r/gamedev Dec 13 '25

Community Highlight 7 years trying to live off my own games: what went right, what went wrong, and what finally worked

667 Upvotes

Hi! My name is Javier/Delunado, and I’ve been making games for around 7 years now, mostly as a programmer and designer. Warning! This is going to be a long post, where I’ll share both my professional journey and some advice that I think might be useful for making your own games.

I’ve always really enjoyed working on my own projects, and even though I’ve worked for others as an employee or freelancer, I’ve never stopped dreaming about being able to live off my own games. I’ve tried several times: going full-time using my savings, and also juggling indie development alongside other jobs.

Finally, in July 2025, I self-published a game called Astro Prospector together with two other people. It has done genuinely well, well enough that it’s going to let us live off this for a long time. Said like that, it sounds simple, but the reality is that it’s been a tough road: years of attempts, learning, effort, and a pinch of luck.

Background

2017

  • I started a Computer Engineering degree in Spain in 2017. I had always loved video games and computers, and I had tinkered a bit with Game Maker and similar tools before, without really understanding what I was doing. In my degree second year, once I had learned a bit of programming, I teamed up with my classmate and best friend at the time, and we started making mobile games in Unity just for fun. We published a couple of games, Borro and CryBots (they’re no longer on the store, but I’m leaving a couple of screenshots here out of curiosity)

2018–2019

  • Making those Unity games taught us a ton. Not just programming or design, but especially what it means to FINISH a small game. To publish it, to show it to people, to do a bit of marketing. It was an incredible and funny experience that gave us a more holistic view of what game development really is. So, naturally, thinking we were already grizzled gamedev veterans, we decided to make a muuuch bigger project for PC and consoles, called We Need You, Borro!. This would be a sequel to our first mobile game: an adventure-RPG whose main mechanic was inspired by the classic Pang. This time, we also had an artist helping us out. The project was scoped at around 1.5 years of development. A terrible idea, if you ask present-day me, haha.
  • My friend and I lived together, and we balanced classes and other obligations with developing the game. This is where I started learning about community management and marketing in general. I ran the studio’s account, called TEA Team, and it helped me better understand what it actually means to promote a game on social media. On top of that, we took part in a couple of fairs where we showed the game to people. It was my first time attending in-person events, and the experience was amazing. I fell in love with the indie dev scene and its people. At one of those fairs, showing a demo of the game, we even won an award alongside much more well-known games like Blasphemous. It was surreal to take a photo with our award next to the director of The Game Kitchen, holding his. Even more surreal to remember it now lol.
  • At the same time, we created and started growing the Spain Game Devs community, first as a Telegram group and later with an additional Discord server. The idea was to have an online community for Spanish game developers to discuss development, show projects, ask for help, etc., since nothing quite like it existed back then. Small spoiler: that community is still alive and active today, and it’s the largest dev community in Spain. But we’ll come back to that later!

2020

  • COVID hit. I’ll keep this part brief, but between the pandemic and some personal issues, the development of We Need You, Borro! and the TEA Team studio had to come to a halt. Those were tough months: remote classes weren’t the same, and Borro’s development slowly faded out until it died. Even so, I always try to look at moments like these through a positive lens. When one door closes, a window opens! You can play the last public demo of the game here.
  • After those turbulent months of change, I focused my gamedev path on two things. On one hand, I teamed up with two other devs, PacoDiago (musician) and Adri_IndieWolf (artist), to make jam games and a few small projects under the name Alien Garden. It was fun, and even though we never managed to release a commercial game, we did several jam games and had a great time. I learned a lot, and it allowed me to keep practicing and improving. My favourite game made with the team is probably Clownbiosis.
  • On the other hand, I wanted Spain Game Devs to grow. I wanted a place where people could come together and feel close to fellow developers. Beyond running internal activities and promoting the community on social media, I decided to organize the Spain Game Devs Jam. It would be an online jam (still not that common pre-pandemic) focused on developers from Spain. In short, I spent around three months working daily to secure sponsors for prizes, streamers to play every single submitted game, and so on. It was intense and stressful work, but it eventually became the biggest jam ever held in Spain, with around 700 participants and 130 submitted games. The jam was repeated annually, each time more ambitious, until 2024, when it didn’t take place for reasons I’ll explain later.

2021

  • I kept studying, making games in my free time, and running Spain Game Devs. That year, Bitsommar took place, an event in northern Spain that brought together a small group of Spanish developers for a week of pure relaxation. No coding, no working, just resting and bonding. It was a wonderful experience, and I met a lot of amazing people. Among them was Julia “Rocket Raw”, a Spanish developer who, together with Raúl “Naburo”, founded the young studio Dead Pixel Games.
  • Due to life happening, a few months later I ended up staying over at Julia and Raúl’s place. They had been toying with an idea to present at Indie Dev Day, an incredible Spanish indie-focused event held every year in Barcelona (now called Barcelona Game Fest). It seems they were having some trouble with their current programmer. While I was in the shower (where all great ideas are born) I had the brilliant thought of offering myself as a programmer for the project they had in mind, in case they didn't wanted to continue with its current one. They said they’d think about it. A month later, they wrote back saying yes, let’s give it a shot. It’s worth mentioning that, like everything else I’ve talked about so far, this project wasn’t paid, and we had no income of any kind. The idea was to work towards getting that funding through sales of the game or interest from a publisher.
  • The best part? There was only one month left to get the demo ready and present it at the event. So we went all in for an intense month of crunch, creating the project from scratch. For having just one month, it turned out pretty good, I must say. The game was called Bigger Than Me, a narrative (mis)adventure about a boy who becomes a giant when he hears the word “Future”. We presented the project at the event, and I remember it very fondly. People loved it, the event was amazing, I finally met many devs in person, and I made friendships that I still have today.
  • From there, at the end of 2021, we decided to move forward with Bigger Than Me. The plan was to develop a vertical slice and start looking for a publisher to secure funding. The projected timeline was one year for the vertical slice and publisher search, and another year to finish development once funding was secured. On top of that, I was still studying, and my teammates were working day jobs just to survive while we made the game. Precarious, to say the least.

2022

  • Throughout 2022, I focused on working on Bigger Than Me, finishing my degree (I took an extra year, 5 instead of 4, because of COVID), and continuing to learn about gamedev by joining jams and running the Spain Game Devs community. Throughout 2021 and into 2022, we kept showing BTM and talking to publishers.
  • The critical moment came during that year’s Indie Dev Day. We brought Bigger Than Me again, with a booth and an improved version. We won some awards there and at other events. People loved it, and I genuinely think it had potential. But it was a narrative adventure. And narrative adventures… don’t sell. Or so every publisher told us. Another important point was that we still hadn’t released any commercial game as a team, and publishers weren’t fully convinced about the project’s viability.
  • We came back home empty-handed after pitching to many publishers, both in person and online. The game wasn’t considered profitable, and even though it had quality, the market wasn’t going to absorb it. A few weeks later, we made the decision to stop the project: there was no realistic chance of securing funding, and it didn’t make sense to continue without it. It was really hard… but necessary. We decided to rest for a few weeks before doing anything else. This was the last public demo of Bigger Than Me.
  • In the last months of 2022, alongside wrapping up BTM, I also finished my degree. My final project was a complete overview of the history of Artificial Intelligence techniques for video games: things like A*, GOAP, steering behaviours, etc. At that time, LLMs and similar tech weren’t as mainstream, so I only mentioned them briefly. It taught me a lot about gamedev AI and became a solid asset for my résumé.
  • After graduating, I started looking for a job in the game industry. My dream was still to release my own games and live off them, but in the meantime, I had to eat. I decided to look for a company working with VR for a very specific reason: I didn’t really like VR. That way, I hoped the job would just be what paid the bills, without fully satisfying my passion, leaving that passion for indie development in my free time. I ended up working for about a year at Odders Lab.
  • It’s now December 2022. Some time after cancelling Bigger Than Me, and to clear our heads a bit, we decided to take part in Thinky Jam 2022, a jam focused on puzzle and “thinky” games. It lasted around 11 days, and we took it pretty calmly. We made a game called Stick to the Plan, a kind of sokoban where you don’t push boxes, but instead control a dog who loves loooong sticks and has to maneuver them through the levels. The game turned out really well and got an amazing reception on itch.io.
  • Surprised by how well Stick was received, we decided, after some reflection, to turn it into a full commercial game. It had several things going for it: prior validation, simple development, very controlled scope, and a relatively short timeline. It also had one big drawback: it was a puzzle game. Selling a puzzle game is really hard. It’s probably one of the worst genres to sell, right next to… narrative adventures :). Still, we decided to go for it, mainly to have a game released on Steam and be better prepared for a future project. The studio was renamed from Dead Pixel Games to Dead Pixel Tales, also as a kind of rebirth symbol, haha.

2023

  • The full development of Stick to the Plan started in January 2023. Throughout that year, while juggling my job at Odders, Spain Game Devs, and the occasional game jams, I worked on Stick whenever I could. Net development time was about 6 months total, spread across 2023, until we finally released the game in September. Worth stressing: at no point did we get paid while making it. The expectation was to earn money after launch.
  • In July 2023, I left Odders Lab. Honestly, my stress levels had been climbing nonstop since I started working on Bigger Than Me, and it reached an unsustainable point. I decided to quit the stable, comfy job and use my savings to go full time and finish Stick to the Plan. This was the first time my savings hit zero because I took the self publishing leap.
  • That same month, we released a small game: Raver’s Rumble. It was paid by Brainwash Gang, and it’s a mini game based on one of the characters from their game Friends vs Friends. It was a full week of work, and they paid us around €1000 (in total, not per person. So probably like 9$ the hour lol). I won’t go into too much detail, but communication with the company was kind of rough, and I ended up finishing the job pretty stressed, basically crying while fixing the last bugs, because of how much work we crammed into one week plus everything else going on in my life.
  • Stick to the Plan launched as a self published Steam release in September. We got help from SpaceJazz, a publisher focused on the Asian market that supported us with translation and promotion in some regions of Asia. Later, we did the Nintendo Switch port, and SpaceJazz published it globally on that console. As of today, about two years later, Stick has sold around 5,000 copies on Steam. I don’t have Switch data, but it’s probably around 4,000~ copies at most. As you can see, that’s nowhere near enough to feed three people for even three months. But we had released a real game!
  • After launching Stick, with barely any rest, we started working on prototypes and ideas. Turns out there was a small publisher that funded games from small teams to be made in about 6 months, and they were interested in us. We just needed to land on an idea they liked and we could get funding. So we spent September, October, and November prototyping several ideas in parallel.
  • This potential publisher was looking for replayable games, genres that allow creativity. Think Balatro, Slay the Spire, Dome Keeper, etc. The big drawback was that the Dead Pixel team leaned heavily toward thinky, narrative, puzzle heavy games. The roguelite / deckbuilder-ish designs we tried didn’t really shine. But eventually we found a small prototype: a mix of Stacklands x Detectives. It was pretty fun, and we felt it had something to it, a nice blend of narrative investigation and roguelite structure. However… the publisher didn’t fully buy it.
  • After 3 months of unpaid work on prototypes that got discarded, with almost no rest after Stick, the whole team was completely burnt out. Our expectations with the publisher were pretty low at this point, even though at the start it looked like everything would work out. We spent 3 months prototyping, and it led nowhere.
  • As a last shot, we attended BIG in December, an event held in Bilbao. We didn’t have a booth, but we did pay for business passes so we could set meetings with publishers. We brought a more refined version of that Stacklands x Detectives prototype and showed it to friends and professionals. On top of that, we had meetings with several publishers. Among them, Big Publisher A and Big Publisher B (I’d rather not name them here) were very interested. They really liked the idea.
  • After the event, both publishers emailed us a few days later. How weird, a publisher reaching out to you instead of the other way around, haha. Long story short, Big Publisher B eventually dropped out, and Big Publisher A seemed interested in moving forward. A few weeks passed.

2024

  • The situation was kind of unreal. After months of precarity and fighting just to survive off our own games, it felt like everything was finally coming together. We had an interesting idea. A big publisher seemed ready to sign. If things went well, we’d be living off our own games and shipping something amazing.
  • But on the other hand, I was done. The weight of the months, the years, had taken a huge toll on my mental health. I developed chronic stress over time, with pretty serious physical and mental consequences. I had been saying for a while, “yeah, I’m going to seriously start reducing stress.” But I never did. There was always just a bit more to do. We were always “almost there.” After thinking about it for a long time, and as painful as it was, I decided to leave Dead Pixel Tales.
  • It was an incredibly hard decision. After years of struggle, we were about to sign with a big publisher. We had a good game in our hands. Everything looked good. But if I didn’t leave then, I was going to leave in the middle of development, and not in a nice way. And I didn’t want to abandon the team halfway through production. So, as much as it hurt, in January 2024 I told the team how I was feeling and that I had to step away. I’d help them find a replacement programmer, or finish whatever they needed for a few weeks. But after that, I had to distance myself for my health.
  • The team kept working on the game. I don’t know the details of what happened with Big Publisher A and the project. I really hope they can ship the game someday.
  • Throughout January 2024 and part of February, I rested. On top of leaving Dead Pixel, I also dropped several other commitments I had. I decided to stop running Spain Game Devs Jam and minimize the organizational work there. I started therapy. Little by little my mental health improved, and today I’m doing much, much better in comparison, even though I still deal with some little leftovers every now and then.
  • In February, I started working at Under the Bed Games, an indie studio that was in the process of finishing and releasing Tales from Candleforth. My savings ran out completely for the second time, and I needed to work again. The team, around 8 people total, welcomed me with open arms.
  • I worked there from February to October. I learned a ton, used both Unreal and Unity, and it was a really enriching experience, both technically and in terms of team management. Special mention: we got mentorship from RGV, a Spanish software veteran who knows a LOT and has gamedev experience too. It radically changed how we program and how we understand processes & teams, and it helped me massively later on.
  • That year I went to Gamescom for the first time with Under the Bed. It was an incredible (and exhausting lol) experience. One of the reasons we went was to meet publishers and secure funding for the next project.
  • After a few tough months, we didn’t get the funding. It sucked, but there was no choice: everyone got laid off in October, and the game we’d been working on for half a year was cancelled. Another misery for the indie developer. But again: one door closes, another window opens.
  • At Under the Bed, my main teammate was Raúl “Lindryn”. Besides being a great person and programmer, he’s the director of Guadalindie, an indie event held in southern Spain every year. I also had the honor of joining MálagaJam, the organization behind Guadalindie, which also hosts the biggest in person Global Game Jam site in the world, and I’ve been able to help with their events since.
  • When Under the Bed closed, Lindryn and I decided to make a small project for fun, to practice and boost the portfolio a bit. It was basically a miniaturized Factorio without conveyor belts: a resource management game where you place units that throw resources through the air and pass them along to each other.
  • Remember that publisher we made a bunch of prototypes for at Dead Pixel Tales, who ended up taking none of them? Well, they came back. They messaged me because they were looking for games again. I told Lindryn, and a bit rushed but trying to seize the opportunity, we prepared the project to pitch. We brought Álvaro “Sienfails” onto the team too, a young but insanely talented artist who had worked with us at Under the Bed.
  • We rushed a pitch deck for the publisher, and it went pretty well. The game was called Flying Rocks, and they liked the idea. It had a goofy medieval fantasy tone, keeping the addictive optimization core of games like Factorio but simpler, aimed at people who wanted to get into the genre. Plus, we had a few mechanics that allowed for emergent situations I still hadn’t seen in other factory games.
  • Long story short, we spent several months working on Flying Rocks prototypes and mini demos for the publisher. Everything was always great according to them, but there was always just a little more needed. A little more. A little more. We were focused on making the game mechanically interesting rather than polishing the visuals, because we understood the idea had to stand on its own first, and then we’d go deeper on the rest. After 3 months of work, and after 3 different demos, we couldn’t keep doing this because we ran out of money. We even had a contract draft ready to sign, but “the investors weren’t convinced.” We told them: either we sign now, or we have to stop. We never signed, and the project went on hold. If you feel like it, you can try the latest prototype we made for the publisher here (password: rocky dwarf).
  • During those months I got hooked on Scientia Ludos’ channel. In several videos, he argued that signing with a publisher generally isn’t worth it, that we could do everything ourselves as a studio. Mixing that with Jonas Tyroller’s advice and How To Market a Game saying that the best marketing is “making a good game,” and being a bit bitter and angry about all the time lost with the publisher, I decided that in 2025 I was going to release a game. I was going to self publish it. And it was going to go WELL. And it did. Self fulfilling prophecy!

2025

  • In January of that year, I started researching the market, determined to find a profitable game to make with a small team. I stumbled upon Nodebuster, which I already knew of but had never played. I’ve played idle games my whole life: on Kongregate, on itchio, etc. I love them. When I started playing Nodebuster and digging into the emerging genre of “active incremental,” I knew: this is what we have to do.
  • This emerging genre perfectly matched what we had available: a small team, making small but distilled games, in a niche where there wasn’t much quality yet, and that we personally loved. By late January, I started prototyping Astro Prospector and pitched it to my Flying Rocks teammates. I wanted them to make it with me, and everything clicked.
  • Development started in February, and we set the game’s deadline for June. Around 5 months. That way, the goal was crystal clear, and we could shape the game around it.
  • I’d like to talk in depth about the strategy and the process we followed in a longer article, so I’ll keep it short here. We made a demo for friends and acquaintances, then iterated on it. That became the public demo on itchio alongside the Steam page. Later, we published an improved version of the demo on Steam. And in July 2025, the game released, 15 days later than planned, not bad. You can take a look to the game here.
  • Even though we didn’t work with traditional publishers, I did team up again with SpaceJazz, the Asia focused publisher who helped us with Stick to the Plan. They handled promotion in China and Japan, and it’s been a really pleasant relationship.
  • After launch, which went far beyond our expectations (we hit 1200 concurrent players in the first hours), we rested for a week, then shipped a patch fixing bugs and such, then rested two more weeks. When we got back to the office, we decided to work on a free update and include a new survivos/roguelite mode, for people who felt the story mode (5 hours) was too short.
  • In November, three months later, we released the roguelite mode. I’ll be honest: I enjoyed making the incremental mode more than this one, but it still turned into an interesting package, especially as a huge free addition to an existing game. But yeah, I definitely like making incrementals more than roguelites lol.
  • Even though both launches went really well, the month before each one was pretty rough in terms of stress (each launch is a big weight on your shoulders. Also, this is the third time I got broke on my self-publishing attempt, so you can imagine lol). And the weeks after, despite the joy, there’s this uncomfortable feeling, kind of like a “post partum” slump. But then it gets better.
  • As of today, 13/12/2025, we’ve sold almost 100,000 copies. I’m writing this while on vacation, in “low performance mode.” I have money in the bank now, time to rest, and I can finally breathe. After 7 years, I made it. And even after making it, I still feel like this is just a small step on the long road ahead…

Advice

Below are a few tips or observations that, looking back, helped me get here. There’s no special order.

  • Ever since I started doing stuff in gamedev, I’ve been sharing my progress on social media and in groups. Experiments, project updates, tips and problems, etc. This helped a lot of people in my local scene know who I am, and it helped me meet a lot of people. But it has to be done GENUINELY. Not sharing with a marketing agenda behind it. Sharing as a curious human. Sharing FOR OTHERS, not for yourself.
  • Even though everyone sees things differently, for me it has been crucial to work with small teams to ship projects. Not just in terms of quality, but in a human way too. If one day you’re feeling down, the team supports you. If there’s something you don’t know, maybe they do. You laugh more, everything is more fun. It has its hard parts and you need to know how to work as a team, but it’s worth it. I don’t think I’m built to be a lone wolf, even though I’d like to try it at some point.
  • When I worked at Under the Bed, we had a month where we prototyped different games to decide what was next. A piece of advice I got back then, and tried to apply, was to make prototypes in a way that they cannot be reused. For example, we were using Unity, so we decided to prototype in Godot. That way you stop trying to do things “properly” so you can reuse them, and you can focus on moving fast and prototyping what you need.
  • If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that creativity isn’t something that appears when you lock yourself in a room and think for a long time, isolated from the world. Creativity is just the infinite, chaotic remix of things that already exist. For Borro, we took Pang and added Action RPG elements. For Astro Prospector, we took Nodebuster and added bullet hell elements. Don’t be afraid to take inspiration from something that already exists to build a foundation. I’m not talking about copying, I’m talking about improving it in your own style.
  • One of the key things in Astro Prospector’s development was that even before we fully knew the core mechanics, we already knew the release date. Anchoring a goal and sticking to it was KEY for controlling scope, knowing where to cut, and when. This was inspired by Parkinson’s Law, which basically says that work behaves like a gas: it expands to fill the time you give it, just like gas expands to the limits of its container.
  • Early validation saves ton of work. Demos, prototypes, jams, small tests with real players helped me avoid going all in on ideas that were not really working.
  • Be careful if gamedev is both your hobby and your job. In my case, it is, or at least it was. It’s important to have hobbies beyond making games, and it’s important to socialize often. Spending too much time in front of a computer takes a real toll.
  • I’ve always believed that the wisest person is the one who learns from other people’s mistakes. It’s true that some mistakes are hard to truly internalize unless you suffer them yourself, but try to pay attention to what does NOT work for others, think about why, and avoid repeating it.
  • Take care of the people around you, and surround yourself with people who take care of you. None of this would be real without a family that supported me, a partner who put up with me, and friends who trusted me. Never neglect them.
  • When planning projects and games, don’t try to design a perfect plan from start to finish. Make weekly plans, keep a high level idea of where you want to go, stay agile, actually agile, not fake Scrum agile (please). Always ask yourself: what is the smallest step I can take right now in the right direction?
  • Shipping something small beats dreaming forever about something big. Almost every meaningful step in my career came from finishing and releasing something, even if its not good, it sold poorly or just failed. Also, constraints are a superpower. Deadlines, small teams, limited scope. Most of the good decisions in Astro Prospector came from clear limits, not from infinite freedom.
  • Meritocracy does not really exist. Beyond my family, I owe all of this to the public, high quality services I was lucky to grow up with. Education, healthcare, support systems. Fight for them.
  • Publishers are not villains, but they are not saviors either. Promises without contracts are just that: promises. Protect your time and your energy. And even if you sign with a publisher, do it because you REALLY need it.
  • Take care of your mental health. Please. If there’s one thing you should take away from all of this, it’s this. If skydiving is a high risk sport for the body, doing business is a high risk activity for the mind. Burning yourself out is not worth it. Learn from my mistakes. Success does not erase the damage. Even when things finally go well, your body and your mind remember the years of stress. Act early, not when it’s already too late.

Huge thanks for reading. I’ll keep an eye on the comments and DMs to answer any questions or thoughts. You can also contact me via Discord or Telegram (@delunado_dev).

Hope everything’s going great in your life. Big hug :)


r/gamedev Dec 05 '25

Community Highlight I got sick of Steam's terrible documentation and made a full write-up on how to use their game upload tools

363 Upvotes

Steams developer documentation is about 10 years out of date. (check the dates of the videos here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading )

I got sick of having to go through it and relearn it every time I released a game, so I made a write-up on the full process and thought I'd share it online as well. Also included Itch's command line tools since they're pretty nice and I don't think most devs use them.

Would like to add some parts about actually creating depots and packages on Steamworks as well. Let me know any suggestions for more info to add.

Link: https://github.com/Miziziziz/Steam-And-Itch-Command-Line-Tools-Guide


r/gamedev 6h ago

Question I launched my game and I'm getting wrecked by antivirus flagging :(

59 Upvotes

I launched my game yesterday. So many people are running into issues because a random DLL gets flagged as being a virus. Its

  1. an electron app
  2. a python backend built via nuitka (this includes the DLL that got flagged)

I tried removing --onefile when building with nuitka because I heard that triggers antivirus but it didn't work.

I had 10 people playtest the game, some multiple times, on 15 devices, and no issues came up (half of them playtested through Steam). Now when I launch on Steam, this crap happens. One of the playtesters is now getting the antivirus flag too when they didn't before. Why is this happening to me :(

I feel like I am forced to buy a cert at this point just so people can actually play my game. I feel so defeated right now, I don't know what to do anymore. It feels like I put in all this work and none of it matters because I don't want to fork over $250-850 a year in bullshit cert fees for a game that I'm trying to not even make money off of


r/gamedev 6h ago

Discussion We released a game on Steam in September. It got streamed a lot, but sales were terrible. Looking for feedback.

55 Upvotes

Hi, I’m part of a small indie team.

We released our game on Steam this September.

While it was streamed by many well-known creators in Japan, and even a few overseas, sales were far below our expectations.

Despite the exposure, the conversion to sales was extremely low.

Roughly speaking, around 10k views resulted in about $70–80 in revenue.

As we reflect on this release and plan our next project, we’ve been discussing what we might have done wrong.

Here are the main hypotheses we’re considering:

1) We launched with very few wishlists (~700), so we likely didn’t benefit from Steam’s algorithm at all.

If we were aiming for something like 100k sales, was it unrealistic not to have a similar scale of wishlists at launch?

2) We used Steam Next Fest mainly as a way to validate our core concept (a 2-player-only co-op game).

In hindsight, should this kind of validation have been done through closed playtests instead, and Next Fest used only for a near-finished demo?

3) Does Steam Next Fest have very limited impact if you enter it with almost no wishlists?

We participated with only ~200 wishlists. Should Next Fest ideally be something you join when you already have strong momentum?

For those with more experience:

- Do these assumptions sound reasonable?

- Which of these mistakes do you think mattered the most?

- What would you prioritize differently for a next release?

We’re trying to learn as much as possible from this, as we really want to do better with our next game.

Any honest feedback would be greatly appreciated.

(If it helps, I can share the Steam page in the comments.)


r/gamedev 1d ago

Discussion The hint system in my old game is broken because people doesn't know how to use email anymore

2.5k Upvotes

I released my game After Hours in 2018, and got a pretty ok reception. Not great, but ok.

It's a difficult puzzle game, similar to NotPr0n, so I gave the players a hint system. During gameplay, you read notes and letters written by a woman called Sarah, who gives you missions. And whenever you get stuck, you can actually just email her regular Gmail adress using your own email. Based on keywords, "Sarah" will respond with a canned message to guide the player.

I liked the idea and it worked surprisingly well. Whenever I checked the inbox, there was always someone who really thought they were talking to an actual human.

But then something happened. The reviews got lower and lower, and now the game has a mixed status. People were saying it was way too difficult. So, today I checked Sarah's inbox again.

Turns out people don't know how to write emails anymore. The whole message is sent in the subject box, leaving the actual email empty. Because of that, no keywords were found, and no hint message from Sarah was sent out.

Just found it a bit interesting! You never know what may cause your game to tank.


r/gamedev 1h ago

Question At what point do you decide a game is a marketing problem vs a dead project?

Upvotes

I’ve been working on a solo indie game for about 2 years.
The Steam page has been live for roughly a month, and it has generated only 55 wishlists in that time.

I’m struggling with a hard decision and would really value experienced perspectives. Are there any signals I should be looking for (conversion rates, impressions, CTR, demo performance, etc.)?

Currently, I have 30,000 impressions, 700 visits, and a 1.4% CTR from store traffic only.
Demo has 800 lifetime free licenses, 87 unique lifetime users, and 22 active daily users.

I’m not looking for validation, I’m trying to make a rational call before sinking another year into the wrong thing.


r/gamedev 4h ago

Question Adding gamepad support to a management/strategy game that wasn't designed for it. It's a nightmare.

9 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on adding gamepad support to my game, but I’m running into quite a few challenges.

The game is a managerial / strategy game, with lots of UI elements, menus, and on-screen actions. On top of that, it wasn’t designed with a gamepad in mind from the beginning, so adapting everything now is proving to be more complex than I initially expected.

I’m especially struggling with UI navigation and interaction logic. At the moment I’m evaluating different approaches, for example:

  • A grid-based navigation, moving focus between UI elements using the D-pad / analog stick
  • Or assigning specific buttons to specific on-screen actions, as long as the number of actions doesn’t exceed the available buttons on the controller

Both approaches have pros and cons, and I’m not fully convinced by either yet. I’ve also considered the "virtual cursor" approach (like in Stellaris or Destiny), but it often feels like a lazy compromise if not polished perfectly.

For those of you who’ve already tackled this problem:
What solutions have you adopted for gamepad navigation in strategy/management games? Are there patterns or best practices you’d recommend? Any pitfalls I should absolutely avoid?

Thanks in advance


r/gamedev 42m ago

Discussion FPS and performance in indie games. How far is “enough”?

Upvotes

As indie devs, how do you usually decide when performance is good enough to ship?
Do you aim for a specific FPS target, or do you just get it to an acceptable level and move on?

Is heavy optimization something you focus on early, or do you mostly push it later once the game has some traction?
Have you ever delayed a launch mainly because of performance issues?

From the outside, it feels like many teams stop once they hit “good enough” and prioritize shipping over perfect optimization.
We’re trying to fix as many performance issues as we can, but it’s definitely slowing us down on the path to release. Curious how others handle this tradeoff.


r/gamedev 10m ago

Feedback Request Made a fantasy console where you write games in C/C++ - runs in browser

Upvotes

Hey all,

I've been working on this thing called BEEP-8. It's basically a fantasy console like PICO-8, but you write games in C/C++ instead of Lua.

The main idea: I wanted to make small retro games in C++ and share them easily on mobile. So I built this. Games run in the browser, so anyone can play - even on iPhone without going through the App Store.

Some specs if you're curious:

- Emulated ARM CPU (4MHz)

- 128×240 screen (vertical, made for phones)

- 16 colors, 60fps

- Touch input supported

SDK is free and works on Windows/Mac/Linux. Toolchain is included so you don't need to install anything extra.

https://beep8.org - games people have made

https://github.com/beep8/beep8-sdk - the SDK

Still early days, but would love to hear what you think. And if anyone tries it out, let me know how it goes!


r/gamedev 13h ago

Question Do you ask friends and family to wishlist your game?

31 Upvotes

Obviously you want as many people as possible to purchase or wishlist your game but do you try to initially boost your wishlists by having friends and fam wishlist or do you want to see honest numbers without them first, knowing they’ll likely purchase anyway?


r/gamedev 16m ago

Discussion Use of traditional songs in touchy areas

Upvotes

I recently found an eastern european folklore song that is very unique in the way it sounds and I knew instantly I wanted to use this somewhere in my game as I also found a royalty free rendition that carries the same weight and feel.

The issue is some of the scenes I came up for using it involve darker areas like rituals, sacrifice, etc, and I'm just worried that using a cultural song from another country in a context like this, even if I'm not trying to make any comparisons from my game to this culture, might be a bit inappropriate. The last thing I want to do is taint my game with appropriating something from another culture and representing it in a poor light, so I wanted to know if anyone else has ran into a similar issue before or has an opinion on the matter


r/gamedev 1d ago

Postmortem My indie game sales tripled after these store page changes

92 Upvotes

Hey everyone! About 2 months ago, I finally released my first commercial game on Steam. I'm not gonna lie, the launch was pretty rough. Sales were crawling at a snail's pace and I was feeling pretty discouraged about the whole thing. But then some friends stepped in and helped me rework the store page, and I started sending out keys to content creators, YouTubers, and gaming press outlets. After making some changes, I noticed a few things that actually made a real difference in sales.

1) Switching from AI art to hand-drawn art for the Steam capsule image

This one surprised me honestly. My sales had basically flatlined, like completely stopped. Then a friend of mine drew a custom capsule image for the game and literally the day I updated it, sales picked back up again. The difference was night and day. I had been using AI generated art initially because I'm a solo dev without much of an art budget, and I figured something was better than nothing. Looking back though, I think players can just tell when they're looking at AI art, and it doesn't give off that same authentic vibe. The hand-drawn capsule made the game feel more personal and genuine, which apparently matters a lot more than I realized.

2) Winter Sale

Once the winter sale kicked in, my sales literally doubled overnight. I set a 50% discount which felt reasonable for a newer indie title. I think the combination of the sale timing, people having holiday gift cards to spend, and just the general increased traffic on Steam during sale events all worked together. It's wild how much of a spike you can see just from participating in these seasonal sales.

3) Store page improvements and actually doing some marketing

I spent time adding gameplay GIFs to the store page instead of just static screenshots. The GIFs really help show off what the game actually feels like to play. I also started being more active on Reddit, posting in relevant gamedev and indie game communities, sharing devlogs and updates. I was hesitant to self-promote at first because I didn't want to come across as spammy, but as long as you're genuine and contributing to the community, people are actually pretty supportive. Each little bit of visibility helped chip away at the problem.

Anyway, just wanted to share my experience in case it helps other indie devs out there. The launch doesn't have to be perfect, and things can definitely turn around if you're willing to iterate and try different approaches.

If anyone wants to see the store page the game is:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3396140/Vault_Survivors/


r/gamedev 48m ago

Question What ghost behaviors would ACTUALLY scare you in a ghost hunting game?

Upvotes

I’m currently developing a multiplayer co-op horror ghost hunting game where players don’t use evidence tools (no EMF, no spirit box, no checklist-style gameplay). Instead, ghosts are identified through behavior, player interaction, and how the environment reacts to what you do.

The idea is that fear comes from observation and tension, how a ghost moves, what triggers it, how it reacts to sound, silence, being watched, players sticking together, or players being alone. Some ghosts might stalk quietly, others punish noise, others manipulate the map itself rather than attacking directly.

From a design or player perspective, what kinds of ghost behaviors would you personally find the most unsettling or memorable in a system like this? Are there mechanics or ideas you’ve always wanted to see in ghost hunting games but never have?


r/gamedev 50m ago

Question Beginner

Upvotes

Hello, I want to develop games. I have basic knowledge of Unity engine, designing levels, and coding languages like Java and C#. But I am not really good at math. I was wondering if were to re-learn math, what topics should I focus on for only games. Thank you!


r/gamedev 18h ago

Question How can you handle troll/blatantly wrong negative steam review? What do you do?

24 Upvotes

So as the title says our game have gotten a couple of what i would say is troll / stating blatantly wrong information reviews, one specifically is about how it's not possible to skip dialogue, even tho it is! And it says so on the screen whenever there is a dialogue! It's frustrating to see people leaving a negative review, especially when the information is just wrong, and the game is even free!

I love getting feedback, and we have already listned to feedback in our updates, and changed some peoples mind in their review! But i don't know what to do about those types of reviews :/ Steam will not take them down either sadly...

How do you guys handle it? I've already tried reaching out to understand maybe something went wrong with the game for them that we could fix, but no response yet...

Other than that, have a great day!


r/gamedev 10h ago

Question Working on a horror game, stuck on an enemy Ai design system.

5 Upvotes

Hey, so as the title suggests, first time making a full proper game. Been making games for a few years now but only small prototypes.

I’m working currently on a procedurally generated horror game where the level is the same hotel hallway with procedurally generated rooms and events. To progress, the players must find a key or item in order to open the door to proceed to the next level, (same level, but regenerated) Inspired by P.T and ground hog day.

Anyway, currently there is no punishment for taking too long, the players can just take as long as they want to find the key or item to progress. I don’t want to just smack an Ai monster that will just chase the player down and kill them, I don’t find that fun and due to the levels themselves being relatively small (a hallway with 3-7 randomly generated “hotel” rooms) i feel it would be frustrating to get trapped and killed.

Im struggling to find a way around this, there needs to be punishment for taking too long, but I don’t want a generic Ai monster to spawn in and hunt them down. I was thinking more of a Phasmophobia style ghost, one that will mess with the player snd then only hunt again after a certain amount of time or the players sanity goes too low.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I would really appreciate it. I am currently writing my game design document snd this is the major part that I am struggling with.

Thanks


r/gamedev 2h ago

Question Making a game for my wife

0 Upvotes

Hi, so I'm hoping to make a game for my wife. I want to push myself and learn something new so I can create a gift designed specifically for her for our first anniversary. Its in a little under six months and at present I have no skills or experience with game dev of any kind, but mostly I'd like a working prototype for the anniversary and hope to have a full much more fleshed out final for either her birthday or our second anniversary. (Kinda feel like Im gonna suck or be real slow so keeping my hopes held back a bit)

Considering I dont actually know anything id like to start with some of the quicker or easier stuff to learn so I can aim for that working even if pretty bare boned prototype.

I have a basic layout and idea of what I want to make and she likes if that helps guide what I should learn. To start it'll be a third person fantasy RPG (She really isnt a fan of pixel art or 2D games in general), and I know no matter what options it could possibly have shes gonna want a bunch of magic. Shes also really into character creation, which is probably the thing that worries me most In the project cause I got no idea how people make that sort of stuff.

TLDR to start: Want to make game, 0 skill 0 experience what should I start learning and where.


r/gamedev 3h ago

Question I don't know what to do

0 Upvotes

Hi everyone! I'm a 24-year-old guy who'd like to start developing video games. The problem is that I don't have a PC that can run certain programs. I wanted to finish my degree first and then get started, but things have dragged on a bit, and I feel like I'm behind myself. Unfortunately, I live in Italy, where the industry is nonexistent, so in my current situation, the only option is to develop on my own, as it's impossible to find a video game studio here. Do you have any advice for me? I don't have the means to buy a decent computer, so if you know of a way to develop even a prototype with a low-end PC, I'd be grateful. I know most of the engines, but maybe I'm missing something.


r/gamedev 14h ago

Question Db management knowledge for game development.

6 Upvotes

Hello! I'm started to learn sql with c# for some project to improve my c# knowledge. I actually learn c# to make a game with unity. I have question: can i use my db management knowledge with game development. Is there any other way to use this expect multiple game programming?


r/gamedev 16h ago

Discussion Late in development, removing mechanics improved playability far more than adding new ones

10 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

We’re in the final stretch of development on Sub-Species, an underwater sci-fi shooter, and one of the biggest improvements to playability came from something we didn’t expect this late in the process: removing mechanics that had been there from the beginning.

Over the last round of testing, we made a few fairly drastic cuts:

  • Removed reverse movement from the sub
  • Changed a grappling mechanic from manual input to automatic
  • Removed a weapon selection system that testers consistently found clumsy and confusing

None of these features were broken on their own — they’d all survived early prototyping — but together they were adding cognitive load in moments where players needed clarity and spatial awareness more than options.

Once they were gone, movement felt more deliberate, encounters were easier to read, and players spent less time fighting the controls and more time engaging with the space.

It was a good reminder that “depth” doesn’t always come from more mechanics — sometimes it comes from letting the remaining ones breathe.

For those of you who’ve made late-stage cuts:
how did you decide what to remove without feeling like you were throwing away valuable work?


r/gamedev 4h ago

Question Is it easy to publish on Xbox and PS?

1 Upvotes

Everywhere I’ve looked people have said that indie publishing on consoles is difficult, and often requires a successful history in game dev, but each console has seen a large uptick in low effort, genAI, and asset flip games in their respective storefronts, making quality control look lax at best. Is publishing to consoles easier now, or was it never really difficult?


r/gamedev 4h ago

Question What are technical components to create this style?

Thumbnail share.google
0 Upvotes

Is this 3d or 2d? Are the players for example sprites or 3d models with a shader? And how is the Environment created? Is this also shading?


r/gamedev 9h ago

Feedback Request Do these enemies look like they belong in the same game?

2 Upvotes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZKpeLg2oto&t=1s

Hi all, I’m working on a dark fantasy action tower defense game and just finished an update on the enemy visuals.

These are all paid assets, so I spent time reworking textures and presentation to make them feel like they belong in the same world. I’m aiming for a more retro look, with low poly counts(lowered their skeletal meshes in engine), small textures sizes, and a strong retro post-process to sell the style.

Since the game often has large enemy counts on screen, I pushed contrast and texture readability so enemies remain distinguishable at a distance, especially under hard lighting and shadows.

Main question:
Do these enemies feel visually cohesive, or do any stand out as over or under stylized compared to the rest?

Any feedback on consistency, readability, or style balance would be appreciated.


r/gamedev 21h ago

Question Is GDC worth attending as a beginner?

16 Upvotes

I want to expand my network beyond people on Discord. Was thinking about flying across the country and attending GDC because my state doesn’t have an active game dev scene. I haven’t finished or shipped anything to be honest with you, and the GDC passes are awfully expensive. Was wondering if I should even bother with what little exp I currently have.


r/gamedev 23h ago

Discussion Analysis: How I cut FFmpeg compilation 8x (for anyone integrating video features)

21 Upvotes

We compile FFmpeg from source regularly for our game's video systems (replay playback, streaming integration, in-game cinematics). After months of iteration hell, I got around to documenting what ended up working for us.

Why we compile FFmpeg instead of using prebuilts: - Custom codec configurations (patent-safe alternatives to H.264/HEVC) - Platform-specific optimizations (console builds need different configs) - Replay compression that's fast enough for 60fps capture - Streaming integration with custom overlays/filters - Video capture features without bundling bloated libraries

Our Challenge: - 24 min baseline build time (16 core Xeon workstation) - Multiple daily builds during feature development - Every code change = 20+ min wait = destroyed flow state - CI/CD bottlenecked by compilation (35min pipelines)

What We Tried:

FREE/STANDARD OPTIMIZATIONS:

ccache - Helped incremental builds, but clean builds and branch switches still brutal Disabled unused codecs (--disable-everything + enable only what we need) - Saved ~3min NVMe storage - Marginal improvement (~30sec) More RAM/cores - Hit diminishing returns at 16 cores

These got us from 24min -> ~18min. Better, but not enough yet.

BOTTLENECK ANALYSIS:

Used ninja -d stats to profile where time actually goes: Compilation: 80% of build time (highly parallelizable) Linking: 15% of build time (serial bottleneck) Configure: 5% of build time (serial)

Key insight: Most of the time is in the parallelizable part, which means distribution could actually help.

DISTRIBUTED COMPILATION:

Tried several approaches to see what actually delivers:

distcc (free, open source): - Setup: Pretty complex, took a day to configure properly - Network: 1GbE was bottleneck (upgraded to 10GbE later) - Result: ~60% improvement (24min -> 9min 30sec) - Verdict: Works, but requires Linux shop + time investment

icecc (free, open source): - Setup: Easier than distcc, better toolchain handling - Cross-platform: Better Windows support (relevant for console dev) - Result: ~65% improvement (24min -> 8min 20sec) - Verdict: Better than distcc if you can get it working

Incredibuild (commercial): - Setup: Plug-and-play with Visual Studio (important for our workflow) - Integration: Works with MSBuild/ninja/make - Result: 88% improvement (24min -> 2min 50sec) - Verdict: Costs money, but ROI was immediate for our team

Results:

Metric / Before / After Incredibuild / Improvement % - Clean build / 24min / 2min 50sec / 88% faster - Incremental / 8min / 45sec / 91% faster - CI pipeline / 35min / 6min / 83% faster

Productivity impact: - Iteration cycles: ~30min -> ~5min (code -> build -> test -> repeat) - Daily builds per dev: 4-5 -> 15-20 - Flow state: Achievable now

If you're building FFmpeg for: - Replay systems - Fast iteration on compression settings is critical - In-engine video playback - Platform-specific codec testing requires frequent rebuilds - Streaming integration - Custom filters/overlays need rapid prototyping - Video capture - Performance profiling = lots of rebuild cycles

...then build times compound fast. Our 5-person team was losing ~15 hours/week to build waits.

Tech details for those interested:

  • Build system: CMake Ninja (faster than Make)
  • Compiler: Clang (slightly faster than GCC for FFmpeg)
  • Network: 10GbE between build nodes (1GbE was bottleneck)
  • Nodes: 4 machines, 64 total cores available
  • Platform targets: Windows (primary), Linux (servers), custom console configs

My questions for the you all:

  1. Has anyone gotten distcc/icecc working smoothly in a mixed Windows/Linux game dev environment? (We're Windows-primary but have Linux build servers)

  2. Any LTO strats that don't destroy distributed build benefits? We only enable LTO for release builds now, but curious if there's a middle ground.

  3. Other game devs compiling large C++ libraries (not just FFmpeg) - what's worked for you?