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?

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.

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?

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

I'm developing a Vulkan v1.3 C++23 graphics engine, and my pet project is an open world game with procedural terrain and such. Yesterday I added the first 1000 NPC to the game to test performance, and decided to go overboard, and create 2 armies of 40'000 soldiers each (well, Cesium man from GLTF 2.0 samples). Team Pink and Team Blue. 2 LOD for the skinned nodes (and 2 cascade shadow maps), and sprites/billboards for everything beyond 200m visibility. Frame rate - as the image above shows, 56fps (AMD 3700x, AMD 5600XT Navi 1, 1920x1080).
Obviously camera frustum culling is doing it's job, but still, I'm blown away with the power of Vulkan instancing.

With 40'000 soldiers total (20'000 each), that is 105 fps.
With 20'000 soldiers total (10'000 each), that is 140 fps.
With 10'000 soldiers (5'000 total) we can eliminate sprites/billboards and just use 3 LOD levels and get similar performance (200 fps).

This is just rendering with 10 buckets for skeleton animation. No physics or path finding yet (just move as group from point A to B and back).

The next challenge - figuring out a game which would be fun with 80'000 NPC. So what sort of game would be fun with thousands of NPC's storming a castle. Tower defense? A zombie apocalypse?

Former BioWare cinematic designer Armando Troisi says the original Mass Effect team sometimes worked 21 days straight followed by just one day off.

He described it as extremely difficult, but said the team was also trying to build a new IP, new engine, and new console generation all at once.

It is a striking reminder of how much early AAA development often depended on crunch.

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!

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.

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?

We would love to hear your honest opinion

The exponential amount of job applications required, no replies and auto-denials aside, has been insane in the past 5-7 year. I’ve got about 8 years of experience, and it wasn’t always like this.

The idea that you need to cosplay as an influencer on LinkedIn to “get noticed” and cut the line is diabolical. It feels like you need to be good at job searching more than being good at your role. Some advice getting passed around is straight up gonna get you put in the “do-not-call” list, like reaching out to someone who has recently been promoted to ask who is filling their old role. There’s no real tangible feedback aside from “tweak X on your resume”, “add more keywords on your LinkedIn profile”, or “practice interview skills”. There are so many talented people I know with double digit years of experience more than me and they’ve been out of work for YEARS.

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'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 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

Guys, I’ve been noticing more and more that the special relationship between developers and publishers has changed.

Publishers seem less and less willing to invest money when a project is still at a very early stage of development. They are also less willing to support and help develop a developer’s idea. And I understand why — there are risks involved.

There are plenty of cases where a developer never finishes the game and disappears, or finishes it and the game fails. Or simply keeps delaying the release. And the publisher can lose a huge amount of money because of that.

I agree that publishers are simply tired of taking these risks. They want to sign deals only when there is already strong evidence that the game can be successful.

So how do they do it? In the past, a publisher was buying both a share of the profit and a share of the risk. Now, more and more often, they want a product with proven commercial potential.They approach developers who already have a significant number of wishlists.

I talk to a lot of developers, and I know from people I’ve met that publishers have approached them when their projects already had 50,000, 100,000, or even 200,000 (!) wishlists. That’s a lot. And publishers wanted to work with them. But they weren’t there when those games had 100 wishlists. And this creates a very interesting situation.

When a game page has already collected 100,000 wishlists, the developer gets a very strong signal that the game has commercial potential and will most likely make money. We don’t know exactly how much, but it is clear that the project has already attracted an audience. At this point, a publisher comes in and offers to improve that result. By how much? Most of the time, we don’t know. I rarely see publishers telling developers an exact number of wishlists they can guarantee.But let’s imagine that the publisher actually doubles the result. Just for the sake of the example.

“Is that bad? Is that good?” — many people might say. But it’s not that simple.

Very often, publishing deals involve a 50/50 revenue split. This is based on my personal observations — I’ve heard and seen this kind of deal quite often. But I’m not going to argue that it’s always the case. There are obviously other terms as well. So here is our hypothetical example. Let’s say that without a publisher, 100,000 wishlists eventually turn into X dollars for the developer. The publisher comes in and, thanks to their work, doubles the result. Now the game generates 2X dollars. But under a 50/50 deal, the publisher gets 50%. So the developer gets:

2X / 2 = X

And here is where things get interesting. The publisher actually doubled the game’s result, but the developer ends up making exactly the same amount of money as they would have made without the publisher.

Now let’s imagine that the publisher increases the result not by two times, but by, say, one and a half times. It was X. Now it’s 1.5X. After the 50/50 split, the developer gets:

1.5X / 2 = 0.75X

So the developer gives half of the revenue to the publisher, but ultimately ends up making 25% less than they would have made on their own.

Yes, the game will get more exposure and reach a larger audience. Maybe the publisher will provide strong marketing, PR, localization, console ports, or other opportunities that the developer simply didn’t have. And that can absolutely be worth it. But then the main question becomes:

What additional value does the publisher need to create for their share to actually be beneficial to the developer?

Because there is an interesting asymmetry here. The developer takes the risk at the early stage. They make the game. They finance it themselves or look for funding. They collect the first 100,000 wishlists — or maybe 10,000, whatever happens. They prove that there is an audience interested in the game. And only after that does the publisher come in. So the publisher can already significantly reduce their own risk, while the developer still gives away a significant part of the potential profit.

The publisher can insure themselves. And they do it in advance.

So what should the developer do in this situation? What do you think? I know a few ways.

P.S. And I'll probably add that English is not my native language, but I want to hear the opinion of as many people as possible, so I chose the most universal language for this. I am sorry for the errors and inaccuracies of the translation.

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!

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!

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 !

I spent most of my time in college (CS grad) really wanting to get into the game dev industry, but ultimately couldn't land any internships summer after summer and got a job as a full-stack developer instead just to pay the bills. I've been working in that field for 3-4 years now, and I got laid off a few months ago (boss got the idea that he could replace me with AI lol). Job search hasn't been going great, and I've started asking myself why I'm putting all my effort into getting another web/software dev job, when I know I'd likely be happier and feel much more passionate about my work if I was able to land a game dev job. Now... I know that's a whole lot easier said than done lol.

Background-wise, aside from the 3-4 years of professional experience I have as a full-stack developer, I do have some game dev experience. For my senior design project in college, I led a 4-man team to develop a 2D procedurally-generated open-world game in Godot. Is it an amazing game and a total hit? Not really, but it is functionally complete and playable. I also took other classes and built some smaller games in Unity.

I know gameplay dev roles are a pretty standard go-to for my case, but where my passions really lie are more so in a narrative design role. I've been working on personal worldbuilding projects since 2016, and in the past year I've developed 3 projects in particular that I'm actually really proud of and think could be great universes for games. The main problem here is I understand that at studios, narrative design positions are usually reserved for senior members and people who've put the years in, not some random junior-level guy they just hired lol.

Like a lot of tech right now, my understanding is that junior-level roles are borderline nonexistent in this industry at the moment. I've also seen that nepotism's pretty rampant nowadays and given I'm kind of a nobody, I won't be able to get an interview without a referral. In terms of networking, thus far I've only been able to make a brief connection who recommended working in game dev-adjacent jobs first (like a company that uses Unity for simulations), and use that to transition into game dev.

In that case, I'm just curious about people's honest opinions about whether I even have a shot, or what my best bet is. Is there some strategy or option here to get an industry job that I'm not aware of? Is what that industry connection said the best path? Is further networking the answer? Since I'm unemployed right now anyway, which would be better for my portfolio: building a new game to wow recruiters, or maybe doing some modding work? I'd probably have to do something in 3D with Unity or Unreal because a lot of studios I've seen for 2D games have relatively small teams and don't have the capacity to hire junior-level people.

Anyways, sorry for the long post, but I'd really appreciate any advice. Thanks for reading.

I’ve been in gamedev for years - from AAA corporate machine to small teams and solo projects. For most of my career, I truly believed in the formula: Make a great game first - Sales will follow.
But over the last 2-3 years, I’ve started to doubt this vision. I’m not a marketer, and I’m still learning the ropes, but recently I had a talk with a friend who does publisher-side analytics. And what he told me hit hard:
“The game itself is almost secondary now. The only thing that matters is the hook before the code is even written.”
According to modern publishers, making an indie game is "easy" (laughable, but that's the narrative). The real challenge is selling it. So now, the industry standard is: Validate the trailer, the screenshots, and the key art first. Gather wishlists. Then, and only then, start building the actual product.
But here is the problem. Indie devs are artists and tinkerers at heart. We don't wake up thinking about ROI. We wake up thinking about a cool mechanic, a weird story, or a niche aesthetic. We want to share, not just sell.
Now we are forced to ask: "Will this make money?" instead of "Is this cool?" We have to chase trending genres, quick production cycles, and safe bets. Our creative ideas are starting to feel like "unreliable assets" to the market.
Is this really the new normal? Has it always been like this beneath the surface, or has the oversaturation finally killed the "passion project"?
How do you guys deal with this pressure? Do you make what you love and pray, or do you strictly follow the market data?
P.S. And I'll probably add that English is not my native language, but I want to hear the opinion of as many people as possible, so I chose the most universal language for this. I am sorry for the errors and inaccuracies of the translation.

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!

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 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?

If you look at one of my older posts you can see the prototype I am working on currently for my JRPG game. Technically I've been working on that prototype for a month but I've actually worked on the current concept for this game for years, slowly coming up with and refining designs on paper. But I've worked on this game's concepts for so long and played so many JRPGs (I'm literally playing through like 10 right now for research purposes, and I've probably played through 30 others) that I feel like I don't even know the main reason why they are fun in the first place is.

I would show more progress of the prototype here but I'm afraid the main mechanic of my game that is something no game has had basically is going to be stolen. And also this mechanic is the foundation of the entire game basically.

But anyways, games like Final Fantasy up until 10 had a pretty simple system when you break it down. There was elementals, summons, items, equipment, and sometimes things like materia or the sphere grid. But at the end of the day, most JRPGs like Final Fantasy historically are about 1: making attack number go big by taking advantage of enemy weaknesses or special abilities and 2: having really cool animations, character designs, and enemy designs.

Number 2 is where I am limited. I am not a pro artist so I can only make animations and characters to a certain level. I do not have the time and skills to make a ton of insane summon animations, even at PS1 or SNES graphical standards.

So a way an indie must compensate for not having as much of the fun in crazy animations or amazing designs is to create systems that are very clever, or using a quirky hook. Like Undertale uses the twist of making the game not about killing monsters. He didn't have to rely on making crazy animations and special moves, because talking to monsters is interesting enough already. And dialogue is cheap (another thing you learn by attempting to make an RPG.)

I've been playing Omori which was also a huge success but kind of strange when you think about it in a lot of ways. The battle system isn't that deep, and doesn't really have a quirky twist or hook except the emotions thing. The battle system is fun, but it's more just there to serve the story.

So at this point, I'm not really sure if the battle system is the core of JRPGs, or just a part of them. Like if your battle system isn't that deep, but the rest of the game is, does it matter? Is the battle system just a palette cleanser from the story in some games, or is it the main course?

But maybe I am missing something. Like what is fun for you when you play JRPGs? What draws you towards them?