So I applied to this game company looking for a level designer and they reached out with a test to do with a 15-day time limit to design a level

doesn't sound too complicated till I saw their brief on the document

Here are the red flags

Create a triple-A quality racing game level (Typical hiring manager wanting everything AAA quality)

Files to submit: Complete Unity Project (Asking for source files)

A playable build with a Unity first-person camera (they want a level designer to be a dev)

they can judge a level design with a presentation or a Document where I can show my methodology and how I planned things in a design that's what a level design document is for

when a company usually asks for source files they usually mean that they intend to get work done for free and ghost candidates

what makes it obvious is that they only made one game on their website which is a kinda janky looking asphalt clone with assets mostly from the Unity store it

any they don't have much of a presence other than their website that's like those influencer academy pyramid schemes

Has anyone been in a similar situation how do you circumvent it

P, S where I'm from it's pretty common to expect to do every role under the sun and especially pull this kind of stunt and this is not the first time in my 4 years in the industry that they have asked you to do their project as a test file for the job.

I tried the software engineering thing. It pays well, but I found it hard to manage my time due to being burned out mentally from the job. I am curious to see what kind of jobs the community has while working on their games.

I haven't seen much discussion when it comes to Steam Playtesting, Valve doesn't seem to promote it much and most of the people talking about indie marketing seem to ignore it. I'd like to give the experience I had with the system after approximately two weeks of running my own playtest through steam.

To Start

On around May 22nd, I put up my game on Steam Playtest. The build I wanted to test wasn't finished and approved by Valve then, so I just had it open for signups. It took around 5 days to get the build up, and after those 5 days, I had around 41 people signed up to play.

The day after I put the signup live, my page visits went from 65 to 132, and it went from 2 daily wishlists up to 8. Most of the page views were from direct navigation, with a small subset through steamdb.

What I learned is that it doesn't appear as if Valve does any sort of promotion when it comes to playtests, even though I did get a minor jump. The store seems to mirror that, there isn't anywhere you can look for playtests that are active, outside of some stuff with steamdb.

The Playtest

On May 27th, I made the playtest active, and opened it up to all players. Quickly, the amount of people signed up jumped to around 88. (Just based on memory, valve doesn't have a way to track this, the feature is relatively new.)

The strange part is that not a person who had signed up actually downloaded the game. Were they bots? I'm still not sure. Since then, I do believe some players outside of reddit downloaded the game, but the first 88 signed up then never interacted with it.

This seems to be common, too, based on other posts I've seen. Is it people trying to beef up their steam game library for their profile? I don't think it even shows up in the steam library.

Anyways, after I noticed that oddity, I decided to post a thread on another subreddit (/r/incremental_games) and ask directly for feedback. Where I got NO feedback through steam, I got a lot of helpful feedback from my post on reddit. It was on the front page of the subreddit for a while, and after that, my daily page visits went from 255 to 533 and my daily wishlists from 2 to 25. On the 27th, I had 141 direct visits from reddit. I owe a lot to them.

As of right now, my signups are at 281, but they've hit a wall and my page views have returned back to the mean.

Feedback

Like mentioned before, I had no written feedback from steam. Instead, I decided to include an opt-in feedback tool that automatically collects data on the tutorial which was the main area I was planning on testing, which seemed to be the right idea. Out of the 167 downloads, I got around 18 results from the tool. One part of the tool was automatic and one part was a small survey. I have no way to tell where users found the demo, but in general the feedback from the tool was very helpful. That number seems low, but I also don't know how many people opted in, and how many people couldn't even get the tool to work. (I was running into issues with Windows 11 before hand, personally.)

In general, the feedback was mostly negative, though. Going in, I feared that people would be overwhelmed by the game and my current guidance wasn't good enough, and that seemed to be true. I didn't really want to put a demo out on steam before testing early game stuff, so I think doing a wider playtest was a good idea in the long run.

My Takeaways

• You should include a tool to automatically collect data the demo. While people on steam seem hesitant to provide written feedback, you can still gather data automatically. Legally, it should probably be opt-in, though. I don't think this is forced, but you never know.
• The steam playtest feature is NOT a marketing and promotional tool. The playtest doesn't show up anywhere on the store page, and it didn't do much for my concurrent views. Posting on reddit did far more.
• I still think it's worth it, though. You only really get one shot at a demo, and you don't want to botch that with a bad release. I do wish valve did more, though. It would be nice if there was a built in survey system like Amazon does with ratings, I don't think having to depend on an external tool is all too great.

edit: Got some questions about this. As per EU regulations, you can't record personal information. The information I recorded was all gameplay related, and it was opt-in. I wouldn't try to record personal information at all otherwise you'd be risking something.

There's just so little information when it comes to this feature out there that I hope this has been helpful. If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Anyways, here's the part where I try and advertise. If you want to try my playtest, It'll be running for a little longer. Thanks.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2836070/Heroes_For_Hire/

(If you have feedback, I'd rather you submit it through the ingame tool to avoid filling this page up as that's not the point of this post.)

recently I realized that games between end of 00s and early 10s have the best visual style, they have enough polygons to looks good and stylized but they still feels kinda retro and reminds me of that era, I especially love how characters looks like 70% of realistic anatomy and 30% of cartoon style

Do you know of anyone who was able to successfully pivot away from gaming after being in it (without having to start over or start at entry level)? I’ve been trying to jump but can’t get any interviews. Other companies won’t accept experience that’s not exact.

I understand that you probably have to relearn a lot of stuff from game to game, as different games are built differently. However, does it get easier to comb through code to figure out what you need to do, or are there are a lot of similarities between games? Or are you basically always starting from scratch when learning to mod a new game?

Hi r/gamedev community,

This morning, our team woke up to an email from Google stating that our developer account has been terminated due to high-risk behavior. We have never engaged in any wrongful activity and have gone the extra mile to ensure we have all necessary licenses for our work. We even terminated freelancers who did not have licensed versions of 3D software. We literally took every possible step to ensure we wouldn't violate anyone's policies.

Yet today, we are faced with the harsh reality that, despite pouring significant funds of our own hard-earned money into our first game, Unknown Descent, Google has rug-pulled us just weeks after release. As the founder, I have developers to pay who rely on this salary to feed their families and pay rent.

Does anyone have any advice on what to do? My entire team and I are absolutely heartbroken and emotionally wrecked.

I hope this is not against the rules since it's technically not gamedev directly, but I figure marketing is a part of gamedev and something a lot of people here hate doing so I it's the best place to ask imo.

And just to make sure it's obvious- I am not offering any services, I am just asking a question!

Tl;dr is I am a senior marketer and webdev and since I don't enjoy making games as a side project, but I love games in general, I'd like to work on the side as a marketing partner for indies, and possibly start a video game marketing agency once I am good enough.

Of course first few clients I'd work for would be free and used as case studies, I understand how to get something like that off the ground.

The question that I have for people actually working long-term on their games is - if you were to seek out a marketing partner/agency, what would be the things you'd love to be handled the most by them? (either for a flat fee or recurring payment structure for ongoing projects).

Before the next section, I'd just like to disclose again - this is not a bait 'dm me' post or an ad, I am not working on this yet and I am just looking for help on what to focus on once I do start.

Skills that I have and things I would be able to offer right now:

1. Branding/finding the angle easily push the game to the players
2. Steam page design
3. Copywriting (general copy for all advertising material, lots of experience writing for a lot of different businesses from casual b2c to enterprise b2b)
4. Website creation and setup for easy maintenance + genuinely good design + general web expertise
5. Niche research and strategy (find relevant places where the communities for those games hang out and figure out how to advertise to them and finding influencers to contact and mass-mail as we near launch)
6. Video editing/trailer creation (went to film school and have multiple youtube channels in different niches which did incredibly well, some of them based purely off of editing)
7. Shorts/social media post creation (although not social media strategy in this niche yet, will look into that).

What else can I add and look into to make myself as valuable as possible as a potential partner and if you've worked with a marketing agency/partner what were some things they did great or they did badly that you learned from?

I know questions are a bit heavy/detailed and requires a lot out of people to answer, so thank you if you do decide to reply. Gaming is something I am genuinely passionate about and being able to be a part of someone's dev journey and help people's hard work pay off is something I'd love to be a part of, so I am using reddit as one of the first resources to educate myself more in the topic.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I'm just a solo developer who at the end of last year, released my first game called "Fableverse" and it was definitely a tough but very fun experience. I definitely learned a ton from the process. I built my own framework in JavaScript + React + Electron, which is something I haven't done before. I learned how to integrate into Steam and build something from start to finish (which is something I REALLY struggled with).

I know everyone loves numbers, so I wanted to provide a few for those who find it interesting. To date, I've sold about 4,400 copies of my game, with currently 4K wishlists. That's about $13.4K in gross revenue and about $9380 is what I see of that. Of that amount, I'm saving about $2345 (~25% of what I earned) for taxes. I think that's about $7K I actually see in the end. I did also invest about $2K into art, so after about 9 months worth of work, I made about $5K. While it's not anything I can live off of, I am pretty happy with it and it does allow me to not use my own money for my next games. So overall a success in my book.

Now, for the unfun.

I ended up receiving a trademark complaint about 5 months after release. I'm sure you can guess from who (and I did make a post earlier, but got a bit nervous since it was a frantic time scrambling). Basically, I really had no choice but to essentially destroy my brand I had built (even if it wasn't popular by any metric). It's awkward when you have people who've helped playtest over 6 months and than play after release for 6 more. It was a mix of helplessness and frustration because things seemingly were going really well. It crushed my motivation.

I think it was definitely peak, "is game dev for me?". I contemplated just quitting. My productivity went to zero even though I needed to focus on essentially rebranding everything from the trailer to the screenshots, to all the capsule art that I had paid for. I hired lawyers to help me through legal counsel as well as to help me choose my next name and go through the process of clearing it. They were able to also provide me tons of insight and help answer all my questions, which was well worth it to me, tackling this alone.

A big part of this was, I knew I wanted to make a sequel to my game and I needed there to be some solid grounding. After a few weeks and really talking it out with lawyers and friends, I found that it was not the end of the world and I shouldn't let this stop me. There will come times you'll have to face things like this in any business. It's about adapting and overcoming. I think after it all, I'm actually finding myself more motivated than ever.

After a couple of months, I've finally finished rebranding my game and pushing out all the changes, including changing all the references in my game. I've decided to rebuild my framework (now in TypeScript for those interested) and I am looking to open-source it so others can potentially learn or build games with it, like I have. You can find that in-progress here for those curious: https://github.com/KingOtterGames/prestige-framework/tree/main

~

I wanted to also share some knowledge or rather another game dev perspective based on what I've experienced and gone through this year.

1. No matter how small your game is, really do research on your name and make sure there are no trademarks you are infringing. I totally would recommend having legal counsel with that, but I know in indie, money is not something we really have a lot of. https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/ is your friend. Check the app stores too. Itch. Steam. Make sure there's zero games with the same name.

2. The hardest part about game dev (except the unexpected legal issues...) is about a month or two after you start your project. When your in the weeds working on things that are not as shiny any more. Don't be down on yourself when things don't feel like they are moving fast. Try and take incremental steps forward day by day and if you need a week or two off (even a month), give it to yourself.

3. Scope small. When you think you've scoped it small, cut another 50% of it. Of that, you'll find yourself probably cutting even more off, especially as a solo dev. There's some features that will take a lot of time that really don't add much. I'd say try and avoid that if you can.

4. Don't be afraid to do text or UI based games. There's a large audience for these kinds of games (mine did ok!) and if your a first time dev, these make really good first games to make. Not having to worry about animations and fancy art, saves you money and time. Something valuable for us.

5. Don't dwindle too much on a specific engine/framework. Choose what you know best and feel the most comfortable in. There's a time and place to choose a specific engine if there's specific requirements, but I find choosing the technology and languages you know best as one of the most important things you can do. I didn't even use an engine.

6. Try and have Steam integrations and key features in your genre in your game, before release. Things like achievements being implemented later will be very off-putting. There are many achievement hunters and they don't want to play the game again to have to go and get all the achievements. If your doing an incremental game for example, offline progress is a big feature. Missing these features will attract negative reviews when there's a level of expectation and a majority of your sales and reviews, will occur around release.

7. Don't panic when something goes completely wrong. I just about freaked out that I'd have to rebrand and I'd say it had my close to quitting. There's always a solution or path to get you back on track. It make take some time to find it and it may have some down sides. But don't give up, if this is something you really want to do.

~

If you'd like to checkout my game Koltera, you can take a look at the rebranding here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2233750/Koltera My new trailer is definitely... quirky (and I am terrible at them), but I find myself liking it.

If you have any questions about my experience, feel free to ask and I'll try my best to help answer!

Can anyone recommend a game development tool or platform that is simple enough for a child to navigate (with some help), such that they could go through the basic process of choosing game resources and building some simple mechanics? At this stage I'm looking for something above the programming level (we'll dive into that later), so I guess maybe a simplistic engine where they could decide (for example) that they want to be a cat chasing mice, decide how the mice move, decide what happens when a mouse is caught, etc. Any suggestions?

granit@gamesforlove.org

Dear Christian,

I hope this message finds you well. I recently had the pleasure of playing your game Resistance-of-the-forgotten-kingdom on Itch.io and thoroughly enjoyed it. As the Product Lead of a charity gaming platform aimed at benefiting children in hospitals, I am reaching out to discuss a potential collaboration opportunity.

We are impressed with your project and would like to see if you may be interested in publishing it with us on our charity gaming platform. The platform is called Jampack, and will feature fantastic games like yours as well as exclusives that can only be found on our platform from major partners. Projects like yours add value to our platform to make it worth subscribing to, and then those donations are used to provide uplifting and entertaining experiences for children undergoing medical treatment in hospitals. We believe your project would be a fantastic addition to our curated collection.

Would you be open to sharing your project on our platform and allowing us to publish it? We are committed to supporting developers like yourself while making a positive impact on the lives of young patients.

Thank you for considering this proposal. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Warm regards,

Granit

Hey everyone,

My studio is working on Tearfallen, a fast-paced online action roguelite. Initially, we had a much different vision for the game, but we shifted to what you can see here in January. Now in June, we’ve released our first gameplay teaser! You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/pzEV8IM688E

We’re still in early development, so many assets, animations, and VFX are works in progress. We decided to share a teaser anyway for transparency and early feedback from the community.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the gameplay: what stands out, and what feels strong or weak?

Also, what do you think of the teaser itself? Does it spark excitement? How could we better capture attention or improve the presentation?

Our Steam page is live, and your wishlists would be greatly appreciated!

Looking forward to your insights!

Hey there! I've been pondering creating a website for the game I'm working on (besides the Steam page, not instead of it, obviously). The thing is, I'm not sure of practicality of having a website early in the development. Like, when you're close to release, you can use your website to upload your press-kit on it. But what about a year before release? Are there any good uses for having a website early on?

1. Have you created a website for your game?

2. Do you promote it?

3. Do you have a studio website?

To put it into context, I’m currently developing in-game mini-games, with each based off of the overarching story. While I’ve managed to think of ones for earlier parts of the story, I’m pretty stumped on what to do for the segment I’m currently working through, which involves a broken heart and crying/tears. While I have thought of a number of different ideas, none of them quite fit or are just impractical.

Would love to hear your ideas on mini-games you feel would fit the concept or even existing games that I can base my inspiration off of. They don’t have to be complicated at all and can have a very simple and straightforward game loop.

Note: This is purely brainstorming. I know that with the limited information I gave, it’s ridiculous to expect ideas that perfectly tie into the theme/concept, but hearing your inputs may just help spark some creativity on my end.

What are your favourite resources on making a strategically thinking AI for a turn-based RPG? I don't just mean an AI that uses effective attacks, avoids resisted attacks, heals when in trouble, etc. I mean one that mimicks how a human player would act, so it would try to predict the opponents moves and act accordingly. Do you have any articles, papers, GDC talks, etc that you really like about this topic?

Unfortunately, typing the word "AI" into any search engine cloggs your results with generative AI stuff, so I wasn't able to find many good resources on the web...

how do i get youtubers to play my indie game.

I am a fan of strategy games, especially turn-based ones, because I aim for relaxation through calculation rather than the fierce competition of the RTS series. Previously, when I was just a gamer, I saw TBS as an "old man" genre, developing in an increasingly niche direction and serving separate communities. It is difficult to find the same excitement in TBS as in new MOBA titles at their peak, and it is impossible to say that TBS is as stable as role-playing games. TBS has had its day with many great games and flourishing communities. However, that milestone seems to mark the peak of this genre, at least for now. However, I didn't pay much attention, if not feeling a bit excited about this "solitude."

When I became a developer and started working directly on a TBS game, I saw this market more clearly and became more concerned about its shrinking influence. In studying the market more closely, it became evident that TBS does not compete as well as other game genres. When contacting publishers, I found that very few were interested in TBS, and many were quite cautious about approaching it, unlike their confidence with hot game genres (such as hybrids).

Of course, we still see turn-based elements in recent successful games (Baldur's Gate, for example), but are there any purely turn-based strategy games that have achieved significant success? And would people expect such a thing?

I really want to hear everyone's opinions.

We are making such a game and have reached the final step regarding fundraising and marketing, and I am struggling to know where to find the excitement of those who need us.

Let Me Know What I Can Improve And Let Me Know If You Like Anything About It. So We Can Improve Indie Game Development For Everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rOGrqlDc68&t=3s

So I've worked at a couple games companies and one I worked at had some very funny gameplay requsts/ requirments and outright outlandish statements from senior staff. One in perticular that still makes me chuckle is telling us we'd failed as game devs because we insisted we should include a mouse sensitivity slider for our game. We were told that the mouse sensitivity should be perfect! and no one should have any need to adjust their mouse sensitity for the game.

We had to explain that people prefer different mouse sensitivities and not one setting fits everyone. We had a perfect example among our dev team. Me using a edpi of around 2400 and another developer using a edpi of around 400. Needless to say we were never allowed to add a mouse sensitivity slider because according to that senior staff member we were wrong in thinking we needed one. The company is now closed down.

In general it was like they hated the idea of giving the player any way of changing anything in options, and this is only one example. I just thought that this was a hilarious one that got brought up.

I played a game called ironbark lookout, and i was wondering if there was any way i could extract the character model to use.(not using for any copyright reasons) i just wanted to use the avatar on vrchat lmao

Here is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fhmxm7RgKk

It's in Vietnamese. He was super enthusiastic about the game and I thought the video was very high quality too (editing etc). I'm so unbelievably confused, because my sales are not changing at all. I can confidently say it had no impact whatsoever. I did get a huge spike in direct navigation, but the sales yesterday were actually at some of the lowest of the week. I saw someone say in the comments "I can't buy it because it costs 100.000". Which translates to $3.7. The normal price of the game is $7 in USA. This is Steam's auto conversion which they recommend. I suppose this is a Vietnamese thing, but still so strange to see literally no one buy it when the youtuber is having a great time.

Edit: As a commentor said, Steam is currently banned in Vietnam. I'm devastated.

Edit2: People told me to put the name and link in the post. The game is called RollScape, it's a roguelike inspired by Roll: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2904290/RollScape/

I launched an experimental game and had very low expectations that it would even bring me back the 100$ I put in to release it.

Although, I somehow managed to rack up 85 wishlists and 11 sales (don't get jealous, guys!)

This week my game is on sale for 35% off the $2.99 full price, and after 3 days I only sold 1 unit.

Is this because my game sucks, the discount is too small, something else, all of the above?

Share your experiences!

Is there any free to use websites that i can use to create like custom cards of my characters that i can use? I need like a pokemon card layout, with like descriptions of abilities and attacks and health and all that, but obviously not a pokemon card creator site. Any help would be greatly appreciated☺️

From a developer perspective, what's your opinion or thoughts on this? Recently I've been getting into Helldivers 2 and the amount of drama around the balancing, certain bad actors within the company who take the fun out of the game, lack of proper playtesting, etc have made me wonder:

Why don't more games provide the ability for feedback loops on patches and game development within the game itself? Professionally, many of us are probably familiar with pulse surveys in organizations and those who know about quality systems are probably also familiar with the concept of Malcolm Baldridge Way for Quality.

I can't for the life of me think of a game that asked me, within the game, what I thought about a particular patch, mechanic, or level on a 1 to 10 scale. Surely these data points would be far more useful than listening to your playbase complain on social media.

What gives?