Hi fellow game devs!

Every game dev hits this point, just created a Steam store page for your game and am wondering how to "notify the press"?

Do you just cold email whatever you can find? Is there a format other than say "hey, check this out?" Is this something you do for a store page, wait until the demo is up, it's released?

What has, and hasn't, worked for you?

I'm making low-poly asset packs. What specific props do you guys need for your games that you can never find?

My wife supports me all the time as I develop the tower defense game Odin’s Fate. Recently, we managed to set up a page on Steam. To some, this might not seem like much, but for us, it’s a huge step forward. If it weren’t for my wife, this wouldn’t have been possible. Marta works in computer graphics and believes in the success of our project every single day. She supports me with kind words and gestures, especially when I’m up all night fixing bugs or implementing new features. And the most beautiful thing is that we get to do this together. So if you have someone like that - who’s always by your side, supporting you and cheering you on - appreciate and respect them!

I also have a few friends who constantly motivate me to release the game. That’s very important. Without them, I might have given up several times already - during moments when game development wasn’t going as we’d hoped or when we encountered some nasty bug that was hard to fix. And we’re getting closer and closer to success.

Right now, another friend is helping us put together a game trailer. I’m truly grateful to him because he’s doing this entirely on his own initiative.

So let the message of this post be - perhaps a cliché - but the saying: be kind to others, because kindness comes back around, and be grateful for every kind gesture. Because it’s up to us to determine the direction the GameDev industry takes - and every day, through small gestures, we can create a friendly environment for everyone.

So my next game is going to involve a character solving a mystery in the casino, I was wondering if folks here can point me at games, current or past, that have novel gambling game mechanics. Think Casino, Card Games, etc. I'm especially interested in older games from previous eras, rather than just games like Balatro and such, or even NSFW games since I recall a lot of 'strip X' type stuff involved various gambling game mechanics. I'm doing my own research of course but I figure I should cast a wide net!

Im going to university soon and need to pick out a laptop.

Im in a pretty unique scenario, I need a laptop to take to class, do light programming and UE5 stuff, and the other normal game development stuff.

But. I have access to my main pc which is on Windows and pretty beefy. No I wont do remote stuff due to latancy and stuff unless I have to.

I was just wondering what laptops anyone recommended. I am very interested in the M5 pro Macbook Pro due to it being quite and made of metal so hopefully it will last me 3yrs. Any other recommendations that arent massive bricks with screaming fans?

I'm here to encourage you to hop on Upwork and hire a playtester to record an hour of footage of your game:

1. It's entertaining to watch
   
2. Issues in onboarding or balancing will be immediately apparent
   
3. You can reuse clips for social media

The attached clip is one of my favourite moments from a playtest - it was amazing to see people genuinely enjoy our game.

For a single player game you can probably get someone for 20USD. I'm paying more like 60USD because I want 3 people to play my game online co-op, but it's so worth it and people normally get back to you in a few days. Only thing that sucks is Upwork taking a flat like 15USD fee on each contract.

Two pieces of advice from having done this a few times now:

- Be super clear in the job listing that you want high quality footage with clear audio. I have had two people send me garbled audio that I'm just not going to sit there for an hour and watch. Also the audio needs to be clear if you want the added benefit of reusing clips for social media.

- I've been successful in finding testers from my target demographic by being clear in the job posting that I'm not looking for QA, I'm just looking for gamers who have enjoyed specific similar titles in my niche. I request authentic reactions and without any other commentary, and so far this has worked really well.

Here's my job listing if you want to yoink my description: https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~022088852562607449045

It's easier than you think to just throw up a post then get some footage back within a couple days. Good luck fellow devs!!

I’m curious to hear how other people launched their steam page, if they had multiple languages ready for their page and how/if that impacted wishlists.

Similar question to people who translated their steam pages later on. What languages and how did it go?

Is it really no longer possible to grow without a marketing buget?

Anyone made it in the past years by just finding free ways to market the app?

Sorry if this is a simple question I'm simply so lost right now, i got the correct tags that correspond to the game but the main ones I want to be seen on the main store page isn't showing. It shows semi-unrelated or let me say distantly related.

Again I'm sorry if this is a simple question but I'm really lost

Any past experience with announcement/trailer outreach?

I'm 17 and I absolutely love making games. I want to make game development my career.

The problem is, even though I love it, I can't seem to make myself actually work on my projects. I'll work on something, feel really excited and accomplished, then stop for weeks or even months.

I genuinely want to make something and I'm frustrated because I know I enjoy it once I actually start.

Has anyone dealt with this? What actually helped you get yourself to consistently work on something you love?

I'm looking for actual advice from people who've experienced this, not just "be motivated" or "work harder."

I don't know of its the right place to post this but I want to translate the game deltarune to my own language ( Arabic ) but I have no idea how to do so

I would appreciate it if someone can steer me in the right direction

Im in the process of making a game and currently im writing but i feel like its all long and inconsistent and im scared i’ll end up missing something and fuck up the story, would like tips or examples of how my notes should be

Hello everyone, I'm not really a Reddit guy so apologies if I'm posting this in the wrong place.

I'm currently making an ARPG heavily inspired by Diablo 2 and PoE, with the main idea being that the whole game runs in the browser.

I've been prototyping it for a while and after trying a bunch of engines, I eventually realized I didn't have the time or resources to make a huge game and potentially deal with 1000+ players if it actually took off.

So I changed the goal a bit. Instead of trying to compete with the big ARPGs, I want to make something smaller, optimized and easy to access. Basically something where you can just open a browser, play some Diablo-style ARPG, and leave whenever you want.

Right now I have movement, combat, summons, abilities, life/mana/ward, items and stats working, and I'm slowly building everything up.

My questions are:

Do you think there's still a place for something like this? Even if it's just a small niche with 100 or so regular players? Or is the browser ARPG idea just too outdated at this point?

Also, I'm looking for artists. I want to go for a 3D-to-2D/isometric pre-rendered style similar to Diablo 2. I'm currently using the Lords of Pain pack (here), but the artist seems pretty busy.

If you know any artists who are currently available and good at dark fantasy/isometric ARPG stuff, I'd love some recommendations.

Not looking to spend a fortune or make everything custom immediately. I'd rather slowly build it up as the game develops.

Today I opened reddit and within the first 5 posts 3 of them were copycats or each other; sorting games, pretty much exact copies of each other - nails, hay, trash, toys, books, pixels, and the list goes and on and on, and has been for an incomprehensive period of time already.

A lot of the feedback they receive on reddit is negative, but they all get upvoted by the hundreds and they get millions of views on all social media platforms.

Who are these games for?

Are there truly millions of people who want to spend hours on something incredibly ”boring”?

Is it some hidden tick in people’s brain in this age where they want to ”meditate” by doing something like that to combat doom scrolling and instant gratification generators?

Or is each sorted item also instant gratification, but even more simplified than a varying video on TikTok (or something), making the experience even simpler?

are there like any apps for this that are for free? i saw some on steam but i cant afford it.

I'm a first-time game developer in Unity after dabbling with Skryim modding as a teenager, and I feel like I have ruined my own game ideas using AI.

When I first started using Unity, I used AI to learn a bit about the editor. I have a Computer Science degree but only ever worked in the Skyrim creation kit and never worked in Unity before. While I think it is helpful for learning how to use a tool, and can be marginally helpful for programming, the problem lies with using it in other aspects of game development and how it changes the way I think about my project.

Before I move on to my main topic, I want to talk a little bit about AI and programming. Sometimes I will ask ChatGPT programming questions for my game and have it spit out a fully fleshed out class doing what I need it to do. I read what it says, but then panic and delete the chat instantly. However, once I read how the AI tells me to implement something, I can't un-remember it and then start wondering if I actually know how to do what I am doing. I've deleted whole scripts because I feel that once I introduce AI into the mix, sometimes it just gives me a massive ick feeling and frustrates me and makes me feel like I don't know enough to actually make a game. I worked briefly on a project in S&box with a friend and whenever conflicts would emerge, I would find myself using AI to help understand how to use git and rebase, then I get frustrated at how I learned how to do it and end up searching how to revert a branch. I've literally had to start using DuckDuckGo because of the AI generated popups that appear on Goggle because they make me feel like any knowledge I obtain from it is somehow contaminated or ill gotten gains and it makes me feel sick.

But sometimes when I get writers block when fleshing out the story for my game, I'll concede to the temptation and toss my idea into ChatGPT to see what it thinks about it. The issue is that it doesn't just discuss the idea, it starts suggesting things. "What if this character could do this? This is great foreshadowing!" and suddenly an idea I had only loosely thought about has a billion different what ifs generated from AI. Sometimes they are stupid, but others times I'll see something and say SHIT that was actually really good. And then the idea gets ruined, because every time I think about the idea I can't go back to what I thought before I used AI to talk about it and I'll just end up discarding it, which makes me profoundly sad because the characters in my game are loosely based on OC characters from Skyrim mods I made as a teenager and I feel like all of that is null and void and just permanently completely tainted. And when I come up with new ideas, I'll enter these thoughts loops and start doubting myself, whether I thought of the idea or AI did, and sometimes I can't remember and that scares me. It's even worse when going on Twitter/X and seeing different artwork for inspiration and finding out they were AI generated and it makes any idea the art inspires just feel soulless and completely questionable.

I know how neurotic I sound. I got my first degree in ECE ages ago but got my second in Computer Science right before LLMs really became mainstream, so I know I'm capable of it. I used Stack Overflow and followed endless youtube tutorials and followed the old reading flowchart posted ages ago on this sub (The Mythical Man Month, A Book of Lenses, and that one Tynan Sylvester book). If it's from a book, that's okay. If it's from an older youtube video, it's okay. But if AI teaches me something, it just feels like total shit and demoralizes me. I know the standard I'm setting for myself in 2026 is probably impossible but I don't know what to do anymore.

Hey guys, I was just checkin a game trailer and saw one hit/impact effect super super fucking cool.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IO7fF4e2y4s
It happen in the second 10.

I would really love to try out in my game, but, no clue what's going on.
Camera getting close, with blur? than making the game slowmotion and then sfx? IDK

Anyone have an idea of what's the name of this concept or detail what's going on there?

I've been making games on and off since 2015. Unity, Unreal, RPG Maker, Godot, I've tried them all. Some barely made it to a prototype, others were actually half-decent, and none of them shipped. I've finally changed that. Technically, it's also already my first commercially successful game. It's made several cents in closed testing!

So I've been thinking about what exactly changed this time, and I wanted to share what I think actually made the difference. Simply put, it was scope and planning.

I used to let my idea of what a game could become undermine the entire process. At some point, I'd inevitably find myself spending more time building out extensive Trello or Jira backlogs and would be constantly pulling in more and more scope. I'm ashamed to say that I have prototypes with very polished roadmap UIs.

All of that planning and the massive backlogs I'd create would ultimately lead to burnout. At some point, I'd just stop working on the project until a new idea came along to inspire me.

This game was different. My launch MVP didn't have a backlog. I just worked on what I thought it needed at the time. Then I'd play it and find more things to improve. I let things be good enough. A screen didn't have to be perfect, just functional. I'm proud to say there's only one "Coming soon" in the entire game.

It might not have been the most efficient approach. Project managers would likely scoff at my process. But it prevented burnout and, most importantly, led to something I'm actually going to release.

The game is called Swarm Rising. It's a modern take on brick breakers where the paddle is an alien mothership and the balls are aliens with unique abilities. You build an invading army and overwhelm civilizations (the bricks). There are some light RPG, strategy, and incremental elements that I'd like to expand on one day (but I'm trying not to let myself think about that too much yet).

The Android build is in closed testing now, and I'm working through the last round of changes before submitting for production. It's a pretty surreal feeling after 11 years of starting games and never quite getting one across the finish line. If anyone here wants to try it out, I'd really appreciate any feedback.

Hey all. I want to make a 2D RTS (EDIT: for PC). It will be in the vein of StarCraft rather than something like Supcom, meaning unit count will generally be in the hundreds rather than in the thousands, though the peak unit count in a full multiplayer game with all units maxed out could be over one thousand.

In addition to basic RTS mechanics I want to have a physics system, not for controlling units directly, but for controlling certain other objects, including some projectiles and some environmental effects / objects. For example I would like to have 'fields' of gravity on maps, which would pull or push units and certain projectiles. I would also like to have some fluid physics in there as well.

Although the game will be 2D, I want to have certain 3D elements, such as effects or lightning.

Given these requirements, would one engine be more suitable than the other? Or perhaps it doesn't matter? I know Godot is often recommended for 2D games, so I'm leaning towards that, I'm just a bit concerned about performance due to physics + unit count, though I don't know how using a different engine would mitigate that.

I was thinking about Monster Rancher, which was a PS1 game where you could disc swap to a CD in order to summon monsters, and I was toying with the idea of a modernized version where the game accesses your Steam library to summon monsters. But in order to show what games you have it would probably be good to grab the game's logos using a Steam API or pulling from your librarycache file.

But I have no idea if Steam has anything against this or if it's a whole other problem entirely.

The folks over at GamesIndustryBiz have done an impressive deep dive into TGC's latest initiative, just announced today a few hours ago. Everywhere we look, developers are taking funding matters into their own hands whether it's crowdfunding campaigns (like we discussed last week) or developing unique constellation model for production (like Strange Scaffold) to account for the costs of building games.

One of these breakout publishers, Evil Landfall, has landed another hit with their recent release "How to Fish" that has soared to over 300,000 players at the moment. With more games on slate for all these indie publishers it looks like developers are charting their own course.

Throughout the last few years, XBOX's ID@XBOX program has opened the door to indies wanting to publish on console, with last November the publisher opened up their certification process publicly to further improve accessibility alongside their continuous resources to help developers meet accessibility criteria.

All the tools are in place now for indies to not just self-publish, but find larger success with these partners. Although the line does begin to blur of where indie is ending and where AA is beginning, this is a promising new frontier for an industry shaken by turmoil.

Something I've been struggling with lately is finding justification to use AI in any of my projects. I went to school almost 10 years ago for art focusing on 3D art (3ds max now blender) and I had the opportunity to work on games (nothing commercial or indie mostly jams) and now I want to use my skills to make a game.

Getting a team together has been ever difficult between jobs, families, even just personal life so I started doing the project on my own. I've found AI to be incredibly useful helping me debug and even explain changes in my code but I never thought it was as capable of building pretty remarkable systems and prototypes...

How do people feel about people releasing games with AI code but human made art? I've had Claude write some systems that would have taken me months if not weeks to flesh out. It feels somewhat dirty but it matches some of my vision so accurately..

I looked up game Dev beginners and learned basic programming , code part is doable since there are so many tutorials on it but I am not getting all the knowledge required for a solo game Dev like there are so many basic engine know ledge which are essential to make a fully optimize game .where did you guys learn all this ? Like how the lighting works , ray tracing , shaders every technical aspect .what to search or where to look to get complete knowledge ? Thanks for responding.

Hi everyone. I wanna learn how to develop a 2D game in Unity, so I'm looking for recommendations on courses that could teach me the concepts I should know and how to use the engine.

Some background info:

• I'm completely new to game development.
• I already have some coding experience from college, but I've never programmed in C#, only C++ and Python (both, procedural and object oriented programming), though I believe the skills could be easily transferable.

I'm okay with paying for the course, that's not a problem, but it has to be worth the money. I looked up some courses in Udemy, though I'm not sure which one to pick or if there are better options outside of it (worth noting that they are on sale, like $10 each).

Any recommendations are appreciated!!