Game Development

Ever wondered what happens when you mix:

Stickmen with anxiety,

A totally “safe” bunker,

A resource system that hates you,

And a card mechanic designed by someone who watched too much chaos theory?

Well, now you don’t have to — because I made A Survival Game: a simulation/strategy roguelike where you’re always one bad card away from total disaster.

👨‍💻 Why? Because I’m a developer with questionable priorities and too much love for watching virtual stickmen fail at life.

🃏 Features: A full card-based control system (because UIs are for cowards)

Resource micromanagement that makes you question your decisions

Stickmen that level up, change appearance, and complain a lot

Permadeath, obviously

A Monster Wiki, because everything wants to kill you, and you need receipts

A “Mercy DLC” where you can literally pay $1 to go back in time (feels very on-brand for debugging, tbh)

😅 Dev things I learned the hard way: Implementing permadeath logic is easy. Explaining it to confused players? Not so much.

Saving in HTML5 is a feature I now worship.

Stickmen animations don’t need to be fancy if they scream internally.

💾 Tech stack? Godot, lots of JSON, and the occasional sacrifice to the RNG gods.

💥 Play it. Break it. Tell me it’s terrible. Or great. Or both.

Link: https://danielgamedev14.itch.io/a-survival-game (Warning: may cause stickman-related stress.)

Very interesting stuff

Ludii is a general game system designed to play, evaluate and design a wide range of games, including board games, card games, dice games, mathematical games, and so on. Download the Ludii player to explore our ever-growing database of games, test your AI search algorithms, and design your own games.

Games are described as structured sets of ludemes (units of game-related information). This allows the full range of traditional strategy games from around the world to be modelled in a single playable database for the first time. Ludii is being developed as part of the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project.

Starts with the basics of how Datamoshing works in video encoding, then explores it in game engine rendering.

Saw it on flathub, went on their site and saw that some popular games used it like knockout city, forza horizon 5, century age of ashes, etc. Was wondering if anyone uses it since I've never heard of it, and don't see much on reddit about it.

I'm testing adding the No To AI icon in the Steam page for Robot Anomaly.

Saw a couple of streamers wondering if some of the images in the game were AI generated (they are not!)

Also saw chat wondering if voices in a different game were AI (they were not).

Sadly Steam don't add a No AI disclaimer when the developer is NOT using AI. Only when they are.

Hello

I find myself abandoning hobby projects and never getting a finished version. Primarily due to me not being a student with no responsibility and a whole lot more free time, but among other reasons, a lack of accountability. I was thinking, why not try making something with someone else? Since then it won't be as easy to abandon a project because something else caught my mind. However none of my friends or colleagues share this interest, but perhaps one of you guys might be interested.

A bit about me, 22yo fintech backend developer professionally working with Java. My two main ethos, or things I want to do differently are:

• Games should be dynamic. There should be many ways to approach a system (think markets in games, players should somehow be able to influence the buying and selling prices, along with the wares being offered by interacting with the game world)
• Games are too transparent. Being able to directly compare items by their raw stats make it a lot more boring. Games should show this with text or more broad values making the player infer which is more efficient.

I am mostly thinking about making a primarily text based game, since it's a lot more likely to reach a MVP, but I'm open for most things. I've got some game ideas myself but if you have something better I'm open for it.

I'm primarily thinking about chatting on discord or waheteven about some ideas and toolchains and setting up a public repo.

Also if you don't vibe with my ethos, feel free to comment that as well, maybe you'll find someone with similar values here.

How do you experience good and bad reviews and feedback on your games? Are you ecstatic or proud when reading positive reviews? Is it difficult to read reviews listing a lot of negative points?

How does it depend on the proportion of your contributions to the project?

I've occasionally wondered about team titles, how individual developers feel when reviews turn out majority or overwhelmingly negative. For very small teams and individual devs, I've often wondered how they feel when receiving "negative" feedback, especially reviews pointing out many flaws.

Today, I posted a Steam review with a long list of things the title is lacking. Personally, I would have never released a title in that state, and for money. I feel bad about pointing out many flaws on indie titles. But I also see no way around it. It's only honest to list what I see and notice. For a review, honesty is key, and allows others to see these things that are not visible from a store page or game trailer.

I'm interested to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Almost four years after our reporting on the games industry's unseen crunch at outsourcing studios in SE Asia, Chris received an email that demanded we return to this story once again.

Reporting on a specific outsourcing studio with abuse, with occasional references to the broader industry and its dependence on outsourcing studios.

I found the announcement (quoted in the article) interesting and worth sharing, even without knowing or seeing the game.

Excerpts (I recommend reading the full thing):

My primary inspirations were the Japanese living doll myth and my experiences urban exploring in Germany (many backgrounds were crafted from photos I had taken).

The final act obviously deals with a difficult topic, sexual assault. I wanted the ending to be shocking, that was intentional, but never to cause harm. Instead, I thought I had crafted things in a way that would act as a jumping off point for some difficult discussions.

Secondly, the girl was never meant to look underage. In retrospect, I should have been more careful to ensure there was no ambiguity. Because she’s a doll (not human), I didn’t consider the possibility of misinterpretation as thoroughly as I should have.

This was also written long before the #MeToo movement, and I was a lot less educated on all the nuances of topics like these at the time.

If I had written it now, in my mid-30s, in 2025, it would be very different. Still, some choices I stand behind:

Do you have experience representing difficult topics in art? Weighing or deciding on respectful or acceptable representations, on the degree of deliberately shocking or uncomfortable representation?

Or do you remember scenes in games or otherwise in art that you found uncomfortable or shocking? In a good (well-represented or tactful) way or a bad way?

Just saw this interesting article by the Witchfire devs on creating big games with small teams. Really interesting read!

Just saw this interesting article by the Witchfire devs on creating big games with small teams. Really interesting read!

First, i know this place is mostly for video game design. But i don't see many other places for game design beyond video games, and i have no idea where else to go for guidance with designing a sport.

I had an idea today for a new variety of bowling that i think would be best played with duckpin balls and pins. Problem is, those are apparently really expensive. A quick look online has a single ball going for $60-$80 US, and candlepin balls aren't better.

Less recently i wrote rules for another sport that would require mostly original equipment, and i don't even know where to start with getting totally custom equipment made. I guess talk to a smith or welder?

If anyone here has experience with this sort of thing, how do you get equipment for experimental games/sports without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on it? Is this why apparently nobody makes new sports?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30302028

video by GDQuest
very awesome to see tutorial and encouragement for 3D game
Godot would get much greater recognition if there were more 3D games made with it.