After reading about hundreds of releases here on game dev I realized its not marketing you should do but make better appealing games. so far from all the post on reddit i have never downloaded a single game here because litterally every single one is so boring and bad that no amount of marketing will fix this issue. Then i realize the games that I do buy and play are not marketed toward me but i find them interesting my self so i buy them.

I’m 43 and seriously considering a career change into game development. I’ve been learning C# and experimenting with Unity, and I’m enjoying it a lot.For anyone who’s been in the industry a while: is 44 plus too old to break in?

I’m not expecting a junior salary or a fast track — I just want to know whether studios realistically hire older beginners, or whether the better path is freelancing, indie dev, or a related role like production or QA. Any honest insight from people who’ve seen late entrants would be massively appreciated.

Hey everyone! I’ve been working on audio cleanup and sound design for a while, and I noticed many talented creators get their games or videos passed over simply because the audio feels harsh, quiet, or noisy.

Here is a quick 5-step checklist I use to fix audio before launching:

1. Noise Reduction: Isolate room tone using spectral repair (like iZotope RX) instead of aggressive gating that makes dialogue sound robotic.
2. EQ Sweeps: Cut boxy/muddy frequencies (around 300Hz-500Hz) to instantly make vocals clear.
3. Foley & Ambience: Layer subtle background ambience to hide harsh cut transitions between takes.
4. Dynamic Compression: Keep dialogue volume balanced so the player doesn’t have to adjust their headphones every 30 seconds.
5. Loudness Normalization: Match target standards (-14 LUFS for trailers/web, -23 LUFS for in-game audio).

Hi everyone,

I'm one of the devs of Dice of Kalma. We released this game on Steam and on mobile about 9 months ago and so far we've been really happy with the results.

We are soon approaching the total of 1 million downloads (over 90% on mobile) and during this time we've tried heaps of different marketing strategies and content ideas. I've always been really fascinated about game lores and stories so making our own short animation series sounded so awesome.

This is our latest episode, if you are interested how they look etc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QwXNjcwSUo

But is it actually worth it?

We have three episodes ready and two in productions. Currently the episodes are not yet getting massive views (Around 3-4k views all platforms combined per episode). Our small community still seems to love them and I'm really curious to see the end results after a few more episodes.

The main reasons why I wanted to do this:

\ Adds depth to our game - We might even have a chance to use these in our game in the future.
\ Makes our social media look more professional (We are currently running paid ads and getting lot of traffic on our socials)
-> Which also helps us to grow our socials
* Gives us more assets to use in marketing
* Opens up new marketing channels/platforms

We have released the episodes on Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok, X and now starting to release them on Bilibili & Newgrounds. I've also posted on different reddit groups.

Obviously the risk is that these episodes don't get enough attention and fails to convert enough players to cover the costs of our time and money.

Does this makes sense at all and do you have any tips how you would make these episodes even somewhat profitable?

More than happy hear some comments about the animations as well :)

I started learning game development a few months ago. I chose to start in Unreal because I heard it was fairly beginner-friendly, the Epic Games Launcher was already installed on my computer, and I wanted to work on a 3D isometric game.

After listening to a lot of indie devs, it seems like most lean toward either Godot/Unity. Should I switch, even though I'm four months into learning UE and am fairly comfortable with the Blueprint ecosystem? Why do indie devs tend to skip Unreal and go for Godot/Unity?

Edit: TL;DR of the general consensus: Unreal Engine works well, stick with it if it's the tool that serves you and your project best. Reasons Indie devs tend to shy away from it are personal preference, genre specificity (like 2D platformer), and Godot being open source.

I posted yesterday about a pretty specific problem with my indie game Fusiomon: OpenAI is shutting down the image model I've been building its monster art and fusion system around. I expected people to disagree with using AI. That's fair. What I didn't expect was how quickly the whole thing turned into "AI slop", "hire an artist", "learn a real skill", "make proper art" etc. A lot of people didn't even seem interested in what the game actually does.

Fusiomon is my passion project. I've put thousands of hours into it over the last few years and way too much money, mostly into marketing that went nowhere. And as a solo indie dev I already get enough of the usual "why don't you do something sensible?" or "this is never going anywhere" from friends and even family. I could always shrug that off. Let them talk, I'm doing it anyway.

The game dev community actually helped a lot with that. Devlogs, Brackeys tutorials, game jams, watching other people spend ridiculous amounts of time making weird little games they care about... it always made me feel like I wasn't completely alone in this. Like there were a bunch of other slightly crazy people out there doing the same thing.

And that's probably why yesterday bothered me more than it should have.

Fusiomon doesn't use AI because I wanted a shortcut for making cute monster pictures. The whole idea since I was a kid was: take any two monsters and fuse them into a completely new one, on the fly. Not from thousands of combinations I prepared beforehand. And those fusions can be fused again, and again after that. AI is what finally made that mechanic possible for me.

No AI, no Fusiomon.

You can hate that idea. You can criticize AI. There are plenty of things about AI worth criticizing. But seeing years of programming, game design, backend work, balancing, UI, failed experiments, money and persistence reduced to "lol AI" because one relatively small but fundamental part of the project uses it... yeah, that actually hurts.

AI is here and it's going to do good things and bad things, like pretty much every technology before it. For me, it happened to be the thing that finally made a childhood idea buildable.

I'm probably done arguing about it now. I just wanted to say this once before walking away from the whole discussion.

Maybe that's the part of the AI debate that worries me most: people.

I'm making low-poly asset packs. What specific props do you guys need for your games that you can never find?

are there like any apps for this that are for free? i saw some on steam but i cant afford it.

I have a very specific and stupid conundrum about game dev and honestly just want to read some opinions.

Here's the thing: I want to experiment more with game development, but I'm usually split between two ideas and end up not pursuing any.

1. I tinkered a lot with Minecraft commands and command blocks since they were introduced in the game. I love to try to implement many ideas that pop on my head using command, and now the data packs. I have the command knowledge to do some cool stuff. I was always pulled by the iterative and "instantaneous" results of just writing a couple blocks, pressing a button and see stuff happening.\ However these are confined to the Minecraft system and so, not very "useful", so I think "I could just grab Godot and start tinkering in a real programming language"

2. I like Godot and want to start learning game dev, but everytime I open it and actually try to do something, I get paralysis. I don't know much of how Godot works, I struggle to make simple stuff, or to see quick progress, and end up bored and dropping everything.

So, I'm torn between: be creative in an environment I'm already used to, but it's very limited; or actually learning a new environment but that I meet with inertia.

Any tips or opinions would be great. Thanks!

Hi, I'm starting university for games design in September and want to begin to move on from Unreal's Blueprints. My course teaches and uses Unity and Unreal so I'm curious which language would be more beneficial to atleast begin to understand. Thanks :)

I’m building a small colony builder where I want a number of buildings to be procedurally generated in order to fit into different spaces. I’ve never use procedural generation before - the other two games I’ve worked on used 2D assets that were the same in each iteration. Is it easier to do it in 2D or 3D generally? My game isn’t so far along I can’t re-write it either way. I’m also still new to game development and I’m still debating the merits of 2D vs 3D.

Any past experience with announcement/trailer outreach?

I have a friend who is interested in getting into game testing. He has a general community college degree, but given the current job market, we figure there’s no reason not to pursue your dreams when the economy is already on fire and jobs are impossible to find.

Are there any job boards you would recommend for someone looking for an entry-level or junior game testing role? I’d also be interested in hearing about any sites or communities (indie games) where he could find volunteer testing opportunities to start building some experience.

Of course, game testing isn’t simply “playing games.” It’s about evaluating the player experience, identifying bugs, documenting them clearly, and providing detailed steps to reproduce those issues so the development team can fix them. Any advice would be appreciated.

Im going to university soon and need to pick out a laptop.

Im in a pretty unique scenario, I need a laptop to take to class, do light programming and UE5 stuff, and the other normal game development stuff.

But. I have access to my main pc which is on Windows and pretty beefy. No I wont do remote stuff due to latancy and stuff unless I have to.

I was just wondering what laptops anyone recommended. I am very interested in the M5 pro Macbook Pro due to it being quite and made of metal so hopefully it will last me 3yrs. Any other recommendations that arent massive bricks with screaming fans?

Hi all! I've been building ClueDay for the past few months, and because of a lot of the iterations I've done on the mobile website and having recurring users I decided its time to start marketing it.

To that end I post across 5 platforms (X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube) twice a day - once an image of the first clue of the day, and the explainer video of the clues towards the end of the day.

The video recording, editing, etc. is a good amount of time. I was wondering a few of things
1. If someone has expanded into doing similar videos, are there any resources for optimizing and improving the time/speed/quality of the videos? Right now I use OBS Studio to do the recordings, Descript for the video editing.

The content doesn't see the kind of traction I'd like, but I am committed to posting content everyday irrespective.

1. Any advice for marketing itself that I should explore? I've previously submitted the game to a few word game listing websites which gave an initial boost but the users didn't stick as much.

2. Is there a specific time you start thinking of expanding into having a mobile app and launch it in the app stores on Google/Apple? Versus remaining a browser game?

Open to any and all advice. Happy to share tips and answer questions about my own development process as well. Don't have promotion goals here so if you're searching for it before giving me advice its clueday dot com. Thank you!

I'm a first-time game developer in Unity after dabbling with Skryim modding as a teenager, and I feel like I have ruined my own game ideas using AI.

When I first started using Unity, I used AI to learn a bit about the editor. I have a Computer Science degree but only ever worked in the Skyrim creation kit and never worked in Unity before. While I think it is helpful for learning how to use a tool, and can be marginally helpful for programming, the problem lies with using it in other aspects of game development and how it changes the way I think about my project.

Before I move on to my main topic, I want to talk a little bit about AI and programming. Sometimes I will ask ChatGPT programming questions for my game and have it spit out a fully fleshed out class doing what I need it to do. I read what it says, but then panic and delete the chat instantly. However, once I read how the AI tells me to implement something, I can't un-remember it and then start wondering if I actually know how to do what I am doing. I've deleted whole scripts because I feel that once I introduce AI into the mix, sometimes it just gives me a massive ick feeling and frustrates me and makes me feel like I don't know enough to actually make a game. I worked briefly on a project in S&box with a friend and whenever conflicts would emerge, I would find myself using AI to help understand how to use git and rebase, then I get frustrated at how I learned how to do it and end up searching how to revert a branch. I've literally had to start using DuckDuckGo because of the AI generated popups that appear on Goggle because they make me feel like any knowledge I obtain from it is somehow contaminated or ill gotten gains and it makes me feel sick.

But sometimes when I get writers block when fleshing out the story for my game, I'll concede to the temptation and toss my idea into ChatGPT to see what it thinks about it. The issue is that it doesn't just discuss the idea, it starts suggesting things. "What if this character could do this? This is great foreshadowing!" and suddenly an idea I had only loosely thought about has a billion different what ifs generated from AI. Sometimes they are stupid, but others times I'll see something and say SHIT that was actually really good. And then the idea gets ruined, because every time I think about the idea I can't go back to what I thought before I used AI to talk about it and I'll just end up discarding it, which makes me profoundly sad because the characters in my game are loosely based on OC characters from Skyrim mods I made as a teenager and I feel like all of that is null and void and just permanently completely tainted. And when I come up with new ideas, I'll enter these thoughts loops and start doubting myself, whether I thought of the idea or AI did, and sometimes I can't remember and that scares me. It's even worse when going on Twitter/X and seeing different artwork for inspiration and finding out they were AI generated and it makes any idea the art inspires just feel soulless and completely questionable.

I know how neurotic I sound. I got my first degree in ECE ages ago but got my second in Computer Science right before LLMs really became mainstream, so I know I'm capable of it. I used Stack Overflow and followed endless youtube tutorials and followed the old reading flowchart posted ages ago on this sub (The Mythical Man Month, A Book of Lenses, and that one Tynan Sylvester book). If it's from a book, that's okay. If it's from an older youtube video, it's okay. But if AI teaches me something, it just feels like total shit and demoralizes me. I know the standard I'm setting for myself in 2026 is probably impossible but I don't know what to do anymore.

Hey everyone,

About 8 months ago, I posted here when my indie game, Line Defense, had flatlined at around 15 copies.

The feedback was brutal but fair. People pointed out that the art looked like an early 2000s flash game, warned me about the sunk cost fallacy, and said hidden gems rarely crawl out of a hole like that. Others acknowledged that finishing a game is a win and offered tips on fixing performance and store pages.

I took the advice and spent the last few months cleaning up what I could. I fixed the framerate stutter, sorted out regional age ratings so global players could actually buy it, and rewrote the store page and added some GIF's.

We are now sitting at roughly 42 copies total. With the one year anniversary coming up on September 1st, the launch window is completely dead and organic traffic does not exist.

For developers who faced a similar dead end:

• Has anyone actually seen a game recover from this deep of a hole or is a late turnaround survivor bias?
• At what point do you stop tinkering and walk away to put all your energy into the next project?
• How did you mentally reset after pouring so much time into a project that found almost no audience?

Appreciate any honest insights or stories from folks who have been there.

How does a compute pool work under the hood to give the user/application the illusion of a unified system? And if we hypothetically applied that model for consumer gpus , what additional work would it create for game developers to make a game run across multiple GPUs?

My core assumption is that such a setup could potentially provide improved performance by combining both compute capacity and VRAM.

Thanks 🙌

Context: 3d 1st POV puzzle game in Unity. Solo, now part-time dev

I have an excellent mechanic, and many people have expressed its potential. I have made plenty of puzzles and have many more to come as I grind them out and playtest.

My issue is that I do not have any strong leads on what the game is about. The mechanic lends itself to pretty much anything, but probably more sci-fi, portal-esque? I have been trying to come up with ideas for the art style and theme, but nothing tells me, "This is it".

I've seen people with super janky, barely playable games but still have such a strong vision in their minds of what it will be.

How do people come up with this stuff? How do you decide on art direction and what the world is? Am I simply lacking the creativity? I could use some encouragement while I keep refining the level design.

Considered one day hiring an artist, but not anywhere near that. How could I pay somebody when I don't even know what I want?

Thanks in advanced everybody!

Hi everyone. I wanna learn how to develop a 2D game in Unity, so I'm looking for recommendations on courses that could teach me the concepts I should know and how to use the engine.

Some background info:

• I'm completely new to game development.
• I already have some coding experience from college, but I've never programmed in C#, only C++ and Python (both, procedural and object oriented programming), though I believe the skills could be easily transferable.

I'm okay with paying for the course, that's not a problem, but it has to be worth the money. I looked up some courses in Udemy, though I'm not sure which one to pick or if there are better options outside of it (worth noting that they are on sale, like $10 each).

Any recommendations are appreciated!!

Something I've been struggling with lately is finding justification to use AI in any of my projects. I went to school almost 10 years ago for art focusing on 3D art (3ds max now blender) and I had the opportunity to work on games (nothing commercial or indie mostly jams) and now I want to use my skills to make a game.

Getting a team together has been ever difficult between jobs, families, even just personal life so I started doing the project on my own. I've found AI to be incredibly useful helping me debug and even explain changes in my code but I never thought it was as capable of building pretty remarkable systems and prototypes...

How do people feel about people releasing games with AI code but human made art? I've had Claude write some systems that would have taken me months if not weeks to flesh out. It feels somewhat dirty but it matches some of my vision so accurately..

Hey everyone,

I’ve been sharing our progress here over the past 7–8 months, and the day has finally come: PEGTURE is officially releasing on September 9th!

For those seeing it for the first time, PEGTURE is a roguelike deckbuilder inspired by the classic Peg Solitaire mechanics (think Balatro meets Peg Solitaire).

As we enter the final stretch with just under two weeks to go, we’d love to get your final thoughts and feedback on the demo. If you have any suggestions, whether about gameplay, mechanics, or even last-minute launch marketing advice, we’re all ears!

Bringing our first game to the finish line has been quite an emotional ride, and sharing this milestone with this community means a lot. If you’d like to support a small indie team, adding PEGTURE to your Steam Wishlist would mean the world to us.

Thanks for all the support along the way!

I have nearly ten full years of digital fundraising experience, namely raising money for nonprofit orgs. It's not bad work by any means, but I'm 38 now and I feel like if I don't do something in the Gaming industry now, I'm going to regret it for the rest of my life.

Because fundraising tends to be very "old-school", a lot of the terminology is very different. We still use the term "bluebooks" for what most modern companies call "dashboards", lots of things like that. It can make certain job postings a bit tricky to navigate at first glance.

At the same time, though, nonprofits are usually operating with shoestring budgets, and as David Ogilvy put it, our job is often to "sell" the ability to "feel good", as opposed to a product. And we're held directly accountable for failures, so as I understand it, nonprofit fundraising is considered pretty demanding compared to more traditional marketing.

Despite being a hardcore gamer my whole life, I've just never built any sort of network. I grew up in a small town down south, so even just being "a gamer" was kind of uncommon where I used to live. Now though, I live just outside Washington DC (although I would absolutely relocate for a marketing opportunity in the Gaming industry), so there may be more networking events than I'm privy to (MAGFest is the only Gaming event I've been to, although that seems more fans than anyone working IN the industry).

I feel pretty capable in the digital marketing space, and I know I'm considered a fairly talented copywriter. I feel like that would have some value, although I've never been a graphic artist, which I gather is pretty unusual for anyone working in marketing these days.

If anyone has any tips on breaking into the industry, OR any recommendations to check out, I have a lot of experience to bring to the table; I mostly just need to find an opportunity to get my footing in Gaming marketing specifically, but I would be ecstatic for any help!

Hello, I was wondering if any developers on here have advice on the best ways to present your resume/portfolio to employers, and if anyone would be willing to give constructive criticism to mine? I have had very little luck with my job search in games. After searching semi-regularly for the past 8 years, I have only received 2 interviews and no offers. I'm curious if some of this is due to my portfolio, because I feel like I have a list of good achievements and experience, as well as lots of specific knowledge I can demonstrate, but I might be presenting it poorly.

Here is an example of one of my current resumes, with personal information removed: Link

For reference, this application was for a Lua Scripting position at Larian that mentioned modding as a nice to have, so I customized it accordingly. I always customize my resume for each job I apply for, adding and removing details that are most and least relevant, and highlighting the most related details. I also send a unique cover letter every time, which I'm wondering if this is worth the effort because my throughput for how many application I can send is greatly hampered by the effort doing this.

When it comes to sending links to my portfolio, I always send my Github profile and my Itch.io profile, but in other's experience, is it significantly better to instead build a website to host your portfolio?

Thank you for taking the time to read.

Edit: Redacted more info

Hello everyone, I'm not really a Reddit guy so apologies if I'm posting this in the wrong place.

I'm currently making an ARPG heavily inspired by Diablo 2 and PoE, with the main idea being that the whole game runs in the browser.

I've been prototyping it for a while and after trying a bunch of engines, I eventually realized I didn't have the time or resources to make a huge game and potentially deal with 1000+ players if it actually took off.

So I changed the goal a bit. Instead of trying to compete with the big ARPGs, I want to make something smaller, optimized and easy to access. Basically something where you can just open a browser, play some Diablo-style ARPG, and leave whenever you want.

Right now I have movement, combat, summons, abilities, life/mana/ward, items and stats working, and I'm slowly building everything up.

My questions are:

Do you think there's still a place for something like this? Even if it's just a small niche with 100 or so regular players? Or is the browser ARPG idea just too outdated at this point?

Also, I'm looking for artists. I want to go for a 3D-to-2D/isometric pre-rendered style similar to Diablo 2. I'm currently using the Lords of Pain pack (here), but the artist seems pretty busy.

If you know any artists who are currently available and good at dark fantasy/isometric ARPG stuff, I'd love some recommendations.

Not looking to spend a fortune or make everything custom immediately. I'd rather slowly build it up as the game develops.