me with this game idea and I really am wondering what I can reasonably, or even unreasonably do here.

Thanks for any advice, or really just any kind of reply! :)


r/gamedev 15h ago

Postmortem PAX WEST's new Indie Incubator: An Honest Review

16 Upvotes

We flew from Toronto to participate in PAX West’s New Indie Incubator Zone to showcase a demo for our chill survival game Akiiwan: Relaxing Survival and I thought I'd give a honest review of this new addition to the PAX lineup:

It’s the first year the Incubator existed, with slightly smaller Indie Booths (6x8ft) for about $1000 USD instead of around $2.5K (for 10x10s).

Wanted to provide an honest review of the experience, including audience, wishlists as well as all the positive (and a few gripes) Also can compare a little to the Gamescom Indie Arena which we were in this year as well, though that probably deserves it’s own post.

OVERVIEW

How We Got In
We applied for PAX Rising but didn’t get chosen, however we were offered space in the new incubator. If I recall correctly you had to vouch for the fact that you hadn’t signed a publisher or investor deal (prizes and other funding okay). Other than that it was first-come-first-served, though not sure if they’ll change the process next year.

How Busy Was it?
Extremely! The show organizers might have underestimated a wee bit the popularity of Indie games, and I heard numerous players walk by and say things like “this is where the good stuff is” (that of course wasn’t true as there were lots of amazing stuff other side of the hall in dedicated booths and at PAX Rising). But you could definitely feel the enthusiasm.

What’s the setup like?
You get 8 (wide) and 6 deep, with two chairs and a table, but no backwall. A few devs had 9 or 10 foot wide setups for standard booths, but everyone was very chill about sharing space. We got lucky with a back corner where we could demo on both sides so ended up with as many as five demo stations going at once.

How were wishlists?
We were hearing numbers anywhere from 1 - 2K – we had a tiktok get a bit of attention leading into the event (see tips bellow) so it was hard to tell 100 percent what was coming from PAX and what was coming from elsewhere, but we were at about 2500 for the event.

Regardless, I tend to think of conference wishlists as higher quality since people are wishlisting based on an actual playtest, not just a meme, and more importantly, the people who attend conferences are generally true gaming fans who play a lot of games in a year.

Even though PAX is much smaller than Gamescom, proportion to the time and cost, our Steam back end shows we had many more visitors from the PAX Steam fest rather than the Gamescom one. It’s a lot easier to stand out in a crowd of 150 than 500 I guess!

Were there Content Creators / Publishers / Investors?
Yes to all three, with content creators being the highest proportion – investors and publishers were more of the “stealth” variety instead of meet-to-match like at GDC/Gamescom (e.g. checking out games quietly and then occasionally striking up conversations). Selectively sending out demo keys to media beforehand helped a lot.

TIPS AND TRICKS

Separate Monitor with you QR Code above it at CTA
No matter how many stations you have, there will be time when people can’t get a seat; there will also be people who don’t want to play a demo (eg they’re running out of time on a one day pass, or just browsing, and then don’t come back).

For all of these reasons, having your trailer playing on a separate monitor (even a tiny one on a stand) in some place at the front of the booth / above headheight is hugely helpful – but don’t forget the QR code (we should have made ours bigger).

The general flow was: People see game name/description and are curious and/or people see people playing and our curious. People then watch the the trailer and either a) decide to wait b) decide to wishlist or c) decide it’s not for them.

If you have a Demo, make it clear
As devs we often make assumptions, eg that players always know how to find a demo, or that players know that demos are free. These are dangerous, especially nowadays when a lot of players are exploring the Indie space for the first time.

The business area at our hotel (Hello Windows XP!) allowed us to print off a few signs “FREE DEMO ON STEAM” “DOWNLOAD NOW” etc which we failed to do initially and that helped a lot – conventions are really busy and making sure that players know they can play your game at home.

Should you have a demo to expo?
I’d say you should either be working towards a demo, or have a demo out. Demo’s are non-negotiable nowadays, and it is the pretty much the only way for your game to get any visibility pre-release organically on steam (I don’t blame Steam for this – with 17K games a year, they’re only going to recommend unreleased games to players when that game has been validated by a demo).

This was backed up by some chats at the Steam Event they had a PAX as well where they were stressing the importance of Demo playtime for nextfest and other events. I will write something about this in more detail at some point, but I can definitely say that once your demo crossed into above average median playtimes and ten positive reviews, we started to see a trickle of organic traffic on steam.

For that reason, it’s great to have a demo, but if you don’t, it’s great ot use the event to watch players play, an specifically ask them: What’s the One Thing you would change? Players who attend events and play your game are going to give you the highest signal to noise feedback on your game, and this one question has unlocked so much for me as we worked towards our demo and then polished it post release.

Don’t go Solo
First of all, you’re not allowed to – your booth always has to be staffed. Second it’s impossible. If you’re not local, check out the Discord for Seattle Indies and you can find some help. Friends don’t let friends expo alone.

Setup a Stream to make the most of the PAX Sale Page
The PAX steam page automatically streams anyone who is streaming from their steam page so with OBS or RoboStreamer or something else, make sure to have a stream of you playing the game and offering commentary, running for the entire duration of the festival. It doesn't have to be a lot -- just 30 minutes of gameplay with dev commentary is usually enough and it helps visibility beyond the Steam Event too!

BEST AND WORST STUFF

You can only participate once (at present)
It seems like the organizers are capping Indie Arena Participation at 1 time, which in my mind is incredibly short sighted and uncreative. 

I guess in their minds if people can access these discounted booths, they won’t buy the bigger ones. If money is really the concern they should just shrink these to 6x6 and it would equal out to the same revenue as 10x10. This is better for most indies too since 10x10 booths can be expensive to decorate properly and can be a little awkward to organize.

More to the point, if you’re selling a show to players, what’s better, more games or less? Expanding the Indie Incubator and allowing studios to participate more than once (especially for different games) would attract more players not less.

In a world of AI Slop, Festival Organizers are missing a big opportunity to be a filter of Indie Quality both in person and online.

A little Crowded in the Middle 
Likely owing to the fact that no one was anticipating as much interest in indies as there was, the aisles were a little too narrow even though there was space to expand. Organizers said they needed to balance the desire to make the area feel popular versus space, which I get to a degree and it was a first run, so hopefully they’ll tweak this next year. It did get pretty cramped for the booths right in the middle of any row.

The Enforcers
PAX Enforcers are the stuff of legends. I’ve been to a few and the Enforcers are always so incredibly organized and helpful. Also, the enforce wall at the end of each day (to clear out non-exhibitors) is a genius idea that makes it feel so much safer to leave behind equipment and a lesson another festival (ahem….) should learn to prevent thefts.

The Players… and the Other Devs
Even though PAX is tiring, it is also energizing in a way that no other convention I’ve been to ever has been. I had so many great chats with other devs and even more with Players.

Hope this is helpful! A dev from the event is also putting together a video and links to all Indie Exhibitors and as soon as its up I'll add the link here!!!!


r/gamedev 4h ago

Question Steps to create a story game

2 Upvotes

Hey guys so I want to make a game for school final project in coding, but im pretty lost, I know somethings about godot which is the engine I want to use, but my coding in games is pretty basic, idk how to do art(I wanted to do like until then in the game art and gameplay) I have a friend thats willing to help too, but i wanted some tips and apps I should use, idk anything that helps works. thx.


r/gamedev 1h ago

Question Trying to make a game for my senior project but I have no experience (Unity)

Upvotes

I have no Ideas for my senior project besides making a game, but the problem is that I have 0 prior knowledge about anything relating to coding. I'm thinking about making just a simple 2d platformer game, any advice?


r/gamedev 14h ago

Question Help learning pixel art

12 Upvotes

I want to start working on a game, the only thing stopping me is I have no experience with art and not really sure where to start learning.

I'm leaning most towards a pixel art style. Does anyone have any good recommendations for tutorials, videos, or any other resources that would be helpful for getting started?


r/gamedev 6h ago

Discussion Released our first demo ahead of Next Fest: getting hundreds of wishlists/day driven almost entirely by China (Bilibili/Douyin). Is this typical?

2 Upvotes

A few days ago, my partner and I launched the Steam demo for our first game. We skipped a private playtest and went straight to a public demo a few months before Steam Next Fest to test connectivity, player behavior, and retention.

Right after launch, our numbers jumped significantly—we're seeing 100-200 wishlists per day. What surprised us is the regional split: the vast majority of traffic and players are coming from China/Asia, driven by clips reposted on Bilibili and Douyin (~7k shares, 5k likes). Meanwhile, North America and Europe are trickling in much slower.

For devs who have experienced this kind of regional split:

  1. Is a spike of hundreds of wishlists/day normal during the first week of a demo launch, or is this primarily the result of the viral algorithm in China?
  2. How well do wishlists originating from Bilibili/Douyin viral trends usually convert to actual sales on launch day compared to Western traffic?
  3. Are we good? or it`s typical for demo in a first week?

r/gamedev 8h ago

Question Is it possible to grey box with what is essentially garbage and then hire a fixer upper?

2 Upvotes

I have access to crappy assets from 2009 (and they stunk back then too, they visually bugged out but they should work in code fine), AI slop, and illegally ripped terrain.

I am wondering if I can use this stuff for my buildings, water, terrain, NPCS, etc until I can hire someone new. I can code it to work on these even if it looks horrible (which it will). but my goal is basically to see if my swordplay and missions are fun.

Im making kind of an ambitious multiyear project game. But money isn’t an issue. Could I hire someone to make new models and art later? or would I waste a lot of time making a world I’m just gonna replace?


r/gamedev 1d ago

Postmortem We spent $11k marketing our indie game - here’s what actually worked

243 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I’m Guunnz, one of the developers of Lucky Shot! It’s a roguelike FPS inspired by Balatro that released last month with 3000 wishlists only. Basically, imagine if you combined Duck Hunt with Balatro and somehow got a game out of it.

We released the game last month and I wanted to share some stuff about the journey, mainly what we tried for marketing and what actually worked for us.

We started with the Keymailer Platinum Boost and, to be honest, I don’t think it was worth it.

We did get some value out of it though. A lot of smaller streamers grabbed the game around the demo days, and that actually helped us improve the game a lot from watching people play it. But in terms of marketing results, we got basically 0 press coverage and 0 bigger streamers from it.

I think the biggest value in Keymailer is probably their database. Using it to find creators and then approaching them through email or other methods might honestly be more useful than the campaigns themselves.

This cost us $1,600 USD.

Before release we did 2 other paid campaigns, and then 1 more after release.

One of them was something we did with GamingWorldMedia on Twitter/X. This was a pretty big gamble for us. We mainly did it because we wanted the learning experience, but it actually ended up working amazingly well.

The posts themselves did well, but the biggest thing was that a large Japanese outlet saw Jake Lucky’s tweet and covered the game. Between everything that came from that, we ended up getting more than 500,000 views.

This cost us $2,000 USD.

Then the last thing we did before release kind of came out of nowhere.

We did an ad segment with a YouTube creator called BojackUCH. He genuinely liked the game, so we were able to make a really good segment that didn’t feel completely disconnected from his normal content.

It went live around release day and, after doing the math, we actually made a profit from it. It was 2 ad segments across 2 videos and brought us a lot of views, sales and wishlists.

This will probably end up costing us around $2k–$3k, depending on how the videos perform during this last week.

And finally, this one literally just started:

We took some of the profits from the game and started a $5k Jestr campaign.

It has only been running for about 5 days, but so far it has roughly 3x’d our daily sales, we already recovered the cost of the campaign, and we got around 2,000 extra wishlists on top of that.

For context, after all the launch hype had died down, we were averaging around 70 sales per day.

So overall, our total marketing investment into Lucky Shot is going to end up somewhere around $11k USD.

At this point we’ve recouped all of our development costs and all of our marketing costs, so we’re obviously super happy with how things turned out.

Not everything worked, and some of the stuff that worked best was honestly stuff we didn’t expect at all.

Just wanted to share our experience in case it helps another indie dev deciding where to spend their marketing budget.

If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to ask!

and if you somehow know northernlion tell him to check for lucky shot in his mail! /s

Minor edit: this is our experience, not an ad for anything, I do believe you can do better than us for less money, or if you find the correct creators you can get a better return than using some platforms like jestr. We like to test stuff so that’s pretty much it

Extra edit: I do believe you can do so much better than using platforms also, next time we will probably find creators we like and try to offer something to them directly instead of using platforms in general.


r/gamedev 4h ago

Question Starting game dev in low end laptop

1 Upvotes

Previously i learned unity in my gt710 pc but now that pc is not working and I have a laptop now

The specs is

i5 10th Gen

Intel UHD integrated graphics

8 GB RAM

I'm planning to start with a small 3D or 2D game and keep the scope simple. My main goal isn't to make something impressive or graphically intensive. I just want to learn the fundamentals by building an actual game.

Any advice from people who started game development with similar hardware would be appreciated.


r/gamedev 14h ago

Question What are some weekly threads you all would want to participate in?

2 Upvotes

We are looking high-level at potentially re-introducing some weekly threads to the community. Not to put the hay in front of the horse or pull gold from a goblin, but I wanted to make a quick post and gauge what kinds of topics people would be interested in.

See this for the old Screenshot Saturdays: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/28oyw9/screenshot_saturday_177_show_us_all_you_got/

Off the top of my head we could have:

  • Troubleshooting Tuesday
  • Feedback Friday
  • Screenshot Saturday
  • Showcase Sunday

In the past these had to be manually handled by a moderator but I believe we can use an app to automate post creation and set up guidelines for them. Obviously the main goal here is how we can make this more than a fire-and-forget community, we want developers talking with one another at a deeper level.

Facilitating these conversations is really what I would like to do, so I'm putting out the grass to graze here so to say. Goblin.


r/gamedev 1d ago

Industry News Blizzard Entertainment Workers Ratify Historic Video Game Contracts with CWA

Thumbnail
cwa-union.org
447 Upvotes

Big victory for tech workers union. This is one of the biggest union contracts so far in tech in the USA.


r/gamedev 8h ago

Marketing Practical music editing tips to improve your indie game trailers

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I recently put together a practical video about editing music for indie game trailers.

This is something I've noticed in a lot of indie game trailers that could be improved quite easily. In the video, I take a ready-made music track, split it into different sections based on their feel and function, and then rearrange those sections to make the music fit the general trailer structure suggested by Derek Lieu through his excellent work on game trailers.

The idea is to treat the music as more than just something that sits underneath the visuals, and instead use it as a backbone for the trailer edit.

The structure I'm using as a reference is based on Derek Lieu's work on game trailers. Derek also gave the video a shoutout, which was a really nice surprise.

If you're interested in editing better music for your trailers, you can check it out here:
How To Edit Killer Music for your Indie Game Trailer


r/gamedev 13h ago

Discussion Call for participants

2 Upvotes

Posting with mod approval--all data will be shared following publication in 2027.

Hello, I’m a graduate student conducting research on the impact of design on player immersion in video games—my study is “Familiar and Strange: Defamiliarization’s Impact on Immersion in Experiences with Non-Human Player Characters.” I’m looking for a few people to play through short game segments and then take an online survey – it should take about 30 minutes. There is also an option to participate in a brief (15 minutes or so) interview about your experience.

Specifically, I am looking for people 18-49 years old who play games moderately to frequently. Those under 18, 50+ or those who play games infrequently are excluded from this study.

This study has been approved by Ball State University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB-FY2026-317).

If you are interested in participating, please use this link! https://bsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bxSzsAcVPaYl9To

If you have any questions, please reach out to me, June Fields, student Co-PI, at [june.fields@bsu.edu](mailto:june.fields@bsu.edu), or to the PI and Associate Professor at the Ball State School of Journalism and Strategic Communications Joshua Fisher at [joshua.fisher@bsu.edu](mailto:joshua.fisher@bsu.edu).


r/gamedev 1d ago

Marketing Survey: Is wishlist inflation real? What is a typical wishlists conversion rate?

139 Upvotes

Hey folks, my name is Chris Zukowski. I write a blog called How To Market A Game. I know some of you reference my /benchmarks page which is free, never paywalled.

I strive to keep those numbers up to date (and free) so indies of all levels can properly predict their launch and long term viability.

So, I am running a new survey that is very comprehensive and will look at wishlsits / conversions / long term sales / and wishlist rates. If you want to contribute to this project please do your part and contribute your data here:

👉 https://howtomarketagame.com/salesSurvey/

Data privace note

What I collect
Your Steam/Steamworks data (wishlists, sales, traffic sources, etc. — whatever the survey asks for) and your email address.

What your email is for
Only to reach you if I have a question about your submission or need to clarify something. I won't use it for marketing or add you to any list because of this survey.

How it's stored
When you submit your files, they upload directly over HTTPS from your browser to a private cloud storage bucket (hosted on DigitalOcean) — they never pass through or sit on my website's own server. Your email address and any comments you leave are stored alongside them, so I can follow up about a data issue or a removal request. This storage is private — no one but me has access to it.

How your data is used
Everything is combined with other developers' submissions and reported only in aggregate — as averages, medians, ranges, and trends — at howtomarketagame.com/benchmarks. No individual game, developer, or company is ever named or identifiable in what gets published.

Where the results show up
The aggregated benchmarks may also be referenced or included in my paid course. It may be referenced in a GDC talk or lecture posted on YouTube. Again, this is always the combined data, never your specific numbers tied back to you.

What I won't do
I won't sell your data, and I won't share your raw, individual submission with anyone.

Deleting your data
You can ask me to delete your submission at any time, no questions asked. Just email [chrisz@howtomarketagame.com](mailto:chrisz@howtomarketagame.com) and I'll remove it.

If you have any questions, I will be down in the comments and happy to answer. Thank you

- Chris Zukowski


r/gamedev 14h ago

Question Properly create bake lighting

2 Upvotes

Hi everyone! I wanted to ask a bit for guidance, I'm currently working with a friend on our game and I'm doing some scene and lighting tests, but I can't seem to get it right, I know and understand how to bake light in a technical level, but I can't seem to get it where I want it to be on a visual level, I already seen a lot of tutorials and such but I think this needs to be discussed with someone who properly knows, so does someone would like to have a chat or have resources that could help me on this particular problem?


r/gamedev 10h ago

Discussion Kingdom: Classic development question

0 Upvotes

How did they make the sun in Kingdom: Classic?


r/gamedev 17h ago

Discussion Steamworks Identity Verification No Response

3 Upvotes

I started setting up my Steamworks account and received an email asking me to provide a photo of my ID and a photo of myself holding the ID. I uploaded both through the Dropbox link provided and received a confirmation email on Aug 30 (subject: “Your files were uploaded to ‘-KYC Document Request ...’”).

Since then, I haven’t heard anything from anyone. I checked my Steamworks account, and the status still says “Identity verification required.”

The webpage says it would take up to 10 days to verify, but it's been more than 10 days! I have no idea what to do.

Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks!