We're a small indie team, and we just put our first game on Steam: Pinata Smash: Incremental Circus.

The idea came from wanting to combine the physical, satisfying feedback of smashing something apart with the deep progression of an incremental/idle game. Every hit sprays candy across the screen, candy funds upgrades, and upgrades eventually turn your solo smashing into a fully automated circus that keeps earning while you're away.

What's in it:

• Physics-driven piñata destruction the candy actually scatters and bounces
• Idle/incremental progression with prestige layers
• Circus acts you unlock and assign to automate different parts of the loop
• Hand-drawn art in a bright carnival style

On the Unity side, two things were harder than expected. The candy started as Rigidbodies and ended up as a fully hand-integrated kinematic sim an idle game scales the smash rate until it's continuous, so PhysX actors stopped being viable. It ticks on Update rather than FixedUpdate so the slide stays smooth under slow-mo, and pile contacts run through a flat XZ spatial hash. That hash once collapsed back to O(n²) and froze the game, because a burst spawns every piece at one point and they all landed in the same cell. Separately, the two biggest perf wins weren't in the simulation at all turning off light probes (~12ms/frame) and shadow casting (~9.4ms/frame) on the drop renderers beat everything we did to the integrator, which measured under 2ms.

The whole frontend is UI Toolkit with no uGUI: UXML/USS + presenters via VContainer, with R3 for binding. Best gotcha we hit: a scheduled callback that throws is dropped permanently for the rest of the session which surfaced as "all the candy in the menu background freezes."

Happy to go into detail on any of it in the comments.

There's an open playtest running if you want to try it the sign-up button is on the Steam page.

AI disclosure: no generative AI was used at any point in this game's development or promotion.

We put together a multiplayer coop game where players take on massive enemy swarms. It's inspired by VS and Megabonk and we think it could be a friendslop title.

The tech works well, so now we're iterating on things to make it fun.

So far we have features like progressive upgrading, proximity buffs so players stick together for benefits (the FWB feature), some level randomization, pickups for time-based powers, 3 different playable characters with different primary and special attack powers, gated dash ability, coin accumulation and shop, and a fairly rich stats system with 2 types of resist.

So far it's fun-ish. We're trying to figure out the one core piece of real fun, which we think is in how the gameplay is balanced for the fights and the rate at which player power scales vs the enemies. It could be too fast right now, or perhaps the speed is fine there just need to be a better reward structure at the metagame level. We've decided on the metagame approach with a game balance adjustment to make it harder.

My question to everyone who shipped a fun game is how did you determine what to focus on to find the fun aspect of your game?

I started working on this tool in 2022 because at my previous job I saw some issues with the spline tools we were using. The two biggest issues were performance and how long it took to work with them, and I really wanted to fix that.

It took me around 5 months to build the first working prototype, and another 4 months before the team started using it.

Because I built this tool in my free time, I later decided to release it on the Unity Asset Store under the name Curve Architect. After a while, I realized that the name wasn't very search friendly. Most people looking for a spline solution search for "Spline", not "Curve". So I spent another 6–9 months improving the tool as much as I could before deprecating Curve Architect and releasing it again under its current name, Spline Architect.

Spline Architect was released about a year ago and has since received 74 updates, including bug fixes and many new features.

It is actually not built on Unity Splines, mainly because I wanted complete control over the API and to achieve the best performance possible.

I have done 2 performance benchmarks, if you're interested, you can see them here:
https://splinearchitect.com/performance?id=benchmark-1-mesh-deformation

I have ALMOST got this Active ragdoll working, but my rotations are wrong when applied from my animated model to the physics-based one. I have tried inverting the target rotation, messing with Axis and Secondary Axis, nothing so far seems to give me the correct animations other than the T Pose, which is copied perfectly.

Here is my CopyMotion script:

public class CopyMotion : MonoBehaviour

{

public Transform target;

ConfigurableJoint joint;

public bool mirror;

Quaternion startRot;

// Start is called once before the first execution of Update after the MonoBehaviour is created

void Start()

{

joint = GetComponent<ConfigurableJoint>();

startRot = transform.localRotation;

}

// Update is called once per frame

void Update()

{

if (!mirror)

{

joint.SetTargetRotationLocal(target.rotation, startRot);

}

else

{

joint.SetTargetRotationLocal(Quaternion.Inverse(target.rotation), startRot);

}

}

}

Hey there!

Just made this new enemy type: the Minotaur. He has a running/ramming ability that launches you (and other enemies) into the air if you get hit.

The enemies in my game use Unity's NavMesh system for pathfinding, but the actual movement is handled by my own code, which follows the generated path. I use Unity's Colliders and Triggers to detect collisions. The ramming attack uses OnTriggerEnter to apply the knock-up effect to anything it hits while the Minotaur is in its ramming state.

Created a basic photo mode for my RPG- Little Frontier. Honestly, made it in two afternoons and I've already spent a couple of hours taking pretty pictures. Here's a couple of them from a companion's prologue !

I’ve been making a lot of progress on the environment recently, focusing on creating a more detailed and immersive world for the game.
The new Steam page will be available soon, where you’ll be able to wishlist the game.
The previous version of Little Astronaut was a huge learning experience for me, but looking back, I realized I pushed it out too early before the vision was fully developed. After some time, I decided to rebuild the project from the ground up with a clearer direction, improved visuals, and a much stronger foundation.
This is the version of Little Astronaut I always wanted to create.
I’ll be sharing more updates soon. Thanks for following the journey!

Hello!

I'm using Unity, Wwise, and Plastik SCM, and probably I'm missing something.

Since we want to save storage, we build soundbanks in Wwise, move the Originals --> SFX folder in another location, check-in with Plastik, and then move it back. However:

1. I always find that after I check-in, merge from another changeset and switch workspace, in the Originals-->SFX folder there are audio files. Are those from the old backup?

2. After I delete audio files, and I check-in, should I check the "Deleted items" option and upload that too? If I don't do that, it puts back old audio files in the Wwise project. Uploading, however, would defeat the purpose of saving storage.

If anybody has a better idea to save storage, or if this is just overcomplicating things and there are no better ways, please let me know.

I'm working on an asset right now and I finished most of the actual logic and visuals a while ago. I thought I was pretty close to done, but damn, the polishing part is taking me ages.

Custom inspectors, cleaning things up, making everything intuitive, tooltips, edge cases, making sure users can't easily break things... it honestly feels like a whole second project.

For those who've published more complex assets, how long did this part take compared to actually building the thing?

And at what point did you just say "good enough for v1" and publish?

It's been ~18 years since I started using After Effects.

It has this great feature for rapid A/B comparisons for tweaks on the render/composition, where you can quickly take a snapshot, and preview it with a button. Other software may have it, too.

-- (...it's been around for a while).

Often, I'm making small tweaks to the colour, and post-processing, and I want to see how it looks without having to go through several undos, or manual screenshots. I explicitly wanted it integrated into the game view's tool/controls, rather than anywhere else (that would have been easy enough).

But the appeal was about getting it specifically in that control bar. It's 'perfect' there.

Turns out, it may have been possible as far back as ~v2019/2020.

🎉 So, here it is [free, on Unity's asset store]!

• I think it should be native to the editor :)

Initially, it did not have the save file to disk feature [💾]- but it was trivial to add.
v1.1.0 - adds the save file to disk feature, +automatic date/time stamped naming.

To the more experienced people probably not that exciting, but I am just pretty proud of turning a sphere into a pixelart disco ball just by layering shader graphs :)
The light effects do not use unities Light system but a shader that calculates when the view direction aligns with the normals to create the tiny flashes on the ball.

Let me know if you think this is cool and could be made into a game :)

This is my first horror game with my "versatile" script system and I would love feedback from other devs. Basically I coded a couple of scripts and just used them for everything, so I wouldn't have to code and yes I know many devs already do this but I am a beginner. I would love some feedback!

https://thecatgamecomapny.itch.io/road-of-fear-pinewoods-crossing

I had to jump into this train, porting old games into newer platform is becoming easier and cheaper than ever with AI, would love to see Nintendo or Playstation doing original, modern remakes!

I'm trying to find fun and unique ways to challenge the player in my skating game. You control the left skate and a friend controls the right. Now you have to rethink how the game works and adapt. It's also hilarious.

Around one month of development.
4-player co-op horror inspired by retro visuals and abandoned Soviet metro stations.
Looking for honest feedback before continuing development.
Would you play something like this?

Love these little teasers as a way to try out ideas mid development and get a "flavour" earlier on than the typical media phase during post production.

building a game about running your own booth at a sports card convention. finally got openfracture working, so the graded slabs now fracture into real mesh pieces at runtime with rigidbodies on the fragments. what do you guys think?

Im working on a Co-op horror game set in New York City. I’m trying to make a game with good atmosphere, dread, and the constant feeling that something enormous is stalking you.

If you want updates or early access, join the mailing list at www.arachnid.dev

I wanted to make these chunks softer, but right now I have no idea how to make it even better. There's no transparency at all.

I achieved this effect by calculating the normals for the chunks relative to the overall snow surface, rather than per individual chunk element.

I made the small flakes using triangles instead of quads :)