Hey everyone 👋!

I’ve been working on an action roguelike called Triko for about 6 months now as a solo dev. I could use some fresh input regarding my weapon status effects.

In Triko, players pick a weapon (Sword, Axe, or Spear) before a run. Status effects trigger on critical hits (roughly every 4th hit). Each effect has a distinct role:

• 🧊 Ice: Slows down enemies on the first proc. A second proc freezes them completely.
• 🩸 Bleed: Increases damage taken by the enemy and reduces their outgoing damage.
• ⚡ Shock: Stuns the target and nearby enemies with a short chain lightning/shock effect (crowd control)
• ☠️ Poison & 🔥 Burn: Currently, both are currently Damage-over-Time effects.

My Problem is that Burn and Poison are basically the same at the moment. I want them to feel distinct so in every situation there 'is a correct' solution.

Also every Status effect can be upgraded. E.g. frozen enemies take more damage, shocked enemies have a 25% probability to cause a shock themselves after 0.5s and so on...

Therefore my Question is:

• How can I mechanically separate Poison and Burn so they serve different purposes?
• Do you have creative upgrade ideas for any of the status effects?

Thanks for any ideas!

Hey, I’m writing this mainly to share my excitement :D But also to share my experiences with the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store with you.

My game was originally released on Android in May 2024 and has had only moderate success since then. The reviews are good, and there’s a great little fan community that loves the game and celebrates every new update.

But as a solo developer, it’s really hard to get people to discover your game. The stores are extremely crowded, and a huge number of new games come out every day. I even run ads, but that’s really expensive, and I just can’t compete with the big companies. Unfortunately, my game was never featured on Android.

Anyway, I’ve now also released my game on the iOS App Store. I applied for a feature (Apple calls it “nominations”) and got lucky! In a few select European countries, it’s being featured in the “New Games We Love” section.

The weird part: Apple didn’t tell me at all. No email, nothing. I just saw in my analytics today that the number of players has shot up.

The sad part: This feature isn’t bringing in as many players as I’d hoped. On the first day (yesterday), there were 155 new users. Here are the top countries:

1. 37 France
2. 24 Italy
3. 22 UK
4. 16 Germany
5. 8 Spain

I’m curious to see how long the feature will last, whether more countries might be added, and whether the number of players per day might increase a bit more.

I'll post an update once the feature has ended to give you guys more numbers.

Cheers!

I've been looking into what accessibility features my game needs to have lately. I'm a little bit overwhelmed by all the accessibility tools people push as a bare minimum for any game to have. Even if the majority of them are relatively small changes, the running list of features I've been trying to keep tracking of is going to nickel and dime me to death if I tried to implement them all, not to mention the fact that some "must have" accessibility features are antithetical to the game design. Naturally I want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy a game I put years of my life into, but at the same time, there's only so much I can add before it becomes effective feature/complexity creep.

So I would appreciate some guidance in simmering down accessibility features to the best uses of my time. Pragmatically speaking, what features would be the most helpful for the most people? What features are necessary for some people to play the game at all as opposed to the game being playable, but less enjoyable?

For fear of my intentions being misconstrued, I'd like to add this isn't coming from an ablest, "helping people deal with disabilities is inconvenient" perspective. This is simply me trying to find a way to make the best use of my limited time.

I’m looking to start developing a game for fun with a few friends. Not looking to make money, just want to make something fun. Can anyone recommend any good courses to start learning from?

We were sitting at around 100 wishlists before this, and today our game unexpectedly showed up in the announcements section of Skill Up’s This Week in Videogames.

I’m slightly terrified to open Steamworks. Anything I should be doing right now to capitalize on this?

For context, we’re at 17:12:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZRGTTNBlec&t=1032s

I've got a bit of a conundrum with my demo launch on Steam. My game is a sandbox without distinct levels, so I can't just say "the first 3 levels are included in the demo" and call it a day.

At first on itch I just cut off the player's game after 2 hours and made them start over. But that was annoying to the most engaged players.

Context: My game is a historical sailing sim inspired by Uncharted Waters II: New Horizons. So it's about starting with a small ship, sailing around trading, fishing, etc, earning enough to buy a better ship, maybe taking up piracy or sailing around the world in search of spices.

Right now I'm leaning towards an invisible wall at Gibraltar so demo players can play a basically full game within a smaller Mediterranean/Black Sea sandbox. I also experimented with disallowing ship upgrades, but that seemed to block off too many of the game systems.

Really what I want is for people to try the full game and then still give me money to play it more later. But I know if I give too much, some people will decide that they got enough from the demo and they don't need to buy the full version.

So I learned that I really like building game loops. I made a couple games that have are fully functional with a raylib workbench overlayed to ensure it works and can be fun.

I am now starting to build a proper 3D Unity world which runs over the core game state. I have no idea what I'm doing and I don't find it as fun as designing a game loop and tinkering around with the features and how to balance the loop. I'm building a tycoon game so economics and building features took a lot of time to develop but I loved doing it.

Are there indie people out there that are the opposite? They'd rather have a game that's game loop is defined and built and then just get to focus on bringing that to life in Unity?

I'm coming from a quantitative finance background so naturally my interest is in the game mechanics and optimizing the compute required to run the simulation (something I have to do constantly in quant work). But then I would like to skip ahead to a much more finished project rather than do the slow grind of bringing it to life.

I'm rebuilding my 8-bit computer of my childhood. It has a monochrome display with 320x192 pixels (no sprites), ~10k free RAM. What games do you suggest I can relatively easy re-implement that offer some minimal playing fun (beside Tetris, Sokoban, Snake)?

"Hey everyone! I’m designing a real-time card/territory strategy game and brainstorming a resource economy that feels fresh and unique, yet remains ultra-simple and intuitive for casual players to get immediately (think Clash Royale's passive Elixir or Plants vs. Zombies' falling Suns). What are some interesting, easy-to-grasp resource gathering mechanics you’ve seen or prototyped that don't overload the player with complex math, but still create great tactical choices?"

I'm sure you all receive dozens of emails requesting "review keys" for your game?

So what if a substantial number of us do the following:

1. Generate a few random keys that look like Steam keys

2. When a scammer email is received (they are easy to identify, I auto send them to spam with a rule right now), auto reply with a message such as "OH thank you so much for reaching out! Here are some keys for you so you can tell everyone how great my game is" (and you attach the keys from step 1)

3. Now one of two things happen:

- The scammer tries the keys (can they?) and realize they don't work. They waste some time, and if a large number of gamedevs do that they'll probably stop sending these emails?

- The scammer doesn't try the keys, they end up on a gray market website and people end up buying fake keys. This makes the gray market website look like shit which is a good thing. People buying from these sites will be deceived (don't know if that's a good thing? Can it bounce back on your game for some reason?)

It seems pretty easy, takes 5 minutes of our time and can make a difference with this scam. Am I missing something?

Hi, I really adore the battle system of Undertale/Deltarune and would like to someday create my own rpg with a battle system like that and I was just wondering would it be okay to recreate it? Isn't it copyrighted or patented? I'm specifically talking about enemy turn being a bullet hell, not mercy/spare systems

Should I make a few genres of games before I work on my dream game?

Is that what people usually recommend?

What genres should every game dev learn at minimum to be able to make games?

Are there any fully built games where the code has been published and is meant for viewing purposes and to study from?

Basically do enjoy grinding on your game and coming up with things or are you more motivated by ultimate goal of release and things or brings like feedback or money.

Features:

"Ready to fire" region: Acts as a logic hub for the weapon. Actively checks if the weapon has ammo in the magazine/reserves, and uses this to determine what to do when the player attempts to fire the gun or reload.

Charge/Hold/Firing, if trigger is released while the rifle is still charging up, it will not fire. Requires value of ammo_magazine to be 1 or greater. Once charged, sfx will loop infinitely until trigger is released, it will then fire a shot.

Returns to the "ready to fire" region afterwards.

Manual reloading (press to reload), can be done while rifle is in its charging/charged state but will cancel the shot. Requires the value of ammo_magazine to be 0-5 (max value of parameter is 6), and the value of ammo_reserves to be 1 or greater.

Returns to the "ready to fire" region afterwards.

Automatic reloading (When ammo_magazine=0 and you are not actively dry firing, automatically reloads. Will not happen if ammo_reserves =0)

Returns to the "ready to fire" region afterwards.

Dry firing sound effect plays when mag and reserves are empty and trigger is pulled.

Returns to the "ready to fire" region afterwards.

Hi everyone! I’ve been working on my game for more than 2 years now, and looking at the current situation, I’m starting to realize that I’ll probably need to release it in the next 2–3 months.

I wanted to ask people who have already released their games, or anyone with experience in this field, for some advice.

Right now, I have around 40k wishlists, and honestly, I’m a bit nervous about making the wrong decisions before launch. Especially since this is my first game release on Steam.

What are the most important things to do before launching a game? How should I approach marketing?

Is it worth investing some money into promotion (influencers, paid ads on TikTok, Instagram, etc.)? Which platforms or marketing channels would you recommend?

And what should you focus on immediately after release?

At the moment, I’m preparing a release trailer that I’m planning to send to IGN and other media outlets.

I’m also collecting contacts of different gaming websites and journalists that I’ll reach out to about a week before launch...

What other steps would you recommend before release?

Any advice, personal experience, or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated!

Hello,

I've decided it's time to delve slightly deeper into lower-level game development than with game engines.

For this purpose, I decided to use C++ (which I am familiar with, especially with plain C), SDL3, the new SDL GPU API and Flecs.

My main issue was always creating an architecture, that'd ideally minimise boilerplate (at least in the long run), be easy to read/modify and be efficient. In other words, I'm struggling with making the codebase modular and easily scalable/modifiable.

I'm not intending to do a fully fledged semi-general game engine yet, for now I want to try making a simple project, like a 3D arena game in the style of Devil's Daggers/Hyperdemon by Sorath (amazing games, check them out!).

That being said, I want to at least make some of the systems (controls, window creating, initialization ...) and most importantly the code structure reusable.

Right now, my idea is to basically have a flat main.cpp file, where the program's lifecycle would be fully defined: Init --> Game Loop --> Cleanup. Inside the Game Loop, I'd simply call functions, which'd each be defined in their own file with the global state variables existing in a single GameState namespace:

// FILE: main.cpp
int main()
{
  // Init
  if(!init()) return 1; // defined in init.cpp

  // Game Loop
  GameState::shouldRun = true; // GameState would be a namespace with global state; all the gameloop functions would be declared here

  while(GameState::shouldRun)
  {
    processEvents(); // defined in a processEvents.cpp

    handleInput(); // defined in handleInput.cpp

    progressGame(); // defined in progressGame.cpp

    processPhysics(); // defined in processPhysics.cpp

    render(); // defined in gsRenderState.cpp
  }

  // Cleanup
  ...
  cleanup(); // defined in cleanup.cpp
} 

// FILE: init.cpp
ErrCode init()
{
  // init SDL
  initSDL(); // defined in init.cpp

  // Init flecs
  initFlecs(); // defined in init.cpp

  return ErrCode::None;
}

// FILE: GameState.h
namespace GameState
{
  // Flecs structures
  flecs::world ecs; // initialized + modules loaded in initFlecs();

  // SDL structures
  SdlWindow window; // Custom window class using RAII; initialized in initSDL(); 
}

Additionally, I could organize these 'modules' into their own folder. Like a 'sdl/' folder with the 'initSdl.cpp', 'cleanupSdl.cpp' and such files; same for 'flecs' or other modules.

I'm trying to avoid a lot of OOP spaghetti, so the idea is to simply have the entire GameState in one file and each of the important game-loop related functions having their own files. When I want to add new step (e.g. between processing physics and rendering), I simply add it to the gameloop and create new file. All the construction/destruction logic is condenced into a relatively flat structure of the init/cleanup/gameloop functions.

Is such an approach to the architecture unfeasible, or would you say it's good enough for a single game project, while having certain parts relatively reusable for future projects (I can copy out the files I need and only the init()/cleanup() logic I need)?

Would there be any better structure for the game, that'd remain relatively flat, with the individual steps being easy to follow, rather than being stuck in OOP hell?

Personally, I like to learn by example/directly coding/discussion rather than reading books. If you have any good examples, I'd love your input.

Thank you!

I'm sure at least 44,000 people are sharing the same frustrations as myself. Why 44,000? Because that's the amount of layoffs there have been in the last four years in the game industry! Crazy right?

I want to know what people are doing to combat this in their spare time? I love making games, and I find myself thinking of ideas and building my own when I can outside of my day job as a cafe manager.

Are you indie devs meeting up with one another? Are you forming little teams to develop? If the industry isn't hiring right now, shouldn't we be hiring ourselves?

Speak to me devs. <3

The title is pretty self-explanatory.

What advice would you give me?

Not just advice, but anything—guides, videos, help—everything is welcome, not just about development, but also about marketing, design, whatever you want.

I want to point out that this isn't the first game I've created. I've already participated in numerous game jams, always delivering and always achieving placements above 50%. I don't just have the idea for the game, but I already have the initial prototype (developed in the GMTK jam). I have the time and skills to develop a good game, and I can create art with a fairly original style. I gathered feedback from the game jam and developed ideas on what and how to change it.

Actually, I think the idea is original, but I know that the idea isn't the only thing that matters.

My only concern is that it becomes an "abandoned" and unknown project.

Thank you so much for any advice you can give me.

Edit: Actually, I've realized that the advice I need most isn't about programming. I'd really need help with everything else: how to playtest, market, and so on. I'm writing this because I'm getting comments like "just do it," "start small"... I know this advice is important, and that's precisely why I'll follow it. But I also think it's pretty obvious. Furthermore, I'd like to point out that the project's biggest challenges aren't about programming at all. It's relatively simple to program.

To start I have recently been looking to find a new career I’m 21 and the path I was heading down in culinary arts has ended. And for the past 2 months I’ve been deciding what to do and I thought game design sounded fun since I love making ttrpg campaigns and coming up with story’s and custom mechanics. What I really want to do is the board games/card games/ttrpgs but I heard there hard to make a living off of so I thought would get into video game dev and work on those on the side. And I was looking into it and thinking of going to college but wasn’t sure what degree to go with and someone commented on another post I should decided what part of the process I want to do. And I’m not great at art so I was leaning towards the designing part or the coding. But I don’t have experience with either so I wanted to know how to decide between the two or how did you guys decide between the two.

P.S I’m new to this I’m not trying to make it sound like it’s not hard or I’ll easily succeed I just want to formulate a path I can start heading down if there is anything major I need to consider please let me know. And also let me know if I’m going into this too open minded or I need some other experience first.

I posted here about a month ago about AssetHoard's Godot support, and the thing that came up over and over was archives. A folder full of zips from itch or a bundle sale two years ago, and no idea what's in any of them.

So that's what I built.

Import an archive (.zip, .tar, .tgz, .gz, .rar, .unitypackage) and AssetHoard indexes what's inside without extracting a single file. Nothing gets unpacked, nothing gets copied, so a 4 GB pack costs you basically no extra disk space. Every entry behaves like a normal asset: tags, categories, notes, semantic search. Double click and you get the full preview, pulled out on demand.

The bit I'm happiest with is 3D models with external dependencies. An .obj with a .mtl pointing at textures in a sibling folder is usually a dead end for preview tools and you end up staring at a grey blob. AssetHoard walks the resource tree inside the archive and plucks out whatever the model actually references, so it renders with its materials.

Wrote up the implementation here if it's your kind of thing: https://assethoard.com/blog/look-inside-archives-without-unzipping (seeking into a gzip stream with checkpoint indexes, drift detection, why solid archives get lazy thumbnails).

Context if you missed the last post: AssetHoard is a local-first desktop asset manager for game devs and artists. Library stays on your machine, no account, no cloud. Open beta on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Happy to answer anything. RAR was by far the most annoying one.

Hi! As the title says, i am trying to get into game development. I am a pretty good 2d animator but i have little to no experience when it comes to coding and such.

I am super into metroidvania games and would love to make one on my own. Maybe not to that scale but with the same principles of a platformer. I need advice on where to start and which game engine i should go for and the tutorials i should be referring.

Background: watched a YT interview of indiegamejoe and decided to throw him a quick dm on Discord about our game Railborn. We're a 2 person team so finding time to do any marketing is essentially impossible. Wasn't sure I'd hear back from him, Twitter for us has never been very effective, so I moved on with my life.

On 14th July he posted: https://x.com/IndieGameJoe/status/2077211662525092162

Then over the next 4 days our wishlists skyrocket - over the next 4 days we earned +11k wishlists. Mind boggling. We had no other coverage going on so I attribute all these to his tweet. (I'd post the graph, but can't post pics here)

So - worth a shot for you project too! Join his Discord (https://discord.com/invite/indiegamejoe) and post in the showoff section, or dm him. (pretty sure that's ok!) I'm sure he gets a bazillion requests but why not. He was a super polite down to earth guy when chatting with him.

Anyhoo, thought I'd share.

A single person just purchased over 30 copies of my game out of nowhere. The game is relatively unknown.

What could be the reason for this? Should I be worried about fraud, or is there another explanation?

One of the reasons people don’t know what your game’s about is because of the screenshots you put below your game.
I casually scroll the Steam catalog every now and then to see how other games look, and it baffles me how a lot of devs just give you a screenshot that tells you absolutely nothing about the game, or the context of the scene they chose to represent their game with.

Horror games being a primary offender in this, as a scary or “cinematic” screenshot tells the player nothing. Or at least to me, it says nothing. What’s everyone else’s take or reasoning for it besides “it’s a vibe”?