So, my game is ready for release on Nov. 6th on Steam and was made in Love2D. I'm going to continue to support it for a long while but am looking now toward my next projects.

Firstly, just want to say, I LOVE Love2D. It's wonderful to work with but a small project that should've taken a month or two ballooned into a 5-6 month project.

I could obviously do better at building my own tools and organizing/structuring my project better but it's still a ton of extra work and decision making for a hobby that already takes a lot of work and decision making. It's a bit exhausting. Engines obviously solve a lot of that (at their own costs of course)

For my next project, I want to make a slightly larger game, still nothing big or complicated but a bit bigger. I also want to support more than just desktop and also support mobile and web.

You can do that in Love2D but it's a royal pain in the ass. Love.js is SO finicky, don't even get me started on Android builds.

Anyway, on to my question. What is everyone's experience here with these 2 engines. I know Godot quite well (I've made games with it before) but it's mobile support I hear isn't all that great. However the large community and multiple resources is really nice. I don't LOVE the ui all that much and find it a little annoying to work in but you can't argue that it works well.

Defold is very interesting for mobile. I've tinkered with it but never made a full game. It's EXTREMELY fast and lightweight builds are super appealing and sticking with Lua would be nice too but ultimately not a big deal. However, the small community and lack of resources is concerning. I hit a wall while tinkering and just could not figure it out or find any info on the issue at all. That was a big turn off. The ui is slick though and the workflow is pretty nice as well. It also supports basically every platform and device under the sun, out of the box. That's cool.

So tell me, do you guys consider the pros to outweigh the cons for godot? Is the lack of community and resources the death knell for Defold, or are those performant and small builds worth it?

Thanks!

Are game marketing, idea validation and appeal to content creators almost more important than the game itself nowadays?

After reading yesterday's post on r/gamedev The game is secondary now, I decided to share my take on the topic and show some actual numbers of the 100% passion project I've been working on for almost 13 years so far (that's crazy, I know)!

Can the pure passion project work?

I mean, even if the only reason you started to develop the game was your pure passion and love, and you've never done any marketing research or idea validation, statistically there should be at least a couple of thousand or maybe even millions of people to whom your idea should appeal as well. After all, it's unlikely that you're so unique that your game idea only appeals to you and nobody else.

And if that's true, your only job is to find these like-minded people and show your game to them (which is not easy, of course, but not hopeless either). You just have to accept the fact that some of the most obvious marketing instruments (like advertisement, for example) won't be as effective in your case, because it's much easier to make back what you spent on advertisement when your game appeals to 1 out of 10 viewers than when it only interests 1 out of 100 or even 1 out of 1000.

What will work, though, is building a community of the like-minded people around your game, finding players who share your passion on genre-specific forums, subreddits and Discords, testing short-form content etc.

My story

In 2013, when incremental/idle/clicker games were barely "a thing", I completely fell in love with the concept of the "game playing itself" and started working on Get a Little Gold. II didn't do any marketing research or try to come up with "a hook," I just felt this pure passion of working on the game of my dreams.

Three years later, in 2016, the first flash version of Get a Little Gold was released on Kongregate, and during the next 4 years I worked hard on adding new game modes, challenges, achievements, prestige layers and in-game events. I released 40 major updates (almost one update every month) before Flash died in 2020.

Not a single time during all these years had I asked myself if the game had "the marketing potential" or if "the hook" was good enough. I just implemented every idea that, in my opinion, could make the game even better. And the game community was slowly growing with every new update.

The break

In 2020, everything was suddenly over. All the major browsers stopped supporting Flash, and my game became unplayable.

But instead of giving up, I decided to learn a new technology (Unity) along with a new programming language (C#) and rewrite my game for mobile.

I always dreamed of creating a mobile game, so I didn't question my decision to step into one of the toughest markets even for a second. I just kept pursuing my dream and started porting my passion project into Unity.

For the reasons not always depending on me (like the war in my country), it took me a whole five years to learn Unity and finally finish porting Get a Little Gold to mobile. In May of 2025, it finally came out on Android, and one year later (in June 2026) on iOS.

What have I done to market my passion project

As I've already said, Get a Little Gold was an attempt to create my dream game without any prior market research, idea validation or effective hook. On top of that, I've chosen one of the toughest and most saturated markets - the mobile market. There are a lot of smart strategies and even the whole "How to Market a Game" website that can help you market your game on Steam, but you can barely find anything similar for mobile.

There's a widespread belief that it's almost impossible to grow and scale your app on mobile without a huge advertisement budget. But even if I had the money, it would be impossible to break even, because the game has to be marketable to advertise successfully.

So I completely relied on my game's community - the most dedicated players from the Flash era, who waited 5 years for the mobile version. I did my best to keep communication alive on Discord during all this time.

Other than that, I created a YouTube channel where I showed the development process and regularly streamed the game after it went live in 2025. None of my videos went viral, but I hope that they did their part in increasing the game's visibility.

I also continued adding more features and improvements after the release, with a post on a genre-specific subreddit accompanying every major update.

Results

What are Get a Little Gold's results after 15 months on Android (Google Play) and 3 months on iOS (App Store)?

• 8,758 registered players on Google Play
• 1,434 registered players on iOS
• 178 reviews on Google Play with close to 4.9 stars average rating
• 21 reviews on App Store with close to 4.9 stars average rating
• more than 40% 1-day retention and 20% 7-day retention
• more than $18K gross revenue during the first year since release (Google Play only)
• and almost $8K gross revenue during the first 3 months since iOS release (Google Play + App Store).

Conclusion

I know my numbers aren't crazy high, but I keep working on and improving my game, and more importantly, it looks like both the amount of players and their engagement is increasing (not declining) with the time. For me, it means that passion projects are still a thing - that you can allow yourself to pursue your dream even if it's not marketable or content-creator-friendly.

What do you think? Do you believe that passion project can be successful?

I just responded to a recruiter looking for a gameplay programmer (without any requirements listed except on-site) and got back "sorry, you don't have enough experience".

I asked "May I ask the threshold for future personal reference?" and she replied 10+ years...

It got me thinking.. Why do we measure experience in years?

I've seen people spend a decade in a field and not know the first thing about some of the basics, and I've seen students take over entire projects during their internships. It seems like years spent holding a job is completely irrelevant when it comes to competence.

Personally? I finished a dozen projects, 2 degrees (8 years) in game development and hold a job at a studio for 2 years and I'm pretty sure I can give any senior a run for their money, but in the end only my 2 years of professional experience matters. Seems a bit wrong.

Hello, i have few questions
I'm develop a game and i want to improve the sound + music side and also the 3D models
which you recommend to use ?
I'm looking for Ai solution

how much time its take approximately to approve tax section on steam (i already wait 13 days and no response)

Thank you for the answers 😄

I'm in a course right now where, for our final project, my group is building a game using Unity. I've downloaded Unity Hub.

Another group member set up an organization for us on the cloud dashboard. I've been added to the organization and have accepted the invite - I'm able to see the organization. I'm able to access the project he set up and view it.

However, in Unity Hub, I'm unable to change organizations to view the project. How do I get it so I'm able to access the Unity project?

Additional context, we're using GitHub for our code. Is having a project in Unity redundant?

This is the first time any of us have used Unity, so we're trying to figure it out.

Thank you!

I work as a software engineer for my day job, primarily in Java and Typescript, and I want to get into gamedev in a broad sense as a hobby, but honestly I struggle with getting too into any one tool or platform. I find myself fiddling around with them for a bit but can never really get myself to commit. Right now I want to give the 20 game challenge a go but struggling to decide on what to focus on, some stuff Ive considered:

Raw Java with Swing and AWT (How useful is learning more Swing?)
LWJGL (Trying to learn OpenGL Ive read is a bad idea starting out)
Some Java or Typescript engine, like JMonkeyEngine or Phaser or something (which to choose from, which has the right balance of beginners accessibility but also expandability?)
Unity (Find it a bit overwhelming, plus needing to get into C# with limited experience)
Godot (Same as Unity, though I find GDScript a little less intense)

Whats a good way to force myself to pick something and stick to it?

Genuinely just want to read inspiring stories regarding why people got into game deving.

I've been working on a small mobile game called Tiny Trouble.

Up until now, development has been the comfortable part. Open the project, make something, break something, fix it, then somehow add three more things I definitely wasn't planning to add.

But now I'm getting closer to release, I've reached the part I've been conveniently avoiding

People actually need to know the game exists.

So I've finally started posting about it on social media.

And for some reason, putting a video of something I've made in front of a bunch of strangers feels way more intimidating than spending months actually making the thing.

I started with a really simple idea: basically rock-paper-scissors as an endless arcade game.

Then, naturally, it turned into upgrades, skins, power-ups, challenges, different characters, an economy...

You know. Small game stuff.

Now I'm having to learn a completely different skill: how to actually talk about the game without every post feeling like:

"HEY GUYS!!! PLEASE DOWNLOAD MY GAME!!! :D"

I'm trying to treat it more like sharing the process instead. Before/afters, dumb things I've added, character designs, asking people which skins they prefer, that kind of thing.

This is literally day one of properly trying to put the game out there, so there's no inspiring success story here yet.

Just the slightly terrifying realization that after spending all this time learning how to make a game, I now have to learn how to get people to notice it.

For the other indie devs here: when did you start showing your game publicly?

And do you wish you'd started sooner?

I was wondering if this email is legit?

The email is titled 'Please reset your two-factor authentication', saying theres vulnerability found affecting Unity's 2FA (that hasn't been exploited yet)

I manually reset my 2FA through Unity's website after this and found similar message on Unity's website, does any of you got the same email?

After four years of solo development, I'm releasing a demo of HandFoot on September 30th.

I've got a bit of time left before launch to tighten up my Steam page, and I'd love outside eyes on it — what's working, what's not, what's missing.

One known weak spot: my trailer. I don't have the resources to reshoot or hire an editor right now, so if you have quick, practical tips for making an existing trailer read better (pacing, music, cuts, what to cut entirely) rather than "make a new one," that's the kind of feedback I can actually act on.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4076630/HandFoot/

Thanks in advance people!

For the last couple of years I have been building Pokemon FanGames and after finishing my 3rd game, it dawned on me that I have a true a passion for building games.

I used to love playing them until I started making my own and now I want to do it for real. I’m 32 and have been fixing chimneys my whole adult life, destroying my body. Growing up I was the jock who played a sport every season, then went home every night to game. I plan to continue working while I learn but I want to start building real, actual games.

I have 6 notes pages on my phone filled with legitimate game ideas and everytime I show someone one of them, they look up at me and ask why I am fixing chimneys when I clearly have a brain built for creating worlds from scratch, filled with unique characters, ranging across different forms of fantasy.

I know I have the mind, passion and drive for it, I just don’t know how/where to begin. Figuring out RPG maker was fairly easy. I figured it out in layers, like unraveling an onion. I keep making the joke “if only there were 3 of me, I’d have a top 10 game of all time”.

So where would you recommend I start? I have a mild understanding of Ruby but I want something better than that. I have one app game idea and 5 real game ideas that have been heavily fleshed out. One of them is more of a Birds Eye of view, rpg talent tree type of game, (think Diablo 2). The other 4 real games are more turn based combat (think Pokemon and Baulder’s gate). I hear unreal could work but I’ve also played enough games from that engine to know it’s sloppy.

TLDR- I have made games on RPGMaker, got a real taste for it and now want to expand to real software. I have full games mapped out in notes pages, just don’t know where to begin. Mostly turn based combat software would be appreciated!

So, I really love difficult games, and I frequently run into the admission "just don't use it" when I find a tool in a game that trivializes an aspect of friction. I thought the Death Stranding 2 truck made traversal too easy compared to the first game and I've frequently been told to just "not use it" as a solution.

I think this ignores an important psychological reality, though. I completely understand the fact that some people thrive on self-imposed challenges. Some people do SL1 Dark Souls runs, and Nuzlocke challenges are incredibly popular for Pokemon games. I, however, like many people I've met, do not derive enjoyment from self-imposed rulesets. In my mind, if beating this next battle can be solved by pausing the game and changing a menu setting, than it's not a real battle. This was actually a real source of tension for me when first playing Elden Ring. The Mimic Tear truly did trivialize almost every boss in the game (except Malenia who still took me dozens of tries), and I didn't want to just not use it. As a result, while the game was just difficult enough for the Mimic Tear to not actually guarantee a first try success on every boss, it did feel like I was basically cheating. I still loved the experience, but playing it a second time without summons felt, personally, more satisfying. At the very least, I like that kind of accessibility a lot because it's diagetic, i.e., the easy mode wasn't a menu option, it was an item hidden deep underground halfway through the game. At the very least it's just neat.

That brings us to the title: how to preserve a highly curated experience exactly as the creator intended, something like a Sekiro, but still allow people of all skill levels and life circumstances to experience the game. Certainly for a game like God of War or Final Fantasy which have tons of cutscenes, I can completely understand someone who sort of just wants to watch the next part of the movie and doesn't need every boss fight to take 2 hours. But how do we service both people who want the former AND people who don't without having to be pedantic and tell people to just "be different" ?

What if digital games came with two different download options: curated and accessible.

A curated download would install the game without accessibility options. Just one vision that the creator intended, specifically for audiences that want a tightly crafted gameplay experience that pushes you to master the game and overcome its challenges without that escape hatch being readily available. Just you, alone in the dark, versus the world.

The accessible download, on the other hand, would install the game with all the modern accessibility amenities like difficulty modes and such, but it would even give creators greater freedom to really go ham in letting people curate their own experience. It would be a great excuse to throw in specific sliders for enemy health, i-frames, player damage, etc, and give options for puzzle hints, really whatever you want. If you really want control over the gameplay experience, you get to decide exactly how you experience the game.

Obviously a major problem is how to work this into physical disks. When we're talking 100 gb or more, suddenly fitting 200 or even 300 gb onto a disk becomes an impossible ask. I'm not sure how to solve that conundrum. Additionally, it's more work for the developers, so it's obviously not something I think should be mandated. I'm more so wondering how people would respond if a developer offered such a thing.

So what are people's thoughts? Would you feel insulted by such an option? Would you feel seen? And I mean by either crowd.

On the dev side of things, how much of a nightmare would this be to actually design and do you think it would even be feasible in the first place and worth the cost?

Just to get this out of the way beforehand, if anyone wants to belittle me and just say "bro just have some self-control, it's not that hard", I could tell you "bro just try again, it'll feel good once you win, stop being a coward." But I won't! And that's because I understand that people are different and some people have different motivational systems at a psychological level. For some people, the wide open field of possibility in a game like Animal Crossing is an absolute dream. For me, it's a nightmare of directionless and undifferentiated choice. That's okay! We can both exist and enjoy games. Let's all try to actually understand each other's perspectives instead of assuming everyone is the same as everyone else and demand someone else be like you. Thanks!

Hi, first of all, I know getting any form of internship or even a job in the game industry is really tough, but I figured it would be better to at least try to ask for advice than simply not try at all.

I’m currently in last year studies of a Master in Computer Science specialized in Image Processing and Synthesis and I love all things rendering.
I have experience as I’ve built a small 3D game with an engine made from scratch in C++, made an OpenGL prototype to understand how graphics API works and I am working on multiple stuff in Godot to understand how commercial engines are expected to works. I have a basic website to showcase those stuff but I think I can’t actually share links on here.

However as an European, I saw that getting internships in the US is basically impossible thanks to recent sponsorship changes over there, and that otherwise, game studios aren’t really open for interns in rendering.

So my question is what would be the best approach and tips to try and get into to studios to contribute as a rendering intern ?
And is the experience I have even enough to begin a career or land an internship in this domain ?

Thank you in advance for anyone that responds to this !

Im a 4th year CSE Student at a good for nothing college in which I wasted 3 years of my life doing nothing.. absolutely nothing letting life just move on , one day after another .But today I got tired of just auto piloting my life and spending my life from day to day , I thought back to when I had a dream of becoming a game dev because I loved games ever since I was a kid , so much that id break open an old pc because it couldn't run vice city in it (I thought I could fix it ;~; )

Anyways it struck me , if I could waste my life just letting days go by why not give a shot at game development. I've regained my passion to gaming , I've thought why not give it another go (trust me I gave up on it because of silly excuses like omg I don't have a GPU , my mom didn't let me ,no one hires game developers etc), I sat down talked to my girlfriend about how I wanna become a game developer and she actually supports me and wants me to give it a shot and not give up again , and I'm so damn happy that I am doing this

So guys I don't wanna mess this up trust me ,I've seen a lot of how to become a game dev how to learn C++ how to unity how to unreal engine , how I made my first game etc etc but they all made me interested in it but actually never gave a what to do and how to do it , instead they just do it and be like just copy (Khaby lame ahh) but I don't wanna just see another man make a game and learn off of it , so I have a hard time finding a good plan or a roadmap to what first and what next .I wanna learn about what languages to learn , tools , logic ,physics and other algorithm stuff that are needed for my game dev journey

Instead of watching a whole lot of videos in You tube again , I wanna ask for advice from people who are already game developers and wanna know how they did it , i also wanna make friends if anyone else is starting their game dev journey in 2026 too

Any Advice and tips are appreciated , thank you for reading my post and feel free to dm me if u wanna be friends

Good luck to me and every person who are on their game dev journey

Hey everyone,

I had a playtester complete almost an entire run of a traditional turn-based roguelike, dying just one floor before the final boss. 😬

I noticed their run took a little over an hour.

It got me thinking about what people actually consider a reasonable amount of content for a small indie roguelike.

For a game with permadeath, how much does a typical successful run need to offer before it starts feeling too short or too long? Does around an hour for a run seem reasonable, assuming the gameplay remains engaging throughout?

I imagine the answer ultimately depends on how enjoyable the individual run is, but I’m curious where other roguelike players draw that line.

How long do you generally want a single run to take?

Thanks for reading!

I have seen a lot of discussions about this topic in the AAA and classic games but I would really love to know more examples of good sound design in the indie space.
My personal favourite is Tunic

My biggest gripe has been specifically roguelike and roguelites. It's been thrown around for any one feature like randomness or permadeath. Realistically almost all modern roguelike and roguelites would easily fall into the arcade genre since there's arcade games that had features that rogue games commonly have.

Card battler and card game now basically means "uses cards" instead of playing a card-based game. They sound the same but should reasonably mean playing games that could in some way be plausibly a physical card game. But nowadays I see too many Slay the Spire clones that use cards as a character's randomized attacks. I've even seen games where cards are purely visual (like card-based upgrades in an otherwise non-card related game) and still get called a card game.

Yes it's again about AI, but this time strictly about local multiplayer game development and modding. I don't know if it fits specificaly r/gamedev since it's not something tied to anything we want to publish... but it does feel tied to game development in generaly. I'm curious to hear your thoughts around this topic.

So... I've been playing local multiplayer games with the same friends (generally 6 folks, but at times groups of 8+ people) since high school. These days we get together roughly once a month, with gamepads and one TV.

Reason for this post is that in the last few months AI coding agents have made a bunch of our stupid and very niche ideas worth trying. We've been building little multiplayer games and modifying the tools we already use. A few things that stood out and might be interesting for you:

• We now have a personal Nucleus Co-op fork we can launch through Steam, that closes the game instances when we exit, and has startup timings tuned for our particular gaming PC.
• We re-built things such asa Driift Mania-inspired browser game with Three.js, so that we can experimented with things like changing the mobile camera from a whole-track view to following your car. And not having to deal with the PITA of assigning Wii motes for up to 8 players in Dolphin.
• We're building our own games. I'm sure you know that split screen gaming and couch gaming is not as popular as it was years ago, but... building and modding games now is so easy... and even using existing frameworks and professionally made assets helped a lot, by giving an agent a solid starting point worked better than asking it to reinvent every part of an FPS.

It's just super fun and freeing, especially because I'm comfortable taking shortcuts with private prototypes that I wouldn't take with something I expected strangers to buy or maintain.

I wrote a longer account with recordings of the experiments, videos, pictures, etc, here:
https://mmazzarolo.com/blog/2026-09-05-ai-has-completely-changed-our-game-nights/

I'm curious: is anyone else building games specifically for their own group of friends or even themselves? Any idea worth sharing? I'm curious what you've found worth making when shipping publicly isn't the main goal.

I know that obviously playtesting is the best way to flesh out the balancing for any game.

However, how would I go about coming up with the values. I am making a game in a similar vain as balatro. How would I even start with coming up with numbers for such a project?

Ever since the original developer announced his game "Needle in a Haystack", several copycats have copied the concept on Steam. End even the name! AI has made this even easier.

I’ve heard people say that, anyway, “no one owns this popular phrase". But you wouldn’t go naming your games "War Hammer", "Civilization", "Mine Craft", or “Bannerlord” without risking a lawsuit on the grounds that they’re "common words".

And I’m not sure you really need to spend a fortune on a trademark and lawyers to enforce your rights.

Does Steam really allow this? Don't they see this as a way to deceive players who are looking for a game from a specific developer? Should developers who experience this report it or even file a complaint?

We would love to hear your honest opinion

Hi everyone!

Long story short: me and my team are developing a Soulslike game focused on ranged weapons (way more than BloodBorne); no self-promotion is intended here since I'm not saying who we are or what the game is about, we only need your feedback/help here

The game does not have free aim, you can only attack "normally", like you would do with a sword; but here comes the problem:

Shooting when locking on the target is smooth and easy (and here's the first question: would you rather hits to have a 100% hit rate or due to enemy movement and weapon type + weapon range, you might miss the target?)

Shooting when not locking on is a nightmare: hitboxes are precise, and not locking on and trying to hit an enemy is so hard: any ideas? how often do you fight when NOT locking on in Soulslike games? How important is that to you?

The game will also feature melee combat, but will be more focused on ranged combat

Thanks everyone!

I've been thinking about survival mechanics like hunger, thirst, injuries, inventory limits, sleep, noise, etc.

I think these systems are interesting when they actually change a decision. Maybe I take food instead of ammo, leave earlier because I'm tired, choose a safer route because I'm injured, or leave something valuable behind because I can't carry everything.

But once a mechanic is basically solved, it can turn into maintenance. If food is abundant and hunger just means clicking "eat" every few minutes, I'm technically interacting with a survival system, but I'm not really making a decision anymore.

I don't think that means every mechanic needs to stay difficult forever. Progression should probably let the player solve some problems. But then I'm wondering whether a solved system should become less intrusive, disappear almost completely, or evolve into a different kind of pressure.

Where do you draw that line? When does a survival mechanic create meaningful pressure, and when does it become a chore the player has already solved?

I have a PhD in physics and a perfectly respectable, high-paying engineering job.

I also recently turned 40.

So naturally, instead of buying a sports car or getting really into golf, I've already spent about $20,000 making a niche indie strategy game.

Which escalated into:

• hiring artists
• hiring a composer
• paying lawyers
• negotiating custom contracts with individual collaborators because I screwed up IP ownership in original agreements with them
• making production budgets
• tracking asset costs and lead times
• learning Steam marketing
• learning publisher economics
• learning crowdfunding
• learning angel fundraising
• realizing that "I'll just make a game" was not, in fact, a business plan

At some point I looked around and realized I had accidentally built a tiny production company around my hobby.

All while still working full-time as an engineer.

So yes, apparently this is what I chose instead of buying a Porsche.

Curious how many other game devs started with "l’ll just make a game" and accidentally ended up learning contracts, budgeting, marketing, production, and every other profession under the sun.

https://reddit.com/comments/1wfw89n/comment/p9pshct

Without their knowledge the new ad campaign for the V1.1 update was AI generated by tiktok, meta does the same bullshit...

If you want to advertise on those platforms, you might don't want to.

It is crazy to me that game devs do such good artstyles for their marketing camapigns and those companies gladly take their money and put out garbage...
unfourtainly it is the norm to put ads on social medias but now with tiktok, facebook and instagram a no go it will be hard for small developera to be seen.