Hello everyone I was thinking the other day about the resident evil item that brings a limitation to the amount of times the player can save the game: the ink ribbon. I always think it was really cool and I perfectly understand why it's not used anymore but I think it could be possible to bring it back with some modification: stats increase.

First I want to make clear Im not a game developer. I'm just a dude who like games and have an idea and want some feedback.

The thing is: If the item that allows you to save the game (Let's call it IR) also gives you stats or passives or anything in return for not saving the game it could be nice.

Cool things like:

1. Roleplay: The IR can give you bigger stats based of the amount of IR you have but if each IR give you different stats you can save the game using those who give you something you don't need. Let's say you are playing a souls like and you are building Strength, you can use your dex IR to save the game. This make the others IR you are saving some kind of alternative lvl.

2)Exploration: If the IR is a reward you get by looking around or doing alternative things of the main objective the urgency of having a good reserve of IR can incentive players to dive in the game.

3)Speedrun: Yeah, looking around for getting buffs hurt Speedrun but not that much if you never save the game. Since you are completing the game in one single move the accumulation of IR it's unavoidable so you are not forcing the player to do something outside the main quest.

Downsides?

1)Try and repeat: If people try to get everything perfect they can just not saving the game and going for everything making every mistake something awful and throwing the game.

2)Anti casual: If people don't really have that much time to play for a long single session they will have a big downside. And even people who does have time but just that day happened that they can't play that much but they want to play you are saying "Nope, or you play a lot or you don't play". Unless you play only to see what is coming next and play it again later but it's the same history as before.

3. Farming: If the IR can be farmed and people had to sometimes it will feel horrible: like "Yeah I have being the last 2hs of my life here just to SAVE THE GAME".

Probably in order to make it work there should be a lot of this and probably the buff should not be that high. But if you have a lot and it's not relevant then why would they exist? Idk I have thinking about this and I can't imagine it happening.

I was thinking later that this could work better as a resurrection item: If you die you use one IR and come back in some safe zone and if you run out of this it's permadeath. But if you run out of the useless ones you must consume the ones that give you good stats becoming weaker after dying making more likely to die again, really contradictory. Unless consuming the IR it's what give you the stats but that will make the useless IR even MORE useless. Unless being in your inventory and consuming it both give you stats but the stats that give you are different so there will be ones you will want to consume and others that you will want to have in your inventory? But as I say I really think all of this because I was nostalgic about the IR and the limitation save.

In conclusion: I have a lot of things in my mind and I can't put them together so I throw here the information. Whit some lucky some of you that actually know how to make a game could tell me if this is horrible or good. In any case thanks for reading all of this.

I have recently been approached by several publishers for my game, some a bit sketchy but a few of the larger well known ones.

During discussion when asked what they can provide it seems like, well, not really much that I can't already do myself. Promotion:I have been promoting my game fairly well in a far less corporate way than most publishers do. Funding: I still have enough money to live on and certainly wouldn't want to give away a part of my future sales for.

I'm just wondering others point if view. Is it really necessary to have a publisher? Do they actually increase the chance of success or is it that they just latch on to games that would succeed regardless of them?

You know the nemesis system from the Shadow of Morder/war series? Probably the best open world system I've ever seen because it generates it's own missions, mini campaigns, loyalties, grudges and developments all on it's own. Unique to each and every save file, without player interaction, obviously you want to get involved but enemies and friends pursue their own agendas and missions regardless of what the player does.

I want a 3rd person open world with this system set in the universe of the Planet of the Apes prequels, where you can play as either side.

I’ve been trying introcuce some gamification element of Contributing to common Good. It’s the Meaning and Calling Part from the Actionable Gamification book.

I want people to do and create challenges for a common purpose with a clear visual progression.

Some world examples are Wikipedia editors, the Helldivers gamification of clearing the universe from monsters together, etc.

Hey guys, I'm currently working on a landing page for a game development collaboration tool. I'm trying to make an illustration for the header. The brand promise is centered around helping game developers build their dreams. So my question right now is this.

What's the dream of every game developer?

So, I will be making portal sortof functionality in my custom engine and my question is how to(in which order, should I apply the matrixes.)
I know that you should first apply model, then view and then projection matrix, but where should I multiply by the portal matrix? Perhaps should I multiply the view(world) matrix by the portals matrix, and use that?

Also by the portal matrix, I mean the offset as well as the offset rotation of [portal]:position - [camera]:position and [portal]:rotation - [camera]:rotation

Hey guys, you might remember me from this post. If anyone's wondering I managed to publish my game on App Store and yes the issue was the name of the game. Thanks to everyone who helped with pointing that out.

The old name "The Wizard's Companion" is now changed to "Aras and Wawi" although I kept the old name for the Play Store release. (I know what you're thinking but the game now has two names! hehe)

*Fun note: the game reached no13 in adventure on App Store second day of release. I guess all newly released games get the same treatment? I'm a newbie developer so idk how things happen.

Anyways, I would like to ask you about if my game is actually that hard to follow and the player needs a tutorial to understand what's going on? a few people I know tried the game and I've gotten mixed answers from them. Some say "I don't know what to do" and others already reached level 30 in a few hours. That's basically half of the game. (Which indicates the game is fairly simple). That is also what I think since my game is really easy to play. choose your character, enter a level and kill any mob you see (or whatever the level requires you to) and onto the next level. If I were to make a tutorial, the only thing I'm thinking about is guiding the player on what button they need to click. "Click on Adventure Button" > "Choose your character" > "Click on level 1 button" > "Click to pass dialogue" > "Click on move right button to move right" > "Click on attack button to attack" > "Click on jump button to jump" > "Click on shop button to buy potions". etc.

So do you think I need to make such a tutorial? or just forget about it and move on to the next project?

If you have any other feedback on the game please feel free to say it. It will surely help me in my future projects.

App Store Link

Play Store Link

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Thank you for reading.

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I just made an FMOD discord server if anyone is interested in connecting with the community and figure out issues/bugs/how-to/etc. It's fairly new, but hopefully this can be useful to someone on the long run: https://discord.com/invite/KKE86madrg

Hi, i was running around youtube looking at some old classics and ran across this guys youtube page. Then i watched a few of his videos about the game remakes he does. At the end he had a link to his website where he SELLS these remakes. So what i would like to know is how is this legal? and if it is legal how do i get permission to do this aswell. Here is a link to his website where he sells the stuff. https://www.retrovideogames.store/shop-all, here is a link to his youtube where he talks about it. https://www.youtube.com/@r3games1985. At the end of the day if this is all legal, more power to the guy. but i really would like to know.

Hi, I'm thinking about making some gamedev tutorials (some about niche topics) and I'd like them to service the most amount of people. The code would be Unity related, but the structure can work everywhere else. So my question is - is it better to make two videos: One strictly for theory, the other for Unity application or just make one including theory and unity application. Do you watch videos not related to your engine if you want to get a grasp of theory? Do you even watch theory tutorials without any code?

Hello Game Devs,
I just had my first ever booth at a nearby convention. This was such an incredible learning experience. I highly recommend any dev that has a complete demo, or an alpha version that can be playtested, to get your own con booth.
It is a wonderful experience to see a random person play your game, and smile. The joy your game can bring will fill your heart and give you extra passion to work a bit harder.

Here is my personal advice and experience.

• Search on Google conventions that are in your nearest city. Most chances there will be some. I personally wouldn't travel too far.
• Booths cost some money. be prepared for that.
• Bring something to give to people who play your game! My game features an adorable and angry Mama Duck as the main character, Everyone who played got a free rubber duckling, that had a QR code sticker on it. Those QR codes take you directly to my steam page. Over all, 500 rubber ducks and 500 stickers cost around $120 through Amazon
• If someone wishlisted the game in front of me, they got a bigger rubber duck (One that was wearing knight armor or a wizard hat)
• I went from around 20 wishlists to 200 in the span of the weekend thanks to the rubber ducks.
• Anyone that makes eye contact with you or your booth, say these magic words to them "Would you like to give my game a try?". People usually only need a tiny push. They want to test a fun video game but need that extra social push. People will say No, just tell them no problem and have a great rest of your Con.
• Try NOT to add features to your game the day before the convention. Get a playtest ready to go a few days ahead of time. I made this mistake and had to deal with a new bug all weekend.
• You will get instant feedback, both good and bad. Be prepared to accept the feedback and take notes.

The Switch is such a great form factor for some games, but I'm curious if anyone makes their own games to be played on a console from a company like Anbernic? And what even would be the process for that? Or is this just the dumbest thing I've said today?

For a while, I've been thinking about how I want to create the art for my game. I am familiar with working with tilemaps on Godot but I feel like it limits what I am able to create. I want to create an RPG where tilemaps aren't used for everything since I think it can make the art look disconnected and I am not fond of the blocky design of cliffs. My question is, what alternatives are there to tilemaps?

For example, Pixel Architect on YouTube is making a pixel art RPG (ChefRPG) and he doesn't use tilemaps but rather draws the entire map scenes in Photoshop. How would I attempt to do something like this and implement it in game? What limitations are there to this method compared to tilemaps?

I'm planning on a stealth game but during the story writing I found the second chapter of the game leans towards hack and slash more than the stealth

so are fine with sudden change of gameplay in the middle / in the beginning for the rest of the game ?

I’m happy with the current state of my project and I want to start sharing on socials. I see it as a way to share progress, show potential game studio employers my skill, maybe discuss the game with potential players, as well as early attempts at marketing.

This is my first devlog and I’m wondering, how technical should i go? Should i discuss the process much at all or just make videos that showcase the game? Is taking the portfolio and marketing approach at the same time a bad idea, should these be separated into personal and business videos/social media accounts?

Thank you for the help!

Actually I wanted to learn unity and I installed it in my Laptop that because of it's capabilities it actually took 1 or 2 min to start running the proj in unity editor and sometimes my laptop explode. So today I watched brackeys' video and I searched about Godot. It seems Godot is much easier to start with and it use less storage than Unity. So I was in the middle of learning unity. Should I stop and move on?

I'm an indie developer who recently created a game that's playable in browser. I want to share my game with other people, but I'm not sure where to do this. Many subreddits, (including this one) have rules against self-promotion, which I understand as no one wants subreddits filled with advertisements for games. However, I'm excited about my game and want to share it with people and unsure where to do this. So, where do you share your game?

I've been following Ryan King Art tutorials on procedural textures and while i know they arent a substitute for actual textures. My current art skills just aren't there for that. So right now as im trying to make a small game with the hopes of selling im wondering if by using procedural textures can i make a game look good.

Hi so I've been recently trying to make combat system inspired by For Honor , Absolver and Godhand. Essentially being able to switch directions and do different attacks based on that direction. I found a pretty good tutorial series on YouTube on the actual directional system (For Honor/ Absolver) , however i also want to implement the ability to let people make their own move sets (Absolver/Gohand) this has been tricky and I haven't been able to find anything to help with that aspect. If anyone has any resources or advice their willing to share I'd be grateful.

So i'm creating a psychedelic horror game based in the cold war era where the protagonist is the subject of an experiment run in a blast zone test radius. I've been deep into lore creation and i'm wondering if i'm doing too much?

I've created experimental data with graphs (dummy data obvs) and entire reports written by the scientists with redacted text and all. As well as written logs and email chains.

Essentially should I scale it back? And further, how do y'all go about writing those sorta lore notes? I want them to be something the player actually cares to read, but especially with me being a physicist i'm a tad concerned i'm getting stuck in the weeds with jargon and scifi theory dumps.

Since the game has a psx aesthetic I fear stuff like that could potentially break immersion too much. Or is this what players will simply expect of the game?

I know "show don't tell" of course, but I find it a fun way to fill out the players understanding of their place in the game world without divulging too much (hence redacted text).

I'm considering freelance after being offered a job.

Hourly rate would be €55/h and I wonder how accurate that'd be.

I have 12 years of professional development, 5 of them as a senior game developer for a fairly large mobile studio.

It feels at this price, it's just a bit better than a permanent contract, i was at 60k/year in last studio (I'm in Northern Europe where salaries are a bit above).

I'm a solo developer preparing to launch my first game on Steam in a few months, and I'm gearing up to start the whole marketing grind. The game is a casual turn-based RPG / minigame mashup (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2619650/Cauldron/). I haven't done any real marketing aside from a couple reddit posts to get people to try my demo and give feedback.

Some basics:

• The game's demo has been out on Steam for a few months. Development is very close to being finished, with mostly just sound and music left.
• Sitting at 777 wishlists as of today (lucky?).
• The demo has 538 lifetime unique users with a median playtime of 43 minutes.
• We have a small discord for the game (~50 people).
• I don't have any sort of social media following (this is bad, I know).
• I'm signed up for Steam's NextFest in June, and I plan to release shortly after.
• Game will be priced at $10 with a 50% discount for the first week or so after launch.

So my main questions are, how much should I spend on marketing, and where is best to deploy it? I have a full time job and a good amount of money saved up, so I'd want to spend as much as would give me a reasonable return on investment.

Marketing is my least favorite part of this whole process, and honestly it's a bit daunting. I just want to give my game a decent shot, so that people who would enjoy it are able to find it. If you have any helpful tips to share, specifically about my game/genre or just in general, please do!

Hi! Does anyone know of any good website scrapers or newsletters dedicated to game and gamedev studio funding? The one I was suscribed to became pretty inactive so I’m looking for a new one now. Our indie studio is located in the European Union, if that means anything. Thanks!

Most 3D games really struggle with large numbers of NPCs on screen. A notable recent example of this is Dragon's Dogma 2, where the devs have resorted to making NPCs basically only come into existence right in front of the player to reduce the number of NPCs in their cities and even then the performance is poor. The NPCs don't even do much, they just stand around.

On the other hand, I played Mount and Blade Bannerlord which can handle 1000 NPCs on a battlefield at a time, including fast moving cavalry running in formation, and performs decently. Given that the game entirely focused on big battles, I imagine optimizing for these battles was their top priority. So what kind of things did they do to make sure large NPC counts weren't painful?

How would a developer make sure that their game performs well with large numbers of NPCs? What would it take for a game to depict real army sizes?

Hey, Frankie here!

I just wanted to upload this milestone as a sort of "record" and as an advice for gamedevs.

After posting here on Reddit (on r/indiegames ), my game wishlists' count had a super spike, and 4 days later, here I am. I'm very happy for this result, and I would like to share my experience on promoting the game;

-Post something valuable

-Call to Action message

-Connect with the audience (answer their questions, make them participate!)

-Have your Steam Page ready to go!

Thanks again for helping me out, I hope this message can help somebody as well :)

(Feel free to ask whatever, I'll try to help asap)

I'm working on a third person platformer and I'm looking for suggestions on how to make item pickups feel good. Ive tried a bunch of stuff but nothing feels good yet.

The camera is pretty far from the player and the items float above ground and spin. When you pick them up I have a sound effect and a little particle confetti pop, then they scale immediately +20% then over 1 second scale down to 0 while spinning faster. All that and they still don't have any umph.

The game is meant to be fast paced so I don't want to slow the player down or make it too intrusive. Any suggestions? Or common knowledge I don't have?

A group of people and I are currently working on a hospital themed game where the main character deals with wacky diseases. Despite the inherently silly undertones, we want to make the game uncomfortable feeling, and ominous at points. Not to the point where it would mess up the frankly messed up end of the game, but where the players feel uneasy. How would we go about this?

Hey there!

I am Daniel, 30-year-old male from Italy, and I've been working as an individual web developer for several years. Gaming has always been a big part of my life; I've played on Nintendo, GameBoy, PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Mobile... since I was around 10 years old... countless of hours.

At some point, I decided to try something new... "why not create your own game? With all those hours of gaming, I should be able to create something nicely done, right?" Two to three years ago, I started full-time development of "Melody World" - a free-to-play, augmented-reality, location-based Android game about music and rhythm. When I started out, I knew my game was very unconventional and might not garner a lot of interest, as the majority of people don't like to leave their room, walk around, and play outside. Additionally, combining outdoor with music-rhythm elements doesnt seemed the best idea. Anyway, I absolutely love location-based games for the benefits and variety they bring, and music is great, so I decided to just do it, regardless of success or revenue.

Even though I gained a lot of experience in coding from my previous work, there was much more to learn in game development than I initially thought: coding, database management, modeling, animation, color theory, legal matters, art, video and photo editing, audio creation/editing, server administration, marketing, and some undefined tasks like the creation of billions of spawn points worldwide... Coding is just a small part of game development, so it won't get boring quickly. However, it can be very exhausting due to the continuous need to learn and execute new things.

After investing thousands of hours, the game is released and i started working on marketing. I've noticed that it's very hard to find a player base for your niche. With thousands of games released every day, you have to work hard for each install. I initially thought that the Google Play Store would feature my game in the new category section, allowing it to grow gradually. However, they don't do that. They don't even index your game for search terms until you reach specific metrics like installs or reviews. This implies that you either need to be a big, known company or have a very well-prepared marketing plan.

Therefore, here's an important piece of advice for you:

Doesnt matter how good or unique your game is, don't wait until after release to start marketing. Begin building your community and audience early on. If you're concerned about someone (big studio) stealing your idea while you as solo dev will work multiple years on this project, start your marketing efforts a few months in advance (general advice is 6 months earlier). Upload nice trailers or video dev logs and post it to various platforms.

It's essential to warm your social media accounts up beforehand. Otherwise, you might encounter the same issues I faced: my Twitter posts aren't seen, I can't use hashtags effectively, my YouTube shorts aren't properly shown in feeds, and my TikTok videos don't end up in feeds at all for weeks now (0 views issue).

Good luck to everyone.