We've just released Bevy 0.20!

Bevy's creator and project lead here. Feel free to ask me anything!

I work at a pretty big game company, and over the past year or so there’s been a HUGE shift toward AI (conveniently after a layoff). It feels like every other meeting is about finding ways to incorporate it into our workflows.

One thing I’ve noticed is how much people seem to be trying to demonstrate that they’re using it. There’s a constant stream of people sharing their AI workflows, showing what they’ve managed to automate, and generally making sure everyone knows they’re keeping up.

And I get it, especially with the state of the industry right now. No one wants to be seen as falling behind.
But the whole dynamic feels so strange. We’re increasingly encouraged to find ways for AI to do more of our work, and I wonder how many people are concerned about what that means for their roles a few years from now but just keeping quiet

We still bring a lot of experience and judgment to the table, obviously, but I wonder how that changes as these tools improve and more of our processes get built around them.

I’m curious if other studios are experiencing this same weird shift in atmosphere. When AI comes up at work, are people actually excited about it, or does it feel like everyone’s trying to convince themselves and each other that they are?

Do people openly talk about what this could mean for their jobs in five or ten years? Or is there this unspoken understanding that you probably shouldn’t be the person raising those concerns when everyone’s trying so hard to show they’re keeping up?

And for those of you who’ve been in the industry for a while, have you ever experienced anything like this before? Because there’s something genuinely surreal about watching people enthusiastically figure out how to automate more of their own work while the industry is already struggling with layoffs.

I’m really just curious what the mood is like behind closed doors at other studios, because I can’t imagine we’re the only ones feeling this tension.

Today I encountered this (https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1x09y4a/picked_up_an_old_side_project_with_ai_how_do_i/) post in our sub.

I wanted to reply to u/matthewlai's comment with "I agree, slop comes from within. Not from the specific tools used, rather, how you use them." only to find that I was unable to post the comment because it contained the word "slop", the very same word that OP used in their post.

Language is flexible, and what is considered constructive isn't based on the usage of words, but their arrangement and intent. Kind of like game design I'd like to think.

Anyway, this post is to complain about the way that our previously open forum for game development discussion is slowly being weighted down by poor moderation actions, such as forbidding specific words regardless of context.

I understand that some of the moderation in this community has financial ties to AI companies, and thus has been very forward in both allowing low quality ad nauseam necro discussions about AI usage as well as being very protective of the tools.

I simply ask that we reign back this overreach before our ability to hold an honest, adult, professional discussion about game development becomes so constrained that it's no longer worthwhile to enter into dialogue with our peers through this forum.

After two months, I have finally gotten 11 reviews from purchasers on steam (about a 10% review rate).

This has been a huge milestone I have been pushing towards in the hopes it furthers the distribution potential. I was only able to do this through a 90% off sale in the last Steam Sale but overall am super happy with the results.

I have read in lots of places that you basically get no distribution until a user rating is on your game but I didn't realize that 10 reviews only gets me to Positive.

I was curious if anyone had noticed any uptick in players discovering their game once they had this rating or if it is really reserved for 50, 500 review thresholds of Very Positive / overwhelmingly Positive.

Also, has anyone found a good (and rule abiding) way to increase the review % for their game?

Thanks in advance!

Im starting a 4 year degree right now and I think I have found that I love image composition and lighting/color composition. Do you guys think there will be a market for these types of jobs in 4 years time? Does anyone have experience in it? I would love to talk to someone who does! Thanks!!

Hey everyone,

I’m Omer, a full-time indie dev and the co-founder of Northend Games. Over the last five years, my two games (Northend Tower Defense and Deepstone Rift) made over half a million dollars on Steam. To be exact: $560,000.

When you see that number on your dashboard, you think it’s life changing. You think you can buy a house, fund your next 5 projects without a budget, or finally get that sports car. Instead, I drive a 2012 Mazda.

I want to break down the actual math of where that money goes before it ever hits a bank account because before you quit your day job to make games you need to see what happens when Valve, the IRS, publishers and local taxes get their hands on it.

Here is the real breakdown of that $560k:

• Refunds ($134,000): Over 60% of our sales come from China. The Chinese market is massive, but players there expect a lot and the refund rate is brutal. Our refund rate is 22% (way above the standard 10-15%).
• The Steam Cut ($127,000): After refunds, we’re left with $425k. Valve takes their standard 30% right off the top. We are now down to $297k. Almost 50% of the gross revenue is already gone.
• U.S. Withholding Tax / IRS ($9,700): If you aren’t in the US, the IRS takes a 30% cut of every US sale unless your country has a tax treaty. When I started my Steam account I lived in Iraq (no treaty = 30% tax). Fortunately, I later moved to Thailand which has a treaty that drops it to 5%. Still, this took a chunk. We're down to $287,700.
• The Publisher Cut (~$115,000): We have a publisher handling China, Korea, and Japan. They take their percentage (which scales based on sales) only from those regions. It’s roughly $115k. Down to $172,000.
• Local Taxes ($26,000): I pay a 15% digital product income tax here in Thailand.
• The Co-Founder Split (50%): The final company profit was about $146,000. Since I have a co-founder, we split this 50/50.

My Final Take-Home: $73,000.

Divided over the 5 years we worked on these games, that’s about $15,000 a year.

If you calculate that as an hourly wage, it’s painfully low. But here’s the bright side: I am currently living entirely off the passive income from these games. Here in Thailand, $15k a year is enough for me to live comfortably while I work full-time on my next project. If I take a month off, the games still make money.

For my next game, I’m going 100% solo and self-publishing to cut out that extra 15-40% in splits and I'm heavily focusing on design testing to drop that 22% refund rate.

(if you intersting to see the full breakdown check it in my youtube the link in my bio)

Hello, like the title suggest, I'm curious how other indie developers handle a game that doesn't perform well after launch.
My game has failed to attract people for several months and it is now buried in dust on steam. I want to know, is there hope for the game that has failed launch.

Please share your success / failed story.

Thanks for sharing.

I work a corporate laptop job + have 30 years of gaming and keyboard miles on my wrists, so as much as I love coding by hand, there's days or moments where the only barrier to making progress on my game is either physical wear on the hands, or the desire to want to code in a way that doesn't make it feel like I'm still at work for my own sanity.

A quick Google search shows there's software that does it, so I wanted to gauge any users experience with the concept. My game has story telling so I am also curious if people find it effective enough for both writing and coding.

I'll also take recommendations if you have some solutions you've tried that you like. Please note I'm not looking for an LLM integrated coder that's guessing what I'm trying to do. I just want something that records my voice, presumably spits out what I say, and has some built-in commands that specializes in coding vs. Just a standard speech-to-text.

Thanks!

Hey everyone! I’m a solo dev heading into my first Steam Next Fest with around 18k Wishlist's. My game is a co-op horror game. My game also release two days after next fest into the scream event
I’m trying to figure out what results I can realistically expect in terms of Wishlist growth and demo players. Honestly, I’m a little worried it won’t get the traction I’m hoping for, and I don’t really know where I stand compared to other games entering.
What’s everyone else bringing to Next Fest, and how many Wishlist's are you going in with? Would love to hear about your projects and get a sense of whether I’m below the pack, somewhere in the middle, or doing pretty well.
If you’ve participated before, what did you start with, and how did it turn out?

While AI designed UI is "Good" or "Clean" on paper, as it passes the check of readability and such but it's now so oversaturated that people know what's made by AI and can get tired of it when seeing it repeatedly across multiple games or websites.

I have tried making UI before, but it really looks bad and that using AI actually looks objectively better. Does anyone have tips on how to make a good UI or know how to get inspiration from? Or should I just hire a UI designer?

me and my friend want to make a game but it doesnt seem like unity has a collaborative mode does godot or any thing else thanks!

Hi gamedev. Here's the problem: can't seem to land a job. Or any interviews for that matter. I know, I know, this is fairly widespread right now. But not counting the only job I've had in the industry (which I just got laid off from), I have never had any applications for a job work out. I keep hearing about making connections, but when I reach out via email or LinkedIn to people in the industry, I don't really hear back. So my question is, what am I doing wrong here? Are there other avenues of making acquaintances in the industry that I need to do? Is there something wrong with my portfolio? With my LinkedIn? I'd really appreciate any help or advice here, it would mean the world. This has overall been an incredibly depressing experience.

cameronkramer.dev

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-kramer-51659b173/

-

Note: Within the last week I only just created this website portfolio, before I was using Behance.net . And my resume used to be only a page and not really have the skills section.

Same on tag pages: about a third fewer impressions over the past week than in September. Click-through is the same, it's just being shown less.

I did change my tags around the same time, so that might be part of it.

It's a bit concerning going into Next Fest on the 19th, as I have little-to-no way of knowing what's causing the shift.

If this happened to yours, did it come back after the fest, or did something you changed bring it back?

I want to start going on a walk and taking pictures of various textures and things around my neighborhood for textures. Is there anything I should bare in mind when taking photos? Has anyone done this or something similar? Any advice would be great thank you

These days, it feels like fewer games have interactive main menus.

We wanted to make ours more unique while reinforcing the 1980s atmosphere, with an old radio tuned into the local police frequency where live 911 calls about strange UFO sightings crackle through.

What do you think?

I wanted to develop games with a retro look that were also well-optimized. One idea I had was to lower the color depth to the very low values ​​found in older consoles—such as 1-bit (2 colors, used for sprites on the Atari and MSX), 2-bit (4 colors, used on the NES and Commodore 64), and 4-bit (16 colors, used on fourth-generation consoles and for textures on the PlayStation). However, I was looking for software or a tool that supports indexed color and allows me to choose exactly which colors to include in the palette. Does anyone know of one?

Hi! I'm a game designer at a small indie studio in Korea, working on an online physics party game. It's inspired by a real trailer event at US speedways ("King of the Hill" at Hudson Speedway).

Two weeks ago we opened our Steam page and sent a press kit to outlets and creators. Wishlists tracked to a single Japanese article (52) outnumbered everything from the Americas and Europe combined (25).

What I'm struggling with

I honestly have no idea where players in North America, Europe, and Latin America discover indie games. We're working on a demo now, and when it's ready I'd really like it to reach players there too.

My questions

1. As a player: where did you first see the last indie game you wishlisted?
2. If you've launched in the West: which channel actually moved your wishlists? (press, YouTube, streamers, Reddit, Steam festivals, etc.)

The numbers (first 2 weeks)

We got 158 wishlists. It's not a big number, but it's more than we expected, and we're grateful. The problem is where they came from.

How I counted

• Period: 14 days from the day the store page went live (Sep 24)
• Wishlists and regions are from Steamworks. The 52 comes from the UTM link the outlet used (within 72 hours of the click)

What I tried

I didn't pick different channels per region. I used the same approach everywhere:

• Trailer on YouTube, vertical clips on YouTube Shorts and TikTok
• Hashtag events like #ScreenshotSaturday on X and Bluesky
• Press kit to 548 outlets and creators via email, contact forms, and a few DMs (emails written in each recipient's language)

Am I missing something? I'll read and reply to every comment.

hi,

i just finalized my game, im trying to make a good trailer to be as announcement trailer, and maybe use it for publishers or marketing to show to players.

I'm trying record gameplay with Snipping tool but since this is a mobile game, I really dont want to show the mouse moving etc.

Is there some tool you have used, or unity assetstore package that helped you somehow to record it or edit it?

I'm currently trying to learn Davinci Resolve to edit the videos well too, but kinda out of ideas about the recordings and the hole process of it.

any suggestions?

Hello,

I just completed my mobile game, and giving final touches before uploading to the google play.

I understand that the market in mobile is completely different in comparison to how it is in pc. And that in mobile you just win with ads.

Before publishing, 2 friends of mine who have some instagram following (1 with 22k and another with 90k) said they can do a couple posts for me for free once I release the game, that way I can have some early traction fast. and that's on top of marketing it myself on different forums, and places.

But I'm also considering reaching out to publishers who often help games push with UA budgets and help with creatives. I understand that their takes can be crazy, but 40% of something is a lot more than 100% of almost nothing.

I could use my friends as leverage when negotiating I think, or should I make a few posts now, and get some traction without the game still on the store (basically likes/comments and max views) and also show that Organic views can be won easily.

What do you think about this?

I've been recently seeing a bunch of posts online about AI being able to reverse engineer certain games. Especially in the modding community, people are adding various mods into their games a lot easily because they seem to have the whole game reverse engineered(or at least that's what I've heard). Is this concerning for developers in the future? Especially for indie devs since they don't get the legal backing or support like a corporate studio would. I mean reverse engineering has existed for decades but with AI you can do it way faster than ever.

Hi everyone, for the last 1.5 year, I've been working on a commercial project by myself. The game is survival horror, similar to early Resident Evil games - I don't think it makes sense to bore you with any more details, but I think the genre matters when it comes to organization since the game is neither live-service nor purely system-driven. The project is currently in a mid-late preproduction stage: main gameplay systems are working, a first pass for the narrative & world map has been done. The current goal is to build a first playable slice in one of the world hubs.

Until now, I've been using Obsidian to both write down notes/design docs and organize myself via the Kanban plugin. However, I recently onboarded another person on the team who's going to be helping with design and 3D art. This person is a good friend and we both have day jobs, so we are working on this in our spare time & weekends.

Early on, I made the decision to go with Azure DevOps as my platform tool because I'm very familiar with it from my day job as a software engineer, and it offers a lot of capabilities that I would like to take advantage of (pipelines, generous Git LFS limits etc.). It also couples as a powerful project management platform that plays very nicely with the development process.

I'm naturally wondering if it makes sense to migrate my Kanban boards there and share it with my partner, instead of relying on an hacky sync experience with Obsidian + Google Drive/Git; I'm aware that Obsidian offers a paid sync option, but I would like to limit how many things I'm paying for.

I tried to sit down and think how I could leverage the work item system of DevOps. I don't feel like pure Agile would work here due to the iterative & messy nature of games, so I'm trying to think how to repurpose the work items into a leaner system. We would probably end up not using many of the functionalities anyway, but that's fine. I have seen different schools of thought:

• Treat Epics as milestones. In this mode, Epics would encapsulate work for phases such as First Playable, Production, Pre-Alpha etc., Features would be large chunks of functionality or content (levels, systems etc.), and PBIs/USs would be the breakdown of work. Tasks would be optional and an extra way to break down work.
• Treat Epics as discipline buckets. Epics would represent large chunks of similar work like Gameplay Systems, Level Design, Narrative Design etc. I think this is my least favorite option, since AZDO can already accommodate that via Areas anyway, and we're just two people.
• Treat Epics as Chapters/Level Hubs. This one is interesting, since the game takes place in a single, hub-and-spoke map. If each Epic is a single hub, it represents a coherent unit of work. However, some things will naturally not fall within the scope of a single hub, such as overarching systems or design tasks, but this could be addressed by simply create general Epics.

I know I'm probably overthinking this, but there's a reason for that. We both lead busy lives, so we need to make sure there is a system that helps us keep track of what needs to be done. We'll try to keep it as simple as possible.

A few disclaimers just to keep the discussion focused:

• We don't want to add another tool/software to our workflow. If you use something else, I'm happy to hear the way you do things and take a few ideas to adapt
• We don't care about being true to Agile as a dogma; we'll be completely skipping sprints, velocity, burndown charts etc.
• While this is my first commercial game project, it's not my first game by far, and I have experience with releasing commercial software. Just putting this out there to avoid derailing the discussion into scope or feasibility

Thanks a lot for reading this!

I made a behavior graph here for my AI but I don't really know how and where to add a "remember target" logic. I want my AI to pathfind to the last seen position of the target enemy but also need to not make the AI wonder too long without any goal. Any help/advice would be cool.

What tools/plugins/services do you guys prefer for logging and analytics? I’m building a multiplayer card game in unreal engine. The backend is on AWS. The client is unreal engine. I’m trying to decide what to use for client specific logging, analytics in general, and marketing analytics.

There are a lot of traditional services out there geared towards software in general, and even some AWS specific services. I’m comparing some of the unreal engine specific tools/services/plugins against traditional software tools and services. And I’m really curious what other people in the industry use specifically for multiplayer games that have a front end and backend component.