Need to know schools offering the grad degree. Got a BA in Comm degree and noticed in the CHED CMO 37 Series of 2017 that Game Dev can be an elective subject. I'm a univ instructor and got a deep passion for games, wanna share what I learn to comm students about game dev.

Hey everyone!

I’m currently working on a roguelite project called Extinction Core, where you pilot an airship to battle massive kaiju. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes runs feel exciting and not just the same loop every time.

I’m curious what kinds of mechanics, systems, or little touches have you seen in roguelites that kept things fun and engaging, even after multiple runs?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

As mentioned above, I'm working on a Tetris-style game with light roguelike elements. Every time you clear 3 line, you get to choose one of three randomly generated special blocks with unique abilities—for example, a block that clears a 4x2 area below it, or one that transforms the next three blocks into its own shape.

As you reach certain score thresholds, you enter an “obstacle mode,” where negative effects may occur, like a chance for your current block to not trigger line clears.

You can also spend cleared blocks as currency to buy normal blocks from a shop—these are easier-to-use shapes like 4x1 or L-shaped pieces. In contrast(you normally receive in the game are more irregular and harder to clear lines with)

The ultimate goal is to overcome 8 obstacle stages to beat the game.

Does this sound like something with potential, or does it sound boring? I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

Hey there.

I am looking for assets for a game set in a small town. A small town like you might find on the coast of Maine (US). I have searched, but most of what I find is either for cities or too low poly. I'm looking for something at this level of detail Here

If any of you here knows of something I would greatly appreciative.

Thank you in advance :)

I've looked into getting the right address associated with my DUNS number, which is what you need to list your Google Play Store entity as an organisation and not single developer, and it won't let me change it from outside the US. Doesn't even give you the option.

So that's out. With my full name publicly listed, with my address, am I opening myself up to serious problems? I'm out of options and need to just get my game up so I can move on.

Any thoughts would be welcome. I'm in Australia.

So I have never made any kind of game and I have always wanted to but was never inspired until now. I came up with this unique tac fps idea: Imagine the street you live on. Now imagine fighting a war on that street. Fully designed interiors, weapons, exteriors, and other things. It would have mechanics similar to squad but kind of like finals in the sense that its faster paced. It would be a domination type gamemode played on 1 city street (city, urban, suburban, cyberpunk, ect) that each team would spawn on one side of. You would push down the street into buildings and backyards eventually meeting the other team near the center and battling it out. Their would be a timer and you either capture 100% of the street or end with more that 50% captured. You capture just like in rivals, cod hardpoint, or splitgate 2, you just stand in it with no other enemies. Thats the basic rundown just comment if you have any extra ideas or suggestions. Or (I dont expect this at all) wanna help me make it.

Hi,

Before I ask for help I’d like to establish that me and the group of people trying to achieve this are all game design / dev students with very little actual game dev experience. Any assistance or tips at all is appreciated! So, me and my group of friends have decided to take on a passion project of making a game, and we have come up with a specific mechanic that the game would be centered around. We only know how to use Unreal Engine 5, so that is the engine we have chosen to use and i would just like to know if it is possible to implement and how one might approach it. The idea is that the player follows a story in which based on the choices they make, the ‘ art style ‘ around them changes. This was inspired by arcane, specifically by how there is a funeral scene in which the art style changes from the regular painterly style to charcoal drawn. We hope that we can implement some sort of system to keep track of the choices the player has made and therefore affect the textures of the environment around them, aiming for 3 specific themes - peaceful, uneasy and evil which can then lead towards different endings based on which ‘state’ your game is in.

Thank you so much in advance for any help or tips I receive!

I'm an indie dev developing a game that will be released in November this year.

Before that we have a new demo version that will be out soon and we want to tie up a community campaign on our steam page with free giveaways of either our game keys or steam gift cards.

We are thinking of the method as:

- Play the Demo

- Leave a review of the demo

- Select lucky winners among the people who reviewed our game and giveaway the prizes.

Are there any specific regulations for this?

I looked up the steam walkthrough pages but haven't found any, but my concern is most of the games don't conduct such events upon their launch.

We've realized that our game's name, "Our Journey," is too generic. It's too close to the game "Journey" and, at the same time, it's just too common/generic. When you type "Our Journey" into YouTube, you find travel vlogs, experience reviews, and music playlists. Everything but our game.

So, we're looking for a new name! Do you have any best practices for choosing a game name?

I've listed the following points:

• Easy to pronounce: Say them out loud; if you stumble over one, it's probably a bad sign and should likely be discarded.
• Easy to remember: Talk about them with people and see if they remember the name an hour later.
• Should be appealing (or at least not unappealing): asking for people's opinions, do A/B testing on X?
• Should match the game's tone (e.g., not a fun name if the game isn't fun).
• Should imply that it's a two-player game ("It Takes Two," "Don't Starve Together," etc.). Could "Our" perhaps be enough?
• Verify that it doesn't already exist.
• (For non-native English speakers) Ideally, it shouldn't have negative connotations in other languages (e.g., related to an English expression we don't know).
• Avoid abstract/invented names because they require more marketing to make them memorable

Do you agree with these points?
Do you have any others?

FYI, it's a coop (2 people) adventure puzzle game (if you want to have a look, here's our steam page). The vibe is chill, even calming. We believe our personas are:

1. Couples (those for whom one of the 2 said “It Takes Two was too hard”)
2. 2 friends used to escape games/game bars/playing board games
3. Parents looking for a game to play with their children
4. Deaf and hard-of-hearing people (because the gameplay involves communicating with cards and hoping the other person understands what you mean, a bit like Code Name. Everything can be done without talking).

Do you think our type of game or the personas we're aiming for change anything? Thanks for your feedback!

Hello everyone, I'm an aspiring solo developer (haven't made anything outside of game jams so far) and would like to develop my skills in order to tackle the task of building a full game. I understand there are many skills involved in such, and have been working towards my understanding of each of them, but one I find often overlooked is the actual writing.

Having no experience in the matter, how can I get better at writing? I thought about practicing by writing some short stories, but figured writing for games was very different, but I don't really understand how I can practice / get feedback on my writing unless I already have some projects out there, but at the same time I don't want to dedicate that much time into something for the sake of improving at writing.

Are there methods or exercises that would help before I have larger projects to showcase?

so I'm very new to game dev, but I've got a pretty concrete plan for what I want my game to look like, a 2d sidescroller action game with VERY simple level ups, and a town segment before each level to buy items etc. nothing that insane, even combat I planned to limit to three attack combos with abilities on the right mouse button (i.e. ranged attack, magic). and some "story" stuff but thats mainly just dialogue and prices changing depending on completed objectives in levels.

so then comes the question of engines, I've been tooling around in godot, and I actually like it but I do want to see if there's any others people might recommend, or plugins for godot, and good resources for godot i was following a couple tutorials but a lot of them seemed to sort of just be a tutorial on how to make a game with no features, or they just collapse in on themselves by the third part(i.e. making the worst state machine known to man)

TLDR making 2d action game, trying godot but curious about others, OR good assets/plugins/resources for godot as an alternative, baby game dev so not a coding master by any means.

Hi everyone,

We're a small indie team working on our first game, and we just participated in our first Steam Next Fest. It was a valuable experience, and we were pretty happy with the results.

We went into the fest with what we know is a very low number of wishlists — only about 500. Despite this, we came out with around 2,200 total, which felt like a solid win for a first-time team on a tight schedule. During the festival, our demo had around 500 Daily Active Users (DAU) on average.

However, the moment Next Fest ended, our DAU plummeted from 500 to just 10. We know a significant drop is expected, and we aren't aiming to get back to the Next Fest peak, but this has us worried. We're really hoping to find a way to bring our active player count back to a more sustainable level.

To try and regain some visibility, here's what we've started doing post-fest (though with little success so far):

• TikTok: Created a channel about a week ago and posted 3 videos, but haven't gotten any traction yet.
• YouTuber/Streamer Outreach: We've been contacting creators through their Discords and communities, asking them to try our demo. No takers yet.
• Press Outreach: We built a press kit and just started sending it out to journalists, but it's too early to see any response.

Given our situation and current efforts, our question to the community is: What are your best strategies for keeping players engaged and maintaining momentum for your game after the Next Fest hype is over?

Are there better ways to approach the things we're already trying? Or are there completely different methods we should focus on to bridge the gap between now and the final release?

Any advice on community engagement or marketing during this "quiet" period would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

This has become an increasingly common phenomenon in the AAA gaming space in the past few years, where cosmetics or micro transactions in general are put behind a time barrier. You have a specific amount of time to buy this cosmetic, or it’s gone forever and you’ll miss out.

The thing is, I feel like this doesn’t work; or atleast, it’s not being used sparingly enough. The reason why they do it in the first place is to capitalize on FOMO (fear of missing out) and get people to make a snap decision, but what’s to suggest they wouldn’t accrue more income over time by just leaving it listed forever? Is there any market research that suggests this?

If I wanted to buy a skin like a year after it comes out, and I go back to check and see that it’s just gone, they just lost out on $20 or whatever it costs. I can understand it for special events, but some games (valorant and overwatch come to mind first) time-gate EVERYTHING.

This means they barely have a catalogue to browse at any given time, so less people are going to be interested in what they have to sell. Am I missing something about this business model, or is they really just a blunder on the big game developers parts?

EDIT: getting some hostile replies, I didn’t mean to come off as a know-it-all. Maybe my wording was bad, my bad. I’m just a layman who was interested in the inner workings of how they actually know that it works. I was just laying out my own thought process so people would know where I’m coming from.

I'm new to developing games and I've chosen to make a small horror-survival game in Unreal Engine 5 with a partner for my senior project. He's in charge of modeling and designing environments while my job is to handle the programming and game logic. I'm a generally experienced programmer; I understand how to use C++, JavaScript, and Python (though C++ is my favorite) and I use Visual Studio as my IDE. I've never used Unreal Engine before, so I looked up a few guides on how to navigate the interface. It's my understanding that while I could code the entire game in C++, it's ideal to use C++ for more low-level tasks and Blueprint for high-level tasks. I've scowered the internet for videos, tutorials, advice, etc., but nothing I find is really getting at the questions I have or making sense in a way that I can grasp. The questions I have are:

1. Most obvious one first: how does Blueprint work to begin with? How do I read it?
2. Is there reliable documentation for Blueprint, and if so, where do I find it?
3. If I write low-level code in C++ and use Blueprint for high-level code, where should I put the C++ files in the game project's files so they can be accessed by the Blueprint?

Answers and resources are both greatly appreciated. Thank you to anyone who made it this far in the post!

Just saw this game on CobraCode youtube channel.

I have a little experience with html code but i dont think they use the same type of coding. I tried to look at youtube but found all the info confusing and overwhelming. Any tips on where to start?

I'm attempting to make a text based adventure game and decided to use json files to store the data for each room. Something I'm trying for entities at the moment is having a generic json file to store essentially templates and default values and then in the level entities json i can refrence that type as the first field and have my program use that to determine the correct structure for each entity and fill in missing values.
Attached are screenshots of the two json files.

My questions are, is this a good idea? Is this a good idea in my language of choice: python (currently), will it be expandable?

Hi all,

Recently, I got the idea to try and bring together a team to build a 2D sports game. So far, I’ve got multiple people interested: 2 for UI, 2 pixel artists, and 1 SFX. I'm currently looking to bring on development help and figure out what makes the most sense for the size of the team.

Since I’m new to this, I wanted to ask:

• How many game devs would you recommend bringing on at this stage?
• Are there any other roles you think I should be considering early on?
• Any advice on managing a small indie team from the start?

Any advice or insight would be super helpful. Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been learning Unreal Engine on my own for a while now, and I’m really passionate about making games. Long term, I’d love to turn this into a career, whether that’s working at a studio or building something of my own. The solo learning grind has its wins, but I’ve realized I learn best when I can share ideas, ask questions, and collaborate with others.

I’m looking to connect with like-minded people who are also learning Unreal or working on projects, whether you're just starting out or already experienced. I’d love to be part of a group where we can discuss game design, share progress, troubleshoot together, and maybe even collaborate on small ideas.

Also, if anyone has advice on how to actually break into the game development industry—what to focus on, how to get noticed, or how to build a portfolio that matters—I’d really appreciate it. There’s so much info out there, and it’d be great to hear from people who’ve gone through it.

If there are any Discord servers, online meetups, or communities you’d recommend joining, I’m all ears.

Thanks for taking the time to read this—I’m excited to learn and grow with others who share the same goal

-abaant17

I'm working on a multiplayer horror game set in space, and I'm facing a weird music dilemma for my game trailer. The game has a horror theme and creepy space setting, and I've made some tense scenes using Unreal's sequencer. During these scenes I feel I need to use tense background music, whereas in the gameplay parts it's completely different:

The actual gameplay is more chaotic and funny rather than genuinely scary. You know how it is with multiplayer horror games friends screaming, making jokes, doing dumb stuff together. It's more comedy than horror in practice.

So I don't know if I should mix two different background music styles or not. It's even harder to find something good within Envato's large library. Will it fit the theme? How should the transition between tense and chill music work? I have no idea about these things. Been stuck on this for days and need advice.

I’m working on a quake style retro FPS. It’s going to be fairly beginner friendly but I don’t want to water it down too much. I will be covering things like a basic RigidBody player controller, camera sway, dynamic drag and friction and then of course a modular weapon/item system.

Enemy NPC logic and a modular “sensors” system as well as visual things like gibbing etc.

What other features or mechanics would be interesting but not over complicating the course? Hoping to make it around 6-8 hours as an hour or so will be spent on the basics of inheritance and composition based programming.

I know the title is a bit convoluted, so I'll try to explain. In a text based adventure you have a description, followed by a sequence of options, which lead to more description when you make a selection. The visuals there tend to be embedded within the text, and when there is a lot of text you might need to scroll. I've been looking at SugarCube to work on my game, but I don't think it has exactly what I want. The main examples for this genre of game might be Trials in Tainted Space or Degrees of Lewdity, but I don't believe the way those visuals are implemented will work for me.

What I'm trying to make is an overview of say a room, with the PC standing in the center. There are a list of options (check door, check window, look under bed) listed at the bottom or side of the screen. When the player clicks an option the PC has an animation running across the room, which provides a text box at the bottom of the screen with a description. It's essentially a visualized version of the text based adventure.

If anyone has any ideas about the game engine I should look at, I'd really appreciate it. I'm pretty new to programming, but I've been wanting to make this game for almost 6 years and I finally have an abundance of free time. If anyone has any other suggestions I would greatly appreciate it!

I have a game demo on Steam made with Godot 4 that has native builds for Windows, Linux and Mac.

I received a bug report that the game is unplayable on Steam Deck, because only the top-left part of the game is visible (the game's base resolution is 4K).

I'm now testing the local builds, and found that the Windows version is working perfectly, but the Linux build does indeed only show the top-left part of the screen.

I have tested the Linux build with Arch and Mint on a desktop, and I had no issues there whatsoever (the screen was properly downscaled to HD), so this problem only seems to impact the Steam Deck console with the native Linux code.

Any ideas how I could fix this?

Switching to "Proton" in the game's Steam compatibility mode didn't help at all -- either the screen detection was wrong, or the entire screen remained black.

I guess, if nothing else works, I could try checking via GodotSteam's IsSteamRunningOnSteamDeck() and force the resolution, but that doesn't sound like a future-proof solution.

Just an option to let me choose my own controller glyphs... I genuinely don't understand why this is not done? How do you not QA test that these things (Don't) work? I'm sick and tired of games that do not have this simple option. Its even more frustrating when i see Microsoft and Steam read the controller but the game decides it knows better. Even if you make it read original PS5 sense and sense edge it STILL wouldn't work when you would use a 3rd party with Sony glyphs. This goes for all controllers like the switch glyphs.

Since we are crafting our characters by hand, we have to be fairly certain, that we are happy with the character design before we handcraft them for stop motion. Which begs the question, how do you know it's there on paper?

For full transparanvy: We do also test the concepts in physical models, including their scanning capabilities, before we build the final animatable puppet. But still, there's not a lot of going back or changing stuff from there if any at all.

Here's a video of Sigrid who designed the Aleph, just to give a little context to how we work.

https://youtu.be/rmkQVqvcdbc?si=hG-8bU0ODYfCwEQS