r/gamedev

Hi

I'm new to this sub and I'm new to game dev. I have ZERO prior experience I have very minimal coding experience other than Python in my school days 6+ years ago. I want to ask, does anyone have any advice for me to start learning. Obviously game development can be daunting to a newbie such as myself but for those of you that have been in the industry for a while do you have any good sources for learning. Obviously following youtube tutorials will likely be a relatively highly suggested approach, but the thing i want to avoid is learning to copy a tutorial. I can complete a tutorial but i want to make sure that i have the best chances of making the game ive always thought of, not just being able to replicate a game from a YT tutorial. I have a fully written story ready to go but as aforementioned, i have no game dev experience and this isnt something i want to rush. Its going to be a Long LONG term project.

My desire to go into game development as an indie dev was kickstarted by the story of how Expedition 33's development went. I dont know how many of you had the same feeling but it really pushed me to want to make a start and make my own stories.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

**I am going to be working over the next 4 days so replies may be slow. Apologies in advance**.

I saw this video about people using AI to reverse engineer demos to get the full game. I personally have a demo but also lock some content. Other than creating a whole new project, is there an easier way to have the demo not include files when building? I'm using Unity.

I'm gonna be deliberately vague as I'm worried if i publicly accuse them they will obfuscate the tracks as much as possible.

I have been working on a game for the past 6 months, wrote it in raylibs and C++. I recently made a WASM build of the demo and threw it up on a cloudflare page so that i could share it with a few friends and previous co-workers...(ive now taken this page down now)

1 day later. I stumble upon a GitHub page....with a cloned copy of my demo, using all my assets... which they are claiming was made with an LLM in "one shot".

within the GitHub page , it contains what seems like Claude's translation of the WASM code to JS... my original demo's levels, and my original demo's assets stuffed into JSON files (presumably to obfuscate where they are from).

At the moment they published the demo under a pseudo name , so my current plan is to hold off on acting to see if they go though with the effort of finishing off the game themselves and shipping it or if they are just gonna release the stolen demo for the internet points and then leave it as abandonware.

what should i do and or, what can i do?

outside of that, i wish to post this more so as a warning , that "the future is now" and this is apparently a thing people are sad enough to do.

So my husband has finally gotten his first game onto steam (early access). It's now the waiting period between when people can see it/wishlist it and when it is available to purchase. My brother and I worked on the art for the game so it's a sort family endeavor and I'm hoping I can help out with getting the game seen.

It's pretty niche and we are no experts on the advertising and outreach side of things. How do you/others get the word out? It's the more uncomfortable part for us because we want people to be excited with us and to enjoy the game but we also struggle with the "hey look at us!" part of it all.

Any tips would be much appreciated!

I saw a post recommending that developers send their games to very small YouTubers because they're more likely to cover them.

The advice itself makes sense, but I really don't like the way the post talks about these creators.

If someone with 200 subscribers takes the time to play your game and make a video about it, they're not just some SEO tool you found because nobody else will cover your game. They're a person who chose to spend their free time playing something you made.

Especially as a small indie developer, I think it's worth remembering that every person who shows genuine interest in your game is someone you should appreciate.

Don't treat small creators as disposable marketing channels. Treat them like people.

A small audience doesn't make someone's support less meaningful.

I've been studying on a Games course for 4 years now (in my 4th year). I started out in my first year on a Design course learning 3D modelling, animation and production. I wanted something more technical, so I restarted onto a Programming course with Mechanics, Graphics and UI.

I've been to lots of networking events where I've met amazing and talented people in this Industry and befriended a number of them. Seeing them getting laid off or having their friends and colleagues losing their job feels extremely demoralising. I even spoke to my lecturer about job security, where he told me it never existed in Games in the first place.

I'm set to graduate this academic year, and given the environment, I feel that no matter how passionate, talented or well connected someone is, they are still at the mercy of their management's competence. At this point, I find there are better Industries and roles out there which offer higher wages and more security for the same level of stress.

Am I paranoid?

Is it masochism masquerading as passion?

Is all of it overblown?

Maybe the fine individuals of this community may know something that I just don't, and could help reassure me it's not just doom and gloom. It's just sucks knowing for every Peak or Expedition 33, there are countless games and people who poured their everything into a game that never succeeded (or saw the light of day).

A friend and I are working on our first video game, so we have very little experience in the industry. Our game takes place in an old-school computer terminal that requires players to use a command-line-like interface. It’s begging for a tutorial, but we’re really trying to resist the urge to put one in.

Are we being foolish?

Here’s a little backstory that’s necessary, I think:

When we first sat down to start brainstorming ideas for our game, we decided on a puzzle game. We both love puzzle games but routinely find that the ones that are commercially successful are often too easy for our liking. So our goal very quickly became to make a brutally challenging puzzle game.

During one of our first days actually working on this project, we decided on ONE guiding principle that we wanted to prioritize over everything else: we wanted to make the player feel as clever as possible.

And so we agreed that any time we had a decision to make, we would always prioritize this one thing. If something might take away from how clever the player would feel but another option would add to it, we’d go with the other option regardless of what else that meant.

This principle has made making some decisions much easier than it would have been otherwise, which is great. But one thing we keep going back and forth on is a tutorial.

People who don’t know anything about a command line interface on a real computer will, understandably, be lost when they’re dropped into our game. They’ll struggle with it a bit and will have to learn how to use it.

During our play tests, we watched exactly that happen. People had no idea what to do or how to do it at first. They stumbled through at first, but they gradually came to understand what the different commands were and how they worked. And when they did, they felt accomplished and clever.

You might see our dilemma now.

We’ve made this game purposefully very challenging, not to alienate people but to create the kind of game we want to play and then appeal to the probably very small audience who also wants that. We have this idea that making games for a very specific audience is better for us because we just can’t compete with the games with mass commercial appeal (for now, at least). And so the audience we’re targeting would also be the type that would appreciate their hands not being held.

But we struggle with that because some of the people who playtested our demo (not public yet, so we have very little feedback so far) actually liked the game but specifically said we should probably include a tutorial, even though they did feel clever when they “figured out” the interface.

Right now, we’re leaning toward no tutorial. What do you guys think? Is this foolish?

EDIT: I should have been more specific. We really don't want to add a formal tutorial to the game, but we do offer some guidance. For example, when the game opens up to the terminal interface, there's a flashing cursor next to a ">" that suggests the player should type. And then if they type something that isn't a command, they get an error message that says, "Command not recognized. Try HELP for a list of commands." Then they get a help menu to explore if they want to, and they can type "HELP <specific command>" to get more info about how to use that specific command.

Even at this level, our play testers said a tutorial would be helpful, but we're torn since we feel we do have some guidance in there.

Hey guys, I wanted to ask what people generally consider to be AI slop.
I’m currently building a game completely solo, and I’ve been working on it for about 5 months now. I do everything myself all the pixel art, buildings, environments, characters, level design, narrative, etc. I’m also handling the sound and music alongside everything else.
The one area I’ve never been particularly good at is coding, and unfortunately I can’t afford to hire someone to help me with it. Because of that, I use AI to help me with the programming side of development. I still work on the game myself, but AI helps me write and troubleshoot the code.
I’m wondering would people consider a game like this AI slop simply because AI was used for the coding?
I’m genuinely curious because I’ve put a huge amount of time and effort into this project. Since I started, I’ve been learning pixel art, music, level design, narrative design, game development, and pretty much everything else required to make the game myself.
I’m not trying to hide the fact that I use AI for coding. I’m just wondering where people draw the line between using AI as a tool and making an Ai generated game
and how would you know if a game used AI generated codes and nothing else by AI?
Would love to hear what you guys think.

Thanks for the answers.

"What's the point of sending my game to youtubers nobody watches?", you ask. The point is that initially nobody knows about your game either - especially Google. So when you start promoting your game and someone googles it, very likely it won't even show up, because google's crawlers didn't see the title enough times to consider it a real thing. And you NEED the first result to be your Steam page. No, people won't type "<game title> steam" to narrow the results, people are fucking lazy. They'll think "probably some amateur shit" and close the tab. You just lost 98% of potential wishlists right there. And that's were meek, tiny, sub-1000 subs youtubers comes to save the day - they're absolutely stoked to receive a key. For any game - yes, even your shitty survivor clone. Nobody talks to them. Nobody cares they exist. They often post 1 boring gameplay video a day, get 30 views, 1 bot comment and that's it, that's their life. And then you send them a key, a closed demo or beta access, and holy shit, Christmas came early. Some get so excited they will post about your game every day for the next month. You'll suddenly get hundreds of independent pieces of content about a game that previously had no internet footprint. So the next time someone searches your title, a nice, plump, juicy page full of results will pop up, very clearly about your game and your game only and not some restaurant in Oregon that just so happens to also be named "Dragon Breeder Simulator".

I have ADHD myself and have been trying to make a game as a solo dev for around 3–5 months, but my progress has been really slow. I get bored and distracted easily, especially when I get stuck. I’ll start doing anything that gives me more dopamine, modeling, animation, VFXor even something completely unrelated to the game.

Sometimes I won’t feel like doing anything for several days. Then suddenly I’ll get the motivation back and work on the game with full passion only to get stuck again. I’ll sit there scratching my head, look at the time think I’ll continue tomorrow and then end up doing nothing the next day.

I used to work at a game studio and we successfully published a game, but working alone feels completely different. There’s nobody pushing things forward when I lose interest or get stuck.

I’ve tried writing tasks down on paper or in Obsidian, but when I’m stuck on a game mechanic, I end up avoiding it by polishing a feature I already have because that’s something I’m comfortable with.

So I really want to hear from other people with ADHD who managed to actually finish and publish their own game.

How do you do it? Thanks!

I'm tired.

I created a game and poured countless hours, energy, and honestly a good chunk of my health into it over the last two years. I've been working on the story behind it for decades, and on the actual game concept for about five years.

And now I look around and see people publishing AI slop in a matter of hours, flooding the stores with an endless stream of shitty games that nobody actually wants to play.

I'm not only complaining for myself either.

I keep thinking about all the solo developers and small teams who spent years, sometimes decades, building something they genuinely cared about. People learning programming, art, music, game design, writing, balancing, marketing, community management, and everything else that comes with trying to make a game.

Then they release it and immediately get buried under hundreds or thousands of projects that took a fraction of the effort to produce.

No amount of passion, polish, or work can compete with sheer volume when the stores are constantly being flooded.

And that's the part that scares me.

I'm not against AI existing. I've used AI as a tool myself. There's a massive difference between using it to help with development and asking it to generate an entire game as quickly as possible so you can throw it onto the Play Store and move on to the next one.

It feels like we're reaching a point where actually caring about what you're making is becoming a disadvantage.

You spend two years building one game while someone else generates twenty. Even if nineteen of theirs are garbage, they still get twenty chances at being discovered while your project gets one.

Maybe I'm just exhausted and frustrated after working on this for so long, but seeing what the mobile game market is turning into is depressing.

There are still incredible indie developers making genuinely interesting games. I just wonder how many of those games we're never going to see because they're buried underneath an ocean of disposable content before anyone even gets the chance to find them.

Riot says there are plenty of rational reasons not to build a new MMO, including the cost, long development cycle, and how difficult the genre is to break into.

The studio is moving ahead anyway because it believes the creative opportunity is worth the risk, even if the project is not the safest business decision.

Hi there! Well I saw that I had low wishlists (around 50) and my game was on a good early stage to already drop a little demo on itchio before dropping a bigger one in Steam. Now the problem is.... Absolutely no one downloaded it! Should I market the demo too, and if so how? Or did I make a mistake by dropping it too soon?

My game is called FROM THE DUGOUT

I have always worked hard on my own business and some side projects.

We always agreed to understand if the other partner needs some space or extra time to "grind". She always owned a business aswell. She sold it 3 months ago and didn't really find anything else so she has too much free time.

Most of my days look like this: I work my regular job, I do some side project and either go home or we do some little date.

It's either dinner, some sport for an hour or just watching some series. We live together so we see each other every day. Here's the thing.

I started GameDev 2 months ago out of curiosity and lust for videogames. I felt in love with it and after few weeks I instantly knew this is my life calling and dream to pursue being GameDev fulltime. The dates didn't stop, the nights didn't end, the series watching continued. Just sometimes instead of coming home at 6pm I came at 8pm. But never if we had date planned.

We even been to the capital for 3 days last week!

Since start of my GameDev journey she is been telling me things like:
"You are not going to make it."
"You are just gaming and this is an excuse for gaming" (she hates gaming)
"This doesnt have any future, you are failure."

And today, she hit me with this line:
"You have to decide, it's me or GameDev."

She know's I have abandonment anxiety and that all of my friends are also her friends. Also her family is the only family I have been in contact with. She has been abusive (both physically and mentally) most of the relationship. But she always acts nice and say sorry right after. And I always forgave her. She always had narcististic traits (we even did test online and it confirmed the suspection) and she always been choleric person. Her mood constantly changes (from beating me to hugging and lovebombing).

But yet, I just know GameDev is my calling. It's my destiny. So I told her. I love you, but if you are going to make me choose over my dream and you, it's gonna always be me.

How would you act in this scenario? Am I overreacting? Should I just quit and forget about my dreams and hopes? Keep entertaining her? Keep forgiving? Keep getting gaslighted that "it's me who is the bad person in the relationship"?

Hi!
I would love to create a game to propose to my bf.
We have been together for 8-9 years and he introduced me to gaming. (I was a 90s girl so I played ps1-2 and Nintendo but before meeting him I hadn’t played for more than 10 years!)
From TLOU to God of war.
From hollow knight to Elden ring.
I would love to make a very easy nostalgic type game similar to the Pokémon yellow-red style but with him/us and different gaming scenarios (I thought about it playing a very recent game that I won’t name because of spoiler)
I don’t want to use Artificial Intelligence to learn or to write it for me.
I’m guessing I’m having 6-12 months time to do it as a hobby
I would love if someone could teach me or recommend where to learn.
TLDR: I want to create a game to propose and I need help with how to start

What would video games look like 10 years from now?

With the current AI tools that remove a lot of friction and augment productivity, it's not far fetched to say that a AAA game could be made by a small dedicated 5-10 devs or, a AA game made by 1-2 devs.

I don't think gamers will settle for millions of slops and one prompt games. flash games filled that spot years ago.

Unlike software, video games don't have a ceiling in terms of imagination and directions so the possibilities of what we can make are endless, only limited by the technology we have and that ceiling is becoming higher and higher.

I see this more akin to the jump from 2D to 3D I think we'll have more Physics, more vivid worlds, branching stories, real ecosystems, intelligent NPC's, less bugs...

So I want to ask other experienced devs here whether you have a clear vision of where video games are heading? or whether you had an idea that was impossible to develop that is now becoming feasible?

I am developing a game and want to ensure player retention; what are your thoughts on this?

Is it all a scam to sell them on the gray market? Like is it just one guy with 200+ email addresses that asks for a free media key?

What are the other nefarious results of keys falling into the wrong hands? The whole thing is pretty nuts and I wasn't expecting my dev inbox to get filled like this

I'm making a 2D platformer (yes, I know it's an oversaturated genre) with a focus on bright colors, charm, secrets, and light RPG elements. I want to create a bright and cheerful experience filled with soul, in a genre filled with plenty of dark and depressing games, with muted colors. I truly believe I have a target audience out there, but I'm struggling to reach it. I post videos to Reddit and devlogs to YouTube, but they don't gain much attention at all. Does anyone have any advice to reach my target audience?

Mods : you can remove this if this breaks your rules or if its a repost.

Now that AI has significantly improved in this industry the past few weeks, I've been wondering what it means to use AI assistance vs vibecoding.

Before, it was genuinely due to AI not being competent enough to be vibecoded. I would treat AI as a google plus, allow it to handle small scoped functions i was too lazy to make but knew how to. a lot of data handling and data shaping too.

However, it seems AI has caught up to our industry. I don't know what the line is now between vibecoding and using AI as a tool.

ex. I just created a prompt for a system I want to design. I elaborate what the system should be designed as, the requirements, etc. All in a single prompt. I read the changes. This feels exactly like vibecoding. I no longer need to manually change a single line of code. The point of AI assistance is to have a fast workflow whilst not losing the plot, but i feel like vibecoding has reached this now?

I just want to get a feel for what the industry considers vibecoding, because it's genuinely destroying my identity as a programmer. but it is just so fast. each system is very disconnected, and i know the points where they intersect, so if one was built too rashly, i know to fix it. It's also good at catching its own bugs very well.I also think a huge reason is that half the game has been handcrafted, so i am still somewhat familiar with the codebase.

I just can't justify going back for my own ego, because I want this game to be commercial and on time. But I also dont want to create a product that is "vibecoded" due to said ego. Where is the line? How is everyone using AI for game development right now?

TLDR : existential crisis from vibecoding, i need a sanity check on what healthy AI tool use is in game development, for people who are making a commercial game with a deadline (sorry hobby chads).

Edit: thanks everyone, i cant respond to everyone but im reading each comment. i appreciate the insight, I'll be adopting some of the things you guys wrote.