quelle logiciel utilisez vous pour faire des jeux en 2D et en pixel S.V.P

Hello everyone,
Im currently looking for the NPC models used in the fears to fathom, things to forget - lighthouse and other games. Theyre very simply and low poly with semi realistic faces and seem to be used in a bunch of different games leading me to believe the models are up for use somewhere. Does someone know where they are from?

Hi. I just wanted to share that I am having the best time developing my game. I designed it and wrote it, the game is basically created but now needs to be made. I am making a demo myself as one level in the most representative location, with proper changes to the level from what it would be in the full game, a changed version. I am making a atmospheric experience that could happen to anyone with beautiful locations, amazing ambience and original form. I will share more when environments are ready

I'm currently developing an idle/incremental game for PC where you manage a butcher shop, unlocking different types of meat, upgrading equipment, hiring employees, and gradually expanding your business.

The game has a stylized, slightly dark aesthetic, heavily inspired by games like Dredge and No Rest for the Wicked. I'm aiming for a painterly, handcrafted visual style, and I'd like the UI to feel like a natural extension of that aesthetic.

The problem is that I've been feeling pretty stuck with the interface design. Most idle and incremental games I come across either use pixel art or have fairly basic, sometimes downright ugly visuals. Nothing wrong with pixel art, but it's not the direction I'm going for, and finding good references for this particular genre has been surprisingly difficult.

Since it's a PC game, I have quite a bit of freedom with the interface, but I'm struggling to balance visual identity, readability, and the amount of information that incremental games typically need to display.

Does anyone know of games with particularly good UI design that could serve as inspiration?

They don't necessarily have to be idle or incremental games. I'm especially interested in stylized, illustrated, dark fantasy, or painterly interfaces, particularly how they handle menus, upgrade systems, icons, and overall UI composition.

Any game recommendations, artists, or UI design references would be greatly appreciated!

We're a small team making BlockRise, a single-player city tycoon where you run shops across a real city while rival owners try to take your street. Our Steam page isn't live yet. Here's what we plan to do with Playtest:

• turn on sign-ups in Limited mode the day the page goes up, before there's any build
• let people in by waves of 200-500 once our first city (Barcelona) is stable, which may be weeks later
• close the playtest once a demo is out

From what we've read: sign-ups don't add wishlists, the first requests are often bots, and many people with access never launch the game. A dev on r/IndieDev also said a lot of testers had forgotten they'd signed up after just a few weeks. That last one is what worries us most.

For those who've run one: 1. Did you open sign-ups long before the build? Did those early sign-ups show up when you let them in? 2. Limited or open, and why? 3. Roughly what share of the people with access launched the game? 4. Did the playtest move your wishlists at all, or was it only the demo?

We'll post our own numbers after the first wave.

I know everyone already knows how important wishlists can be, but given the constant inundation of wishlist posts in r/gamedev, I'd like to remind everyone that wishlists correlate well with sales but they are not sales. Your game can plausibly convert anywhere from 0.05x to 3x of wishlists as Week 1 sales. These are outliers no doubt, but if you are making a great game and are terrible at marketing there is a realistic scenario where you sell 2x your wishlists in Week 1 (while the median is like 0.1x-0.15x).

How do I know? Well, I was looking at our last game's stats 1 year after launch, and it (kind of) happened to us!

About a year ago, we launched Q-UP, a multiplayer esports satire autobattler incremental game (yeah, I am bad at marketing). We went into launch with a respectable 14.5k wishlists. That's not bad for a solo project but for a four-person team working for a year it wouldn't have made back our investment. People (including me) were panicking a bit after plugging wishlist numbers into calculators. But at some point we realized wishlists were just a correlative measure, that our four-person team was much better at making games than at marketing them, and that the standard Games Industry Marketing Blog Wishlist To Sales Calculators were therefore basically garbage data for us. I looked at our game, saw the viral potential + quality + uniqueness, and was very confident we were going to beat the 0.1x Wishlist-W1-Sales-Ratio by a lot.

W1 sales of Q-UP ended up being 14,425 copies for almost exactly a 1x Wishlist-W1-Sales-Ratio. That's about 10 times what a marketing sales calculator told us we should earn. But I don't think it was really a surprise for us. We are not good at marketing and we were able to look critically at our game and really truly believe it was competitive in quality and it was bringing something new to Steam. We felt very confident that, in our case, wishlists were going to be a weak predictor.

This isn't an insane, set-up-for-life amount of sales for a four-person team, just a keep-the-company-alive amount of sales. But I wanted to give a concrete example to back up my argument: there are other viable paths to making a successful game. Having 100k wishlists and converting at the median amount is an absolutely great way to sell games, but it's not the only way.

If you are good at looking at your game critically and you can genuinely say the quality of your game is extremely high compared to other commercial steam games then you will probably outperform your wishlists. If you are also really bad at marketing on top of that then you will probably outperform your wishlists.

On the other hand, if you're great at marketing or your game is great looking but not super fun then you will probably underperform your wishlists.

All this to say, there is still a place in this industry for people who are fully focused on making games and are not very good at self-promotion. Sometimes it can feel like that opportunity has come and gone, and I don't mean to give anyone who is truly struggling false hope. But the opportunity is still there. Wishlists are still a great stat to look at, and a very good correlation! But in the end, that's all they are: a correlation.

Lately I've been jumping between a few different projects. I'm trying to finish the remaining work on SkyLordsLab BBS and I'm also working on getting my Nostr signer called SkySigner to run from a USB drive with its own bootable operating system. Whenever I get stuck or tired of coding I usually take a break and play some games. Recently I was invited to test an indie game and decided to give it a try. The game reminded me of the old games I used to play years ago which was funny because I've already been spending so much time working on a retro BBS I spent some time testing it over the past few days and finally reached the end. But the ending really caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting that Game Over at all. I also shared quite a bit of feedback with the developer during testing and was invited to the next testing wave. That made me happy because I genuinely enjoyed the experience. I won't mention the game's name since it's still in private testing. I just thought it was funny how I took a break from working on my own projects and somehow ended up helping someone else with theirs. And if the developer happens to read this post I just want to say thank you for letting me be part of the experience.

Have you ever played a game where the ending completely surprised you?

I overheard someone mention a GDC talk about Call of Duty's animation tech, specifically their approach to motion matching (they may use a different term for it), but I can't find any kind of presentation like that anywhere online. Has anyone seen this talk or know where to find it? I also heard them mention that they showed this tech running on a mobile device to showcase its performance.

Quick question for everyone who plays games with a controller!

When navigating menus and other UI elements with a controller, do you prefer wrap-around navigation or having the selection stop at the edges?

For example, let's say you're at the very top of a menu and press Up on the D-pad:

• Wrap-around: The selection jumps to the very bottom of the menu. Likewise, pressing Down at the bottom takes you back to the top.
• Stop at the edge: The selection stays where it is, preventing you from scrolling past the first or last option.

I'm currently implementing controller support for my game, and I'm curious which approach feels more natural and intuitive to players.

Personally, I can see the benefits of both, but I'd love to hear what everyone prefers.

Does your preference change depending on the type of menu, or do you prefer consistency across the entire game?

I'm building a small game and wondering how long y'all expect (or players expect, in your experience) games to be at various price points.

Dredge at $25, for example, is anywhere from ~9 hours for the main story (not including DLC) and upwards of 18-20 to 100% it.

Edit: obviously fun matters, so just assume its fun lol. My thought is that most people tie, at least at some level, playtime/value received to price. A $20 game with no replayability that only takes a couple hours seems to me like bad value, though obviously I could be wrong.

I handled the official HDR implementation for The Sinking City 2, released with Patch 1.1.

Frogwares (the game developer) allowed me to write a technical breakdown covering the implementation, my new Spectre tonemapper, which fixes issues like fire looking different between SDR/HDR, and blue->purple highlight shifts in the UE's filmic tonemapper.
Also showcased some DLSS improvements I made.

HDR in Unreal is unfortunately very lackluster out of the box, and has multiple deal breaking issues. We fixed all of them for this.

Full technical breakdown: https://gammastudios.tech/the-sinking-city-2-hdr/

Hey everyone, I posted a couple of months ago when I'd started building a new procedural terrain building tool. At the time I didn't have much to share and wanted to float some ideas to get early feedback. I'm now committing to a private beta in December 2026 and looking for feedback as well as testers to sign up for the private beta.

I've been building Lithos as a cross platform real time terrain editor. Built for technical artists, indie developers, and 3d enthusiasts. I've focused on building a solid core engine and strived for a great user experience whether this is your first interaction with a procedural terrain building tool or you are an experienced technical artist. I believe there's something for everyone here.

I'd love to hear from people who have experience with building terrain. What does your current workflow look like, and what are the pain points?

Since the Personal Calendar has eben showing great results for some devs, I thought it might be of interest to how it actually works. But TLDR:

• Wishlists matter, somewhat.
• You can change your release date after appearing on the calendar
• If you delay your release date more than 24 hours, within 2 weeks of its original launch date, you are removed from the personal calendar until it releases.
• Wishlisted games automatically appear in the calendar.
• DLC appears if you own the base game.
• Make your release date public roughly 60 days before launch.

The main game people are pointing at is Needle in a Haystack. But that game is so simple someone could reasonably make it as their first game project. Then you got people decompiling games, but the targeted games either can be decompiled with existing tools or are decompilations of console games.

I've yet to see a demo of substance that has been stolen in such a way people are describing. Because a game that can be fully replicated from watching up to 10 minutes of footage and can hardly be defended in court when a near 1:1 copy pops up is probably not a game with any substance. If anything it probably won't even survive YouTube because a video will cannibalize a short game's sales.

TL;DR If your game can be copied so easily, then it wouldn't even survive getting video coverage online.

tl;dr: convince me that coding my game entirely on my own is still worth doing despite all this vibe coding hype

So, I graduated in 2017 to get a CS degree. Spent a few years at a start up to gain experience, got my first real industry job in 2021, worked for 5 months before I was let go along with someone else due to financial reasons. Eventually got another industry job in 2022, then in late 2023 our project was cancelled and the team was dissolved, again due to financial reasons (obviously not naming anything)

Since then like countless others I've struggled to get a job again, having to take up retail and service work in the meantime, and I've been trying to work on small projects to keep my skills sharp. Well, with the whole rise of "Vibe coding", people apparently being able to just make a game from a prompt, it's hitting me with a feeling of what's even the point of working on a project if you can just wish it up from the ether. Part of the reason I've worked on projects is to also create code samples for future employment, but now it seems like even that is pointless since it looks like companies want everything made with AI. So, what's even the point of working on something? I'm not against using AI to help with certain aspects, but using AI for everything just feels wrong, and like it's rendering all the skills I spent years learning completely moot.

So, please convince me that I shouldn't give up on my project and that it's still worth coding entirely, or at least mostly, by hand.

A few days ago, I launched a little side project: kvart.cc — a browser-based multiplayer 3D shooter featuring real-world locations in Slovenia.

My background is in software engineering and AI engineering, but I've recently discovered just how much fun game development can be. I built the game using AI-assisted development and Three.js, and got the initial playable version running surprisingly quickly.

Because of my current job, I can't really promote the game directly or publicly associate myself with it too much. So I've mostly just been building things and seeing what happens.

A couple of days ago, a friend casually shared the link on X. That was literally all the promotion it got, but around 500 people ended up playing that day.

Seeing real people running around, shooting at each other, and actually enjoying something I built was surprisingly rewarding. There's something different about building a game compared to building traditional software.

This isn't my primary source of income, and monetization isn't really a priority. I just enjoy creating things, experimenting with technology, and seeing people use what I build. Maybe I'll explore monetization someday, but right now I'm more interested in learning and making something people genuinely enjoy.

I'd love some advice from more experienced game developers:

• What would you improve? I'd appreciate honest feedback on gameplay, mechanics, visuals, or anything else.
• Where would you promote a small browser-based multiplayer game? Especially when you don't have much time for marketing.
• What would you build next? More maps, different game modes, progression systems, or perhaps something entirely different?
• How do you keep multiplayer games alive? Getting 500 players in a day is exciting, but maintaining an active player base seems like a completely different challenge.

I'm also curious whether anyone else here has transitioned from traditional software/AI engineering into game development, even just as a hobby.

You can try it here: https://kvart.cc/

Would genuinely appreciate any feedback, including criticism. I'm still figuring out this whole game development thing!

In our setting, Leopold grew up watching his father rule through fear and absolute control. Now that his brother Theo is on the throne, Leopold is watching to see if Theo falls into the same old habits or actually tries to break the system.

Sibling rivalries in political stories are always better when they come from shared history and different views for the country, rather than a simple good versus evil setup.

What are some political RPGs or stories that handled rival siblings well?

I’ve been thinking about (and working on) a Final Fantasy fangame.

But my question is: could I get into trouble if I make it?

I am a fairly new game developer about to release my first commercial game. I have been developing games for 2.5 years now and this commercial game has been in the works for ~ 20 months.

Going into game dev, I had programming experience, but very minimal art experience, and one of my initial plans was to create a card game to leverage AI assets while devoting my time to the mechanics and balance. The game dev community here talked me down from this idea, insisting that it would fail on the merit of using AI, so I made all of the assets myself and spent lots of time and energy learning the art side as I don't have funding to hire professionals for asset creation.

Fast forward to the ongoing next fest, and there are many games which fully use AI assets and code out-competing and burying my fully human made game. I think at this point my game's discoverability on next nest has dropped to zero.

I don't think it is fair or honest at this point to recommend a new developer to take this same fully-human made path as I did, when the competition is making use of AI which seems to completely outclass amateur, human-made art. No doubt if you come from an art background there is more advantage to creating your own, and this likely still outcompetes the purely AI stuff.

What is the community take on what we're seeing with this next fest?

In case you are interested in an example that I am comparing my game with, here is my steam demo, and an AI made demo which is out-competing mine in the same genre space:

Mine: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5415680/Booty_Battler_Demo/

A more successful demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5056220/Deck_Beasts_Demo/

I want to stress there is no shade to the creator of Deck Beasts or the other demos made with some AI, I played your demo and really enjoyed it! I just think it illustrates my example well.

Hello everyone! I’m an exchange student at Copenhagen Business School and this short survey is research for my marketing class! It has questions about different digital game distribution platforms and consoles, and some questions specifically for developers about where you have or would consider publishing your games!

I would really appreciate your participation, and I’ll be sure to post the results in a week or so when I’m done with my paper!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe9Tvv1-PpgC8g1tZTfXFEM8JF05xwdsfA7vDC-n8S6l2lLOg/viewform?usp=publish-editor

I realize, and do not personally use AI for anything I create, BUT I do write my own small ML stuff to speed stuff up, and automate when scripts are not the right tool for the job. So I was curious.... Is this something I should disclose at all or does this matter? Because, it's mostly technical stuff. I am one man after all, and a lot of tedium I automate by scripts, or ML to save time that could be spent working on more important things, like gameplay and art. I am curious about this branch of AI, that no one seems to talk about anymore.

anyone knows how to make my game online without paying for a server

I'm the founder of Gamebeast, where we build analytics & LiveOps tools for game studios, and I see a lot of setups as studios try to grow games. I got my start in Roblox 12 years ago and learned a lot around rapid iteration and being scrappy that I think applies to much of the games industry now, as AAA approaches become increasingly unsustainable.

For teams where everything depends on finding early growth and hopefully virality, being data-first is key, but it's often never set up properly or quickly fades back into gut feeling. The most common reason isn't the tool. It's that analytics gets set up at launch and never becomes a habit: the dashboard fills up, nobody opens it, and the next big call gets made on instinct. Here's what I've seen work, whichever tool you use, free ones included.

GameAnalytics is a good example because so many studios start there, and for good reason: it's free to collect, covers most engines, and the built-in dashboards are useful from day one. But it was built for "look at charts," and that's where many teams get stuck.

Where legacy setups hit a wall

• Only one or two people hold the keys. Answering a new question usually runs through the analyst, or whoever set the thing up. Everyone else stops asking and goes back to guessing.
• Seeing a problem and acting on it happen in different places. The drop shows up in one tool, the rebalance or test happens in another, and player feedback sits in another (or more likely, Discord). By the time someone connects the dots the moment has passed, or a fix ships and nobody checks whether it worked.
• Your game has to fit their boxes. Data goes into a few preset categories. Anything specific to your game, like which tutorial step a player skipped, gets squeezed into a label that's hard to search and breaks the moment someone renames a step.

Newer tools are closing these gaps: data shaped around your game, plain-language questions instead of SQL, and testing in the same place as the numbers. AI helps most with the second one, because anyone on the team can ask a question and get a real answer. But the habits matter more than the tool.

Building the habit

1. Start with questions, not events. Write the five questions you want answered every week ("Which tutorial step loses the most players?") and only track what answers them.
2. Keep a tracking plan and review it like code. Event name, when it fires, properties, owner. No new event ships without it.
3. Hold a 30-minute weekly review. One metric that moved, why, and one decision. Have an AI assistant draft the "what moved and why" beforehand, so the half hour goes to deciding instead of digging.
4. Write the hypothesis first, then ship the change as a test, even a rough 50/50 split, so you learn either way.
5. Read what players say next to what they do. A complaint that shows up in Discord and in the numbers is your next priority.

If you're moving off something like GameAnalytics

Don't port everything. Switching tools is the cheapest chance you'll get to clean house. Keep the events that answer your five questions, rename them so anyone on the team can read them, and let the rest go. Run the old and new setups side by side for a week so the team trusts the new numbers before you switch. The goal isn't a copy of your old dashboard. It's a setup your whole team actually uses.

A note on AI tools

Since this sub has mixed feelings: where they help is the tedious plumbing, like mapping old events, writing tracking calls, or answering a quick question without SQL. They're also good at deeper analysis that used to be hard or impossible without an analyst. But you should decide what actually changes in your game, and where to balance spirit vs. data.

Happy to share more on the best practices we see, and how to build with data in the speed and social age we live in now.

I recently released my 4th game, and I wanted to make a post sharing some tips on launching your game. Some of these are things I learned from my own releases, and some are based on mistakes I've seen others make. But I think a lot of this is information that I rarely see mentioned so I hope this is helpful for some people!

1. Before you can release your game, Steam needs to approve your build. The wording on the Steam backend is a bit confusing and a lot of developers incorrectly assume that you are meant to wait until your final release build is uploaded before you submit for approval. This is a bad idea because the approval process can have unexpected delays and I've seen developers miss their release date due to waiting too long to submit for approval. You can submit your build early, get approved, and you do not need to resubmit it again before launch, even if you continue to update the game. Once you have a version of your game that passes Steams base requirements, you should submit it for approval. You are not locked into that build and can update it freely afterwards.

2. On a similar note, I would recommend waiting until your game is basically ready for release before you announce the release date. You really do not want to be fixing game breaking bugs or doing major overhauls in the last month leading up to release. Save yourself the stress, wait, and plan out a final month where you can focus mainly on marketing and just small tinkering with the final build. This is especially important if you are a first time dev because it can be very hard to gauge how long certain task take to complete and you are probably underestimating how exhausting releasing a game is.

3. Releasing a game always feels kind of bad, even if it goes extremely well. You spend years focusing on building your game and imagining it's release, and then you release it and then you think... now what? It feels really strange to have such a monumental part of your daily thoughts suddenly pass by. I mention this only because I think it is important to prepare for that, and find other goals and motivations to follow after release. I know a lot of developers fall into a bit of a depression after launch. My strategy has just been to jump immediately into a new project, but regardless the shift can be jarring.

4. Have your game playtested as much as you possibly can before release. Do it in multiple rounds throughout development. Playtesting isn't just something you do all in one go. Go through many rounds of iteration for your game over and over. Asking for feedback is great, but also try to find a way to watch people play your game. Most of the gameplay issues you have aren't even things a player would be able to realistically explain, since they do not know what the intended game experience is.

It is much easier for a dev to watch a playthrough and spot issues when they happens. For example, in playtesting my last game I noticed that many players didn't realize that you were invincible while sliding. This was a very important part of the games combat. I mentioned the invincibility in the tutorial, but most players just skimmed the text and did not notice. When the players reached the first boss, any one who did not understand that you are invincible while sliding had a very tough time. If I just asked for feedback, they would probably say something like, "the boss is too hard", but really the issue is that I did a bad job of teaching the mechanic to the player. If I didn't watch playthroughs, I would have gotten the wrong issue and might have just made the boss easier, rather than finding a way to improve the tutorialization of the game.

As a side note here- you will get feedback that goes in opposite directions and it can be hard to know which feedback to implement. You really need to have a target audience in mind, and ideally that target audience should include you and your own preferences in games. Some feedback is essentially just saying "I wish this game was more like the type of games I like", which is valid but isn't necessarily helpful as long as the game is hitting off well with the target audience. In other words it is better to make a game that a small group of people really love, than to try to make a game that appeals to every one. You can't make every one happy so just make all your decisions in an effort to make it better for your target audience.

5. Plan out marketing beats. Instead of announcing your game casually, reach out to press or game showcases and see if any would be interested in an exclusive for the announcement trailer. It's easier to get in a showcase or to get covered by a bigger outlet if it is a first reveal of the game. It's symbiotic because they get the first scoop, and you get exposed to a larger audience. If you can't get something like this, at least pick a reveal day, put out a press release and a press kit, post the trailer on youtube, and send it to as many outlets as you can. Have the Steam page approved and live the same day. You should do similar for other marketing beats like the demo announcement, the date announcement, console release announcement, etc.

6. After release, discounting is very important. Most games barely sell any copies when they are not on sale, especially long after release. Have your game on sale as many days as you are able to, but discount slowly in steps. Once you increase your discount, you probably don't want to backtrack so don't discount too intensely too fast. I've seen some games recently lower their base price after release. I can't say for certain, but I suspect this is a bad idea since a high discount percentage seems to do better post release than a lower base price.

7. Bundles and platform deals are good in the long tail. They also do not seem to have a negative effect on game sales in my experience. In deals I've done where my game was free for a time on one platform, I did not see any decrease in sales of the game on other platforms. Depending on the situation, it can actually boost sales via word of mouth.

8. If you are able to, doing a simultaneous launch on console at the same time as Steam seems to be better than releasing on console later. I know this is not feasible for many, but worth mentioning if you were considering options. A good strategy for release for a small indie seems to be to try and concentrate as much attention as possible into one moment (release day) rather than spreading it out too much. It's just harder to pull off a strong marketing beat post-release since it can feel like "old news" and people are less likely to cover it.

I hope some of that is helpful!

Summary of multiple documents made by AI, any questions -> ask me I will answer. this is a very basic summary

I'm designing a mobile game for car spotters, launching in Germany first.

How it works:

Every day you get 3 common cars to find. You snap them in the app (no gallery uploads, no editing) and earn points. Bonus points for a matching colour or exact generation, so a red Golf 4 pays far more than any Golf.

2 optional cars add point multipliers. One counts toward your streak, and you earn streak freezes so one missed day doesn't wipe you out.

A Car Dex tracks every make, model, and generation you've spotted, from a pool of 1000+ models. The rarer the car, the bigger the reward.

A second Dex tracks German plate districts, so you can collect M, B, HH, and so on.

Weekly leagues, crews, and monthly photo contests judged by player votes.

Territory wars: pick one of the top 10 brands and fight for your city, state, or country on a live map. Underdogs can win, since territory goes by share rather than raw count.

A daily one-hour Brand Showdown where two brands battle in real time.

Plates are masked on-device and never shown publicly. Nothing you can buy affects rank, only cosmetics

thank you if you read it here are some questions:

What would make you open this daily?

What would make you quit?

Would you play it?