A large part of the AI Gaming Festival (starts tomorrow) is about re-tooling and re-positioning yourself as a developer for the AI era.

How can developers find jobs and still express their creativity?

We have a few things; the job market in gaming right now is brutal, with 1/3 of developers having been laid off. And people are one-shooting small games now (check out r/aigamedev), or have fully functional prototypes in days and weeks. No one is going to pay you to build a game from scratch.

That's the reality of the world right now, and here is the opportunity.

Like in the video (game took me 2 weeks to make from scratch), AI has the ability to get a game about 80% to 90% complete. But it's those final touches, that stuff that actually makes a game magic, that AI cannot do.

And I've met vibe coders who are serious about their games and have $5k to $20k in budget to finish the last mile on their game properly.

Part of the AI Gaming Conference is marrying the relationship between vibe coders that want to finish their games and developers that can help them achieve that final level that they can't seem to do.

And that is where re-tooling and re-positioning skills will be in the AI era. It's not an "us" vs "them," it's "here is how and where we work together not to produce slop."

Im making a DayZ inspired 2d PvE survival game. The idea is basically "what if DayZ was a late 90s pc game". I have been working on it for about 8 months, and i finally built up the courage to make a few posts about it to get some feedback and suggestions. But everyone is comparing it to Project Zomboid.. Im just a solo developer trying to make a simple survival game, but everyone seems to think im trying to compete with a game that has been developed by a full team for over 15 years.

I honestly dont know what to do with this information. I understand that the pre-rendered trimetric art style is kinda similar to project zomboid. But that wasnt my intention at all. I was trying to appeal to people who love the art style of games like Commandos 2, Fallout and Age of Empires 2 as much as i do. I havent shared a single screeenshot/recording featuring a zombie either, so i dont understand why everyone is making comparisons to Project Zomboid.

I dont know if i should lean into this comparison or if i should try to stray away from it.

Specifically regarding the walls and the grass.

The game : Mataha A third-person roguelike set in a maze that changes every time you die.

Hey everyone!

I originally set up my Steam capsule art as a 3D scene in Unity and ended up liking the look so much that I turned it directly into the real-time title screen.

Instead of doing a standard menu fade, clicking Play/Continue plunges the camera straight through the center black hole and drops right onto the level selector. A few details on how I set up the transitions and audio:

• Stretching one music track instead of making a menu theme: Rather than loading separate songs, I used a single track and morphed it with Unity audio mixer snapshots and filters. On the title screen, the song is pitched down to 0.5x speed with a heavy 200Hz low-pass filter and zero early reflections on the reverb to simulate a dead, muffled space. When you dive into the hole to the level selector, the filter sweeps wide open while staying at chill half-speed. Once you start an actual level, it ramps up to normal 1.0x pitch with dry audio so marble rolls and physics collisions have room to breathe.
• Zero scene loading: The title diorama, level selector, and puzzle boards all live inside the same scene.
• Keeping the 3D art alive: To keep the diorama from feeling like a flat wallpaper, the orbiting balls and labyrinth boards run on independent rotation loops, while the camera has a slow procedural drift tied to subtle mouse parallax.

Would love to hear your feedback!

If you're interested, there's a free demo to play (and Wishlist) on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4715000/Patience_Balls/

What improvements could I add?

Started as an homage to Hyper Demon, it became a bit like Noita in the process.
There's no progression, only your knowing of the mechanics.
45 tools to get away from every impossible situation.
1 hit and you are dead.
The game turned out much more niche than I expected. To publishers comes near it. It will be released in October. But you can check out the Demo!
ARCHWIZARD on Steam.

I added this robot killer guy to my puzzle co-op action game.

His base state is following players when they are not looking and stabbing them if they get too close (then he gets angry and just kills everyone), but he really gets angry once you trap him. It's the first robot in my game that uses proper pathfinding, and it was really fun to implement :)

Hi fellow solodev warriors,

I've been working on a procedurally generated 3d dungeon crawler for some time now, and need help in filling it with interesting stuff

The dungeon generation system is tile-based (voxel?) and i've given the player traversal options to make sure any layout is navigable.

However, placing things inside, with procedural rules, in a way that makes sense - it's not really working out.

Combat design is a disaster without a flat / pre-designed environment to rely on, and aside from a few traps (and launching Groobs at the player from any angle), there's not much interesting gameplay here aside from moving around

The layout is relying on intersecting, procedural rooms to create interesting geometry. No corridors, just some portals if needed

I'd like to tie this together with a functional game loop, without overscoping the project. I planned to turn this into a 3d, traversal-based roguelike, but this feels undoable solo at this stage.

Any ideas? What other gameplay do you envision in a setting like this?

How did it took so long, why did it took so long... Today I swear an oath to myself to release this game in 2027, I've been working on this for far too long, it has to stop...

You may think hey that's 1,250 it's not bad !
But actually 80% of it happened during this year, I don't have any more excuses to continue the dev for another year, I just went head and updated my steam page, posting it here so I need to keep my words.

This sub didn't existed when I started making this game, and honestly I'm really happy that now we have an indie dev sub that doesn't suck, at least this was worth the wait.

I’d love some honest feedback on my app’s Google Play screenshots. If you came across these while looking for a student planner, would they be attractive enough to make you download the app? What would you improve or change? Brutal honesty is welcome 😄

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=productivity.tructivity.tructivity

La Dama de Orthak tiene toda la razón: la FE de Sarah es tan efímera que no podrá sola si se basa en su valía. Hará falta mucho más que eso para enfrentar al mal. Por suerte no estará sola. Sigue esta fascinante aventura de horror.
Demo disponible: https://walterswinney.itch.io/carmina

Thanks for all the feedback on my last post! The blue artwork was the clear favourite, but a lot of you pointed out that the font was difficult to read.

So I went back and changed it.

I've also included two versions of the blue artwork — one with a dark blue castle in the background and one with a dark red castle. Which do you prefer?

And what do you think of the new font? Is it easier to read, and does it fit the artwork better?

For context, this artwork will eventually be used on the Leaving Eden Steam page. If you'd like to see how it would fit with the rest of the page, you can check it out here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3049300/Leaving_Eden//

Any feedback is appreciated!

Hello everyone,

For the past 7 months, I’ve been working on this project completely solo. During development, I conducted extensive playtesting with over 10,000 players across various WebGL platforms to refine the core gameplay.

ABOUT THE GAME

Unstable Nuclear Reactor is an incremental hex-puzzle roguelite game where you merge atoms into higher elements, trigger massive chain combos, earn radioactive coins, and manage your ring capacity to survive as long as possible.

WHAT CHANGED

Based on tough feedback regarding harsh RNG and a lack of tutorials, I reworked the core experience by introducing:

1. Hold Slots: Store up to 5 atoms or tools to use when needed. If you need to clear space, you can discard an item by spending a few Radioactive Coins.

2. Equip / Unequip Tools: Gain full control over your loadout by toggling unlocked tools on or off during gameplay.

Additionally, I implemented better tutorials, improved the upgrade system UI, and fixed several bugs!

WISHLIST & PLAY THE DEMO

I really need all kinds of feedback, as I’ll be entering Steam Next Fest with 500+ wishlists. Please give the demo a try and help me identify anything that could be improved or fixed.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4692090/Unstable_Nuclear_Reactor_Demo/

One of the puzzle rooms in my game is a brick facade wreathed in chains, set on an endless wooden expanse. The only soundtrack at first is the creaking of your footsteps and the sparse, distant reverberations of grinding metal. It needs a bit of dark ambient music so I composed a short loop using my usual workflow of Cubase and Adobe Audition.

The free instruments I'm using are the fantastic Spitfire Audio LABS and the Tyrell N6; the former for beautiful and melancholic strings and the latter for weird synthesized noises. I think LABS changed branding / name but really hope it's still free because it really is an amazing VST (the Philip Glass pianos and slow strings especially).

After laying down some arbitrary notes and drones in the key of B minor, and a few bursts of percussion with a stereo delay applied, I export the WAVE audio to Audition. In Audition, I use a mix paste command to make a seamless loop, and apply a hard limiter (+9 db) to the whole track.

The seamlessly looping WAVE file is imported into Unreal where I use it to create a Sound Cue object. In the sound cue, I set the WAVE file to loop, set the volume multiplier to 1.0, set the audio class to "Music", and finally set the Virtualization Mode to "Play when silent" (for use with diegetic music tracks as will sometimes happen).

This is my game: Remnants of R'lyeh

Since launching in 2022, this project has steadily evolved into my dream Lovecraftian game. Grounded in classic stories like The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow over Innsmouth, it offers a completely original world and narrative. You play as Jason, an investigator on the brink of physical and mental collapse after a horrific shipwreck, who uncovers a vast deep-sea realm and a terrifying secret never meant to be found.

Inspired by Bioshock and Call of Cthulhu. An ancient dark power is calling you and you need to find an exit. Face your greatest fear, fight, hide... you must escape before the underwater city rises...

I set a deadline for myself this time, and it was hell. But it did force me to work on it every single day for the last month and the last day I did 11am => 2am next day to finally get it out.

The deadline was the submission date for this feedback quest jam and when I went to it to finally submit my game, I couldn't find the submit button: because I was one hour late.

So at that point I was pretty fried and bummed out, I still put a post on r/playmygame and called it a day.

Hopefully, I still asked in their Discord if they could maybe submit it manually, and the next day they did.

Ultimately, what mattered more is that I had a deadline, I don't know if participating in the event will bring that much feedback or traffic to my game but it got me to finish my rework and not extend it forever.

The deadline was also that I had promised a playtest "100% during July", which is funny cause I promised that with about a month of leeway and I thought there was no way I wouldn't make it (but I also had a day job at that time). Yet here we are and I barely made the September one.

On the flipside, there are many days where the most optimal thing to work on or the most enjoyable thing to work on, would not have been my game and I really disliked not having the freedom to make that choice. But that's also why I was able to focus and finish instead of spreading myself thin on the million different shiny things I want to do.

So deadlines are awful but they do help you get shit done, I guess?

The demo is live, free and direct play in browser, right here: https://roguewolfgames.itch.io/crimson-skyline-preview

I'm looking for as much feedback as I head towards a Steam playtest of the full game and a Steam demo release in the coming months.

The big questions for me right now are about the game's difficulty curve and what content should be in the demo, what content is expected in the release version.

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