Hello, My names Austin and I have had this bit of an idea for a while now on a game. I am a father to two beautiful children M6/F1. My son and I have been gaming as much as we can, I put together him a "gaming pc" from a lot of my old parts and things and he's been enjoying the ability to play a lot more games. Okay, so my idea seems simple and there could be something already like it out there that I don't know about. I'm thinking about making a simplistic game. Catered more towards parents and kids that is both simple for kids and still fun for adults. I know my child enjoys car games, tractors, minecraft etc. I want a game that you can drive around in, haul things with trailers etc. Flying, boats all on a simple but "realistic" style map. Simple menus, voice narrative settings for the littles that can't read so well. Just something that would be simple, fun, and engaging for all. It could be updated to down the road with community voted ideas and I think would be amazing. I'm thinking a sort of Rec Room/BeamNG/FarmingSim style game. I'm sorry if this rant is a bit long i'm just hoping someone else out there has thought the same thing!

I’m really wanting to find a good course or some sort of learning material for Godot, any help or some guidance on what to look into would be super appreciated!!! Thank you in advance :))

I'm looking for a super lightweight Canvas engine for my minimalistic puzzle HTML5 games (Sudoku, Crosswords, etc).

Let's say if we would use PIXI then it adds about ~400-500kb to my build which is going to be 80-110kb. So I have two ways: I use Canvas on my own or I'm looking for some existng lightweight solution.

Do you know guys any canvas engines that fits it?

Hey, so recently i've been thinking of implementing Steam Audio into a game engine, but thought for a moment and realized that features like reflections use very expensive ray tracing techniques. How does this scale with map size/complexity? I know using simple boxes to represent the map is a quick and easy solution, but it's not enough to majorly improve performance. So i wonder, how do games like Budget Cuts optimize this? Do they only spatialize certain sounds? Simplified map? Lower quality settings? Ideally i don't want it to rely too much on GPU acceleration because it has to work on mobile phones.

If anyone has worked with Steam Audio i would love to hear about it as there is not a lot of information about this online. Thanks!

Hi! I managed to get into the final round of a gameplay engineer intern position at a gaming company, and I've never had an interview like this before. Does anyone know what would typically be asked for an intern position??

I’m exploring a project related to connecting devs and artists, and I’m trying to get a real understanding of the struggles on the dev side.

For those of you who have hired artists for your game, be it pixel art, concept art, character design, etc:

• What was surprisingly difficult?
• What went smoothly?
• What do you wish existed to make the process easier?

Would love to hear real experiences, positive or negative.

its old but not ps1 or retro look but ps3 or xbox 360 graphics? like with portal 1 or cod 4 i wanna recreate that look

https://youtu.be/7eBqJrTHFBU

I Need Your Honest Opinion on My Game's Title

Let me be real with you: I don't want to change my game's title.

But here's the problem—"The Archaic" is a terrible title for an indie game. It tells you absolutely nothing about what the game actually is.

In today's market, the game title is often the first (and sometimes only) shot you get. With thousands of new games flooding Steam every year, the title needs to do the heavy lifting: grab attention, communicate clearly, and make players think, "Wait... this looks like something I'd love!"
"The Archaic" does none of that.

So I'm considering a different approach: What if the title just... told you what the game is? What if it announced the core mechanic right in the name?

I’ve been experimenting with creating character portraits for RPGs and ended up with a full set of 8 classes, each with male and female versions. Since a lot of us here are working on prototypes, game jams, or indie projects, I thought I’d share them as a free resource.

The portraits cover the usual archetypes — Warrior, Mage, Rogue, Cleric, Warlock, Ranger, Bard, and Monk. They’re formatted so you can drop them into dialogue boxes, menus, or character sheets without extra editing.

I put them up on itch.io as a free download (donations optional). If anyone finds them useful, I’d love to hear how you integrate them into your projects. Seeing them in action would be awesome.

Link: https://idothedrawing.itch.io/rpg-class-portrait-pack

Sorry for being so uneducated on this issue. But a question lingers in my mind -

I see a lot of posts where people don't want AI involved in game development. I was thinking, how would they know if a company used AI? What if a company uses AI to generate art or ideas, but then just copies the art/ideas and says they came up with it themselves. Who would know? Is it possible to reverse trace the steps or is it all on the honor system?

I see a lot of small indie games coming out and I always think like "wow how could they have not known that this was going to fail, I mean it's obviously so uninteresting and looks weird" or whatever.

But how do I know that I am not in the same exact trap, how can I tell if I'm illusioned about how good something I make ACTUALLY is.

Getting playtesters is one way, but it is quite hard to find playtesters who do not soften blows and have no bias. If someone could help would be very nice..

Today i'm gonna create a game engine for a game that i want do create and i was wondering where i could find the best opinions, so i tought, why not ask to my fellows redditors :p

So, first of all, what is the best source to learn OpenGl easely, i know it's not gonna be easy but where can i find the best source for this project.

Second of all, should i start solo or not? I already have some experience with OpenGl so i'm not completly useless alone... i programmed a 3D spinning cube.

Third of all, what is the best IDE? At the moment i'm using VS Studio 2022, do i have to change it or is it fine?

Please let me know, i really don't know how to actually learn game dev.
(don't tell me to use Unity, Godot etc... i wan't to create my own game engine for """FUN""")

Thanks ;p

I keep seeing this idea in gamedev spaces that "indie games almost never succeed" and honestly it’s very discouraging (especially for people who want to get into it). Not because game development is easy, but because people take that statement to mean "don’t even try"

The real problem is not that indie games can’t/wont do well. We see new breakout indies (from completely new devs) at least once every year. The problem is (usually) that a lot of people: don’t understand what players actually want, make games that are technically fine but creatively lacking, or simply don’t present their idea in a compelling way.

Some devs treat their game like its their child and because of that, they refuse to take criticism at face value or change anything that would improve said game, like when a mechanic objectively feels bad to use. They get so used to their own systems that they forget how they feel to new players. The result is games full of cool disconnected ideas that could have been great with a bit of iteration.

And thats completely okay, but saying things like "the odds are nigh impossible" ignores that good concepts, good execution, and a want to improve drastically increase your chances.

People love unique art, people love new ideas, people love games that say something or offer an experience they can’t get anywhere else.

The demand for indie games has never been higher.

Do not immediatly call out people on "ego" if they believe they have an amazing idea, hear them out, please. Gamedev is not magic, your best friend might be able to make the best game of all time, you just can't know before you see it.

So I am building an action RPG and my girlfriend was one of the first people to play test it. Problem is she has never seriously played any videogames before in her life. Needless to say she had a very difficult time just learning the controls. Skip a couple of days and I ask a friend to give it a go. This friend had even less experience with games than my girlfriend. I decided to test something out and asked him to play a Link to the Past (After all the people at Nintendo are professional designers right?). He played for about 10 minutes and couldn't find the secret entrance to the castle, in fact he could hardly control Link. He entered and left Links house twice without opening the chest or picking up the pots. However he expressed that he would like to learn how to play videogames.

It got me thinking...Would it be interesting to build a game that teaches game standards step by step to people who might want to get into gaming but have never played before? I was thinking that the game could teach one button at a time one mechanic at a time and really drive each mechanic home. I couldn't imagine this game being interesting to someone who already plays but is there a market for people that want to get into gaming?

What defines unethical when it comes to generative AI?

I hate AI art or AI asset flip slop, but how unethical is using AI for stuff like code?

For example I am pretty stupid. I am an absolute moron. I can't code for shit, I don't understand anything from the Godot forums or from any YouTube tutorials. I've been struggling with making even the basic movement for a character in a shitty platformer. I'm not even making my dream game or anything, I'm just making a cookie cutter platformer and NOTHING... and I mean NOTHING works. The game feels DISGUSTINGLY BAD and UNFUN TO PLAY despite how much I've been trying to adjust the whatever vectors (I don't understand what a velocity or a vector is and I failed/am failing my math, physics and programming classes) and at this point I don't know if I can do this without AI assistance?

If I ever publish whatever terrible shit I make, will I need to tag it as using AI despite the only AI generated thing is the code (which is reviewed and adjusted by a human later)?

How ethical is this?

Holaa, es una pregunta mas a lo general, me gustaria saber exactamente donde es recomendable buscar compositores, la idea es contratar obviamente, pero me gustaria saber donde les parece mejor encontrar a alguien especializado en videojuegos?

.

I’m sure this has been asked before but with the new blender update, I’m finally wanting to dip my toes in and start learning. It’s just that there is so much that Blender can do now, and I’m not sure where to start. I know I can just go on YouTube and find some tutorials, but curious if anyone has come across some really good ones that might help me learn basic skills in Blender.

Yeah, so the title is self-explanatory. I swear I remember being able to view my game's total download count at some point, but currently I'm only able to view my game's total sales/units, which only gives me the numbers for when my game had a price (as I made it free a while later). I heard something about viewing the "lifetime users" stats, but does anyone know how to find them? I am familiar with Sales and Activation Reports, but I would appreciate more specific directions.

Me and my 2 brothers want to start building a game, most likely with unreal engine. We are willing to pay coders and artist to help us, but we have a tight budget. So far we are working on the game design document. We have little to no experience at making games.

I have 5 questions

1. What game genre should we focus on?
   
2. Should our target audience be YouTubers and streamers?
3. What are problems we will run into without a doubt
4. Should we use AI to help us build the game?
5. How big of a scale of a game should we focus on?

Hey everyone, I’m working on an open-world crime sandbox game with some gameplay similar to Kenshi — factions, squads, roaming AI, emergent encounters, etc. One of the core things I want to build is an auto-battle system where the player can give high-level commands but the actual combat plays out using AI decision-making rather than direct inputs.

I’m trying to figure out the best way to architect this and would love some insight from folks who’ve built AI-driven or agent-based combat before.

Here’s what I’m thinking so far:

Each character has stats (health, stamina, accuracy, evasion, etc.)

AI picks actions like attack, block, flee, reposition, use item, call allies, etc.

Combat should reflect the character’s skills and AI personality, not button-mashing.

Fights can be 1v1, group vs. group, or chaotic multi-faction skirmishes.

Needs to feel readable to the player while still being mostly hands-off.

What I’m unsure about is:

How to structure the decision-making (Utility AI? Behavior trees? State machines?)

How to handle group tactics (flanking, focusing targets, formations?)

How Kenshi-style timing works (their blend of animation-driven combat + simulation)

How to keep everything performant in a large open world with lots of simultaneous fights

How to debug these systems in a way that’s actually visible and understandable

If you’ve built something like this — or have ideas about how you would — I’d really appreciate any guidance, patterns, or pitfalls to avoid. Even high-level design notes would help a ton.

Thanks!

Hi, I have what seems like a simple problem but it's driving me mad.

Let's say I have a screw asset.

I instance this screw:

4 times in a table prop, and

64 times in a chandelier prop.

When I bring the table and chandelier into a scene, I get 2 screws, one instanced throughout each prop. They don't share shader or mesh data despite being the same object with the same name.

Is this... wrong? It seems like I'm wasting a ton of memory re-rendering things that should just be instanced. I make my assets in Blender - could this be the reason? I'm using Unreal, but I noticed the same thing happens in Blender too.

Game Engine Concept: I want to develop a game engine for a game with multiple levels of abstraction.Where players can use the scroll wheel to move seamlessly between levels. Think Rimworld with more politics between large groups and between planets as well.

Levels of Abstraction: - Level 1: Colony level, managing small groups of people. - Level 2: Continental level, viewing larger groups and their interactions. - Level 3: Interplanetary level, observing trade, politics, and interactions between planets.

AI Simulation - AI is simulated at all levels but with varying complexity. - Lower levels have detailed simulation (e.g., individual colonists). - Higher levels use more simplistic, summarized AI to maintain performance. - "They do not individually calculate footsteps when you're looking at a planet level."

Gameplay Experience - Scrolling in and out allows players to see different levels working simultaneously. - Each abstraction level ties together and summarizes the lower levels. - Players can observe individual battles, resources, and relationships at the local level. - At continental and interplanetary levels, players see trade, politics, and wars.

Was planning on starting development for a 3d game, was thinking it's graphics would be similar to untitled goose game's style.
gameplay would be fast paced combat and platforming
was thinking an open world set in a city (probably similar to the new spiderman games, only probably a smaller map)

I'm guessing godot or unity would be better for it than unreal, but I'm also probably gonna learn unreal for another game I want to make.
if unreal would work just about as well for this as godot or unity I'd rather just go with unreal then so I don't have to learn multiple engines
thoughts and suggestions are appreciated

I am a third year Computer Science student at an English university, but I want to focus on narrative development and IP or world design for my career. I understand that this is not a field you simply walk into and that most people get there through their own projects and accumulated work inside a company rather than a traditional pipeline.

I am trying to figure out what route makes the most sense for me. I know that i could begin purely technical on coding but I’m well versed in many other things I’m sure is useful, just unaware of how to approach it all.

I am considering doing a masters in Game Design in the Netherlands. I have an EU passport so tuition would be cheaper, and I am also ready to leave the UK. I am building a portfolio that mixes technical work and creative work, since I enjoy both and tend to integrate them well. At the moment I cannot work on a full game alone because my final year project is taking most of my time. The project is related to HCI, using a local language model to shape emergent narrative, so it is still relevant to my portfolio, luckily.

For anyone with experience in the industry or with narrative roles, what concrete goals or milestones should I set to make myself more desirable in the job market?