I'm looking to upgrade my personal rig and have debated whether I wanted to send my studio's desktop rig back to my studio and remote into it using Parsec. The main reasons is 1) I don't feel like having two giant desktop machines in whatever little space I have underneath my desk and 2) I don't want to switch on/off PCs before, during and after work. My main question regarding remote PC work:

How is latency? I'm a level designer and will be using the game engine/editor 95% of the time to create blockouts, script and playtest. For my current project its UE5 but I also work in co-dev and have had to use other engines in the past.

This is less of a "how can I replicate your marketing strategy" and more of a genuine curious question. Some time back I used to find out about a lot of new games on social media, and I feel like that trend has started to die out... which actually, is making me a bit nostalgic? The 'fall' of Twitter/X might be the biggest cuprit here, but even on reddit, or youtube, or tiktok everything regarding indie games seems to be gone for me or turned... less organic.

So, is it just me and my algorithm? Or is it true that era is gone? With how fast the market and social media move nowadays, I wouldn't be surprised if this just wasn't a thing, but I'm curious to know what you guys are up to.

I'm a 16 year old boy, and I'm learning C++ to eventually create my own projects through unreal engine, and then sell them, but I would just like to know if anybody had experience keeping their PC safe while using your creativity to create something like games, or animations.

Thank you in advance.

What do you think about posting games on itch.io? Although it doesn't have many fees, I think that due to the excess of games that the site receives, a well-made game ends up disappearing in the sea.

Hi, I'm making a game and I'm not 100% sure I'll be using the assets I currently have, they are very nice, people like them but I'm considering making 3D models instead but that would be a lot of work right now and I'm not even sure if it's going to work well.

I'm curious since everyone says it's best to start the Steam page as soon as possible. Is it better to start with nice looking assets which might not end up in the game or is it better to wait for way (really quite a while) later when you have finshed assets but you are also closer to the release date?

(Just to be clear, I'm not asking about once color test rectangle/circle images but already handrawn assets - most come from an asset pack + some I drew myself in the same style vs some time way later potentially using 3D models).

Thank you very much for your input.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently looking for a Level Designer internship in the gaming industry. I have a solid portfolio that showcases my skills in Unreal Engine, level design, game cinematics, modular level design, lighting, rendering, and advanced workflows. I’ve also worked extensively with tools like Gaea, After Effects, and Premiere Pro.

If anyone here knows someone hiring for an internship or has a friend working in the industry who could help me out, I’d be incredibly grateful. I’m passionate about creating immersive environments and cinematic experiences and am eager to contribute my skills to a professional team

Here's my portfolio - www.artstation.com/ishaan2

Thanks in advance for any leads or connections you can share!

Cheers, Ishaan

Would prefer more beginner friendly resources which are kinda modern. Also yes I have checked out the megathread I'm looking specifically for graphics programming

1. so i had been wanting to make a horror game cause the last couple of times....lets just say they're pretty GARBAGE! so i came up with this idea where your stuck inside a old mine and you have to try to escape somehow. now originally i had this idea like 1-2 years but i was 9 and very bad at blueprints or any kind of coding codes? also im using unreal 5 for this one. ok your pretty bored so thats it.

also how the frick do you upload screenshots here on reddit? cause i want to explain more with some screenshots of the game!

Today I decided to talked about it to see if it's only me or more people notice that to.

I started to notice -for some time now - that the biggest game dev YouTubers/ channels start to copy much each other in terms of topics/talks. I started to notice that appears to release similar videos released somewhat close to each other.

I miss 2 things on Game Dev YouTube, more interesting Tutorials/educational and definitely more interesting devlogs.

Hello, dear readers!

After 5 years designing game economies generating $150M+, I've compiled my knowledge into a detailed 7-chapter guide on game economy, balance, and monetization.

Wiserax is on the line. After working in game development for over 5 years—designing the economy and balance for projects that have generated over $150 million in revenue — I decided to disappear for the last six months to consolidate all my knowledge in game economy, balancing, and monetization into one work and share it with other developers.

There are very few materials in this field; as of writing this article in the fall of 2024, there are only about 20 scientific articles and a couple of books, one of which is an 800-page tome by Brenda Romero and Ian Schreiber. I have compiled all this information into one article and added my own knowledge and experience, so I believe that my insights will be useful to you.

By studying this detailed guide, you will learn how to successfully monetize games, develop strategies and balance for a sustainable economy, and become acquainted with current trends in the gaming industry.

We will start with the basics of game economics and gradually dive deeper and deeper until we understand how to create an economy that not only brings you income but also provides genuine enjoyment to players. My article contains 7 chapters in total; the material has turned out to be quite extensive.

Whether you're a game developer looking to refine your game's economy or a gaming enthusiast curious about what makes in-game systems tick, this guide offers valuable insights to deepen your understanding.

Happy reading! 😊

🔴 DISCLAIMER 🔴

Dear readers, this article contains a lot of information on game monetization and how game developers can make money. I have come across many comments from readers who express discontent, saying, "Why should games make money? I don't like ads or in-app purchases; games should be free!"

So, if you are not ready to read about how games generate revenue from their players, please feel free to close this article.

🔗 Read the full guide on GameDeveloper:
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/i-designed-economies-for-150m-games-here-s-my-ultimate-handbook

Hello, Developers, Engineers, and Enthusiasts!

Shadow Fight is my first-ever open-source project, and I’m incredibly excited to share it with the world. This project is a simple yet ambitious attempt to create a fun, interactive, two-player fighting game using Python and Pygame.

As this is my first step into the open-source world, I humbly invite you to contribute to this project. Your expertise, feedback, or even a small suggestion can significantly enhance this work and help me learn and grow as a developer.

Ways You Can Help:

• Fix bugs or issues you come across.

• Suggest and implement new features to improve the game.

• Optimize the code for better performance.

• Help refine the documentation.

• Test the project and report any issues.

Your support, no matter how small, will mean a lot to me and this project. Let’s collaborate to make Shadow Fight better, not just for us but for everyone who loves retro-style games.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to consider contributing. Let’s build something awesome together!

The link to my project is present here.

Hey guys, how do you deal with prejudices regarding the industry? When I tell people that I’m releasing a video game, I often get a sideways glance. But I’d much rather convince people about the game and the industry.

Hellooo,

I'm looking for some advice or places where I can find some sound effects for monsters more specifically.

Or if any sound designers wanted to contact me I'd also be interested in working with you!

Thanks in advance!

Hello everyone, I’m “Le Poulet,” a solo and independent game developer. My goal is to create small games as much as possible on my own. This is the second devlog for my first game, Wordatro! You can read the first devlog HERE

In this second part, I’ll cover two topics: the design of bonuses and the launch of the Steam page.

To recap, Wordatro! is a word game with roguelite elements, designed for Steam and the mobile market. If you’d like to support me, you can wishlist the game at this URL or simply check out the trailer.

Creating Bonuses

The creation of bonuses was a major part of the game’s development. After the first tests on the prototype, I received feedback that it would be interesting if the bonus system allowed players to do more than just make the longest possible words. A bit like in Balatro, where you can win rounds by playing only a single card.

This was excellent feedback because, in the prototype, there were about ten bonuses, which didn’t significantly change how the game was played. My goal was to have at least 50 bonuses, with each influencing the type of words players would form in the following rounds.

So, I imagined different paths to victory:

• Long words
• Short words
• Drastically increasing your letter deck
• Playing around with the number of rerolls

To avoid favoring one path too heavily or creating an ideal strategy, the bonuses often become more powerful through repeated use. For example, one bonus gives extra points for each word and increases based on the number of letters rerolled. This can lead to a very strong bonus if you commit to the rerolling strategy. The advantage of this approach is that it provides predefined variety while also allowing strategies to emerge later by combining certain bonuses.

To keep things simple, there’s no rarity system for the bonuses, which avoids overloading the player with too much to learn. However, there are two main types of bonuses: those with an immediate effect (typically improving some aspect of the current game) and those triggered by events (during rerolls, when submitting a word, when counting letters, etc.).

For more design help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMk2ezEqQno

Steam Page

I launched the Steam page a little over 10 days ago and now have the first wishlist results.

For the Steam page, I created a trailer and screenshots with graphics in an almost-final version. I translated the page into English and French, the two languages available for the game, and added animated GIFs to the page.

In addition, I prepared posts for various social networks: LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Reddit. The day after launching the Steam page, I had a meeting with about a hundred developers in my city to present the game. For the first week, I focused entirely on communication through different channels.

Despite all this, I find my numbers are very low. I’ve reached 160 wishlists, mostly acquired during the first three days (66, 42, and 12 wishlists on the first three days, respectively). I knew this part would be challenging, but I didn’t anticipate a key factor: it takes a lot of time to engage a community.

My plan moving forward is to continue communicating extensively and hope to grow the wishlist count enough to cover the game’s development costs.

Conclusion

Thank you for following this second devlog for Wordatro! Next time, I’ll try to discuss feedback from playtests regarding UI/UX and dive a bit into the technical side.

If you’d like to help, you can wishlist the game, upvote this post, or simply share your experiences.

Steam Page

One last question: when is the right time to contact specialized journalists?

Made a prototype for a simple game, which I think is not as good as I imagined: https://imgur.com/gallery/conductor-sim-prototype-uPkvVl1

The gist of the game is: You are a bus conductor taking waiting passengers to their destined bus stations (for example a passenger might be on station "A" waiting to go to station "C"). Collect fare, refuel your bus while the maniac driver drives the bus frantically, while managing to not let your passengers fall out of the bus or hate you for giving them a bad experience.

If you watch the video above, you'll see right now there's only boxes and cubes - the passengers are cubes with a dialog above showing what stations they want to go to, and there's a dashboard (the UI thing with letters like A, B, C, D....Y) where you can choose what station to go to next. The point of the game is to make certain $$ to survive the day and each day gets harder.

There's more elements like reputation (if you choose certain passengers over others), some sort of strategic planning like only picking passengers that go to "T" station first so you can do that in one go. The thing I wanted to go for was a Papers please like tension with the movement of Human fall flat/Gangbeasts.

I had one friend play this version and he didn't like it as much, and I've worked on this for roughly 2 weeks and I don't feel the game anymore. It was inspired by how bus conductors in my city fight over each other and that always felt so fun to me, but maybe it doesn't translate well into this game.

What are your thoughts on this? Would love to know!

anyone down to help me coding in C# to shoot a gun in FPS or any suggestion/things I should know before getting started coding?

I'm trying to make an RPG, and I want the player's decisions to affect the direction of the plot. Currently, I just have a list of enum instances that correspond to the choices the player has made, and when I want to see what choice a player made, I check for a certain tag or tags. That seems incredibly clunky. In games like Fallout 1 & 2, Tyranny, Baldur's Gate, etc, how do devs record and reference a player's decisions in dialogue, gameplay, and character creation?

Hello everyone,

I’m working on my very first game, Teller’s Gambit, and I’d love to get some feedback. It’s a 1970s bank teller simulator set in a small Texas town during a tough economic recession. You’ll handle deposits, withdrawals, and money exchanges, all while checking for fraud—which was on the rise back then.

The idea was inspired by games like Papers, Please, with simple mechanics and a focus on decision-making and storytelling. I’m trying to create something immersive with pixel art and an old-school vibe.

Since I’m still pretty new to game dev, I’d really appreciate any thoughts—on the concept, mechanics, or even the art style. What would make this game more engaging for you?

Thanks you in advance :)

Todays greatest artists are video game developers. They must combine all artistic masteries together to form a functional experience.

Form, color, music, scale, movement, philosophy, intellect, logic, and joy all must converge on a cohesive vision.

If Leonardo Da'Vinci were alive today, he would be a game developer.

To use a really on the nose example.

Is a currency name like "Gil" from Final fantasy copyrighted?

And is this a common thing?

I found out that the currency name I want to use for my video game project is the exact same to another game. Should I just change it?

Edit: I guess I meant to TRADEMARK INSTEAD OF COPYRIGHT.

Since September, I stepped away from the job hunt, too confused and stressed about the lack of options available and how I have to find something by February. Well, after reflecting on essentially 1.5 years of learning different areas, this is what I've come to.

• Concept art and UI design are what I have the most background and education in, but there aren't enough jobs available to beat out the competition
• 3D animation is something I also have experience with, but I no longer have access to Maya, so portfolio work would have to be with Blender and Cascadeur. I also doubt my abilities with facial and lip-syncing
• VFX has opportunities in games and film, and UE5 is free and relatively common
• It seems engineering and technical opportunities are probably the most abundant of everything listed, but my experience with coding is limited to HTML/CSS
• I did also look into the design fields (game, level, and narrative), and while I do have interest, it seemed like even just the "portfolio-making stage" was confusing enough, compared to the ease-of-use that ArtStation has

So yeah, it seems like VFX and Animation are my two best bets. I did look into (and have experience with) 3d modeling, but ZBrush and Substance are just too expensive (I dont like subscription plans either) and I dont understand the technical side enough.

Honestly, I'm running out of options, and I dont know what I would even do outside of film and game dev.

Trying to understand the best method of using all these steam features together- they don’t seem to work well together?

Steam nextfest from what I understand is a demo. Not using the play test feature and is a separate app.

Playtest feature is required over 2000 keys especially if you had a Kickstarter with a lot of backers(6000 for us), you don’t have enough beta release overrides. Also a separate app Id.

Steam lobbies doesn’t function properly between multiple app ids of the same app, such as playtest, demo(nextfest), and main app(of original testers and beta release overrides). Depot sharing could have worked but it is experimental and only for released games, so that’s useless for an unreleased game with playtest. We’re a multiplayer game so we’d like all these apps to talk to each other so that beta release folks don’t need to keep installing versions associated with the event we’re joining.

Steam next fest requires a lot of people playing the demo app, but if you had a playtest build, you have to get those folk to redownload(in our case 50gb) the next fest demo app to help you during next fest. If I do a play test week, they can’t play with my more consistent beta release testers.

I guess I’m wondering if there are workarounds?

We have a play test going on right now where we have our users split into two user bases, resulting in much reduced quality of matchmaking.

I’ve been really kind of torn between a dilemma in my game. The game in question being developed is a first person parkour game, with mechanics akin to that of Mirrors Edge. It’s been going great, but i’ve been really stuck on where to take it next. I’m a single team dev, and although a storyline would be really great, I fear it would take quite a long time to flesh something out proper. Especially since it’s my first time developing.

I‘ve been debating adding it [the story] into the game over time, and meanwhile garnering support by releasing it as early access (or a demo) and having a time trial style game first, where players can fight to get the quickest time on the leaderboards through levels, and possibly other mechanics. I have a few ideas but i’d love to hear from other game devs and see where I should take this. I feel like this part of game development isn’t as talked about.

Hi r/gamedev! 👋

I’ve been working on a vertical hypercasual game called Puzzle Jump. The gameplay is simple: a cube jumps infinitely upward, progressing through levels. Currently, the game feels endless, with increasing challenges as you go higher.

I’m at a crossroads and could really use your advice:

1. Endless progression: Keep it as is, but create the illusion of endless levels by designing more unique obstacles and gradually increasing difficulty.
2. Level-based system: Add a menu where players can choose specific levels, each with its own theme (e.g., forest, space, winter) and unique mechanics or visuals.

Which approach do you think would engage players more? Endless games tend to keep players hooked, but themed levels could make it more visually diverse and memorable.

I’m open to suggestions, so feel free to share your thoughts or ideas on improving the gameplay. Thanks in advance! 😊

Edit:
You can check out the current gameplay screenshots on the Play Store here: Puzzle Jump on Play Market.

I’m looking for a good tutorial to build a simple game based on text/menus. Great examples would be games such as OGame or Kings of Chaos.

Hoping to make my first game fully with such options and integrate mini-games that actually contain graphics and animations into it for the 2nd version.

I’m looking for a good tutorial that will teach me the skills I need to do the first version without too much time on systems I won’t be using.

I’m hoping to make the game in Unity and allow usage on mobile and browser.

Hey everyone, im currently a 23 year old father, enlisted in the military. I have been interested in video game programming since i was 11, since then its seems increasingly more difficult to try and get into as i get older. My question is for current developers, for someone in my situation, what route should i take, to go about acheiving my dreams?

I'm using SDL2 & C++ to make a game that has multiple rooms. I want to make it so when you hit the left border of the first room, you will move onto the right side of the next room and move back and forth with a very short transition scene that is just a black window moving across the screen. How would I code this into the game loop? Would I use game state to make this? If so, i'm not very familiar with game states yet but would this interrupt the game loop in the other room? So would actions and timers running in the other room be interrupted if I change rooms using game state? Another way I though of making this was to just move all textures and entities from room one over by 1280 (game resolution) and move everything for the next room over by 1280 so everything in the game is loaded at the same time but some rooms just aren't in the window. What is the best way to go about coding this problem into a game loop?

TLDR: How do I code moving from room to room where you can't see the other room but actions in that room are still running within a game loop?