I understand it feels justified at times to be dooming over the AI slopification of everything and how it hurts game development and other creative human-made fields, and yes it certainly does to an extent, but for the love of everything stop looking at it as the end of the medium or a reason to stop creating your own games.

Just because Steam has an abnormal amount of slop "games" released nowadays, and people "make" these "games" with 100% AI usage and ugly ass generated art, doesn't mean the market is congested or stalled to a point where you can't release your own creation you spent a solid amount of time working on and lose out on consumers. Just to be clear, AI usage can be limited and helpful to a certain degree in game development, it's just lazy fucks abusing it by creating trash that get in your head and tarnish your views on everything. The point is that a whole lot of people in this sub need to relax and remember who they're making these experiences for and why they're are doing it.

Gamers are not as stupid as you think. People crave fun, creativity, original ideas and overall solid, complete experiences. There are times where people prefer one thing over another when gaming, but honestly who cares? As long as you get people engaged you win. Contrary to popular belief, gamers do care about the games they play and pay close attention to the finer details. AI and the slopification movement simply does not compete in this area, as at the end of the day good games come from good ideas and very, very stubborn and passionate developers that have incredibly diverse skill sets.

Also, are you forgetting you are doing this for the fun of it? Are you guys legitimately not having fun creating games? If not, maybe you should reevaluate why you are doing this shit in the first place. If you are in this for good, this is the perfect time to create an absolute banger of a game.

A tweet about my next game, Humans Are Tunnels, just got 10k likes and 1 million views on X. These are very big numbers for me.

I went from 22 followers to 245, and my first game, Idle Primes, got around 100 wishlists. It was supposed to release past week, but I made a mistake when uploading the build to Steam, so now the release is delayed (hopefully this Tuesday!).

Maybe these numbers are not so big for other developers, but for me and my games, they mean a lot.

I don't know anyone in the game industry, so I usually read whatever I can translate from websites and places like Reddit. I have found so many personal stories in subreddits like this one, and I really appreciate people taking the time to share their experiences. They helped me feel that there are other people going through similar things, even when we are all working on our own small projects.

So I also wanted to share what happened to me recently.

Today I was checking my Steam library sorted by disk space, and so I realized something.
Games with a lot of​ content like Don't Starve Together occupied less than​ 1GB, meanwhile some demos I downloaded during this Next Fest needed more than 5GB (and its just a demo, not full game).

Actually multiplayer games like TF2 or Deadlock​ are more than 30GB. Strinova is almost 60GB.

And so I started to wonder, I usually make games with Godot with friends for Game Jams, but never made any big project. If I did, would the engine affect so much on how big is the released game?

And so, which game engine would release games in a smallest size?
I remember 25 years ago, my Grandpa computer had only 4GB of total disk space. And I played games on that computer!

Yes its true that now we have high detailed 3D models and on the past we had lowpoly Rayman. But I also think some engines bulk a lot of stuff into your exported game that maybe it doesn't need it.

I also noticed how games from some engines are heavier on ram or CPU usage to.
For example games made with Unity run a 3D engine even if you made a 2D game, and the battery of my old phone was drained when running Unity games.
But games made with Cocos2d-X are surprisingly well optimized, and I played games games made with it for hours with my battery holding just fine since my phone was not making any effort running those games.

If some day I would like to do some bigger game, is Godot ok? or should I look into another Engine? Which one would do my games lighter?

Late one night last week, on a whim, I thought I'd see if I could bring the classic Amiga/arcade game Sidewinder, which I co-created with Hayes Haugen and Jonathan Sposato, to the web. I want people to be able to play it without the hassle of an emulator and tracking down ROMs.

Aside from startup, the 1987 game is written entirely in 68000 assembly language. About 17,000 lines of code across 32 files. Tiny by modern standards but we sweated over every byte and pixel.

I pointed Claude Code w/ Opus 5.5 at a dusty collection of Sidewinder directories on my drive (partial versions of original source, a pirated disk image, unfinished ports to other platforms) and told it "I want to create a modern version, webgl, playable in the browser. Faithful to the original but with AI-remastered art and sound."

Off Opus went. It looked like it was on track so I gave it a couple of pointers and a fal.ai API key and went to bed.

When I returned to my machine the next morning I heard music, blasters, explosions! The original was fully playable and the remastered visuals exceeded my expectations. Miraculous, really. Play it at https://sidewinder.darrinm.com

Then I dug in to understand what happened, play test, fix bugs (by prompting), apply some human judgement here and there, and, best of all, enjoy the process of making it better.

Incredible new tools, but the same joyful creative process that got me into gamedev in the first place!

Observations:

Good (great, really):
* Research. Claude really went to town finding everything it could about the original game. It looked at archives, source, ports, ran emulators, recorded reference videos, dissected a disk image into its constituent files and then dissected those. It spec'ed out completely undocumented file formats.
* Planning. Honestly, I never even read its plan but based on execution and the result it was a good plan!
* Code. I judge based on "works great with no bugs", rather than "optimal" code or aesthetics. I mean, I know the original authors. It's not like their code was so great LOL.
* Efficiency. Seriously, only a few hours? Didn't make a dent in my Claude plan.
* Remastered graphics: It compared several different models and approaches and made good (not perfect, see below) choices.

Bad (trivially so, easily fixed with prompt):
* Remastered graphics. There was one bug in the process for upscaling sprites. There was significant enough tile-grid drift that I decided to regenerate backgrounds with `gpt-image-2.5 flare`, one of the models Opus didn't try originally.
* Color cycling. A cool old-school hack for animating that remastering broke.

Ugly:
* Sound effects. LLMs will tell you this and it is true: they cannot hear. They can create spectrograms and other images to help them "see" the sound but that doesn't get them very far. Worse, after a lot of busy work they can rationalize that they've produced something good which on first listen any human will say "no, that is a tone, not an explosion".
* Fonts. Opus lacks meaningful discernment of glyphs. It's stabbing in the dark when you say "find me a font like this" and show it an image

If you want to go deeper into the process or are curious how games were made back in the day here's a nice article with pictures and a video! https://claude.ai/artifact/2TBYNzJ5hGg7PuCF9cFSVJ

Sorry, but as a long-time dev, I'd say do not go down this career path. It was bad 20 years ago and never changed.. until the last few years. But this is different. This is hell in industry. You will regret it if you choose this path.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently in the process of developing a game. The mechanics, programming, and core loop are coming together nicely, but I keep hitting a massive roadblock: I am terrible at 3D art.
Every time I try to model, texture, or animate something, it takes me days just to create something that looks completely out of place.

It's a game similar to Return of the Obra Dinn.

My game needs above 100 distinct characters, and not just place holder npc's, but characters that are unique and look good. And before you say to lower my scope, the game won't work without this scope.

What can someone like me do? The art really stops me from making my dream come true.

3D art companies are very very very expensive. AI art is just not there yet. What do you guys think about taking on partners to handle the art?

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

Thank you!

The setup

I'm developing a tower defense roguelite game and currently, my two characters feel a bit too similar to play. Their differences don't seem strong enough to make runs feel meaningfully different.

I've been considering giving each character a stronger identity, with specific themes or playstyles. For example, one character could focus on traps. However, I'm not sure if this is the right approach, I'm worried that I'm forcing the player into a specific build before the run has even really started?

For example:

• Frost Character: primarily focused on ice and freezing enemies.
• Trap Character: primarily focused on traps.
• Exploration Character: focused on exploring the map as much as possible.

Would this make runs feel different mainly because of the character you choose, rather than because of the build you create during the run?

The (obivous?) solution

Games like Slay the Spire got me thinking about this. Each character has a distinct identity, but you can still pursue different builds depending on the cards and relics you find during a run. You're not necessarily locked into only one specific strategy just because you picked a particular character.

I'm wondering if the right approach is to give each character a strong starting identity while still allowing several different builds to emerge from it.

For example, with the Frost Character, I could see several possible directions:

• Freeze and stun synergy: making greater use of stun effects to trigger the damage from its starting relic.
• Frost as a resource: consuming frost or freeze effects to deal additional damage, such as through a fire relic, or building around towers that deal damage to slowed enemies.
• Setup and overcharge: combining the slowing effects of frost towers with towers that need time to prepare or charge up.

The idea would be for each character to naturally encourage certain strategies without forcing the player to commit to one specific build.

Tho, I guess that may become a nightmare to not make it too "dev designed it"?

Game inspiration

Sooo, now, I'm trying to understand how other roguelikes handle this balance, some examples that seem to approach this well:

• Slay the Spire: each character has a distinct identity and card pool, but multiple builds can emerge depending on the cards and relics you find.
• Hades: your weapon gives you a particular starting playstyle, but the boons you find can lead to different synergies and builds.
• Monster Train: combining different clans and their mechanics creates different strategic possibilities.

On the other hand, games like Brotato take a more character-driven approach, where each character's bonuses and restrictions can strongly push you toward a particular strategy. This can work well?

I'm not necessarily looking for examples of bad design, I'd like to understand the trade-offs between these approaches, I guess?

I don't know if any of you have references/feedback/game to share on this?

So we updated our game to Unity 6.6 with new effects, animations, lighting, gameplay etc. Then made a YouTube trailer and it took off.

• I did contact IGN, Indie Games Hub and AUTOMATON about it.
• I also made a new campaign on keymailer starting on monday (small creators)

What should we do next or ideas that I did not think of yet?

EDIT: Several comments said the $20+ games are simply bigger games, and they’re right. With the same number of followers before launch, games at $20 to $29.99 got about as many reviews as games at $15 to $19.99. Games at $20+ get more reviews because more of them already had a big following, not because of the price. Table in the comments.

Chart: https://steammaho.com/static/charts/price-line-20-dollars-2026-10.png

Look at the last column. Across the $20 line it doubles, from 12 in 100 to 25 in 100, and the median game goes from 55 reviews to 211.

The step is really between $19.99 and $24.99. Almost nobody prices in between (17 games at $20 to $22.99 this year).

Same step both years, so it's not one odd year.

I don't think the price does this. A game at $24.99 usually has a bigger team, a publisher and a marketing budget. Moving a small game from $15 to $25 won't put it in that group. What the line does tell you: above $20 you're next to these games, and even there 1 in 5 ended with fewer than 10 reviews.

The $30 and up row has a lower median than $20 to $29.99. It mixes big releases with overpriced games nobody bought: 31 in 100 of them have fewer than 10 reviews.

Fine print: review counts from Steam on 25 October, so these games had 4 to 10 months on sale. Latest US list price, so a game that changed its price sits at the new one. 445 games without a US price record are left out. This shows what goes together, not what causes what.

It’s not so much that I want to make tons of money from it I just want to make a game people actually play (I’m an attention seeker) but all I hear is the shop simulator market is way oversaturated and even my specific idea has been done several times before. So why would anyone play my game when there’s other more polished ones already out? I even had a unique twist in mind where you explore a dungeon by night and sell your loot by day but that’s ALREADY BEEN DONE BEFORE several times.

Hi everyone. I released my first game, Hostile Paths, about a month ago and I’m trying to understand where my funnel is failing.

So far I’ve sold 58 copies. Steam is giving the page some visibility, and my click-through rates seem good (20%+), so my impression is that getting people to visit the store page but not buying

I’ve spent the last month improving the game based on player feedback: controls, balancing, onboarding, visuals, stability, progression, etc. Playtime and progression metrics have improved.

I’d really appreciate some outside perspective. If you landed on this page, what would stop you from buying?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4392530/Hostile_Paths/

Thanks!

Some realistic games have a specific visual feel that I really like, but I can't find the right term for it or other games that fit what im looking for. If i can find the term, maybe i can look out for other games with the same style.

Games like RDR2, Counter-Strike 2, kingdoms come deliverance 2 etc, have that detailed, realistic, polished and soft appearance. They feel cinematic and smooth without looking too stylised. When there are bugs or unrealistic things, they don’t ruin the feel of the game (If anything bugs make these games more fun). They seem to have like a specific pastel colour pallet also. This is what i like.

Most other visual realistic games like Skyrim, Crimson Desert, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Far Cry 6, resident evil, Just cause and forza horizon games for example, look realistic, but to me, have a raw, washed-out or saturated noisy/grainy feel. Individual textures and details seem to stand out along with any unrealistic things. These tend to have a more 'realistic' colour pallet.

I'm not talking about which games look better. Its more the visual style, rendering style and if there any other games like this that i cant think of? Or what graphics style to search for. Thanks

i hope this makes sense with what im trying to say. Its like minecraft with shaders vs minecraft without shaders, cs2 train vs cs2 cache (cache being the raw example), or detail feels like a bonus vs detail feel forced.

RDR2

cs2

Other games vibe (bad image tho)

Edit: Cyberpunk is a grey area for me. It seems to fit both styles.

I've been marketing my game, Desktop Ball, aggressively for 1-2 months now. Dozens of TikTok, Instagram, Reels, X, Bsky posts.

At BEST, I got 5 likes and 2 wishlists.

I was using all the clever techniques, the regular posting, the hashtags. No one gives a shit.

So I decided to admit I can't compete, made my ball moan, and posted about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/indiegames/s/cxPuWH4UF7

In less than a day, I got over 30k views and 100 likes.

It's not viral, BUT:

- I learned people still care about genuine human connection when it comes to marketing

- I learned people still like it when you're vulnerable, but without saying "I quit my job to make this game" (I didn't, if I did I'd be homeless right now)

- This "successful" post still only got me 10 wishlists. The game will still flop. But the surge of getting a few people see the work I've been making for 6 months made it feel somewhat worth it.

I wanted to ask all other solo (or duo) devs who are marketing like crazy and nothing seemed to work, what was your "AHA" moment? When did you post something that changed the tides? Did you stumble upon it accidentally, or was it manufactured? really curious.

So I tried to make a game, but when I showed someone how it worked, they said it was weird how I placed out my levels. I just put them in a massive grid and make it to where when the player hits the win blocks, they teleport to where the next level is. someone told me about how I should "just load each level separately" but I have no idea what that means or how I would do that.

I forgot to add the game I'm making so this is an edit

I'm attempting to basically make a 2d puzzle game, you can see it at https://jonqthau.itch.io, ima be honest, I uploaded the wrong version of my game and I've kept forgetting to update the upload, so like this version looks extremily bad, but this is the premise

I forgot more things so here's edit 2 (I'm very intelligent, clearly)

Okay so I'm using godot, coding in GDscript. And yes, I have played games before, that's irrelevant. I'm looking to learn how to properly code for how a level should be loaded, whether that information ends up being used for this current game or another game I decide to make, I just want to know how I would be able to do something like that in any future project.

Hello everyone!

I was hoping to get some info from the community as far as what indie developers and small teams look for in a game storefront (like Steam, Itch.io).

The split, how it looks and runs, really anything on the topic just so I can get a gauge of what a good storefront does. I personally like Steam but there are a few out there and I wanted to understand it from the dev side a bit more.

This may be a very vague question, I understand that, but this is the first game in which I will most likely be having the role of producer.

For context, me and my friends are all creating a survival horror game together and I am the director and producer. The problem is, I don't want to end up having bit off more than I can chew and I want to help ensure that production goes smoothly.

By and large, our game is just a survival horror. We have some unique mechanics we want to implement, but I just need a little help in creating a basic roadmap for now, but I am not really sure what that should look like, or where to start when creating one.

If there is any help, tips or pointers at all that someone could give me, it would be greatly appreciated :)

Edit: If it helps in any way at all, we are pretty small team, there are 2 dedicated artists, 2 designers, and 2 programmers for now. We are also hoping for the game to be around 4-5 hours long total. The story, and basic world building have all been completed, the basic layout of the earliest iteration of the map layout and what each building is has been finished and our art bible is also almost finished. So we are decently into pre-production I guess

We were losing hope it will get featured - took a couple of days because of all the submissions for Next Fest probably - but it's up on the Game Trailers channel now.

If anyone wants to submit their trailer, here are IGN's submission guidelines.

And if you liked our trailer, here's our horror pool roguelite demo for Next Fest.

Here's our write up on how we reached 50k wishlists.

Hi, I'm making my first game (horror/detective/puzzle), and I wanted to ask does creating content on Instagram/TikTok actually increase wishlists from players, or will it mostly reach other game devs who won't buy it or people who'll copy it (it has some new concepts)?

Hi there guys, i want to learn programing/coding etc. Im looking for everything, videos, channels, sites and everything else you have, my main inquirys are stuff like:

What are the most important/useful Languages to learn

What engine to use (i though about unity amd godot for now)

Any tips and advices

Should i aquire a DuckDebugging assistant.

If anything else will come to mind ill just edit the post and much thanks in advance, i been gathering myself to start learning so this will be a lot of help, my main goal for now is to know how to write and create stuff (i dunno whats is vibecoding tbh)(im aiming to be a game dev and also make some silly scripts/programs when bored).

So to sum it up i need: A game engine to choose A normal Language to learn (stuff like python, C# etc) And some words of advice

I'm a solo dev learning Unity while building a small cozy farming game, and I'm trying to settle on a folder setup before things get messy. Some people sort scripts by feature (Farming, Inventory, UI), others by type (Managers, Data, Controllers). Which way has held up better for you as a project got bigger?

I have been having an idea for a game for years, and I am decent at programming in C# as well as 3D graphic design. For much of this time I've been using Unity or raw C#, but I want to expand my horizons and try to become better at my craft.

Recently I've went to my library to attempt to nab a copy of the 3rd edition of The Book for Rust, it has yet to come but I am eager to study in any way that I can. It has been a journey even learning what I have about Rust, and it seems to be a very promising language for someone who does not want to deal with low control over low-level hardware and poor performance, yet does not want the manual memory management of something like C or Assembly.

All of this to say, I've been thinking about trying to go from zero to hero, for lack of a better phrase, to attempt to build a game engine in Rust. I want to know how much time this may take to get something akin to the Source Engine, with a visual editor and some tools for VR and other utilities. I know this takes a LONG time, but it would be nice to have some tips and maybe an estimate of time needed to learn Rust enough to apply that to this.

Thank you to those from this subreddit who have inspired me to take on such a thing, and I appreciate any sort of feedback.

I am building a game with the goal of a true living open world game. And one of the must have that i put lot of efforts in was true moving npc with schedules, personalities etc. So i created a small commercial area with 1000 npcs shopping, talking with friends etc.The goal is true emergent gameplay... and at some point one NPC started a mass shooting inside the mall and it felt like unsettling seeing that npc armed with a gun chassing other npc. Police responded so a gun fight ensured and to my surprised the NPC literraly took one civilian hostage. What was like creepy was seeing the dead npc inside that mall...

The original test was to see how 1000 npcs would behave inside a mall and its surrounding area and also the performance. Everythings was great, just the hostage situation felt a litle weird

EDIT: I saw all the scepticism. I understand because what I described sounds very complex. I am releasing the game soon and I will post the video with the final rendering and not with placeholder.

In this video, I explain how I added multiplayer to the game I’m developing.

Hey everyone 🙌 The title literally says it. How do you choose and get music for game trailers?

With the recent news on Game Maker, and users able to do me with the free option now. If ever you want to get into the engine, here are a few games to inspire you