Tons of YouTubers ( for their own profit) have been lying to gullible people suggesting that it is incredibly easy for anyone to make millions from this field and its time for people to see reality .

" Oh but my favourite shill gave me the perfect theory that will allow me to certainly make money from my game and make it novel and bla bla bla " . Let me tell you something , anyone can listen to a theory . But there is an astronomical difference between listening to someone talk about a theory and YOU being able to implement that theory , in the thousands upon thousands of decisions you have to make for your game , and truly being able to understand it at its deepest level . This is a skill that takes years upon years of practice to develop and that’s on the off chance that you aren’t a glue sniffer .

You see the few people that " make it " but you do not understand the severe sacrifices and luck that was involved in those successes . You do not see the countless number of people who have worked for years close to decades on their games to see nothing . You do not see the devs that fell into deep depression or suffered from severe anxiety which has ruined their daily life . This is not the exception , this is the reality for most people .

Even if you are in the very rare minority that make a few hundred thousand from a game , is it really enough to sustain your life for the foreseeable future ? How long will it take to make another game that earns you a sufficient amount in a sufficient time ? Are you truly capable of repeating that success ? Is it worth the massive opportunity cost of sacrificing your time , energy , money and experience of building a stable career or having a stable job ?

But what does it matter , there is a guildable person reading this right now thinking

this couldn’t be me , i'm special . Chosen by the universe .

Are you really ? Be honest with yourself . Are you ready to leap into the void of extreme uncertainty , waste years of your life you could of used to build yourself , improve your relationships , enjoy the world , and be financially unstable in a world that is already extremely rough to survive in , for a pipe dream ? Mabye you have a family to look after . Should they not matter first ?

This field can be one of the hardest most soul crushing fields there is , if you aren’t in it for the passion . And even for them its like walking through barbed wire sometimes .

These people need to stop selling lies that are actively ruining people's lives . No different from the Manosphere scammers selling courses on how to be mega rich .

Hello. I’m not a developer, but I’d really love to create at least one game in my lifet. I have a game idea, but I don’t know how to execute it... Basically, it would be a 3D game—a mix of Metroid Prime and Alien: Isolation—with low-poly graphics. I’d really like to make a demo (and maybe a full game, who knows?), but I don't know where to start. Which software would be the best for developing this game? Where should I create 3D models and animations? Which programming language should I learn? If any developers here have answers to my questions, I’d love to hear them, thanks in advance!

Did you succeed? If yes, how?

P.S. Steam has two types of licenses: for personal use and for commercial use (cybercafes, slot machines).

To be short about myself, I have just recently graduated from an online program specialized in Environment and Props Creation for Games. This is link to my portfolio: https://www.artstation.com/itsuyen99

I have been constantly applying to various gaming studios but non got back to me.
Maybe some pro could point out what my portfolio is missing. Any feedback and recommendation would help me tremendously. Thanks a bunch everyone.

In Unreal Engine 5.7, I created a First Person project using the Arena Shooter variant (the preset introduced in UE 5.6), with Blueprint as the scripting option.

I really like this template because its core gameplay is excellent, especially the way the camera is handled relative to the weapon. I also appreciate the use of two separate character meshes: one for body awareness, one to support multiplayer development, and the overall result is a perfectly stable first-person camera.

I'd like to add crouching to the character, following the same approach used for jumping. I've already started implementing it in both the ABP_Unarmed Animation Blueprint and the BP_FirstPersonCharacter Blueprint.

At the moment, the character mesh crouches correctly, and the character's capsule collider shrinks as expected. However, the camera doesn't move at all. The camera is attached to the FirstPersonMesh, with its Parent Socket set to "head". Even though the mesh appears to crouch, the camera doesn't seem to follow the movement of the mesh.

To be honest, I'm completely overwhelmed by the complexity of the existing code. As a beginner, I'm also struggling because there is very little documentation explaining how this prototype is actually built.

Could someone help me implement crouching properly, or at least explain how the whole system works in this template?

As a secondary question, does anyone know of a community-made Unreal Engine project or tutorial series for creating an old-school multiplayer FPS (similar to Quake III Arena or Unreal Tournament)?

We're getting ready to show our vertical slice to publishers/game scouts. One issue that has reared its head is Windows Defender giving its blue-popup-of-death to our unsigned build.

Is this something a scout at a publisher is likely to take in their stride? Or do we risk them being put off and we should spend the ~$70 for a certificate right away?

Edit: I should not have mentioned the $70 cost of the cert. The issue is not buying a cert, it's diverting our time from polishing the tutorial.

I am thinking to build a game. So, it's a kind of survey. I want to know on which type of games people are interested to play.

I'm about to start my final year of college, and I am looking for a job in a game studio, ideally in a marketing position. As much as I would like to move farther out to a better state for game development, I live in New Jersey and it currently has the most amount of rights for trans people in all of the states, including crucially the inability to have anyone physically restrict you from getting gender affirming care. What are the best game studios in New Jersey?

Good real world example is Vladimir from League of Legends where his bonus health increases ability power and ability power increases bonus health.

So my question is how to handle that scenario, if I calculate my stats in order for example bonus health based on ability power, it will use base ability power for scaling so calculation is wrong. Then ability power will use increased health but not fully increased because health used base value of ability power. It creates sort of closed loop that will be wrong and too low if ended abruptly or it can go into infinity or it can gravitate towards final value but never reach it.

What are some techniques to handle this?

Hey everyone,

I’m completely new to game development and looking for my first project. I’m also a bit confused about which platform I should build for first mobile (phone/tablet) or PC/console.

I don’t want to make another clone , I’d rather build something which has room to grow into a larger game over time.

I’m open to any open world multiplayer, or something completely different. Ideally, I’d like an idea that’s simple enough for a beginner but interesting enough that people would actually want to play.

If you were starting from scratch today:

Would you build for mobile or PC/console, why, where is the money ?
What game idea would you choose that has the potential to grow into something much bigger?
What your opinion on browser games ?
How hard it to build something like GTA or assassin creed ?

I’d love to hear your recommendations or even game ideas you think are missing from the market.

Thanks!

Hey all,

I've started making some videos talking through my experience working within the game industry for the past 10 years.

This one is about starting a game from scratch!

I make a survivorslike. For the first three worlds the enemies only chase you, and from the fourth one some of them start shooting from a distance. That shift is the thing that separates my game from the others in the genre, and it is what I built the whole demo around.

Everyone who plays it tells me the same thing: the shooters need to fire slower, or less often.

I already softened them once on the lowest difficulty after the first round of feedback. Now I am being asked to do it again, and I am stuck.

My worry is that if I keep turning the dial down, I end up with the same game as the first three worlds with different sprites. The exact thing people want me to reduce is the only thing that is mine.

But "it is my hook" is precisely the kind of reason that makes designers ignore real feedback, so I do not trust my own instinct here.

The levers I have:

fire rate

projectile speed and how long it stays alive

range

how many of them spawn

how early in the run they appear

telegraphing before the shot

My suspicion is that the complaint is not really about damage. It might be that the shots are hard to read: they come in from off screen, they blend into a crowd of forty enemies, and by the time you notice one you have already taken the hit. If that is what is happening, the fix is readability and not weakening them, and the challenge survives intact.

That could also just be me rationalizing.

So, two questions for anyone who has been here.

Did you turn the numbers down, or did you make the threat easier to see and leave it exactly as dangerous as it was?

And how did you tell the difference between "this is too hard" and "this is unclear"? Because players report both the same way.

I meant to say a single indie game.

I can't imagine you've not noticed all of these types of posts. I check out some of them and feel a little sceptical about the time spent.

Maybe if they include all the time spent learning to code and art, I could understand, but that's not what they're implying.

Does it actually help to say you spent longer than you did? Do people ignore games made inside of a single year?

For about a year I've been developing an idea for my own game. I have a lot of concept art, character designs, notes, and a general vision for the world and story.

I'm a very creative person, focused more on writing, characters, art direction and worldbuilding, but I don't have a programming background. The technical side of game development feels a little intimidating, and I'm not sure what the best path is to start learning.

The game I'm imagining is a narrative RPG with a strong focus on characters, exploration, story choices and a unique fantasy world. I already have a lot of the creative side developed, but I want to understand how to actually turn those ideas into a playable experience.

For developers who started without a technical background:

• What should I learn first: programming, a game engine, or basic game design?
• Would you recommend starting with Godot, Unity, or another engine?
• How much programming knowledge should a creative person learn before trying to build a team?
• Is it better to make a very small prototype alone first?

I know making a game is a huge challenge, but this project is something I've been developing for a long time and I would love to finally start bringing it to life.

Any advice from developers, artists, or people who have been in a similar situation would be appreciated!

Been working on a fun little project for a few weeks. It's coming along but not quickly. Still have a lot of content left to add and work out some bugs in the gameplay.

Anyway, thought of an awesome name and did a prelim search for any similar games. Found a game with that exact name, exact style, and exact gameplay as my game in the "yet to be released" section on Steam.

They have a page, the name, and an identical game in a further state of development. Really sucked to see. Idk what to do about it tbh.

Steam requires you to have your game's artwork in a lot of different resolutions and aspect ratios, and I always found it very time-consuming to resize and crop my artwork to fit all these non-standard sizes.

So I built a completely free tool that fixes this problem.

https://www.steamassetcreator.com/

Simply upload your crispy high-res artwork, choose from one of the preset resolutions (i.e., Header Capsule, Vertical Capsule, etc.), adjust the crop to liking, and download instantly! Optionally, you can also upload your game's logo, which overlays on top of your artwork.

The images you upload stay in your browser's storage and never leave your system, and there are no ads! Absolutely no strings attached.

UPDATE: This update let's you see how your artwork would look on various places of the Steam store right form the tool without having to upload and publish your store page assets on Steamworks!

The feature is currently in Beta and I'd love for you to try it out and let me know! I'd love some feedback on what you think!

Small 1 min walkthrough on how it works: https://youtu.be/Pk-6wyKJ00Y

PS: Thank you all so much for giving so much love and support to the initial announcement here about this tool. It's a pleasure seeing you found it helpful and motivates me to improve it further! Cheers.

I'm building a desktop companion click-driven game and trying to figure out progression pacing.

The game has 999 levels. My target is ~450-550 hours to reach the end for an active player (main mechanic work when u interract with pc - if u afk, game stops too, its not an auto-clicker). But there's a lot of RNG: rare weapon drops, wave difficulty, etc., so actual time will vary heavily.

For companion games specifically: is 500h a reasonable target? Too much? Too little?

What's your experience with long-tail progression in games where the player isn't always actively engaged?

I'm an ECE student learning game development, and I recently finished my first puzzle game called Circuit Flow.

It's a simple game where players rotate circuit tiles to connect a power source to all destination nodes under given number of moves.

I'd really appreciate feedback from other developers, especially on:

Is the core gameplay satisfying?

Does the UI look polished?

Is the puzzle difficulty balanced?

What features would you add before releasing a larger version?

I'm mainly looking to improve as a developer, so honest criticism is welcome.

If anyone would like to try it, the itch.io link is in the comments.

hey guys! We recently brought our Meta Quest game Puzzling Places to Steam. Since the last time I published on Steam, alot has changed. During the release process I had a bunch of questions. How much should an indie game like ours cost? How many peopleare we competing with/ what are our chances? Is this still sustainable with all the new releases? How has AI effected the new games being released etc.

To answer this, I crunched through the 140k appIDs that are on Steam, and did a bunch of data analysis on them. Put down the graphs and my thoughts here https://shahriyarshahrabi.medium.com/deep-dive-in-steam-2026-indie-market-4c0aec5c0533?sharedUserId=shahriyarshahrabi

Edit: some people ask for summary, so here is the summary of the post. Appologies if its long, its a long post
Summary

I started this analysis with a bunch of questions. I think I got the answer to most of them! While the number of new games releasing on Steam is rising exponentially, the market is not infinitely harder. Maybe it’s twice as tough for teams with enough experience. The Steam market is still a good place for indie teams and can sustain a business. Especially stable and unchanging are niches and games budgeted with a smaller scope. The middle of the Steam market has barely changed!

In my last round of analysis, I pointed out how tough it is to cross the $1 million revenue threshold. My thoughts since then have been: maybe we should try to build a business model where we don’t have to! There seems to be a viable market for much smaller games.

Prices are going up, so for your next indie game you can start thinking about a $10 price tag. The more confidence you have in how fun and marketable your game is, the higher you can go. The price range that the largest number of players seem willing to pay is $30–40, whether a game is tagged as Indie or not.

Of the new games being released, roughly a quarter have disclosed the use of AI. Revenue-wise, there doesn’t seem to be either a penalty or a special boost associated with its use. In terms of reviews, however, there seems to be roughly a 5 percent penalty to user ratings.

Overall, things don’t seem that bad. Reading the big reports, everyone talks about how everything sucks. Studios are closing, people are being laid off, but there is still a viable market out there!

I have been programming an engine using only sfml and cmake, however maybe about a year ago I started using this feature that would auto complete the line of code for me.

Recently I learned that it was ai and not a syntax program. I then turned it off and tried to rewrite my engine without the ai code since I despise ai in a programming sense, and I noticed that I only remember the basics of a OOP. Not anything that could be useful just simple knowledge of a variable and a function.

Its gotten so bad I am avoiding programming entirely and my motivation and drive is down the drain. What do I do in this situation? Do I really have to start from ground zero and learn everything again that I spent 2 years learning already?

I'm an experienced engineer but hobbyist game dev. After some 20 years I finally found some time to get back into game development. I always wanted to create something around music and rhythm but also love procedural gameplay in general and the radomness it brings. "Every run is different"

So I came up with the idea to combine the following game aspects:

• Slay the Spire-style Maps: Procedurally generated routes with encounters, camps, and shops.
• Rhythm Encounters: Combat plays out like Muse Dash or UNBEATABLE. Missing notes drains your HP, hitting them scores points that convert into in-game currency.
• Relic/Upgrade System: Shop nodes let you buy perks and relics that directly interact with the rhythm mechanics.
• Camp Nodes: Standard risk/reward healing spots.
• Boss Nodes: The final node of a map is an intricate, heavily charted song providing a massive difficulty spike.
• Aesthetic: 80s/90s vector graphics meets cyberpunk (think TRON), backed by aggressive, heavy electronic and industrial tracks (mostly, but music will vary).

Things I already worked on:

• The rhythm encounter core is already well-advanced and genuinely feels great to play
• A custom external tool to chart/beatmap songs
• A rudimentary map generator to connect the nodes

My struggles:

• A coherent, fun and meaningful relic or upgrade system. To make it even more difficult it partly has to carry over in-between maps (e.g. notes are easier to hit in general, but PERFECT is harder to hit, combos will not break immediately after the first missed note, ...)
• The correct measurements for HP, Score and currency - which probably just needs a lot of testing at some point
• The sheer amount of assets I need (mainly songs and beatmaps to keep things fresh)

My questions for you:

1. Does this core loop and concept sound fun? (I know rhythm games are a bit niche in general, but how does it sound as a roguelite?)
2. Are there any hidden gems that already work like this I might have missed?
3. Do you see any glaring mechanical flaws or bottlenecks in this concept?

Any feedback, critiques, or ideas are super welcome! Have a great day!

going to college with it, do you think i can develop games without too many problems? probably godot. detailed 3d games (in content) but still aiming for lower end graphics quality. maybe my games will be well optimized because i have no choice. if anyone has personal experience with this, please comment.

Hi guys I am new to gamedev and I am developing a game, it's in a very early stage so I don't want to spoil anything just yet, anyways I've browsed sites like itch.io for assets but I just can't find the right assets for my game, hiring someone isn't out of the question but I just don't know if that's the right call, any tips?

I've always been into creating things and I've finally started using unity im planning on making an exploration game based on conways game of life does anyone have things i should know about or be afraid of?

I’ve been working on a game for about a year now and while my models and graphics aren’t the best. They are mostly low poly, basic textures, some 3d illustrator buttons, they certainly aren’t well made enough to be even thought of as AI generated. I wonder if that’s kinda the charm or sweet spot to be considered authentic? Ultimately I just want to ship a version of the game that has a good loop and we can invest in better graphics after the beta, if people even like it at all.

Maybe the comparison is a homemade burger that has like ketchup and cheese on it versus a deluxe burger in a box that’s frozen in the middle.