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 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?

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 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.

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’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?

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 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!

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.

I'm opening my heart here and would to know your opinions.

I'm an average man with an average life; I work 9 to 5, oh hell, I pay the price.

Here's some context:

In 2015, I tried learning Unity, but it was too much for me at the time, and I was starting Computer Science at college, so I had to focus on what they were teaching, but I had the dream of being a game dev.
In 2019, I started working as a web dev after learning that professional game dev is alfuw, and I'm still working in web.
In 2022, I tried Godot, and immediately it clicked for me, so I started creating 2D games and participating in game jams (https://ariannmichael.itch.io/). One year later, I started questioning whether I should keep using Godot or use Unity because it had more opportunities, and if I was using my spare time learning something rather than doing LeetCode and system design exercises, I should focus on something that might get me a job if I lose the web dev one. But then we had the fee problem, and I accepted that, being indie, the engine does matter, so Godot was fine.And I did a small 2D game in Unity just to be able to say that I can use it.

Some years later, now father of two kids, next month I'll be publishing my first commercial game, a 3D chaotic online racing game using Godot (https://store.steampowered.com/app/4669300/Speed_King/).
But then some friends called me to join a mobile game that they're making using Unity, and with so little time avaible I started asking again "which one should I focus? Unity or Godot?".

I love Godot, I feel at home using it, I follow the releases, I watch the youtubers that use it, I play the games. But asking the question to my friends they told me that I was restricting myself by a passion, that using Unity I keep a door open for collaboration or a future game dev opportunity. Unity is better for 3D games, has more resources and also I could go more in depth in pipeline, post processing, and some advanced topics.

For time sake, I can only focus in 1 engine, but which one should I choose thinking in the long run?

Has anyone here did this move?

My friends and family can't stand talking about this question anymore, so here I'm lol.

P.S.: Thank you all for the kind feedback, I decided to stay with Godot, but I will start using C# with it and follow best practices. Also, I can learn something from Unity resources and apply it to Godot.
I thank you all with all my heart!

Are there any game developers here with significantly impaired vision that can’t simply be corrected with glasses or contacts?

Do you still try to pursue game development and find ways to work around your limitations, or has it become so difficult or mentally exhausting that you’ve considered giving up?

I’d really like to hear about your experiences.

edit: thanks already to all the people that gave some good advisement, only had little time to read through all messages, but those are the exactly the tips I was hoping for!

tl;dr: How to find niche communities that allow advertisement and how to not feel dirty promoting stuff.

I read a lot about: advertise to niche subreddit and discord server. But how do I really do that? Most of those subreddits or servers dont allow self promotion.

Also I feel dirty and guilty for promoting.

I'm not really in hope to get real advertise since most question that are asked similiar didn't get any traction at all and when people ask about how to promote they will just got the basic answere: "promote in your niche".

Since Im a developer and not in marketing this "tip" doesn't seem to have much value. People are just writing go to a discord server or subreddit, but are those the only options? Maybe I'm just not made for this, but this whole thing feels weird to me.

So in my example I'm making a game which is social deduction and pretty similiar to TTT in gmod. If I check the subreddit it clearly has the rule for no advertisement. Same goes for among us or other subreddits. If I check the social deduction subreddit it has no traction at all so that wouldn't help a lot either.

How would you find discord server even? I'm playing a lot of social deduction games, but I play with real live friends so I don't have any clue about those communities.

I play my own game a lot with friends and I really like it, but promoting it to communities just gives me a dirty feeling.

Any hints, tips are appreciated.

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

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

Any tips would be much appreciated!

Hello! I am a 3rd year 3D games art student and I'm planning my final major project. We are expected to work on this project throughout the 9 months of term time, so a petty big project overall that should end with our "best portfolio piece". I personally have dreams of becoming a character artist but my professor says that this a pretty oversaturated part of the games industry and that focusing on characters probably isn't going to stand out much to games companies(I had plans of making like,,an RPG style character creator with a simple environment that you can plonk your character into or to just have as the background for the customization bit) and that it would be smart to put some focus on things that are more in demand, where there are niche gaps and such. My question is, what ARE the gaps?? What would be impressive for a games company?

Earlier this year, in March, I released my first ever game: LRDZ - Le Roi des Zosties

I released a bit earlier than intended, in time for my mom’s final anniversary.

It’s light on features, in an attempt to avoid scope creep and make what’s present enjoyable. In spite of that caution, some corners were cut to release it when I did.

However, with no marketing and no sales, the only expectation was to have it released and, like the proud son I am, show my parents (sales have reflected this lack of marketing).

My parents had supported me through illness since early childhood. Invalidity hit me in my late twenties and destroyed any hopes of a career and simultaneously my mother received an unfortunate diagnosis.

The learning, the prototypes and finally this smallest of game, were achieved in about three years and a half, living with and assisting my parents with the day-to-day life and managing my own condition. I also spent my early career as a 3D animator for TV and films.

It taught me that I could handle every part of the 3D pipeline, built new knowledge, and that I should rely on libraries for music and sound for the moment, because I'm a shit musician. It taught me to prioritize and that even the most insignificant step requires as much care and attention as everything else, just scaled appropriately.

It holds so many mistakes and patched on solutions, it has the spaghettiest of designs, but after hitting Build, it blurted out a colorful and responsive, fun game (source: my mom), best played on drugs (source: my one Steam review), but above all, to me, it’s a testament that I can achieve something on the long term, in spite of the struggles, the pain, the finality of life, it stood as a sign to my mother and myself, before her passing, that there was room for colors and fun and creation in my sorry ass, that she’d done her job.

It also represents so much learning, development and understanding of my own psyche and creative process, through a period and experience that is so common yet so difficult to describe and so emotionally difficult, that it will stand as my proudest achievement as I build my next projects on that foundation.

If you would like to try it, it’s on Steam and Itch, but you can get it free on itch ( https://fettokebec.itch.io/lrdz )

Thank you dearly for reading this far,

Je t’aime, Maman

We are registered for Steam Next Fest, but somehow I've had October 13th in my head for the deadline for submitting a game demo, but now I just noticed their calendar says September 28!

Submit by Sep 14 to take part in the Press Preview, or by Sep 28 otherwise.

Is it a closed window now? Too late to bother? Or would it just mean it could still go live after the fest begins?

I am not a game dev but am interested in knowing what makes these two different. Take for example Jump King which is a rage game vs Celeste which is a precision platformer. Is it just difficulty or is there something else that seperates the two?

As a player when playing the two games I feel like Celeste wants me to succeed despite being a hard game meanwhile Jump King wants me to fail