Game Development

4608 readers
79 users here now

Welcome to the game development community! This is a place to talk about and post anything related to the field of game development.

Community Wiki

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
1
 
 

Hey fellow devs! 👋 I just gave my indie game A Survival Game a fresh new cover art, and I’d love to hear your feedback!

🔧 It's a brutal survival strategy game with stickmen, tough choices, and permanent consequences — and now with a much more eye-catching look.

🖼️ Before vs After Before: A minimal hand-drawn look. Now: A sharper, darker, and more polished style that better matches the game’s tone: desperate decisions, chaos, and no second chances.

👁️ My goal: To improve CTR (click-through rate) and draw more players in with a style that’s closer to the gameplay experience — while still keeping that raw, sketchy charm of the game.

Would love to hear:

Do you think the new art works better?

Any advice on small visual tweaks?

Tips to boost CTR on itch.io even more?

Thanks! 🙏 – Daniel (14 y/o indie dev)

2
 
 

Have you ever found yourself in a conversation with people about Valve's anti-competitive practices? Well, I have. And I defended Valve's requirement to let customers choose their preferred storefront when buying games, as long as Steam keys were involved. After all, you end up getting to use all of Steam's features and services when you activate the game on Steam. We can argue about this, but it turns out, that was a red herring!

I've spend the better part of today digging through this newest class action lawsuit, again made by Wolfire, against Valve. (This has been going for a while.) I was compiling a response to each of the points in the overview (can't go through the whole thing, sorry), and there was one thing that stood out after searching for the "Price Veto Provision". I had heard people make claims to the same effect before, but they were never able to back it up. (And it being conflated with the "Steam Key Price Parity Provision" made it worse.) So here it is:

Valve pressures developers into price parity across different storefronts, even if Steam keys are NOT part of the equation.

We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . . That stays true, even for DRM-free sales or sales on a store with its own keys like UPLAY or Origin.

When I looked for this quote, I found a podcast episode that I hadn't listened to (The Hated One, Episode 228 - More evidence of Valve enforcing price parity beyond Steam keys), but that thankfully provided some sources for more related quotes, from earlier lawsuits, such as:

“The biggest takeaway is, don’t disadvantage Steam customers. For instance, it wouldn’t be fair to sell your DLC for $10 on Steam if you’re selling it for $5 or giving it as a reward for $5 donations. We would ask that Steam customers get that lower $5 price as well.”

“If the offer you’re making fundamentally disadvantages someone who bought your game on Steam, it’s probably not a great thing for us or our customers (even if you don’t find a specific rule describing precisely that scenario).”

a Steam account manager, Tom Giardino, reportedly told publisher Wolfire that Steam would delist any games available for sale at a lower price elsewhere, whether or not using Steam keys.

The developer asked, “Regarding the pricing policy, can a non-Steam variant of a game be sold at a different price than on the Steam store page?” Steam’s response was “Selling the game off Steam at a lower price wouldn’t be considered giving Steam users a fair deal.”

These were apparently from 2017 and 2018, so things might've changed since then, but it's reason enough to question Valve. I unfortunately haven't been able to find much on these other quotes (search engine enshittification, or has this really not been talked about?), and I'm unsure why they're not also included in this newest lawsuit, but there they are. Hopefully this helps anyone who was misinformed or lacked proof, like myself. Also if anyone has related stories from gamedevs or articles that actually get to the core of the problem, I'd love it if you could share them.

3
 
 

Hey everyone! 👋 (again) I’m Daniel, a 14-year-old indie developer, and I’ve been working on a survival strategy game called A Survival Game. It mixes stickmen, hand-drawn chaos, resource management, and lots of dumb (but fun) decisions.

🧠 About the game: You control a group of desperate stickmen trapped in a not-so-safe bunker. Your goal? Survive as long as possible. You’ll need to fight monsters, manage food, make tough choices, and pray your stickmen don’t do something… stupid.

Each run is different thanks to random events, unique cards, and permadeath mechanics. There’s also a good dose of humor (because dying horribly should be funny, right?)

🆕 I just released a big update with:

10 new stickmen

New items, traps and events

Improved difficulty system

Even crazier cards (like "Mercy", which might save… or kill a stickman 😅)

🎮 Play it for free on Itch.io: 👉 https://danielgamedev14.itch.io/a-survival-game

💬 I’d love your feedback or ideas! I’m constantly updating the game and open to collabs with other devs too.

Thanks for reading! 🚀

4
 
 

you're into Stellar Blade and tough boss fights like Providence or Raven gave you trouble, I put together a full breakdown on my gaming blog that might help.

It covers:

My favorite combat builds (SP skill path suggestions)

Boss fight tips that actually work (timing-based, not just button mash)

5
 
 

And by revert we mean "keeps in but now with a dark pattern if you want to disable it"

6
7
 
 

I wanted to become a game developer for some time, and even tried following some tutorials for making video games, but i quit it due to not understanding the coding part, i did not really understand what i was doing.

Now i know a lot more about programming, but mostly just in java, however, i dont think it will be very difficult to learn new language, as now i understand many concepts of programming in general.

I want to learn to make games on godot, which i chose because it is quite popular and has a lot of documentation, tutorials, guides and community, which should be very helpful, especially for newbies.

As for a newbie in game development, what advice would you recommend me follow, to easily get in the gamedev? Maybe its some guides, some example or test projects, or something else, which i dont know about yet, everything will be helpful.

8
9
 
 

if you hear rat noises in A Survival Game BE CAREFUL!

a rat may be eating all your FOOD!

and if it runs out your stickmen may DIE!!!!

1 by 1 😉

play now: https://danielgamedev14.itch.io/a-survival-game

10
 
 

Ever wondered what happens when you mix:

Stickmen with anxiety,

A totally “safe” bunker,

A resource system that hates you,

And a card mechanic designed by someone who watched too much chaos theory?

Well, now you don’t have to — because I made A Survival Game: a simulation/strategy roguelike where you’re always one bad card away from total disaster.

👨‍💻 Why? Because I’m a developer with questionable priorities and too much love for watching virtual stickmen fail at life.

🃏 Features: A full card-based control system (because UIs are for cowards)

Resource micromanagement that makes you question your decisions

Stickmen that level up, change appearance, and complain a lot

Permadeath, obviously

A Monster Wiki, because everything wants to kill you, and you need receipts

A “Mercy DLC” where you can literally pay $1 to go back in time (feels very on-brand for debugging, tbh)

😅 Dev things I learned the hard way: Implementing permadeath logic is easy. Explaining it to confused players? Not so much.

Saving in HTML5 is a feature I now worship.

Stickmen animations don’t need to be fancy if they scream internally.

💾 Tech stack? Godot, lots of JSON, and the occasional sacrifice to the RNG gods.

💥 Play it. Break it. Tell me it’s terrible. Or great. Or both.

Link: https://danielgamedev14.itch.io/a-survival-game (Warning: may cause stickman-related stress.)

11
 
 

Ever wondered what happens when you mix:

Stickmen with anxiety,

A totally “safe” bunker,

A resource system that hates you,

And a card mechanic designed by someone who watched too much chaos theory?

Well, now you don’t have to — because I made A Survival Game: a simulation/strategy roguelike where you’re always one bad card away from total disaster.

👨‍💻 Why? Because I’m a developer with questionable priorities and too much love for watching virtual stickmen fail at life.

🃏 Features: A full card-based control system (because UIs are for cowards)

Resource micromanagement that makes you question your decisions

Stickmen that level up, change appearance, and complain a lot

Permadeath, obviously

A Monster Wiki, because everything wants to kill you, and you need receipts

A “Mercy DLC” where you can literally pay $1 to go back in time (feels very on-brand for debugging, tbh)

😅 Dev things I learned the hard way: Implementing permadeath logic is easy. Explaining it to confused players? Not so much.

Saving in HTML5 is a feature I now worship.

Stickmen animations don’t need to be fancy if they scream internally.

💾 Tech stack? Godot, lots of JSON, and the occasional sacrifice to the RNG gods.

💥 Play it. Break it. Tell me it’s terrible. Or great. Or both.

Link: https://danielgamedev14.itch.io/a-survival-game (Warning: may cause stickman-related stress.)

12
 
 

Very interesting stuff

13
14
15
 
 

Ludii is a general game system designed to play, evaluate and design a wide range of games, including board games, card games, dice games, mathematical games, and so on. Download the Ludii player to explore our ever-growing database of games, test your AI search algorithms, and design your own games.

Games are described as structured sets of ludemes (units of game-related information). This allows the full range of traditional strategy games from around the world to be modelled in a single playable database for the first time. Ludii is being developed as part of the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project.

16
 
 

Starts with the basics of how Datamoshing works in video encoding, then explores it in game engine rendering.

17
18
19
 
 

Saw it on flathub, went on their site and saw that some popular games used it like knockout city, forza horizon 5, century age of ashes, etc. Was wondering if anyone uses it since I've never heard of it, and don't see much on reddit about it.

20
 
 
21
22
 
 

I'm testing adding the No To AI icon in the Steam page for Robot Anomaly.

Saw a couple of streamers wondering if some of the images in the game were AI generated (they are not!)

Also saw chat wondering if voices in a different game were AI (they were not).

Sadly Steam don't add a No AI disclaimer when the developer is NOT using AI. Only when they are.

23
 
 

Hello

I find myself abandoning hobby projects and never getting a finished version. Primarily due to me not being a student with no responsibility and a whole lot more free time, but among other reasons, a lack of accountability. I was thinking, why not try making something with someone else? Since then it won't be as easy to abandon a project because something else caught my mind. However none of my friends or colleagues share this interest, but perhaps one of you guys might be interested.

A bit about me, 22yo fintech backend developer professionally working with Java. My two main ethos, or things I want to do differently are:

  • Games should be dynamic. There should be many ways to approach a system (think markets in games, players should somehow be able to influence the buying and selling prices, along with the wares being offered by interacting with the game world)
  • Games are too transparent. Being able to directly compare items by their raw stats make it a lot more boring. Games should show this with text or more broad values making the player infer which is more efficient.

I am mostly thinking about making a primarily text based game, since it's a lot more likely to reach a MVP, but I'm open for most things. I've got some game ideas myself but if you have something better I'm open for it.

I'm primarily thinking about chatting on discord or waheteven about some ideas and toolchains and setting up a public repo.

Also if you don't vibe with my ethos, feel free to comment that as well, maybe you'll find someone with similar values here.

24
25
view more: next ›