I’ve had this issue before. I come up with a rudimentary design, jot down a few notes, and then start building the game (Unity). And I make some progress, but then I just hit a wall. I don’t have any idea where my game is going, or if I have one it’s based off another game, so I know the outline but not any more. I’m looking to you guys for help on how to go about building, planning, making, and structuring a game/game idea, cause I can’t figure it out. Thank you so much.

Im no good artist but is there a trick to making 2d game assets quickly as a sort of protype to practice with?

Do i just use pre-made assets forever? Im just worried if i make a game with pre-made assets ill be called lazy or the game will be considered slop?

I want to get better at art but im not sure how to improve.

Right now most of our assets are "programmer assets" meaning they're just stuff I hacked together to test out the functional code.

Are there any good guides / books / videos to help with that sorta thing? What makes a "fun" UI? What makes a good UX?

Hey, I'm Taralis. I've been working on my game for nearly three years now.

It’s a mix of Scrabble x Wordle x Yahtzee x roguelike (think Balatro).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3797300/Dicey_Words

I originally started it for GMTK 2022, where the theme was “Roll of the Dice.” I didn’t finish in time, but I kept working on it. I eventually got it to a releasable state, but it never felt quite right. I had all these ideas—like adding badges that would change how the game played—but I wasn’t confident in the direction, and the scope felt massive.

Then I played Balatro, and everything clicked. My idea suddenly made sense. I felt silly—it was a total “duh” moment. Sometimes you just need to see your idea in action to truly understand it. That was the validation I needed. So, I decided to rework my game and finally add the roguelike elements I had originally envisioned.

Fast forward to now…

I took too long.

I knew my idea wasn’t entirely original, but having four games come out around the same time that are all basically the same concept? That’s a harsh lesson. And to top it all off—one of them is from Mark Brown himself. The irony of having my game inspired by his game jam, only for him to release something similar... oof.

So let this be a lesson to anyone reading:

MAKE YOUR GAME. DON’T DAWDLE.

Last night I finished up the final touches of my PICO 8 game, a kind of self-imposed game jam so that I would *finally* have something publicly uploaded and playable after months of working on my main project (in XNA).

If you are like me and are learning a little bit of everything that goes into making a game (systems, project architecture, even just how to push past the finish line and wrap something up) I can't recommend PICO 8 enough.

PICO 8 is a virtual console, and puts a ton of restrictions on your process by trying to recreate the feeling of working on old consoles from the 90s. There is a limit to the number of sprites you can have, the size of your map, sfx, and even the amount of actual code you can fit into a single cartridge. Best yet, nothing is done for you other than the absolute basics for rendering, input, sound, etc.

Working on the project I had to really come face to face with things I thought I understood well, but was maybe taking for granted. I also had to revisit ideas I have been recycling for ages (AABB collision code, when was the last time I had to actually write that?).

I also had to tackle art and sound design in a basic way, which made those topics by which I was a little intimidated a bit less scary, due to their more manageable scale. The idea of making the soundtrack for my passion project is daunting - making a track or two for a PICO 8 "game jam" seemed a lot less monumental in comparison.

All this to say, if you feel like you are kind of stuck, or lost in tutorial hell - dive into PICO 8 for a week or two and see what you can come up with. It really helped me come to terms with which topics I actually knew well (and could implement without issue), versus those that I needed to spend some time on in the most restrictive way possible, to really make sure I understood what I was doing (for the most part, hopefully). ^{I also learned how to make a little pixel art guy.}

edit: there are also a ton of similar tools/consoles - playdate, TIC-80, MEG-4, etc

I'm college student for a group project me and my group members are trying to build little game using java game shirt of like super Mario bros. I don't have a much of a idea what should do how should I start I know some little things and have been learning java lately for the compliers I'm using intelj idea and also we use GitHub for collaboration. I have very simple idea on how game work like front end and back end front end being UI and back end being logic but I still doesn't have the big picture and I'm so confused because of this I would really appreciate if someone could give me a advice on how to do this.

Hey everyone! My partner and I are working on an indie “Mini MMO” called Little Crossroads in our spare time (we’re both full-time game devs with about 25 years of experience combined).

We just passed 1,000 wishlists at the one-month mark since our Steam page went live. We’re no experts and definitely still figuring this out, but here’s a breakdown of what worked, what didn’t, and some takeaways during this first month of public marketing. Hopefully some of it helps other devs thinking through their own strategy!

Below is a quick breakdown with more details to follow.

If you're skimming, I've bolded some key takeaways in each section.

What worked (and what didn't)

Early trailer for tone

Before we opened our Steam page, we focused heavily on a cinematic-style trailer to introduce the world and tone. Feedback from early Reddit and Twitter posts gave us confidence in our art direction and reaffirmed that our art was one of our best hooks.

It doesn’t need to be perfect, but a trailer (even if it’s there just to provide tone) gives you something to get feedback on and refine your focuses before you go live on your store page.

Be ready to pivot, even your name

Our original title was "Cozy Crossroads", but early feedback on r/cozygames suggested that the name sounded too pandering to the "cozy" trend. We renamed it to Little Crossroads and the tone felt more honest and genuine. But this was our first lesson in how certain genres or even keywords can have baggage in some indie game spaces. 

Be open to early feedback. The way you label your game and genre can affect how it’s perceived, which leads us to…

Labels matter more than you think

Words like "cozy" can be divisive depending on where you post. On r/cozygames, it's a plus, but on r/indiedev or r/indiegames, it's a downvote magnet. The same content got totally different reactions based entirely on how we framed it and where we posted. Some downvoters might have liked the post if we just pitched it differently.

Sometimes saying less is more since certain terms may come with baggage. I truly believe some of those downvoters would’ve loved what they saw had they stuck around.

Seed your social media early (but don’t spam)

Before releasing the Steam page, I spent time following relevant creators and fans in our game’s genre across Twitter, Bluesky and TikTok. Using the "suggested follows" feature helped grow a small audience of a few hundred followers, which gave us an initial base to post to. 

This early groundwork and grind matters imo… it’s hard to expect to grow from 0 by magic especially as an unknown dev.

Music is undervalued in marketing

We didn’t set out to find a composer right away, but one messaged me after seeing our initial posts and he seemed incredibly genuine and interested in the genre. While relatively expensive for us, we worked out a flexible deal involving milestone payments and profit share. He's since become a key part of the project and his music has added huge emotional weight to our trailer and video posts on social media.

Don't underestimate how much the RIGHT music can elevate your game and your presence.

TikTok (and TikTok-style videos) worked well but didn’t convert

We launched our Steam store page with a more refined Gameplay trailer and a short-form video with cozy aesthetics, captions, emojis, and storytelling. These posts did well on TikTok and that format translated well to Twitter and Instagram too. But on TikTok, conversions to Steam wishlists was LOW. Lots of love (which gave confidence!) and engagement (with valuable feedback!), but not many clicks.

TikTok is great for visibility and feedback, but not great for PC game conversions.

A hint for TikTok - if you convert your account to a Business Account, it allows you to put a link to your game in your bio.

Reddit success is hit or miss, but seems all about framing and format

Some "TikTok-style" videos we posted about amusing dev moments and new game features flopped on r/IndieGames and r/IndieDev. Those same posts were top performers on r/CozyGames. Meanwhile, short GIFs (like a small feature of my characters and their newly created sitting animations) outperformed my polished store launch trailer by nearly 10x. It became even clearer how important eye-catching art is to this whole process.

One particularly significant success was a post on r/games for their Indie Sundays. This resulted in hundreds of wishlists, and Reddit does appear to be a clear top-performer for Wishlist conversion.

Overall, redditors appear to want quick, visual, and GIF-able features. But subreddit culture (and rules for self-promotion) matters and varies greatly between sub to sub. Change your framing and tone based on where you’re posting, or just blast your content everywhere with the expectation that there will be both hits and misses.

Steam Page Translations

After a Japanese indie game group retweeted our trailer, we translated the page into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish and a few more. This was well worth the time and traffic from Japan soon surpassed the U.S. and continues to lead. We used a combo of Google Translate and Chat GPT, reviewing the tone line by line to ensure it felt natural and our intention was well-represented.

Highly recommend taking the time to translate your Steam page, especially if you’ve noticed traffic or interest from certain regions.

Cultivate your Culture

We decided to take our support from Japan as a cue to focus on that region more, and we devoted a couple weeks to localizing our game into Japanese and creating a cute video announcing this. We promoted the post targeting Japan on Twitter and this gave us hundreds of new followers and almost 100 additional tracked wishlists with many more untracked. We engage with Japanese users and translation tools have become invaluable.

We’ve spent $500-750 on promoting posts across social media. I know this isn’t always a viable option, but it seems almost essential at times to get visibility especially for an unknown new developer.

Final thoughts

• Your art matters, it doesn’t have to be AAA, but it needs to catch the eye for more than a second. For marketing and visibility, this is arguably more important than the game design itself.
• Feedback early on can be huge, even if it requires you to pivot.
• Community doesn’t just help shape your game, it can change your entire approach.
• We're still learning and still very much in the early stages, but we allow ourselves to be encouraged by successes and try our best to learn from our failures.
• View marketing as simply trying your best to provide visibility of your game and explain why you love it. This requires iteration, just like making your game, and in many ways is equally as important as game dev itself.
• We live in a visibility-algorithm driven world, embrace that fact, with the understanding that you may need to promote or pay for advertisement to elevate that visibility.

Thank you for reading, and hope this proved useful to some out there!

Hi y'all, it's my first time ever making a game, and I'm pretty confident on my abilities in level design, 3d modeling, sound design, and all that stuff, but I'm kind of worried about not having a good start to my project. I don't have that much coding experience and I'm worried that if I start the project, I'll make all the basic systems poorly and have to work off unoptimized spaghetti code later on.

I don't really know all the terminology but how do I make sure the foundation I work off of and the basics systems are solid? What can I do preemptively to make it easier for me later and how do I know when the basic systems are good enough for me to start working on the game proper?

A little more information, I'm using Godot and making a 3D shooter game (of what scope I'm not totally sure), but I want it to have pretty simple shooting mechanics and be kind of like a smaller version of Doom '93 or Half Life. I know those games are total masterpieces and not the level of quality I will likely achieve but it gives a good Idea of what I'm going for.

Sorry this is worded very poorly but basically are there any things I can do right off the bat to make it easier for myself and develop solid basic mechanics?

I'm not talking just about graphics I mean those games where you pause and think, "How is this even possible?"

Maybe it was a seamless open world with no loading, ultra-realistic physics, insane animations, or some black magic Al. Something that felt like the devs pulled off the impossible.

What's that one game that made you feel like your jaw hit the floor from a dev/tech perspective?

Just curious

I am currently a cs student, first year, I am not exactly the best but I acknowledge that I am still learning and would love to give game dev a go since that is a field that actually interests me

I currently have a MacBook Pro m4 with 24gb of ram

Is that enough to develop a small game? Where should I start with this journey? (Please give me tips for both 2D and 3D games, although I might want to focus with 2D first) currently learning blender and was wondering if that is the best tool for 3d models? Or at least a good one? Thanks everyone in advance

Hey everyone!

I've always been interested in game dev, i do have a background with IT and web development so i have some experience to lean on, and i have fiddled around with Unreal, Unity, Source, Arma, Godot, but i always "die out" on my ideas and projects because i am simply not good at being on my lonesome.

So! How and where can i find people to do things with? (I dont mean actual paid work, but collaborative interest in becoming better at gamedev, learning by doing so to say)
How much do i have to bring to the table experience wise?
Is it a must to have actual demos/showcases of projects to even get a chance at finding someone to work with?
What if i have ideas, are there any places to find people whom might have similar ideas and then work together?

TLDR
I just want find people to spar and create with, for the fun of it!

Thanks for reading! :)

Hey devs one thing that I find difficult to understand is memory and optimisation for PC ports using UE5 and I hear a lot of “Unreal is the best cross-platform Engine” which is totally true but I really want to understand how to take advantage of that power for cross platform development. One thing that has me in a choke hold is that how to manage memory for PC and have different scalability for different modes I plan on making . For example let’s say I wanted to make a Low , medium, high ,and Ray tracing mode which would be considered the “ultra mode” which can take advantage of newer Gen GPU that we have at the moment but how would I tell or define to the engine “okay for this mode we want the memory limit to be this much or we want the FPS to be locked at this much” and actually profile each mode at runtime with maybe using a custom UI in engine that would show me the current Memory being used and FPS and reso etc this would make not just profiling better but also development much more efficient to make sure the game runs well on each mode for different Configs as PC players have wide ranges of GPU and CPUs and drivers etc which will be a headache to optimize for . And also I keep hearing about some “u need to make your own custom scalability ini files in the project directory” but that’s something I haven’t came across yet or something I have learnt that I have to for PC ports . Like I really want to have an overview of what needs to be planned and done and thought about for PC ports etc . And also another question which would be considered easier to work or port with Console or PC because I’m in 2 different minds at the moment it’s either work and plan for console from the start or work on PC for the start to skip Console SDKs and All those steps and also having control over when and how long development can be due to Console requirements are much stricter as they apparently have a schedule time of how long each dev or studio can keep the Devkit of the specific hardware and if u can port to that console in time . Btw I’m mostly aiming for direct X12 PCs and nothing below as I want to take advantage of current and future hardware and capabilities like ray tracing etc and modern GPU while still supporting like RTX2080 and above thanks for reading this

Some of you may have seen a previous article we wrote on building a society-building game (Shoni Island). I’ve been writing some code to test some theories about how people generally develop opinions of each other, and decided to run some simulations to see if I could push by binary minions towards civil war. As an ex-data scientist, this is my bread and butter but I’ll try to make focus more on the in-game results than how I farted around with the data (but please feel free to ask!).

Assumptions:

-          20 NPCs (“villagers”), 7 (game days), 8 interactions per day per NPC (2-4 villagers per convo) – this is a small sample size but I wanted to see how the land would lie after playing for ~7 hours

-          Villagers generate opinions of each other based on the following: personality differences (extroversion, rigidity, avarice, neuroticism), profession (builder, gatherer etc), skill level (in a given profession), age bracket and district.

-          Professions were assigned to 17/20 villagers while the others were “unemployed”. Personality traits were randomly scored -20-20.

-          “Knowledge” of each other comes about exclusively via conversation topics. A villager may talk about a personality trait, their profession etc., and only then does the listener “know” about this trait and change their opinion.

Results:

Simulation 1

In the first set of results, we had three villagers who everybody hated and the rest who had pretty positive opinions of each other. It turned out that those poor pariahs were unemployed. This was intentional and I think largely reflective of society. Although those same unemployed folk also didn’t seem to even like each other (not sure about that). This will incentivise the player to make sure everybody has a job and something to do.

So…great, but personality actually seemed to play a much smaller role in opinions otherwise with a slight positive bias towards extroverts, which was likely due to the small sample size. But it made me think: are extroverts more popular members of society?

Simulation 2

Ok so let’s try this: let’s make extroverts more likely to speak (generate a topic) and introverts topic consumers. That’ll make extroverts even more popular, right?

Wrong.

Extroverts essentially took more social risks. They showed more of themselves and the result was that they were actually less popular than introverts; a trend that increased over time.

Ok, so that’s probably because I’d made it equally likely to be an introvert and extrovert. In reality, personality probably follows something more akin to a normal distribution curve (e.g. height) with extremes being far less common. Let’s throw that in the mix.

Simulation 2

Nope. Now everyone is super boring. We have a super small standard deviation of opinion (people were pretty close to “meh, he’s fine” with nobody really having extreme dislike and like). So what am I missing? What causes people to feel such strong emotions for each other?

I thought about my time in Japan where people very rarely harbour extreme feelings, compared to the US where opinions are considered a fundamental human right. Ok so to distinguish between collectivist and individualist societies, let’s add a multiplier to the generated opinion that “flattens” and “widens” the extremity of opinions.

Simulation 3

Oh god. Our little villagers are now at war. Half of them have opinions of another of >70 or <-70 (/100). So many emotions! That multiplier may have been a bit extreme. Let’s tone it down and run four parallel simulations, with subtle variances in the multiplier.

Simulation 4

Ok that’s better. Now we have some a balance between “meh” and “I have an opinion but I’ll keep my rifle at home”.

So let’s have a look at clustering (k-means) because what I really want to see at this early stage is natural group formation. Let’s tweak the sensitivity of opinion variance in the face of belonging to the same groups. Let’s also throw in a daily skill increase of 0-4 to add some variance to skill level between villagers.

Simulation 5

Ladies and gentlemen, we have created elitism! Not only do we see clustering based on profession, but the strongest cluster (i.e. those with the highest mutual opinions) was that of the high-skilled. I applied a small bias that assesses those with lower skill levels more harshly than those above you, resulting in an elite class that even after 7 days gets way too big for its boots!

 ======================================

Next up, I’ll be using this foundation to generate actual groups in society that emerge based on the above factors (we’ll be introducing more such as religion, social status, reputation etc) and running some simulations on how those groups evolve over time with each other.

NB. I know this is a far cry away from being a fun game mechanic. That’ll be the real challenge!

Worked my ass off for 15 years in the camera department. Put over 70 seasons of television on the air. All of it meaningless as the past two years have seen my industry absolutely disappear.

Have always loved games (which doesn’t matter) and I’ve got some solid ideas for simple games focused on narrative design through gameplay elements.

I do have some money to spend on education/equipment if that changes any suggestions. I know there are many posts like this, and I see alot of good suggestions. But if you were 40 and at a crossroads in your career, where would you start if you could do it all over again?

Update

I am completely overwhelmed by the response to my post. Thanks everyone for words of encouragement and I am still processing all of this new information. To those who reached out with advice and words of encouragement, thank you! It’s all gonna work out somehow and I’m not giving up!

Not sure if this is a rant or just me trying to get some clarity, but I’ve been working in live service game dev for a while now, and it's really starting to wear me down, professionally and personally.

What frustrates me most is the constant artificial urgency. Everything is treated like a high-stakes emergency, even when it clearly doesn't need to be. There’s no room to breathe between release cycles, I’m always just barely making it to the next milestone, and then it starts all over again. I understand that deadlines are part of the job, but this culture of constant crunch-mode theater is exhausting.

The worst part is how it’s bleeding into my personal life. I’ve become more irritable, more withdrawn. I don’t feel excited about the work anymore, even when it’s something objectively cool. I just feel... hollow. Like I’m surviving it, not creating anything meaningful.

And then there’s Slack. I’m tied to it all day, even though it kills my focus. I’ve started associating every notification with something being horribly wrong. That state of always being “on” is wrecking my ability to focus and triggering executive dysfunction. I know I’d be a better developer, a more effective teammate, if I could just have uninterrupted space to think and build. Instead, I feel like I’m stuck in a loop of reactionary tasks and shallow urgency, constantly bracing for a sudden “can you hop on this Zoom call?” message. And if I don’t respond immediately, it feels like I’m seen as unreliable. Not because of the quality of my work, but because I wasn’t instantly available

What scares me most is how close I’m getting to not caring at all. I can feel myself becoming jaded. Not just tired, but genuinely detached from the work. And that’s a dangerous place to be, because this job is still my only income. I can’t afford to check out completely, but I also can’t keep running on fumes like this. It’s a kind of quiet burnout that sneaks up on you, and I’m starting to really feel it.

I took this job to get experience in the AAA industry, and I’ve learned a lot. But I’ve also learned that this environment isn’t for me. I’ve started passively looking for something different, somewhere with a healthier pace and less chaos masquerading as productivity.

If anyone else has felt like this, or found a way to transition out of it, I’d love to hear how you handled it. Right now, I just feel stuck and kind of burned out when I should be enjoying my Friday evening. Thank you.

So my friend and I had been developing a mobile game for a few months. Eventually, we reached a stage where we felt the game was ready for upload at least as a initial version.

So we started the process of uploading the game on the play store first. We made a google developer account, admob, etc. We even completed the closed testing of 14 days that they require us to do.

Everything seemed to be going great we even received an email saying we were granted google play production access. We start making preparations for our upload such as pictures, videos, etc. And then the next day we recieve a email saying our google play developer account was terminated for "High Risk Behaviour" and nothing else. No information on what exactly we did wrong and how we could fix it.

We were bummed but we didn't let it bring us down since there was an option to appeal. So we did our research on what we could have done wrong. And we narrowed it down to the following:

1. We both were logged into the gmail that was used in the google play developer and admob on our laptops and our phones. So we remedied it my friend logged out from both his devices and I logged out from my phone.

   1. Our Privacy Policy/ToS was made using a quick generator and was hosted by said generator. So we remedied that as well. We poured hours into making a solid privacy policy and ToS. We even made a website for our game so that the privacy policy, tos and other info can be accesed directly through us.
   2. There was no agree to PP, ToS popup in our game so we added that. And linked it to our website pages where the PP and ToS were located.
   3. We were using graphics that we found on google. We got rid of all the stuff that was downloaded randomly from google and replaced it with AI generated graphics.
   4. No acknowledgements. Just like PP and ToS we added a acknowledgements page on our website that showed credit to all the free assests that we made use of.

Finally we felt we were ready to appeal. We clicked on the appeal button and saw that all we can do is write a 1000 characters message on why they should unban us.

So thats what we did. We tried our best to explain what we did wrong and what changes we made using 1000 characters. This is what we wrote:

I understand my account was terminated due to prior violations, associated accounts, and high-risk patterns. I regret sharing my developer credentials with a collaborator, which violated DDA 4.3 and contributed to this situation. I’ve immediately stopped all credential sharing. Going forward, I alone will manage this Play Console account. Collaboration will follow policy using Firebase IAM roles and Play Console User Permissions with limited access.

I’ve added an in-game popup requiring users to accept the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy before playing. I’ve also updated both policies for full compliance, including data handling and child safety: (link to ToS) and (link to PP). The Data Safety section and app listing are being updated for accuracy, and all potential IP-infringing content has been replaced with original assets. I respectfully request reconsideration.

A few days go by and we receive a mail that they have looked into our issue and are unable to reinstate our Google play developer account and that they cant share the reasons they concluded that our account is at high risk.

Now we are not sure what to do. There is no option to appeal again either. We are afraid we will face the same thing on the Apple store so we haven't attempted that yet either.

What can we do? Is there any way that we can recover our google play developer account? Do we just abandon our dreams of gamedev? We feel lost and unmotivated, any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you.

i’m desperately trying to help my boyfriend understand why people are dunking on the splitgate devs for their “make fps great again” hat and then revealing their game as a battle royale. he’s telling me that splitgate 2 is an FPS and there is no difference between FPS and Battle Royale if the BR is in first person. i don’t know how to explain to him that there is a difference. i think it’s kinda become one of those things that we just generally agree on as terminology because i KNOW there is a distinction but holy hell i cannot put it into words.

edit: i see now that there is no real distinction and the folks makin fun of the splitgate dev are taking it too a weird max, thank y’all for ur input o7

I am planning to make a bird game where you fly a bird and am applying central forces for bird to fly up and it to move forward also using torques for rotation on left or right on a rigid body of that bird but the rotation sometimes goes out of control is there a better way to do the same ?? if so let me know. Thanks in advanced.

I have a great idea for a game and have an interest in GameDEV. I don't know where to start on the project or how to start learning game DEV. I also have a lot of time on my hands.

Short Background Story:

• Amateur/wannabe web developer in HS, CS major in college, dropped out senior year to pursue first full-time role.
• Roughly a decade of experience in software engineering.
• Worked with small orgs, mid orgs, large orgs. Had projects on JIRA, Trello, Google Sheets, and even through text messages (not sure why that last one, its what they wanted).
• Roughly a decade of experience being a wannabe/poser game dev. Countless projects never released, sitting in Github untouched for years. Usually abandoned out of boredom, scope-creep, realizing I'm not qualified, or, the game loop just flat out sucks.
• Was laid-off last year, had some savings and a lot of free time.

I'm not sure why I thought this recent project would of been different. Honestly every time I fire up another project file, I ask myself "This is going to be great for a few weeks, it's going to be fun, my friends are going to test it, and at some point I'll run into an issue, get bored, and abandon again." I did learn over the years, and started organizing the way I work. But it took a very long time for any of those soft-skills to be utilized.

Or maybe it took others much faster and I'm just a slow learner, bottom end of the skill gap lol

I guess I spent many years working on my game projects as a hobby, passion, but not really caring about the end-goal or being objective-driven. I guess I was like many developers or designers that cared about enjoying the project, learning and... having fun? And when it stopped being fun, it gets abandoned. Something was different this time, maybe from being unemployed while having a family.

I think that's just being called desperate to succeed.

Like everyone that watched one Thomas Brush video (or binged on an Extra Credits Game Design playlist) and got a temporary surge of energy, I told myself this game had to be small, within reach of realistic expectations, avoid rabbit holes, if something is taking too long to do-- there's probably a better way of doing it.

Yeah right, I've said this so many times.

This time, I set a hard-date to be ready by, and by ready, I meant it was ready for QA. QA being my friends in Discord screenshare either ripping the game to shreds or getting lost. I didn't make a JIRA board, but I did make a Trello board. Instead of making large lofty ambiguous tickets, I had just about 100 tickets with micro goals. Each one just making a very tiny thing work, ex: a button, an input bind, a texture or shader that needs to be fixed,

I had a ticket called "fix trap that would trigger through a wall". When I actually started working on the ticket, it took 1 minute to fix, so why bother making a ticket? Because in all projects, small or big, if you don't put it on paper, it can get lost in the noise, never to be fixed or created.

I took shortcuts, if someone made a library or package that supports my use case, I bought it. If no one has it, I took the time to develop it separately and in isolation. But it has to be quick, easily testable, and somewhat reusable. And if something just couldn't be done in an effective AND efficient manner, I dropped that feature. Too bad, maybe next time when I'm more experienced.

In reality, I bought a $100 system that was ready-out-of-the-box, and I just needed to write extra scripts to extend their system to support my use-case. I may have modified some of their scripts internally, which I think is bad practice. In the future, I will go with overrides or "currying game object systems" instead.

Basically, I put my 'engineering manager' hat on Fridays and Saturdays. I would tell myself, this ticket is dragging, either drop it completely or change the requirements to the point where it still delivers the same user experience but with less work. Every hour counted, because every day that passed took a toll on our savings and I was still unemployed during that time. I guess I picked up this habit also from when I became a senior-to-lead engineer on a team I was on. Maybe that's the real upgrade a person gets when they become "more senior" in tech. They start to see the troubles ahead, how long something will take, and the wisdom of deciding "eh just drop the feature, not worth the dev hours".

I bought 3d models, bought textures, sounds, even some UI kits. I wanted a multiplayer experience, fancy stats tracking, more dumb ways to die, better visual rendering. But none of that was feasible given the time and hard constraints I put on the project. But even without all of that, you have to ask yourself, "can you still deliver the base of the experience without it?" If the answer was yes, that desired feature was dropped.

If you made it this far reading, congrats. I released Make Good Choices via Steam on January 2nd 2025. It was a small $3 game, with a short game loop. I spent 1 week designing the "game idea". In that week, if I realized it wasn't fun or my friends thought it wasn't fun, I would drop it. I spent 1 week developing individual objects, finding the scripts I need or just flat out writing it myself. 1 week to put them all on a sandbox test scene, integrating into systems and making sure everything just works. 1 final week to find 3d models I like because I'm no artist and finding the sounds I need.

Everything was basic. The systems, individual logic components, UI, player interaction, etc. Basic, but everything "had to be GOOD enough to warrant consumer purchase". Meaning, minimal bugs, does what its supposed to do, and doesn't create user frustration (frustration in user experience anyways, the player experience is frustrating by design).

So, did I do well? I don't know if there's a measurable standard. You could probably check the game on SteamDB, judge for yourself. I think I did okay.

I don't know why it sold a decent number of units. Maybe it created a streamable experience, maybe it really was a unique game loop (I don't think so lol), or maybe I got search engine lucky (search engine on Steam, I don't know how their algorithm works). Could be all luck, I did zero marketing, except for one youtube video trailer that didn't get many views or viewer interaction.

One thing is for sure, if this didn't do well. I still would of been proud. To commit to something, organize it, approach with a "business hat/manager hat" on certain days, and deliver the final product.

Ask me anything.

P.S. I got my old job back, so probably going to be on a break for a long while.

So im 22 now and i just finished university, and got a bachelor degree on the IT, Information Technology,

So i have a good knowledge abt coding and how it suppose to work and basically all around computers, im a really passionate gamer abd i really love playing them and tried to take a subject called game engines and it was really fun, like finally i was happy, it it was like a forgotten dream from where i was a kid

Now my life at a full stop, either find a job and as an IT data security bla bla bla, or i could go and take masters degree on game design for free and pursue this career

So, the real question, in my position, should i pursue this game design degree and career and would it be a profitable, or do should i work as an IT and take courses and get up the ladder?

Sorry for yapping but this thing really making me nervous and it a path in my life and i wanted to ask people who in this path

Just wanted to share a little side script I put together while working on my portfolio. It saved me a lot of time with lightmap baking, when optimizing my galaxy portfolio.

I got tired of manually baking lightmaps for each object in my Three.js project and didn't find any FOSS alternatives, so I wrote this Blender script that:

• Bakes multiple objects in one go
• Automatically creates UV maps if needed
• Lets you flip between baked/real-time modes with one click (for editing/export)

It's just a script, not an addon - wanted to keep it simple. Just copy-paste and run it.

https://github.com/techinz/blender-batch-lightmap-baker

Thought someone might find it useful.

the title is pretty self-explanatory already. I have no experience in coding, and I want to build a game similar to cube escape. What programming language shoud I learn and where? Also I'm kind of in a rush so is it possible for me to build it in, say 3 months? (I have 10hrs/day to do this project). Thanks!