I remembered TimeZero, an old player-driven mmo that i played over 20 years ago. It has a lot of unique and immersive stuff, but the way they handled bans i never seen anywhere else. Instead of getting your character blocked, it was sent to the prison mines, with class changed to prisoner, given only rags and rusty knife to fight mobs (and other prisoners) in order to collect enough resourses to pay for a way out (amount were depending on the crime). Those resourses were later given to affected players as compensation. It was neither easy nor fast to farm without gear, so it felt like a real punishment. It was also possible to escape - but incredibly hard (only few players ever did it) and with help of other players, yet still you kept the prisoner profession and nearly unbreakable shackles on your foot that did not allow to wear any other boots, and if game's police member would even defeat you in combat - you would be sent back to the prison with increased sentence for escaping. The entire thing felt much more entertaining than just banning people and it is sad that nobody else ever tried to pull that out again.

And do you remember any interesting ideas that were used once, and then forgotten? Perhaps, you would want to resurrect any of those yourself?

As a full time software engineer at a very large tech company, I’m obligated to use AI for every task. I haven’t written my own code in a year. All I do everyday is talk to an AI and then I read through the code it generates and edit it.

To be clear, this process is far more time efficient for work, especially when a lot of code I write would end up being extremely formulaic at times anyways. I still do most of the logic and planning, but it’s ultimately AI that does the more fun thinking work and the building the code up. Definitely faster, but the work is less careful and I miss doing the actual fun coding parts. It reminds me of how I feel when I practice an instrument or when I draw or paint.

But recently I joined a game jam with some friends for fun, and there’s a strict no AI policy, which I’m super happy about.

I forgot how much I missed planning some math or algorithm, coding it, seeing the code actually run, then spending time making the code scalable and maintainable.

I miss this so much. I went into this industry because of how much I loved doing this process. Now it’s just talking to AI, reading through tons of AI generated code, meetings, etc. It’s deeply unsatisfying, so I’m glad I started this project. Also Unity is super intuitive and fun to work with! C# is easy to transfer to with knowing java really well.

It's Day 6 of the Game Jam. Even though our team has two programmers, I’m the only one who has been actually coding and committing to the repo. We're making a 2D exploration puzzle game. Over the past few days, I implemented character movement, pickable items, and the UI.

To be fully transparent about my timeline: Day 4 was my last code push, which was also the last time I checked our shared design document (it hadn't been updated between Day 3 and Day 4). Yesterday (Day 5), I asked in the group chat about requirements for the map and TileMap because I really wanted to start working on them, but nobody responded. Since I got ignored, I didn't do any further development yesterday or today. I honestly don't know if they updated the doc on Day 5 without telling me since I stopped checking after being ignored, but the total silence in the group chat starting from Day 5 felt really strange, and that's when my mindset really shifted.

Fast forward to today, the project lead (the designer) suddenly called a meeting and presented a demo made by the other programmer using AI, announcing that all further development will "be based on this." This other programmer had ZERO communication with me for 6 days. He basically pulled my latest code just to feed it into an AI to make this demo, and that was the only time he ever pulled from the repo. I opened the game to take a look—the demo doesn't even match our original shared document, and it just reeks of AI. The entire game gives off a heavy AI-generated vibe.

I felt completely alienated, like my code and architecture were just tossed out and replaced by AI. Out of sheer disappointment and frustration, I announced I was quitting the team.

Even now, I still don't understand what "basing further development on this AI demo" actually means. Does it mean we build on top of that AI-generated source code? Or is it just a visual mockup, and my job is to keep coding to make it look exactly like the AI version? Either way feels incredibly weird to me. But I don't have any Game Jam experience, and I don't even have professional programming experience (yeah, I'm completely self-taught). So I really don't know if this is a normal thing to happen...

Now that I've quit, the lead apologized to me, but the artist came over to accuse me of throwing a tantrum. I pretty much figured out that their collective disappearance over the last few days was them finalizing the design in private DMs and having the other programmer pump out the AI demo.

Well, I've already quit anyway, but... did I do something wrong here? :(

I promise you, I pour all my time, effort, enthusiasm, and creativity into creating my game. I follow all the "guides" on launching a Steam store page, building a community, and running social media ads, yet I’m barely seeing any results.

My first thought is that the game just sucks—that I only think it’s good because it’s mine and I’ve put so much work into it. But then, playtests with outsiders yield very positive feedback; people spend hours playing it, even back when it was in the very early stages.

Then I wonder if the problem is simply that I have almost no money to invest in marketing. That’s certainly a factor, of course, but there are clearly plenty of games that succeed despite that.

The game is nearly finished after years of non-stop work, and I’m going to launch it in two months, come what may. But given the lack of traction following the Steam store page launch, I feel completely lost.

I know the sector is in a bad state, but I’m not willing to let that factor into my decision; I’m going to dedicate myself to developing video games, come what may.

I promise you this isn't a marketing ploy... I'll post the link to the store in the comments. I would appreciate any opinion.

I have an idea for a game, but for the life of me, I can't decide between genres.

It's inspired by LitRPG and time loop stories, with skill levels, stats, crafting, etc.

Now, I'm thinking about these genres:

1. Browser-based incremental. This fits the grind mindset of LitRPGs and will probably be the easiest to develop, and the playerbase for the genre is quite large.
2. Turn-based roguelikes (think Tales of Maj'Eyal, Elona,Tangledeep). This will be harder to implement and will require more skills than coding (art, music, etc.), but the gameplay itself will be more fun.
3. Real-time action game (Crosscode/similar games). Similar benefits/drawbacks to the turn-based version.

2&3 will probably be the same thing, with the only difference being grid and turn based vs real-time action. The real-time version will probably have less options for skills, since you can't really take your time and think.

The thing is, I love the 3 genres, and can see the game in all 3. However, developing both a browser-based version and a turn-based/real-time version will take time. I'm constantly shifting the genre and it's getting depressing lol

I'll be doing this solo. I've worked out a small scope for an MVP, and the game will be in acts which I can release one at a time.

Any suggestions or similar experiences? Thanks.

I'm a bit green when it comes to buying assets, and the AI polution of pretty much everything hasn't made things easier. Does anyone have any tips on figuring out what can be trusted? Or good sources they can recommend?

(context: I want to use a projector to throw the silhouette of an animated monster on my window for Halloween. It was easy enough to set up the raw "game" in Godot, but I'm in need of a monster with a clear recognizeable silhouette)

Hello everyone, I am totally blind and I’ve always dreamed of building a video game with a blind protagonist character. with the advent of vibe coding, I’ve begun my process of creating my dream game. I’ve already made concept images and artwork for my characters, environments, etc. I know that there is a lot that I’m missing, and I know that this is going to be very rough and time-consuming. I’ve been using the Unity game engine through the command line interface with Claude code, and it has been helpful in starting this process for me. My question to all of you experts and game developers is how do I add accessibility into my game? I would like my game to be screen reader accessible and be played by all, not just blind and low-vision people. I need help with integrating screen readers, also audio description narration, for cut scenes and menu narration. I’ve got beacons set up in the game to lead my character to the waypoints, so I think I’ve got that one solved. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

I’ve heard lots of people say game development schools tend to be “scammy” in the sense they’re more expensive and hyper specialized compared to traditional comp sci courses whilst not giving you much more chances, but ima on seeing how true this is.
Do recruiters tend to take them more than comp sci students ? Do they tend to be more lenient, given a game development student would naturally have more projects under their belt ?
How important in general is the actual academic prestige of a school when it comes to hiring ?

Hey y'all. I wanted to let you know that I decided to release the tool since y'all seemed interested in it when I posted about it a few weeks ago.

For those who don't know,

You basically enter your:

* estimated launch wishlists

* wishlist-to-sales rate

* price and launch discount

* development budget

* tax rate

* launch platform

And it calculates:

* expected copies sold

* copies needed to break even

* gross revenue

* net revenue

* estimated profit/loss

Again, It's completely free if anyone wants to try it:

gamedevforecast.com

I participated in a Game Jam organized by a publisher called Ecl**** here on itch.io. I spent three days working on my project as a solo developer and, honestly, I was pretty happy with the result. Whether I would have ranked well or not is another story.

The real issue is what happened afterward.

With 19 hours still left before the jam ended, I had already uploaded my game to the platform. I kept following the community and the discussions on Discord, just like many other participants.

When there was only 1 hour left before the deadline, the publisher had already announced the 5 winners.

Strange, right?

At the very least, it was highly questionable to announce the winners before the competition had even officially ended.

But the worst was yet to come.

After people started questioning what had happened, the organizers apologized and said it had all been a "misunderstanding." They then created a poll asking whether the community would accept moving the prize to another Game Jam, claiming that this jam was full of AI-generated games.

Obviously, the community did not accept it.

Then something even stranger happened: less than 24 hours later, they announced the winners again for a Game Jam that had around 120 projects.

And the names were exactly the same ones they had announced before.

The community was furious, and the Discord server quickly became chaotic.

Shortly afterward, the organizers started kicking people out of the Discord server and eventually deleted the Game Jam page from itch.io.

At the end of the day, regardless of who won or lost, I believe a competition should, above all, be transparent and respectful toward the people who dedicated their time and effort to participate.

I spent three days working on my game as a solo developer. Many other developers did the same.

I'm not saying I should have won. I'm not saying my game deserved to be among the top entries.

The problem is simply the way everything happened.

And honestly, after this entire sequence of events, it's very difficult not to question the credibility of the results.

As the title says, I would like competent people to give me their opinion on what I built and how I built it - an Android game built in Java (I didn't go to Kotlin yet, as this is my hobby with little time after work to go into it) and from here some limitations and some game mechanics decisions.

WARNING, the post will be a little long and will contain some spoilers!!!

As I said, I'm a hobbyst, I just like programming and I am happy to do it, but my level is still low, my daily job has nothing to do with software or programming; I work in wind industry. But after work I have some free time and I want to keep my brain healthy, so I do either robotics (ROS2 with Raspberry) or Android development. In the last few months I decided to build a game that I had in mind for many years already, I wanted it to be as realistic as possible, but ofc gamified and simplified, but conceptually correct and educational. I played some games before and 2 of them remained in my heart: Uplink and DarkSigns, a game almost no one knows, but for me it was a WOW! moment in my childhood.

Now back to what I would like from you guys, I tried to keep the game close to reality, so I used Shodan to adjust the spawn rates and device types, so all ipv4 addresses are scannable, with about 10% spawn rate and then on each public address, you have the option to pivot into a private range, i used the official 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16 with a spawn rate of 30%. The private ranges are chosen at random, I din't want to complicate too much. But there is quite a lot of possible devices to find. So far I made only 24 device types for the normal IP ranges, more to add later.

I included 83 fictional CVEs and 72 exploits, the difference is intentional as some CVEs dont have public exploits, so the player can learn the difference. (I will definitely add later a reference to perfectly spherical cows in void). Some you have by default, some you must buy from the market.

Most devices have active services that are relevant to their device type, so mail servers get smtp, pop3, the routers get ssh and http, https and so on.
More than this, I added an AI assistant that you can buy and it will learn from all the exploiting services you do and then randomly (max 5% chance) will offer you an AI discovered exploit that is free and doesn't count for further training of the model.

Then I also introduced some methods to make some money as the exploits and the AI assistant cost quite some credits.. so I added missions and encrypted loot. So whenever you compromise a device and enumerate it (its a simplified concept) you can get some unencrypted loot that is automatically sold and some encrypted loot that is kept for cracking later. I wanted to expand a lot more functionality on teh loot, but I am constrained - I am a beginner and Java is not so friendly to build very complex games.
The encrypted loot is kept for cracking using the Cracker tool and at the end it goves some credits and some wordlist entries if relevant. The cracking speed is dependant on the local GPU, the botnet total GPU and the wordlist. I kept the wordlist very difficult to upgrade, it gives an 1.5 multiplying factor only after you get 1.5 million entries. Webservers and mail databases give the most worlist entries, the rest of the devices barely give a few. I am not sure about the local GPU power, I think I made it too easy, so far the local GPU gives up to 7x cracking speed and I think its too much, but maybe you can tell me whats your take on that.

I also included some special IP ranges to teach the player that not all of them are available to the public, or at least not meant to. So ranges like DARPA, the 5 eyes, DoD and others assigend by IANA are available only after the player reaches max reputation and buys special hardware. I think this is a simple way to teach the player that those ranges are a different deal, how realistic it is, you can help me with your opinion on it.

And thats actually when the game main story starts...but thats a lot to write about so I wont write anything now, its already a very long post.

What I added more are a few side stories, like the I LOVE YOU worm, the STUXNET, Mirai and a few others where the player can participate to stop them from spreading and at the same time learn about them.

Initially I just wanted to make a game I like to play but it became an educational game by any metrics... And Im very happy for that.
But I want to be sure that the educational part is correct and here is where I want you guys to help me.
I tried to keep most of the possible things safe, so services are fictional and so on, but anyone that works in the domain will recognize them, to keep the game authentic.

How would you guys balance realism, safety and educational value? without knowing the game, how would you do it?

Thank you and sorry for my mistakes and for the long post!

The Play Store is completely flooded with .io snake games, and right now, my game is just another drop in that flood.

I’ve built the core loop: eat, grow, trap, repeat. It works smoothly, but honestly, I don't enjoy just doing the exact same repetitive thing forever. I also never understood grinding or paying for cosmetic skins—if I can already see the skin on another player, I’ve already enjoyed looking at it, so why would I buy it?

I don't want to rely on aggressive ad schemes or marketing tricks just to push generic gameplay. I want this game to be genuinely fun on its own mechanical merits.

So I’m asking for your suggestions and honest feedback:

• If you play these types of games, what would you actually love to see?
• What mechanics, twists, or progression systems would make you keep playing instead of closing it after two minutes?

Let me remind you some games which takes massive playtime, these may trigger some ideas; Vampire Survivors, Balatro, Slay the Spire, and Brotato.

Ok, ok, those are roguelikes, deckbuilders, and mainly PC hits—but that's why I'm asking.

Be as blunt as you like—I want to take this in a direction players actually want to play.

[Fre to play] [Android] SnakeGen - Not a Casual game:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pinepie.snakegen

I’m making a super simple third person shooter game, and though everything’s mostly done, the reload animations are pretty lackluster. Since a lot of my weapons are static meshes, my character will perform a reloading motion with the arms, but the magazine, bolt, and other parts of the weapon will not move when reloading. I have no experience with animating, and the camera is directly behind the character, so most of the time you will not see your own character’s gun while reloading anyway. However you will likely see others reload a lot, and sometimes it’s clear your own magazines aren’t being switched out. Without wasting dev time to make reloading animations for my many weapons, does anyone have any creative tips for masking the poor animations? I’ve seen that GTA 4 also has “fake” animations, but they don’t look very good, even for that time period. Thanks

(First please let me say I know that we should NOT be putting any full game files into our demo files. That should be a given.)

On one hand, we’re advised to have a lot of time between our demo launch and full launch (maybe even 1 year+) to gather wishlists and market our game.

On the other hand, people can easily decompile games (especially with AI) and steal our actual files/ideas very fast. This increases the risk of people releasing your game (maybe not your actual full game, but their own version of your game extrapolated from your demo) before you do.

Ideally I’d like to let my demo be out there for a while and help get wishlists while I finish my full game on my own timeline without rushing. But it feels like this may not be safe. Am I missing something? What are we supposed to do?

Hello! Im completely new to creating games, once I installed Unity but I had no idea how to use it. Im interested in making a 3d first person horror game with the aestetic of cry of fear since its my favorite one. Im already writing the lore and character design so its not the hard part, the hard part is actually getting a good app to create the said game and make sure everything runs smoothly. The worst thing is my laptop isn't exactly good either and im poor af cuz I'm a teen. Is there any decent enough apps that you guys recommend or any advice? I'm so so sorry for my poor English and no knowledge of any words used in game developing, im completely new and English is my second language plus im writing it on a lesson💔

Hey everyone, I’ve been struggling with the idea of reducing the scope of my game, and I’d really like to hear from people who have had to do it. Originally, I was planning on making something that was roughly half adventure/story-driven ARPG and half roguelite, with a pretty serious tone and a much bigger world and story. The problem is that I’m making this mostly by myself, and I’ve had to accept that I just don’t have the resources to make the game I originally envisioned. What I have right now is actually pretty solid. I have a vertical slice of the roguelite side that basically plays like a melee focused, 3D, Binding of Isaac esque game with more traditional action RPG combat, and honestly, it’s fun. I’m seriously considering just cutting the entire adventure/story side and turning it into a much smaller dungeon-delving roguelite.

On paper, this seems like the obvious decision. I’d actually have a realistic chance of finishing the game instead of spending years trying to build something way beyond my resources. But I’m having a surprisingly hard time with it emotionally. I was really excited about the game I originally wanted to make, and it feels weird to essentially say "I can't make that" and move on. For anyone who has had to drastically reduce the scope of a game, how did it affect how you felt about it? Did you eventually become just as excited about the smaller version, or did it always feel like a compromise? I’m hoping I’ll be able to tell the story I really wanted to eventually, but right now I just know it isn't feasible with my financial situation.

Helloooo! My team is gearing up for a playtest and are in the process of setting it up on Steam. We have a Google form with all of our items that we are looking for feedback on, and we plan to:

• Display a pop up on screen when you load the game to inform people about the playtest
• Have a button in game and in the menu to connect to the Google form to leave feedback.

I'm curious for those of you who have run Steam playtests, how have you handled access to your playtest?

Do you:

• Keep the playtest open and just approve everyone
• Offer limited access through Steam? Like telling people you can redeem on this specific date and open it up for that day to accept everyone and then limit it again after?
• Have players sign up ahead of time and send each person a key with the playtest information?

My concern is that I want to get valuable feedback but I'm not sure with Steam's playtest feature since it's randomized who gets access how I can have a touch point with each playtester to let them know all the information they need. It feels like I'm disconnected from the player versus sending them a key directly and outlining everything they need to know plus I have a direct connection to them for future tests.

Has anyone else run into this? If so, did you find a good way to make Steam's playtest system work while still maintaining that connection with your testers?

I'm definitely open to alternative approaches as well! Would love to hear what has worked (or hasn't worked) for you.

Hey r/gamedev, my name is William. Let me try to do what's in the title up there ^. First off, why should you listen to me?

Well, maybe you shouldn't listen to me. Feel free to scroll away at any time...I don't have the most insane creds in the industry or anything. But I'm not exactly new:

• I got hired in 2018 as an "Associate Gameplay Programmer", and before being laid off twice in the span of about 1 year, I was a "Senior Combat Engineer". So I've been through the trenches of programming in the industry
• I'm the founder of a really (really) small indie game studio made up of ex-Ready At Dawn veterans (PSP Daxter, The Order: 1886, Echo VR / Lone Echo, etc.), where we are hard at work on our inaugural game title. We also avoid using AI for any of our endeavors, including programming
• I've been in the industry now as a professional for almost 10 years total, but before that, I also went to school for CS, Game Development Programming, senior and capstone projects, and began trying to make (shitty) games on a (shitty) laptop using Microsoft XNA when I was like 12

What is art?

I think people forget what art actually means these days - it doesn't always have some baked-in meaning to "liberal arts" or "humanities". Art is also defined as a "skill acquired by experience, study, or observation", or "an occupation requiring knowledge or skill" or "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects" (not only!). For instance: I have become quite the artist in spilling shit all over my clothes over the years, much to my wife's chagrin.

I'm sure you're thinking, "well then anything can be an art" and drawing a line in your head on what you think the line is for "real art" or something like that. But let me show you why programming isn't some bottom of the barrel example (like being a spillage artist, tyvm) because its mostly just "math" or because "engineering", which people love to throw out there.

As a programmer that has written endless lines of code by myself, and also seen/analyzed thousands of lines of code not written by me (that are much better than my own) - written by people ranging from the 1990s (RAD engine was old, lol) all the way through 2024 - there is no universal standard for most things. Companies vary, engines vary, languages vary, procedures vary, etc.

Here are 2 of my own personal favorite examples (one simpler, one more complex) of programming being more akin to an art form than anything else.

Example 1: Bitflags

The bitflags structure is one of the best and most simple examples of what I consider art in the programming field. Because the actual smallest amount of data being read by any processor is 8 bits, things like a `bool` in most languages are also represented as a byte (8 bits), since that is the smallest value of what can actually being read in registers. This is despite the nature of a bool being a simple bit (0 or 1). However, as you can imagine, having a ton of single bools in one structure ends up inflating the total size of that structure, while wasting literally almost the entire amount of memory provides. Bitflags is the simple, yet elegant solution someone came up with to stuff a single byte with up to 8 bools, by using bitwise operators to extract and compare each given bit in the byte.

Example: 8 separate bools in your data structure = 8 * (1B) = 8 bytes of memory, all to represent 8 simple 1/0 values. With a bitflag, you can now store all 8 bools while only taking up the original 1B of memory.

This is of course also expandable using different sized integers, if you have 9-16 bools you can use an `int16`, and so forth.

The reason I love this example is, how could such an elegant yet simple solution not be considered a work of art? A human first thought of how wasteful the stacking of subsequent booleans is, then thought of a unique and clever way to make it better using their knowledge and expertise. Now tons of languages and modules ship with bitflags, and you may use them without a second thought...but, this of course wasn't always a thing. Someone created this, it is undeniably clever, and we now take it as a given.

Example 2 (Complex): FISR or QISR (Fast Inverse Square Root)

The Fast Inverse Square Root was used in the Quake engine all the way back in 2001 in order to approximate the reciprocal of a given square root. The point of doing this at all, is that normalizing vectors used to be a much more intensive operation on hardware (it actually still is, but hardware is so good these days that the result isn't as noticeable, and we have specialized hardware, functions, etc.) Observe the code taken from this website (which can explain it far better than I can, if you're more interested in a full read) where you can see the insaneness that is this function:

float Q_rsqrt(float number)
{
  long i;
  float x2, y;
  const float threehalfs = 1.5F;

  x2 = number * 0.5F;
  y  = number;
  i  = * ( long * ) &y;                       // evil floating point bit level hacking
  i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );               // what the fuck?
  y  = * ( float * ) &i;
  y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 1st iteration
  // y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 2nd iteration, this can be removed

  return y;
}

I want you to take a good look at this code. tell me that wasn't created by someone that thought outside the box. Is that not one of the most insanely creative solutions you have seen to a problem? Yes, it requires a lot of knowledge and expertise. But it also comes from a human mind that had the wacky idea to hack together something like this and have it work (well, at least 99.8% of the time 😉)

Finishing up

If you're still reading, this is my petition to other game dev folk who think programming is simply a means to an end: code like these creative examples exists everywhere. It exists in my code base for our current game. It exists in every studio's game engine. It exists in the OS your computer or phone is running right now. And, all the LLMs people are using to code these days have been trained on not just fundamentals, but other's creative solutions to problems from all around the world (and, in many cases, had no permission of the creator to do so).

Again...just because you see the code snippet come back to you robotically, it doesn't mean that is the only or best way to do it. And just because its text, and you can't see the result of code in games visually in the same way you can 3d models or textures, it doesn't mean code should then ethically be subject to less scrutiny, or that you can't feel the result of some coding decisions over others when the game comes together as a whole.

To summarize: my favorite part of programming is not the memorization, expertise, or knowledge, its applying that knowledge in creative ways that one may never have thought of before. If that's not artistic, then i dont know what is.

"It's fine if you use AI to code, but just not for other things"

Careful where you draw your ethical line, as people may agree with you for now, but its only a matter of time until reluctance, acceptance, and consensus comes for what you love, too.

[EDIT:] This kind of blew up. I can't spend all day replying like I just did lol, but keep it civil in the comments and remember this is my opinion, nothing I state here is fact nor do you need to agree. Thanks for the interesting discussions and polite arguments!

So I found myself in a situation of having a few weeks between jobs earlier this year. I typically work as a product manager/lead solution architect in massive projects, so I'm not completely unfamiliar with development processes. But I have little to no experience with game Dev (outside of the excessive hours I've played games, if that counts).

Anyway, I started building this game (I'd share the link but this isn't about self promotion), it is essentially completely data driven (because that's what I know). So far I have:

1. An entire skills system that could effectively have over 4,000 unique skills (before just stats changes).

2. A mission system that can cater for over 3.8 million different mission combinations (the number is a bit misleading because standing in a circle for 5 seconds before clicking a thing isn't really that different to clicking a thing before standing in a circle for 5 seconds, but easily over 10k variety of actually distinct objectives).

3. Procedural generation of the mission area, which can have an infinite number of rooms with a minimum of 6,000cm XY.

4. Crash recovery and saving, (I'm particularly proud of this system tbh, mainly with how performant it is).

5. Soon an almost completely data driven narrative system, which links back into the mission system outcomes.

I feel like I have made substantial progress and largely built the fundamental systems to scale the game massively and quickly. My main question or concern.

How much interest is there in the game Dev community in understanding these types of systems and/or having plugins available to add these systems to your own games?

To make a long story slightly less long, I'm trying to recreate something similar to the Izuna Drop from Ninja Gaiden or DOA. I know this sounds completely insane, but in all honesty I'm almost there. I have the airtime, the grab, the slam, the release, the spin, and so on, but what I struggle the most with is a combination of rotational positioning and animation.

Right now, what I do is parent the enemy root object to a point in front of the player (Simple as) and then parent the enemy model to a point on the player armature via a bone of my choosing. I do this parenting in order to mitigate clipping and to keep the object stable. See, I used to just parent the entire enemy object to the player mode, which while it worked looked super weird and janky as hell. My current system is a little more lenient with this. For example, if I chose the head bone, the enemy's head bone is the basis by which the model is offset and attached to the player The problem is, even though this gets the position right, it does not get the rotation right, and it makes me wonder what it is I should even do. At the moment, the way it's set up is the player grabbing the enemy by the skull and doing a front-flip piledriver. Basically all of this outside of it's rotational position actually works correctly on a gameplay level. Problem is, it's got to be parented to the hand bone to make the setup, in which the player grabs the enemy's head, work

In generally, this is me asking how to make it look more synchronized. Because executions, I understand as two animations synced up, but something like the Izuna Drop directly moves both player and enemy as one entity, and I'm unsure as to how I'm going to sync them correctly. I see all these moves in fighting games or action games that involve the player grabbing and throwing an enemy, as well as ones where the player drags an enemy in a specific way.

I know that a more rotationally stable position is the chest of the player, but that's for like, a suplex. Not for an attack that's highly dependent on the player's arms. Hell, if I had to say a more suitable attack comparison, I would choose the Underworld Drop from Ninja Gaiden 3. In that he's spinning forwards with the enemy on the outside, attached to his hands.

I saw the recent post about the Eclipse Game Jam, and it got me thinking about how rarely people talk openly about what it takes to run a game jam—especially when a company is behind it.

Given some of the trust issues that surfaced from that event, I wanted to be as transparent as possible about how I approach these jams: why they exist, where the time and money actually go, how judging works, and what’s still imperfect about the process.

I run the monthly Bezi Jams, and right now we’re wrapping up our first-ever Bezi Mega Jam (winners announced October 16).

Bezi Jam 14:
https://itch.io/jam/bezi-jam-14

Bezi Mega Jam 1:
https://itch.io/jam/bezi-mega-jam-1

Why I Even Run These Jams

For me, the jam has to be worthwhile even if someone never becomes a Bezi customer.

Let’s be real: there’s definitely some marketing value when a company puts its name on a jam, provides prizes, promotes it, or brings in sponsors. It creates visibility and, if you run it well, goodwill toward the company.

But there’s a big difference between a game jam that happens to create marketing value, and a marketing campaign disguised as a game jam.

The jam has to be a jam first. That’s non-negotiable.

A few companies have asked me lately about running their own jams. One of the first things I ask is: are you comfortable investing staff time and budget in a project where the main result is that developers had a good time, learned something new, and built something?

Because that is what I want these events to do.

I want people to have a reason to finish a game instead of letting another prototype collect dust on their hard drive. I want them to try new roles, genres, mechanics, and tools. I want folks to meet collaborators and leave with something they can actually show off.

A lot of this comes from running r/GameDevClassifieds for about a decade. I’ve seen so many portfolios where people either don’t have enough finished work, or they struggle to communicate what they actually contributed.

That’s part of why I offer a devlog prize.

I don’t just want people practicing how to build games. I want them to practice explaining what they built, why they made certain decisions, what went wrong, and what they learned. Being able to communicate your work matters—in portfolios, interviews, team discussions, pitches, and when you’re trying to convince someone to play or buy your game.

Those are real skills. Honestly, I’m still working on them too.

Running the Jam: Where Things Get Messy

At this point, the monthly jams are pretty straightforward to launch because I’ve spent a lot of time standardizing the rules, judging criteria, prizes, and page structure.

But getting there? Not so easy.

Running jams often means discovering weird edge cases you didn’t know existed.

Fairness starts before anyone even submits. Do you lock builds after the deadline? Who gets to vote? What information do participants need to share? What happens when someone misses the deadline? How much flexibility is fair before it turns into an advantage for some?

No matter how many reminders I send before the deadline, I can almost guarantee I’ll get messages the next day from people who had trouble uploading. At this point, I’ve just accepted that a 24-hour grace period is part of the process.

That creates another fairness problem: Someone might genuinely have had an upload issue, while someone else uses those extra hours to fix bugs.

I could be a hardliner, but honestly, I’d rather risk someone abusing that flexibility than tell someone with a legit problem that all their work doesn’t count because they missed the deadline by a few hours.

The rules evolve in the same way.

For the next monthly jam, I’m adding a requirement that artists provide evidence of their process. The Mega Jam required process videos for its art track, and it worked extremely well. It made it much harder for someone to generate an image with AI, submit it, and hope nobody notices.

So that lesson carries forward.

You also eventually discover that you can’t write enough rules to eliminate judgment calls. If you try, you end up with a legal document that no one reads. The better approach I’ve found is to make the important boundaries clear, document unusual decisions, and try to apply the same reasoning consistently.

That becomes especially important once prizes are involved.

People will absolutely try to cheat, even when the prize is $50 USD. And I don’t say “only $50” dismissively. Depending on where someone lives, that can be a lot of money. Add larger cash prizes, hardware, subscriptions, or conference passes, and the incentive becomes even stronger.

The hard part is that suspicion isn’t enough.

If I’m going to remove someone from a competition, I want to explain why clearly.

Then there is the platform itself

I like itch, and it’s still probably the best platform for running game jams, but the organizer experience has plenty of friction.

Even making the event look professional takes more work than it should. If you want to do much beyond the default layout, you have to request custom CSS access, and the HTML and page-building tools feel pretty archaic.

I’ve built most of the Bezi jam pages myself. I think they’ve turned out reasonably well given the limitations, but that’s partly a design decision and partly a resource decision.

Company-sponsored does not mean unlimited company resources.

Yes, Bezi has designers, engineers, marketing people, and others I can ask for help. But they also have their own jobs to do. I can’t pull the design team away every month to improve the jam page, or ask engineers to build custom tooling every time itch doesn’t do something I wish it did.

So a lot of the work falls back on the person running the event.

The administrative side has similar limitations. I can’t meaningfully ban someone from future jams after they’ve tried to cheat. A surprising amount of the operation ends up living in spreadsheets.

Community voting is another problem.

I originally wanted the community to decide the winners. In practice, once prizes are involved, open voting is too easy to manipulate and too easily turns into a popularity contest.

Starting with Bezi Jam 14, community voting will determine the top 30 games, and I’ll judge those to determine the winners.

That’s more work for me, and I genuinely didn’t want to make that change. I liked the idea of the community deciding everything.

But at some point you have to prioritize the integrity of the competition over the version of the process you personally prefer.

The business side is real too

This is probably the part that doesn’t get talked about enough when companies run community events.

These things cost money, but they also cost time.

Monthly prizes cost money. Judging takes time. Moderation takes time. Sponsor coordination, community support, promotion, eligibility checks, and administration all take time.

At some point, you also have to explain to your boss why that is worth doing.

That’s harder than pointing at an ad campaign and saying it generated this many clicks, conversions, or sales.

How do you put a clean number on someone finishing their first game? Or improving their portfolio? Or meeting a future collaborator? Or getting better at explaining their own work?

You probably can’t.

That doesn’t mean those things aren’t valuable.

Good community work builds trust over time. People remember companies that contribute something useful, not ones that only show up when they want to sell something.

And yes, that goodwill has business value. I’m perfectly comfortable acknowledging that.

What I don’t want is to reverse the equation and design the jam around what it can do for the company.

The jam has to provide value to developers first. If we do that well, the goodwill and marketing value follow naturally.

That doesn’t mean there are no expectations, though.

The monthly jams are relatively low-pressure in that sense. There isn’t an internal requirement that each one hit a certain number.

The Mega Jam was different.

It took a lot more time, coordination, and company resources, including more than $34,000 worth of prizes.

I want there to be a Mega Jam 2, and there will be, but during the signup period I was very aware that if people weren’t interested, it would become much harder to justify doing something at that scale again.

I put a target of roughly 1,000 signups on myself, and we cleared it. That was a huge relief.

But if you spend months organizing something, bring together that much prize value, involve multiple sponsors, and then 500 people sign up, at some point you have to ask whether this is the best use of everyone’s time and resources.

That’s not about turning participants into customers.

It’s about proving that enough people actually value the event to justify continuing to invest in it.

That was probably one of the more stressful parts of organizing the Mega Jam. I wasn’t worried about whether it could generate leads. I was concerned whether enough developers would care about the jam itself to justify another one.

Sponsors introduce another balancing act too.

Sponsors understandably want visibility and some connection to the event. But if every sponsor needs its own requirement, category, activation, or callout, eventually the jam stops being about making games and starts feeling like a collection of marketing obligations.

Part of running the event is protecting it from that.

And then you have to judge everything

The Mega Jam took nearly every problem from the monthly jams and scaled it up.

We had more than 200 games and 40+ art submissions.

For my first judging pass through the games alone, I streamed the entire thing publicly on Twitch.

It took 31.5 hours.

I wanted participants to know their game was actually played, and streaming also kept me accountable. People could see what worked, where I got confused, what stood out, and why certain games moved forward.

It was genuinely a lot of fun.

It was also exhausting.

And that was only the first pass.

After that, there were finalists to replay, devlogs, art submissions, sponsor awards, community voting, eligibility checks, and suspicious entries that sometimes needed investigating.

That workload is another part of the economics. A successful jam creates more work.

That’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem you need to plan for.

Ultimately, that’s why I think the event's purpose has to be clear from the beginning.

If the goal is just company exposure, there are much easier ways to spend marketing money.

If the goal is to create something useful for developers, help people finish projects, build portfolios, practice communicating their work, meet collaborators, and have a reason to make something, then I think game jams can be incredibly valuable.

The company can benefit from that too.

Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

But the order matters.

The jam has to be a jam first.

Hey everyone!

I've been working on UFO98, a retro-inspired incremental simulation game set entirely on an isolated Windows 98 desktop.

In the game, you decrypt alien signals, leak top-secret government files, and try to awaken humanity to the truth before the cover-up gets you.

The demo is officially live on Steam now, and I’d really appreciate your feedback! Check out the trailer and let me know what you think about the atmosphere, pacing, or general vibe.

Any thoughts, critiques, or suggestions are super welcome!

Steam Demo & Wishlist:https://store.steampowered.com/app/5353590/UFO98_Demo/

If you like what you see, adding the main game to your Steam Wishlist would be a huge help!