r/gamedev • u/Klightgrove • 11d ago
This community has often allowed people to share free tools and assets but it has always been subjective about where the line crosses regarding self-promotion or showing off a project. We have updated rule 3 to make the following clarification about sharing tools in our community:
However we are still left with the open-ended question of what to do with assets. People often share free assets made by others, but what is the line to draw here? We had reports come in because free creators have tip jars or linked patreon accounts. Other reports reference paid products elsewhere on their website.
What do you all feel is appropriate for a developer wishing to share a free asset they made with the community? We will update rule 6 accordingly in the near future as we debate this.
Thank you all for your continued contributions to this community.
Edit: Since there is some confusion this is us expanding what is allowed and we are wanting feedback on if we should allow more posts or not. This stuff has been banned for years already.
r/gamedev • u/thedeanhall • 12d ago
Our industry is rotting from its core, outwards in every direction, and it has been for some time. Driven by greed, driven by a race to the bottom on price. It is my position that the games industry was already heading somewhere unsustainable before reverse-engineering and powerful agentic processes became widely available. These have pushed things over the edge.
But I think one of the biggest problems is something we don’t discuss enough. Developers have surrendered an extraordinary amount of control over their work to companies whose interests aren't necessarily aligned with their own.
So we're doing something about it. We're making the BRUTAL Framework publicly available, with its source code, and we’re making it free to use, including for commercial games, subject to an attribution requirement.
I'm Dean Hall. I originally made DayZ, and now run a New Zealand game studio called RocketWerkz, as well as a new gaming distribution platform called Ahwoo. Our games include Stationeers and ICARUS, among others. We’ve used BRUTAL to replace engines in several of our games currently under development. This is the same framework we've used to make Kitten Space Agency, and which Ludeon used as the foundation for their new Waylith engine for RimWorld.
Four years ago our studio began developing our own custom framework. At the time, it seemed like the kind of thing that only a "crazy" developer would do. Something that would make people shake their heads. Making your own technology was such a "red flag" for a studio that it was even a secret undertaking internally. It started with a few libraries. But it gradually grew, and then rather rapidly became a complete framework you could use to make a game or your own game engine.
We called it the BRUTAL Framework.
It is important to explain that BRUTAL is a framework, not a game engine. You can make a game directly using it, like we have with Kitten Space Agency, or use it as the foundation for an entirely separate engine, like Ludeon have with RimWorld.
At its core is a custom interop layer, giving C# access to native APIs and libraries. We've built quite a lot of supporting libraries around this, including mathematics, memory management, strings, job scheduling, logging, localization, and other systems. We have an obsessive focus on reducing allocations and unnecessary overhead. We make extensive use of unmanaged memory and unsafe code where it makes sense. Our core focus has been on doing a few low-level things extremely well, using the latest versions of C# and Vulkan.
You can use the Vulkan bindings to make your own renderer, for example. But BRUTAL doesn't make all those decisions for you. You get to make them yourself. You can use whatever NuGet packages you want, including third-party packages. You get to write your own stack. In some ways this makes it much harder to use than Unity, Unreal, or Godot. In other ways, particularly if you're doing something unusual, it makes things considerably easier.
It's called BRUTAL for a reason.
Personally, I have found it much easier. But this comes with a forcing function. You actually have to know what you want to do first. In Unity or Unreal I would often spend days or weeks figuring out how the people who made the engine intended something to work, and then how to get around the assumptions they had made. Without all that, it is actually faster. At least for the kinds of games we're trying to make.
I do not believe this is the tool that everyone should use to make a game. We've aggressively pushed back against efforts internally to "add more". Our intention is to make a focused and efficient tool for "hard-to-make games". We are not trying to make something that can do everything for everyone. In fact, one of the most important decisions we've made is what not to put into BRUTAL.
This means we're going to be quite aggressive about maintaining its scope. Pull requests that drift away from a clear purpose will be rejected. That isn't because we don't appreciate contributions, but because adding everything is exactly how the industry ended up with the kind of engines we don't wish to use.
Think of the relationship between the Linux kernel and something like Ubuntu. It's not an exact technical comparison, but it gets across the idea. We provide a technical foundation, and developers build their own systems on top of it.
I'm not suggesting everyone should make their own game engine. I'm suggesting every developer should have the option to do so, without having to spend four years building the foundations first. And without having to surrender so much control over their own work.
On May 1st, Tynan Sylvester, RimWorld's creator, approached me with a problem, and I pitched him the BRUTAL Framework. Since then, Ludeon have been able to leverage BRUTAL to help build their own game engine, called Waylith. You can see for yourself what incredible work they've managed to achieve, in a remarkably short space of time. From that conversation to the announcement was only about five months.
Their team amazingly extracted the last bits of Unity out of RimWorld to create their Waylith engine. Moving such an established game, with a huge modding community, off Unity without anything breaking is extraordinarily complex. I'm enormously impressed with what they've achieved.
I also think this is an excellent demonstration of what BRUTAL was intended to enable. An established studio with a very specific set of problems can take the framework and build an engine designed around their own game, instead of spending years building the underlying foundations.
You can read more about what Ludeon achieved in their Steam announcement.
They report performance improvements of 2 to 4 times in their own tests, with the vast majority of existing mods remaining compatible. The new engine is available right now through RimWorld's unstable beta branch. That's an extraordinary piece of engineering, and I'm very pleased BRUTAL could play a part in it.
Kitten Space Agency is our free spaceflight simulation game, and the first major project we've built directly using BRUTAL. The inspiration came from Kerbal Space Program, and our desire to take that kind of game further. We wanted to simulate spaceflight at enormous scales, with high precision, complex physics, without compromising what we wanted to do because of assumptions made by a general-purpose engine.
It's also brought together one of the most extraordinary groups of developers I've had the privilege of working with. Felipe Falanghe, the original creator of Kerbal Space Program, helps steer the direction of the project. Stefan Moluf joined us after spending nearly twelve years at SpaceX writing flight software for actual spacecraft. I find it somewhat absurd that we have someone who helped program real rockets now helping us program pretend rockets.
We also have some of the most influential people from the Kerbal modding community. Casper works on our terrain and planetary surfaces. Blackrack, who created Scatterer and helped transform what was visually possible in KSP, works on atmospheric rendering and related systems. Jamie Leighton (JPLRepo), a former lead engineer and QA manager on Kerbal Space Program, brings extensive experience both from developing KSP and creating some of its most important mods.
These are people who have already spent years pushing the limits of what is possible with a game like Kerbal Space Program. Now we're giving them direct access to the underlying technology to do things the way they actually want to do them.
The game runs a solar system at real scale, with complex orbital trajectories, enormous distances, and very different requirements around rendering, coordinates, and simulation. The important part for this announcement is that none of this is built around a traditional game engine. We use BRUTAL and develop the systems that KSA actually needs.
Kitten Space Agency is available as a completely free pre-alpha through Ahwoo. You can download it and see the technology yourself.
I first met Felipe a long time ago while I was making DayZ, and there was an instant bond over how we felt about the games industry. We reconnected when we started making Kitten Space Agency. Felipe is, in my opinion, one of the most underappreciated developers in our industry. He made one of the most influential games of our generation, with scientists and astronauts referencing it. Yet I don't think he's received nearly the recognition he deserves.
He was also the first outside developer to use BRUTAL. Having his team as external users proved incredibly useful, ensuring the framework is truly agnostic from developer usage. Felipe and I actually spoke with Game Developer about BRUTAL late last year. He has this fantastic habit of being able to explain something very well, especially when I tend to explain things far too emotively.
He described working with BRUTAL as sitting on a bar stool while everyone else using engines like Godot was sitting on comfortable couches. I think that's a fantastic way of describing it.
Perhaps most interesting was how Felipe approached the framework itself. Rather than starting with how an engine expected something to be done, he could start with the problem itself. One example was using high precision coordinates in rendering. With his approach, he explained, "you get to use high precision numbers as far as you can into the game execution."
You can read our interview with Game Developer here.
Felipe is making his next game using BRUTAL. I'm deliberately not going into detail about it because that is his story to tell. And Felipe is the kind of person who is captivating when telling a story. I've seen what he's cooking, and I can't wait for everyone to see it. Having someone with his experience working directly with the framework, challenging our decisions, and approaching problems differently has been enormously valuable.
I have watched Unity and Unreal consistently fail to be accountable to developers. And I think this problem could get much worse as agentic workflows begin undermining the competitive advantages that have protected established software companies.
My concern is that as those advantages erode, the companies involved will increasingly look to extract more revenue from developers who feel they cannot switch. Whether through royalties, subscriptions, or more restrictive licensing.
When I attend GDC I often go to the Tencent Summit, where Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, has given keynotes. Tim was, for a long time, a hero of mine. A powerhouse of a programmer with a mind I admired growing up. But over time I became frustrated with how much of the discussion seemed to revolve around the latest buzzwords. The metaverse one year, AI the next. Meanwhile developers were struggling with performance, stability, and the practical consequences of decisions made by engine vendors.
At GDC 2025, during a Q&A, I asked Tim whether he thought Unreal was accountable to developers, particularly around performance and stability. His response was about making more demos and putting them on social media to counter people describing games as "Unreal slop". I interrupted and asked whether more demos were actually part of the problem, because they set expectations with customers about how easy it was to achieve those results. I was not satisfied with his answer, and I continue to believe Unreal is not accountable enough to developers. Particularly when it can take a 5% royalty on game revenue above its licensing threshold.
I don't think developers should have to simply accept that relationship without questioning it.
Unity has had its shares of public issues with developers, enough to warrant a whole essay on. Ironically, even as I write this, Unity developers are dealing with account suspensions related to a mandatory security change. Some have lost access even after following the required process. Unity business decisions have repeatedly sent troubling waves across the games industry.
Imagine your ability to work on your own game depending on a decision made by a company you have absolutely no control over. Now, I don't think any of this means developers should abandon Unity or Unreal tomorrow. For many projects they're absolutely the right choice, and I'm not pretending BRUTAL could replace what they provide. But I think we've created an industry where the default is to become dependent on a few enormous technology companies, and we've increasingly accepted that as inevitable. It isn't inevitable.
I think we're going to see many more frameworks like BRUTAL emerge in this environment. Not because everyone will abandon existing engines, but because the cost of making alternatives is going to fall dramatically. I hope those alternatives are free. BRUTAL won't solve all of the industry’s problems, but for some developers it might offer a lifeboat.
This technology is a small step towards changing the balance of power. If the tools are public, if you have the source code, and if you're free to build your own systems on top of them, you have options. And if one day we stop being accountable to developers ourselves, they should have the ability to fork the framework and go their own way. That's important to me.
You are only as independent as your tools are.
This is how we fight back.
We initially wanted to do something simple, like MIT. But that made us realise that one of the many problems open-source projects now face is what attribution actually means in a world increasingly dominated by AI and agentic development. Credit is, to me, what matters most.
The team who made the BRUTAL Framework are world class. They have backgrounds from some of the biggest and most influential game studios in the world. They're experts in their fields, and they've spent years developing technology that most players will never even know exists. They made this. I want history to remember them. So we've drafted a licence based on MIT, but with additional attribution requirements.
You can use BRUTAL for free, including in commercial games. There are no royalties and we don't want a percentage of your game's revenue.
What we ask is that a game or product built with BRUTAL includes the BRUTAL copyright notice in its credits screen, shows the BRUTAL logo before gameplay starts, and ships the NOTICE.txt file alongside it. If you don't want to do that, we can arrange a separate commercial licence. We can also provide detailed support directly from our engineers. You can contact us about waiving the logo requirement, for example for non-profit projects or where displaying the logo would be detrimental to the application's purpose.
We're describing BRUTAL as open-source, although our custom licence has not been reviewed or approved by the Open-Source Initiative. We recognise there will be discussion about whether these attribution requirements meet everyone's definition of open-source, and I welcome that discussion.
There are already OSI-approved licences that allow certain forms of graphical attribution. We think there is room to explore how attribution should work in an increasingly agentic world, and we intend to develop the licence with community feedback, including exploring formal OSI approval.
I'm not particularly interested in fighting over terminology. I am interested in making the source code and the work of our engineers available for anyone to use, modify, and build upon, without paying us royalties. And I want to ensure the people who made it receive some credit.
I've talked quite a lot about credit, so I want to acknowledge some of the people whose work has made this possible. I can't name everyone, and I've already mentioned several contributors above, but I think it's important to put some names to all this work.
Our Enterprise team develops and maintains BRUTAL. They have achieved something I'm enormously proud of. Aaron Koolen-Bourke, Benoit Fouletier, Chris Howlett, Craig Warne, Eric Chiu, Hanan Finnerty, Jane Kim, Josh O'Hagan, and Max Johnson. Additional past or occasional contributions from Ghassen Lahmar, Daniel Southon, Simon Brown, Felipe Falanghe, Brogan King, Hadley Patchett, and Max Kooij.
Our Head of Engineering, Rian Drake, brings enormous experience from his work at Grinding Gear Games and has provided the technical leadership and vision behind much of this effort. He is truly extraordinary. Bobby Lever is the Senior Producer helping tie everything together, and Dr Zac Isaac is our Senior Mathematician.
Across the wider RocketWerkz team there are many others. Simon Brown stewards technical development generally, including leading Stationeers and Torpedia, the latter having migrated from Unity to BRUTAL. His talent, skill, and ability are impossible to ignore.
We also have new people joining us from some of the world's largest game companies, bringing their experience to this effort.
I know I've missed people. But I want everyone to understand that BRUTAL is the result of years of work by an incredible group of engineers and developers. I am humbled and proud to work with all of you. When I talk about wanting credit for BRUTAL, these are the people I'm talking about.
As a team we've been agonizing over how to approach public contributions, particularly pull requests and issues, in the age of agents. Agentic tools can make individual developers extraordinarily productive. But they can also make it very easy to submit enormous amounts of code without understanding it, testing it, or considering how it fits into a project. This is already overwhelming even large, well-resourced open source projects.
We've come to the conclusion that we simply have to throw ourselves at the problem. So you will be able to submit PRs and issues, and we'll try to figure it out. We're a relatively small team, and maintaining a public framework is going to involve a lot of work. So please be patient with us. Our plan is to see what happens initially, assess the problems, and change our workflows as necessary. I'm more than happy to listen to feedback and change our approach.
What won't change is BRUTAL's focus. We are not trying to build another general-purpose game engine. We're trying to make it easier for developers to make their own.
It is ready right now. Here is how you do it.
The source code, the README and the contribution rules are on GitHub: https://github.com/ahwootech/BRUTAL
You will need the .NET 10 SDK, and a Vulkan capable GPU with current drivers if you intend to render anything. Windows and Linux are supported.
BRUTAL ships as NuGet packages, one per library, so you reference only what you need. Create a console project and add Core and Glfw:
dotnet new console -n HelloBrutal
cd HelloBrutal
dotnet add package Ahwoo.Brutal.Core
dotnet add package Ahwoo.Brutal.Glfw
Replace Program.cs with this:
using Brutal.GlfwApi;
using Brutal.Numerics;
if (!Glfw.Init())
throw new Exception("Failed to initialize GLFW");
Glfw.WindowHint(GlfwWindowHint.ClientApi, 0);
var window = Glfw.CreateWindow(new GlfwWindow.CreateInfo
{
Title = "Hello BRUTAL",
Size = new int2(1280, 720),
});
while (!window.ShouldClose)
Glfw.PollEvents();
Glfw.Terminate();
Run it with dotnet run and you have a window with no graphics API attached. What you add next is up to you. The Vulkan packages give you what you need to write a renderer, the ImGui packages give you a debug UI, Concurrency gives you the job system, and Fmod and RakNet give you audio and networking. The full list of libraries, with what each one is, is in the README.
Questions about using BRUTAL go on the forums. Bugs go on GitHub, with a minimal repro. Read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a pull request. It covers scope, what we expect from AI-assisted contributions, and the sign-off every commit needs.
r/gamedev • u/askskfalksfakslfsfa • 4h ago
I figured people were cloning games just decompiling demos but they're doing it now before demos are even released. What's the purpose of this? Small time devs barely ever make it into big money territory, so why not expend that energy in just making a game that looks different? Or were those people just following a devlog and just copying it from that?
r/gamedev • u/KevinDL • 5h ago
I've noticed something repeatedly on Reddit (in r/gamedev and other game dev-related subreddits), and I think it's worth discussing.
Time and again, I see developers asking about sales, discoverability, marketing, or why their game isn't performing commercially, yet describing themselves as hobby developers who aren't particularly interested in the business side of game development. I think there's a fundamental disconnect here, and it's something more developers need to reflect on.
If you're developing games purely as a hobby, that's great. Spend five years experimenting with mechanics, use whatever tools you enjoy, and work on whatever interests you. You can even release your game on Steam and charge money. The difference is that you genuinely don't give a fuck whether it sells. If you make absolutely nothing, that's fine. You made something because you enjoyed the process, and that was enough.
But the moment sales, profitability, or return on investment becomes a thought, you're pursuing commercial objectives. And that requires a different mindset.
That doesn't mean you need to run a studio or develop games full-time. You can work on your game in the evenings and on weekends and still develop a commercial product. What matters is what you're trying to accomplish, not how many hours you're putting into it.
This is where I see developers getting into trouble. They'll dismiss marketing, market research, production planning, scope management, or even their choice of development tools as things that don't really matter because they're "just hobbyists." Then they'll turn around and ask why their game isn't selling at release, or how to do X to boost sales.
The reality is that these decisions matter when you're trying to bring a commercially viable game to market. Your tool choices and production pipeline affect development costs and efficiency. Your scope affects your schedule and ability to ship. Your marketing strategy determines how you reach potential customers. Understanding your audience and the market you're entering should be part of your development process, not something you start thinking about a month before release.
None of this means abandoning your creative vision or treating game development as nothing more than a business. You can be passionate about making games while recognizing that your time has value, your resources are limited, and sometimes you need to make decisions based on commercial realities rather than personal preference.
You can make a fantastic game that fails commercially. You can do everything reasonably well and still struggle to find an audience. That's part of the risk. But there's a difference between accepting that risk and ignoring the business considerations that might help you succeed.
I think more developers need to ask themselves a simple question: Am I making this game purely because I enjoy making games, or am I trying to build something people will pay for?
Neither answer is wrong, and modest commercial ambitions are fine. But if making money matters to you, even a little, then the commercial side of development needs to matter to you too.
You can't approach every aspect of development like a hobbyist while expecting commercial results.
r/gamedev • u/Larmiche_Dev • 13h ago
I’ve been working on my game, for almost 3 years. Three years of working alone, with nobody to show it to except my friends and family. Honestly, it got pretty lonely at times.
A few weeks ago I finished my demo and sent demo keys to a bunch of YouTubers. It was the first time I was showing the game to anyone outside my close circle. A lot of small creators picked it up, and every single one of them made my day.
I also sent keys to a few bigger channels, mostly thinking “worst case, they never reply.” One of them was Fooster, a YouTuber I absolutely love who plays a lot of horror games.
And he played my demo in one of his videos, which is crazy to me😭
It also helped a lot with visibility: I’d estimate around 400-500 wishlists came from the video. It’s hard to say exactly, because I’ve also been posting on social media and some of those posts did well too. But it’s clearly given the game a huge boost.
I can’t even explain how much this means to me. After years of working in silence, seeing people actually interested in the game is the best motivation I could ask for. It makes me want to keep going even harder.
So thank you Fooster, thank you to every YouTuber who gave the demo a shot, and thank you to everyone who has watched or shared it.
Take care, everyone! 💙
r/gamedev • u/_Powski_ • 18h ago
Hi guys,
I'm a bit confused right now and i need you help!
Currently i am working on my first commercial game launch for my game Crown Me Again.
I dont want to promote the game here but i feel that i have to provide the game name as context. Sorry!
I have announced the game end of September and have launched the steam page back then.
Now i have stumbled across a different game King Dies Rich. The Steam page was launched a few days ago and it has a disclaimer that the game was made with help of AI.
I am soooo confused because the game looks similar, has a similar premise and is marketed with similar words to my game. It will also be released in a few days...
But the thing: Its not a exact copy. There are way more systems then in my game. It feels like someone took my steam page and told the AI "To make a similar game but add more depth".
It doesnt look that bad... but maaan this feels so bad somehow.
Also:
I started marketing the game end of september and got quite a bit of traction around that point (2k wishlists in the first 2 weeks). King Dies Rich's App-ID was first seen bei SteamDB on the 2nd October.
Guys, i need your opinion on this. My post is maybe a bit chaotic but thats how i feel at the moment. I have spent over 10 months hand-build this game and now i see this.
What you guys think? What should i do?
Are prompt-generated assets public domain? (Since copyright requires meaningful human input.)
If so, can anyone use assets generated by others? (for the sake of the argument, it's known there was no post-editing)
How does it work?
r/gamedev • u/WasFuckingTaken • 7h ago
Oi! What is it called when the character the player controls feels out of place? Not in a "He's wearing modern clothes in 1639" kinda out of place, but more like you just dragged a bunch of free models into the game in 5 seconds.
I recently-ish played a game that felt this way. It's hard to explain, but it felt just slightly out of place, and kind of cheap? In a way? If that makes sense.
r/gamedev • u/GoodguyGastly • 8h ago
For some context I'm at 4k wishlists. I hit 2k last year from steam next fest and was pretty much at a stand still until I started doing a lot more marketing in the last month. This is my biggest jump by far tho.
I plan to release sometime in November but I really didn't want to until I gave marketing an honest shot. Ideally I'd go live with the coveted 8-10k wishlists but don't know if I got it in me to wait that long in this current climate.
r/gamedev • u/Stunning_Can_2785 • 4h ago
Heya! I'm an design communication student doing research relating to the future of game development for one of my 3rd year project. Me and my group mates are looking for people who are learning game development to help us fill up some survey questions for data collection. Please leave a comment if you're up for it 🙏The survey is not done yet, but I will dm u guys when its done! Would really appreciate anyone who can help us out 🥹🙏🙏🙏
r/gamedev • u/Purple-Income-4598 • 3h ago
so, ive been working on a project for over half a year. im confident i will finish it someday, perhaps in a couple years. and of course i have chosen an appropriate name to match the story and everything. the name is not taken on USPTO, and i own the domain with the name. but im worried that someone will create a game with the same exact name before i finish. what then? i would have spent thousands of hours creating a game around a name that i cant use anymore? that would really suck. i did some research, and it apparently costs me over a whole paycheck and it only protects me in the US (and i need a whole attorney since im not from the US). this is absurd for an indie solo developer. what do you guys do to make sure that you own the rights to the name(s) of your game(s)?
r/gamedev • u/intimidation_crab • 11h ago
Like a lot of you, I've suffered from project hopping.
When you're months into a project and slogging through that last, endless 10% that is actually ~60%, you start to daydream about the earlier days of your project where it was all broad strokes and nailing down how mechanics function instead of supporting translations and fine tuning UI. You unconsciously start to plan your next project. You put mechanics together in your head that you are excited to build and completely mentally block the possibility of ever having to build a well paced tutorial again.
This is the time I have abandoned most of the projects that I've let die. This is the time that every single Revshare team I've ever worked with has failed. It's like the difference between building a house and cleaning a house. All of the stuff with power tools and layouts is done, and now onto the important, but mundane tasks of details and maintenance.
To get around this, I've started picking up Game Jams. There are hundreds of differently sized ones out there. I've been particularly focusing on ones that only last between 2-7 days. It gives me enough time to get the fun of building on a blank canvas without the hassle of needing to deliver something fully polished. It also gives me a chance to test some of those new mechanics and tools that I've been daydreaming about without abandoning my long term project and starting from scratch.
If you have a history of project abandonment, maybe spend a weekend on something un-serious and then go back instead of burning everything to the ground every few months.
r/gamedev • u/astoaria_game • 10h ago
I took part in the October Steam Next Fest with my game. I went in with ~8k wishlists and left with ~10k. I’m sharing my numbers so you have some data to compare to, or to know what to expect.
I had no momentum going in. My wishlists were pretty much dead in the 2 weeks before the fest. I had heard that momentum in those 2 weeks might affect results, along with wishlists count. Both of these are just a starting point. The real metric I believe is how your demo resonates with the people who play it during the event.
My stats from Steamworks:
There were a lot of entries, and there will probably be even more next time. But from what I saw, the garbage got buried within a couple of days. My game somehow stayed consistent through the whole fest, so maybe it was detected as not garbage (?)
What to look for:
This got me surprised since I'm aware the kind of graphics in my game are not for everyone. Anyway, these are the numbers I’d check after the fest. The comparisons come from Chris Zukowski’s Next Fest surveys (Feb 2026, June 2026).
So overall I am satisfied with the result considering how I joined the Next Fest. And got some great feedback from players too.
It's important to have the most polished demo possible. I released the first version months ago and kept iterating on it. I was lucky that a lot of creators played it, so I watched a lot of gameplays before finding a good balance.
What I’d do differently:
Hope this was helpful to somebody :D
r/gamedev • u/Sussybaka800869 • 21h ago
solo dev, cozy farming roguelite (yes, i know), 2 years in. we crossed 10k wishlists last week！！！！！！！
which means i can probably keep doing this. heres the honest breakdown.
what moved the needle:
- steam next fest: about 3,800 wishlists. the demo had to be polished, not big. 20 minutes of game, every second of it good
what didnt:
- twitter. 8 months of devlogs, about 300 wishlists total
- paid ads. spent 600, got 140 wishlists. never again at this stage
- a discord before anyone cared. 11 members, 9 of them my friends
since someone always asks about ai: none in anything players see. steam asks you to disclose it and my players would hate it. internally i did animate some concept art on dreamina into mood clips for my composer, cheap and handy, but it cant keep a character consistent for 2 shots in a row, so it never went near the game.
launching in march. scared and excited in equal amounts.
if youre 6 months in staring at 200 wishlists, i was too. You f-ing got this.
r/gamedev • u/Deadlypandaghost • 1h ago
Playing with a prototype that has the player's avatar growing/shrinking between 50% and 200% normal size and everything in between. Is there an established way to handle this while avoiding mixels(mixed sized pixels)? Are there any ways to mitigate the "offness" of mixels? Would this concept be better with a vector based art style?
I’ve been working on HareStack, a tool that converts 3D models into sprite stacks, including animated models.
The goal is to make it easier to use 3D models in 2D game engines without having to manually create every slice and animation frame.
I’m still working on it, but I’m considering releasing it to the public for free.
I’d love to hear what other game developers think of this workflow and whether they’d find it useful.
Here’s a quick demonstration of the conversion process.
r/gamedev • u/BestManWorstTime • 2h ago
This may not happen for years, but I've been creating a story for a video game for a while now. About a year into making my story I came across some people on Reddit that had stories similar to part of mine.
I reached out to them and they said it was fine to use their material for inspiration.
Should I credit them underneath the "special thanks" area? Or should I leave them out entirely just so they don't get into any trouble considering the subject matter (which I will not spoil)?
I just wanna make sure I'm doing the right thing.
r/gamedev • u/Naive_Reputation_255 • 16h ago
This number is suggested everywhere as the minimum number for a “good” launch, mostly sourcing from Chris Zukowski, I wonder how it turns out as I’ll be releasing one with a close number.
r/gamedev • u/QuadrantFive • 6h ago
Damn.
Today is the 26th. My initial submission for SCP: Antimemetics Division was Oct. 8th. They didn't respond until the 20th, and after a quick fix to controller support in one of my menus, it's back under review.
I heard the backlog from Next Fest was terrible this year, but truly hoped the traffic jam would subside.
If you are considering when to submit a build to steam...don't be like me, and think that 3 weeks is enough time!
r/gamedev • u/_peculiar_goat_ • 3h ago
I'm posting this partly out of desire to rubberduck with humans, but also partly because it's the sort of content that I hope to see when I visit gamedev subreddits.
I'm building a 3D explosion system for my framework at the moment. I have a rough idea of how I want to simulate explosions, but I'm not 100% confident that I'm going in the right direction. I've tried to test what other games do but it's really hard to get a clear picture because explosion simulations are invisible and you generally can't get enemies to shut up and stand still while you fire rockets at them. My framework is for a boomer shooter in the Build Engine Holy Trinity style so I'm going for fast fun explosions rather than super detailed shrapnel simulation etc.
My current thinking is this:
So... does anybody have any thoughts on how to improve this approach? Or ideas for smarter or more elegant approaches? Am I missing some secret industry standard explosion trick?
r/gamedev • u/LainVohnDyrec • 1m ago
I am seeing an increase of sentiments about how AI devs copying other devs work and even without Demo's launched and just a concept. I am also working on my game and I have not released anything to the public since i wanted to create a Demo first, and I am closing that point which makes me fear this.
But I learned something from the company I work in that made me hopeful and excited encouraged me to keep doing what I am doing, (we create casino mobile games I aint proud of it but it is work so I wont share anything nor advertise our games)
I learned that all of our games were copied by another company and there is a distinct AI art feel to it and most of the design and mechanics are copied 1 is to 1 but different design which makes it look its not stolen.
And the company is not worried and almost excited about it (at least the dev, monetization and data analyst team side but not the legal side). The reason is because they see this as a way to improve our games, copying things that works, getting free surveys from players that does not like it and a reference for a player how your game stands out.
Witnessing this gives me a sense of ease on how to deal with it and by the end of the day, we are dishing out a product, the consumers will decide which is better. So aim to be better! I also dont see AI to be gone anytime soon, So this will be a constant battle (Also my stance on AI is that it is a tool, at this point I am more angry at lazy/mediocre users, having this powerful tool only to dish out mediocre product is diabolical. Creativity sure is a skill)
AI also relies heavily on the prompters creativity, they can steal but they can not create.
Making your game visible to the public makes it a threat for AI to copy it. But being visible first is already a step to combat this. And if one day my game gets copied, I will check it out and copy what they did great there and substitute it with my own. If they are lazy enough to AI code this, I am sure they will be lazy enough to support their own game.
r/gamedev • u/pizza_no_crust • 53m ago
Hey Folks,
I've been in game development for around 3 years now, tho I come mostly from a business background rather than games.
I've had multiple successful online businesses and doing well for myself
I very well understand how hard game development is.
I want to get feedback / thoughts from the people here, who understand business, and have launched a successful game, and know the importance of marketing, and how a game won't randomly sell it self.
In regards to marketing, what would be the best way to go about marketing for a game? as far as I know atleast getting a couple thousand steam wishlists before launch
I am working towards organic content, having it clipped, etc..
but also considering gamers / Youtube channels being paid to honestly pay and review the game.
Would appreciate some direction here. thank you.
r/gamedev • u/x1Developer • 12h ago
Hey r/gamedev,
We're a small indie studio. We just finished Steam Next Fest with two games, and the results were so different that we thought the comparison might help others. Both demos had been out since August, so neither game was "fresh" going into the fest.
The two games going in:
- Grandma Left Me a Building: 13,150 wishlists. For the month before the fest it was already doing about 200 wishlists/day on its own.
- Hellmate (chess deckbuilder): 700 wishlists. Basically flatlined before the fest, at 2-3 wishlists/day.
Wishlist charts:
- Grandma Left Me A Building
- Hellmate - Chess Deckbuilder
Days 1-2: the opposite of what we expected
Grandma: Nothing special happened. It kept doing its usual ~200/day. We honestly couldn't feel any extra effect from Next Fest.
Hellmate: This one actually woke up. After weeks of 2-3 a day, it got ~70 wishlists in the first two days.
We didn't read too much into it, though. We'd heard that the first couple of days of Next Fest don't tell you much, so we half expected things to change. We just didn't expect them to flip this hard.
From Wednesday evening: everything flipped
The common wisdom is that the first ~48 hours of Next Fest are when Steam figures out which demos to push. Whether that's exactly how it works or not, things turned around for us right when that window closed, on Wednesday evening:
- Grandma took off and settled at around 700 wishlists/day. Its best day was Saturday, with 1,150 wishlists, our biggest single day ever.
- Hellmate slowed down to about 10/day. That's still better than its pre-fest baseline, but the early momentum was gone.
The China surprise
Partway through the week we noticed something odd: China had become our #1 country by far. Over the week it made up about a third of Grandma's wishlist adds, almost twice as many as the US. Including Taiwan and Hong Kong, it was around 40%. Before this we had barely any traction there.
That made us wonder whether something besides Next Fest was going on, so we dug into the traffic sources. These are rough ranges, not exact figures:
- Visits from Next Fest: roughly 1,400-2,000
- Visits from "Other" (external sources): roughly 3,000-4,000
So our best guess is that around half of this week's wishlists weren't directly caused by Next Fest. Our theory is that the game got shared somewhere on Chinese social media. We tried to find the original post and couldn't. If anyone knows a good way to track down where your game is being shared in China, we'd love to hear it.
The catch is that we can't cleanly separate the two. The game may have been shared in China because people found it through Next Fest. And the outside traffic probably raised our numbers, which may have made Steam push us harder inside the fest. It all feeds into itself. Still, if we had credited every wishlist to Next Fest, we would have drawn the wrong conclusions about what works.
Another data point that fits: during the fest Grandma hit an all-time peak of 41 concurrent players in the demo. Every one of these spikes happened around 14:00 GMT, which is evening in China (22:00 Beijing time).
Don't forget the deletes
Something that's easy to miss in the charts is that wishlist deletes went up along with the adds. On Grandma's peak days we were losing about 100-140 wishlists a day, compared to almost nothing before the fest. Over the week, deletes came to about 12% of adds.
China's ratio was about 11.5%, slightly lower than the rest of the world (~13%). Among the countries Steam lists individually, the highest ratios were Germany, the UK and Taiwan (around 17%).
Still, if you only look at the adds line, your Next Fest will look better than it really was. All the numbers in this post are net.
Final numbers (net)
- Grandma Left Me a Building: 13,150 → 17,300 (+4,150)
- Hellmate: 700 → 825 (+125)
Takeaways
1. Don't judge your Next Fest by the first 48 hours. We expected some change after day 2, but our early numbers still pointed the opposite way from how the week actually ended.
2. Check your traffic sources before you credit Next Fest. In our case "Other" brought in roughly twice as many visits as the Next Fest pages. Without checking, we would have overestimated the fest's effect by a lot.
3. Look at the country breakdown. A sudden jump from one region usually means something is happening off-Steam, even if you can't find the exact source.
4. Look at when your spikes happen. Peak CCU times can tell you which audience is actually playing.
5. Track net wishlists, not just adds. Deletes go up with traffic, and the ratio can vary a lot by country.
6. Momentum going in seems to matter. The game that was already growing got amplified. The game that was flat got a short bump and then faded. (Two games is obviously not a real sample, so take this with a grain of salt.)
Happy to answer questions or share more numbers if it helps anyone.
r/gamedev • u/ChocoFocco • 6h ago
Hi! Quick question. Has anyone else faced a similar dilemma?
Screenshots with version A and B:
https://imgur.com/a/decisions-1CnSoxn
I'm kind of torn because I've started to realise that creating assets that mimic the PSX era is much easier.
I'm still at an early stage of coding an NPC state manager, so this would be a good time to make a final decision on the art style before moving on to creating more assets.
I slapped on some modifiers to lower the texture resolution (of course, if I decide to go with the PSX look, I'll redraw everything with crisp pixels in mind), and... I just don't know.
Some of the games that are currently influencing my thinking are:
r/gamedev • u/Potential_Freedom685 • 3h ago
I’m a solo indie developer from Poland. When I started working on my first game, TRENCHWORMS, I barely knew how to program.
I decided to make a real-time 2D action game inspired by Liero, with fully destructible terrain, 26 weapons, BOT opponents, and local and online multiplayer.
Looking back, I probably chose a much bigger project than a beginner should have.
Getting the different systems working together was a learning experience, and adding multiplayer made the project even more ambitious.
Now, after all that work, I’m just three days away from releasing my first game on Steam.
One thing I’ve learned is that finishing a game and getting people interested in playing it are two completely different challenges.
For those of you who’ve released your first game:
What was the biggest lesson you learned from your first launch? And what would you do differently if you could start again?
Thank you in advance!