I see a lot of posts on here from people who are worried about AI ruining the indie game industry. I think what’s more important is figuring out how to adapt, and for that, I have some tips.

I gotta be upfront and say that we haven’t released a game yet. We have a Steam page up for our first game, “Hello, Dr. Chamberlain,” and we’re aiming to join the February NextFest and then release shortly after that. BUT…I have a ton of experience staying relevant in the face of an overwhelming amount of AI content, which I think is super relevant to the indie game industry.

Basically, I’ve been a full-time writer for 7 years. About two years ago, AI led to me losing a few clients, and then early this year, I lost 60% of my work to AI. I adjusted using these same principles and very quickly got back to having a packed schedule. And my income now is even higher than it was pre-AI. I’ve also helped a handful of other professionals apply these same principles, and I think they’re just a good way all around to stand out in a world full of AI games.

Okay, preamble done. Here goes…

1. Don’t go generic. Make your game for a very specific person.

I think this is the biggest piece of advice I can offer. AI is good at mimicking mass-produced writing, games, videos, etc. It uses existing content to train, which means the stuff that’s already out there in droves is going to be AI’s bread and butter. Or, you know…an AI user’s bread and butter.

I actually learned this principle from one of my writing clients. He builds short-term rentals, and the industry got overrun with units during the STR boom a few years ago. Now, all of the generic STRs compete on price and have access to a small piece of the total pie. My client builds STRs for VERY specific people, and they stand out no matter how many other units there are in the area.

A good example is a STR he built for motocross enthusiasts. It has bike storage out front, a lift and a full repair station in the garage, and a custom network of trails on the property itself. It appeals to such a small group of people, but that group of people will almost never stay anywhere else because this place is made for THEM.

I think this same thing applies to indie games. Make a game for a very specific person, and there is way less competition (within that group of people, at least).

Our first game is a super-tough puzzle game with no hand holding and no objectives. It’s designed for people like US. We always wanted a game that didn’t give you hints, dropped you in without a formal tutorial, and had brutally hard puzzles that really made you work. We never got that, so we made it. And we’re confident there are others out there who want the same thing.

It won’t appeal to the masses, but we think that’s what will make it successful, provided we can find the audience we made it for (TBD on how well that works!).

2. Don’t go low-effort.

This SHOULD go without saying, but…I think it needs to be said: making a low-effort game sounds appealing, but you’re way less likely to get traction.

Again, I learned this from writing. A few of my clients got stars in their eyes when they realized they could get 1,000 words from an LLM for $0.02 instead of paying $500 to a human writer. I’m not saying AI can’t perform and let you create things with minimal effort, but everyone has access to it. Which means there’s nothing special about it. Which means an entirely AI game that’s low effort on the human side is going to compete with the masses.

I have to be clear here: this is not an anti-AI stance. I have my personal beliefs about AI, but I don’t think this is the place for it. What I’m saying is: don’t use AI as a crutch to crank out games with minimal effort on your part.

If you do use AI, make sure you’re also putting in your own work. Write a killer story and dialogue and characters if writing is your strength. Think about Undertale…it had super simple art, sure, but the story was incredible, which made it stand out. If programming is your strength, make something with unique mechanics that players can’t get elsewhere. Think about Superliminal, which had perspective-based mechanics no one had ever seen before (to my knowledge).

I think the goal should be to put as much effort into your game as possible, ideally in the areas where your strengths lie. You CAN succeed with “low effort” games, but I think indie devs have a much better chance of success if they put a lot of effort in. You’ll stand out because a lot of people are churning out low-effort games in hopes of catching lightning in a bottle. For most people, by definition, that won’t work.

I’ve seen this principle work in the writing world many times already. Sites that go low-effort and just churn out AI-only content are taking nosedives on the search engine results page. One client of mine who went low-effort saw an 80% dip in traffic in just a few months.

Again…this is not to say you should never use AI. I just think any AI use also needs to be coupled with immense effort from YOU to stand out from everything else.

3. Don’t eliminate your weaknesses

One thing I see people saying is that AI levels the playing field. A few years ago, you had to get good at programming, visual art, music, story, dialogue, character development, game feel, and a hundred other things to make even a halfway decent indie game. Now, according to some, you don’t have to be good at any of those things.

I get the argument for leveling the playing field…but is that actually a good thing? I don’t think it always is.

When we started working on our game, we had a very large barrier: neither of us knew anything about art. That’s a pretty big issue when you’re making a video game. We could have used AI assets, but instead of using LLMs to sand down our own rough edges, we decided to let our “weaknesses” define our game.

Eventually, we decided to make a game that takes place in an old-school computer terminal, largely because having it be text-heavy would make sense, and any art we needed wouldn’t be too hard to do with our limited experience.

And once we had decided to go in that direction, we had a slew of really cool ideas for how to incorporate the art we could handle into our game, how to create puzzles using the backdrop of a computer terminal, and even a story that made sense for the main character, who ends up using the terminal to hack into a computer system in a medical research facility.

I’m biased, of course, but I think the story is really cool, and the way we used a text-heavy game to tell the story the player experiences is also really unique. That never would have happened if we hadn’t let our weakness guide the game we were making.

Not sure I have writing-related examples for this, admittedly. But lots of games that do this become super successful BECAUSE of their limitations.

Undertale is a good example (again). The dev struggled with art, but the “low-quality” art gave the game its charm and was an impetus for the really unique combat system. The OG Silent Hill is another great example. The PS1 couldn’t render distance well. Instead of trying to work around that, the devs added fog that eventually went on to help define the genre.

In the 90s, id Software wanted to make a first-person shooter, but home computers couldn't render true 3D environments. So they built a raycasting engine that faked 3D by casting 2D rays from the player's viewpoint and calculating what walls would look like from that angle. That game became DOOM, a game now widely regarded as the godfather of first person shooters.

My advice here is not to try to remove your limitations. Instead, use those to spark creativity.

And that’s all I have for now. Hopefully this is useful to someone out there. I’ll couple this with one more insight that I’ve pulled from my writing career, which went through its own AI apocalypse a little earlier than the indie game industry, it seems:

AI isn’t the end of the world. You just need to learn how to adapt. And from personal experience, sometimes things are significantly better on the other side of that adaptation. It doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. Keep your head up.

Hi everyone. It's about AI but I think specific enough to fit the rules here.

You may or may not be aware that there are some tools out there to protect digital (graphic) art from AI, to prevent it from reproducing the style of an artist.

IIRC the two most famous ones are Glaze and NightShade. ( I think the latter also has the purpose of "poisoning" AI learning pool but it's irrelevant here).

Do you think a similar approach could be used for trailer? Could we apply a per-frame method to prevent AI tools from deciphering a game trailer? or does it only affect the ability to get the art style, and it can still fully understand what it's looking at? How it works is beyond my knowledge unfortunately, so I wondered if some people here would know more.

Now, even if it were possible anyone could probably just give a really detailed description of the trailer and feed it to their AI tool, but any way to increase the level of work needed to make a copy of a game is good I guess.

Any input is welcome! Cheers

I'm a senior software dev working on my first mobile game ever, I've been mostly working in Web and some desktop. AI does most of the heavy lifting for me in game dev but I wanna know much more on how my game/assets are built.

I want to learn fundamentals and architecture better to be able correct issues myself or make sure AI wont mess it up. At the same time I don't think its smart for me to spend hundreds of hours on traditional courses.

Help me out here, what should I do?

I’m not asking about games that just have political themes in the story. I mean games where the mechanics, systems and structure push a worldview.

Mine is Disco Elysium.

So I’m curious:

1. Which games do this well for you?
2. Which design choices (mechanics, UI, progression, failure states, what the player can and can’t do) express the ideology best?
3. Have you seen a game whose mechanics contradicted the message it claimed to have?

I’m interested in any ideology.

EDIT: Thank you very much ! Much food for my thoughts.

Stumbled upon this repo called delirium physics , which is a rust physics sdk “inspired” by the beloved euphoria physics sdk used in games like Gta4 and RDR.

But it’s really good.. so I’m wondering if this is actually legitimately an inspired recreation or if the author somehow stole it from GTA4, the delirium testing room requires you to give it your GTA4 install location for the task settings etc. so I’m a little suspicious lol

Maybe someone out there knows more , I’m trying to determine if there are potential legal consequences by rockstar for using this if this is indeed somehow a direct stolen/reverse engineered port of euphoria, not to mention moral/ethical considerations

Might be a stupid question but oh well

I am creating a texture editing software and have been automating the most tedious work I do while creating game textures. I wanted to know what struggles other people have in texturing:

• What kind of textures do you work on, and which tools do you currently use?
• On your most recent project, which texture-editing task wasted the most time?
• How did you work around it, and how often does that problem come up?

TL;DR: Enthusiast has a game idea and has absolutely no clue what they’re doing or even which direction to go.

So I got it in my head about a year ago that if my perfect hard sci-fi space combat sim didn’t exist, that I should be the change I wanted to see in the world. I’ve got programming experience but in C#, a bit of Python and in the completely useless now VB.Net, and all of it in a business setting none of it on the same continent as game development.

I wrote out a huge document with an outline of the plot of the game, the setting, the key gameplay features I wanted, rules the game had to obey, the nice to haves that I could add after the key stuff was in place, factions, ship and weapon types, etc.

I downloaded the Unreal Engine and got it hooked up into VS; I started watching YT guides, building basic UAssets, and I started learning how to draw so I could sketch out some of the ships and stations I wanted for the game.

And then burnout hit. Every inch forward was taking a Herculean amount of effort and I felt like I wasn’t even treading water. I kept hearing that voice in my head saying that I couldn’t actually do this, this game would never exist, and that I should just wait for someone else to make something close to what I wanted and be happy about it. That has resulted in me not touching anything relating to it in about 5 months. I still think about it every day almost though.

I really want to give this a go because while I think it would be niche, this is MY ideal space combat sim and even if nobody else ever wanted to touch it, at least it would exist. I am so woefully equipped though that I’m considering getting a degree in game development from a university without any intention of ever making another game again after this just so I could know what I was doing and actually make this thing a reality.

I came here because this seemed like the best place to get a no-BS reality check from a group of people that understood, and had no personal stake in the outcome one way or the other. So as seemingly insane as it is to ask strangers on Reddit for advice, here I am.

My questions to you guys are these:
Can what basically amounts to an enthusiast actually make a full fledged game like this as a one man show, or did I just delude myself into thinking I could actually do this by learning as I go?

If I’m not completely insane, what exactly am I getting myself into and is there any good way to look forward and see the path ahead or is part of the point to just grope in the dark and figure it out as you go?

Is a university program a decent path to go down for this or is there a more effective path? (Please understand, I’m not looking for ‘least effort’, just least likely to have me realize halfway down the road that I took a wrong turn and have to backtrack)

I think what I’m really looking for is validation that this isn’t completely insane and that even if it’ll be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, there is actually a way forward that gets me to where I want to go and this idea I have doesn’t need to be doomed to the proverbial “what if” pile.

Solo dev from Germany, making Sails of Salt, a singleplayer pirate roguelite in Godot. Next Fest just ended, and the most interesting number isn't from the fest at all:

Next Fest brought me 423 wishlists in a week. One YouTube video brought me 284 in a single day.

I'm at 1,041 wishlists now, with a launch planned for Q1 2027. Here's the rest.

The creator part

I wrote personal emails to 65 creators. Seven wrote back, one made a video: a 10-game roundup that gave me a small bump.

Then on Oct 3, CaRtOoNz (4M subs), a channel I had never written to, found the demo on his own and played it for 72 minutes. There was no Steam link in the description, so people typed the name into Steam search by hand. My baseline was 1 to 5 wishlists a day. That day I got 284.

Next Fest itself

About 60 wishlists a day during the fest. Depending on which slice of Chris Zukowski's survey you look at, that's a bit above or a bit below the median for games that walked in with my numbers. So: normal. Next Fest amplifies what you bring, and I didn't bring much.

My capsule got about 49k impressions on the fest page, and 2.5% of those clicked.

The demo

The demo seems to hold people. Across the ~830 who have played it so far, the median is 35 minutes, 37% played more than an hour (Steam says that's above average for demos), and 1 in 10 played more than five hours.

But 4 out of 5 fest wishlists came from people who never played it. So I don't think the demo is my problem. Getting people to see it is.

The math that worries me

If I fall back to 1 to 5 a day, I'll launch with somewhere between 1,200 and 1,800 wishlists. Everything I read says you want 5k or more. And a game only gets one Next Fest, so there's no second one to save me.

Questions:

1. Launch in Q1 anyway, or push the date and try to grow more?
2. Was doing Next Fest now a mistake? Should I have waited until I had more visibility?
3. How do you find the next CaRtOoNz? Big channels that do long videos on a single game don't seem to answer email. Do you approach them differently, or just hope they stumble over you?
4. If you were in Next Fest: what click-through rate did you get on the fest page? I can't find a benchmark anywhere.

So, how cooked am I?

Steam page, if you want to judge the game yourself: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5084680/

Long story short, I'm from a small eu country with next no 0 real industry. We only have casino studios and I worked in the field for a few years as a 2d artist.. It was really lame and I quit ( I have started a degree in a completely different field before that and now in back to finish it ), but are wondering if I should try getting into the field properly when I finish the degree, maybe somehow working as a freelancer for companies abroad ?

Fortunately I have general skills in 3d and are familiar with the whole process more or less, I like texturing the most( I love substance designer and painter ) and are wondering if it's realistic at all to try finding gigs as a texture artist ?

I got tired of XNA audio's quirks: no crossfades, no ducking, silent failures at runtime. So over the past few weeks I built Duack, and I've been hardening it by dogfooding it in my own prototype, a browser-playable monster prototype on FlatRedBall2, where the mixer, context-based music and encounter ducking all run through it, on the web.

What it does:

- Config-driven (code-only) ducking and crossfades

- Playlists and per-context volumes

- No dependencies (aside from JSON for one part)

- MonoGame and KNI adapters; I patched some KNI internals so desktop functionality also works on web

- Works on FlatRedBall2 now that it moved to KNI for desktop

- Ships with skill docs, runnable samples, and a CLI that tells you which files it can't load instead of failing silently

Source: https://github.com/ultimateownsz/Duack

Install: dotnet add package Duack --version 0.1.0-preview.4

TL;DR: The title. Do you think it's possible? Do you have examples?

Hi all. I made a post on another subreddit recently with gifs of my game and asking if people understood what it was about from the gifs alone, no other context or information. My game itself is basically the gameplay of one game mashed up with the format of Balatro to turn it into a roguelike (comments about originality not needed lmao), and I included one gif of the player at the shop purchasing something and then it cuts to a level where you can see the thing they purchased in action. The reason for the post was that I had been thinking and I made a hypothesis that the first impressions a player forms at the very first glance basically determine whether they'll be interested in the game or not, and this was me testing my hypothesis. I think that this naturally requires the "show, don't tell" writing strategy- if someone can't parse what your game is about by looking at it alone, it's going to have a hard time.

Well, I thought the gif of the shop would be enough to get it across at first, but it turned out not to be. The people who replied were able to identify the first game, but not the roguelike spin. This is pretty bad, because without knowing that it's a roguelike it basically just looks like a weird clone of the first game. I don't really have a clue as to how I would actually get it across, either. All the roguelike games I can think of off the top of my head (Balatro for one, but also Slay the Spire, Cloverpit, The Binding of Isaac) don't *immediately* read as being roguelikes from a single screenshot of the game alone. Balatro looks like a weird poker game, Slay The Spire looks like a game where you do RPG combat with cards, Cloverpit looks like a really unqiue slots game, TBOI looks like a weird Zelda-like. I'm wondering now if this is just an inherent problem with the roguelike medium as a whole.

Do you all have any suggestions? Do you have anything special that you did? I'm not vehemently against the idea of telling and not showing that the game is a roguelike or anything, but I do want to know if there's a better way.

Hello, i´m a newbie here and i would like advice. Recently i decided to dedicate msyself to be a developer of videogames, but it´s kinda difficult. I´m from spain and many people recomended me to study computer engineering in the university, because it´s the base for programming, but i want to study or practise in the meantime since i won´t start until the next year. I wanted to satrt practising a bit with unreal 5 and unity and learn prgramming too, but i dont know where to start or where guides to look. First i wanted to do a carrer we have here in spain specialized in game developing, but they´re so expensive and i can´t afford any of them, so thats why i´m asking you if the career i choose is good for what i want to do, because i because I turned thirty this year and i have been always so lost in my life and now i think that i have a clear path. So that are my questions, sorry for the large text and thank you.

Thinking about building a platform for online tournaments for various games.
The idea is you can create a loby anytime and competetively. It would not contain any game logic. The game servers would still be separate and owner by the game devs. But they would integrate with the platform.

Interested to hear opinions and ideas.
It would be open source, and I know no big game would integrate.

Hi coders. I am 18. I will be going to university next year. I am interested in game developing, i want to make indie games and roblox games. The problem is that I am completely beginner to coding. which language should I learn first ?

Back when I first learnt coding, I was just using Python and html to make websites and peices of code. I’m using godot right now, but I can never finish something. So I want to go back to when coding was fun. I may use godot again, but for now, I’m going to vscode.

anybody still use it?

Hi!! I’m hoping to release a passion project / code learning project on Steam in a few weeks. I submitted a build of my game for review 8 days ago, and they still haven’t gotten back to me. They say to allow up to 7 days for review, so I’m now like officially worried and I don’t know what’s happening.

​

Hello boys and girls and everyone else,

I graduate this December with a Computer Science degree, I have a good GPA at 3.63, I've had 3 Co-ops through college, I am currently a paid student researcher (part time, minimum wage, ends at graduation), and I helped found the Game Design club at my college.

Why am I not getting even interviews? I've applied to hundreds of jobs and have gotten maybe 3 technical interviews. I've even gone to my career advisor to take a look at my portfolio, resume, and LinkedIn and they said it looks great.

Well If you need a Junior Game Designer, or Junior Game Programmer, or know of people I can reach out to, please hit me up here:

grantharvey9876@gmail.com

Also here's my portfolio: https://not-spielo.github.io/grant-portfolio/

Thanks!

I had two demos in Steam Next Fest (Oct 19-26). Here are the real numbers from Steamworks, in case they help someone planning their next fest.

Pidgeon Pocket (pigeon heist game)

• Fest (8 days): 47,488 impressions, 2,587 store visits, 82 wishlists
• Week before (7 days): 3,137 impressions, 925 visits, 9 wishlists

Maneki Mania (lucky cat idle game)

• Fest (8 days): 41,416 impressions, 2,832 visits, 178 wishlists
• Week before (7 days): 1,655 impressions, 1,852 visits, 171 wishlists

So Steam did show both demos a lot more: about 15x and 25x the impressions. Pidgeon's wishlists jumped, but from a tiny base. Maneki's barely moved: roughly the same wishlists from 50% more visits.

What I did during the fest: a 24/7 broadcast on both store pages from the 22nd, and short gameplay clips on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and X.

For scale, my previous game, Tied to the Beat, has about 9,700 lifetime wishlists, so these are small numbers.

If your Next Fest went better: what actually moved the needle? Streamers, the first minute of the demo, the capsule, something else? And did anyone see a real effect from a 24/7 broadcast?

what made family guy online fun and why? i am working on something on the side, and need input

Personally, I would enjoy management and economy sims because the gameplay loop itself is fun. You earn money, and re-invest that money back into the business to grow and improve it. Maybe strive towards some kind of high score rating of some kind.

But recently I'm noticing a weird trend in indie management sims, where they also add some kind of "personal" gain from the money earned from the business: buying a big house, an expensive car, investing in stocks or whatever, and even gambling it away.

To me this feels weird and kinda cringe. But since I'm developing a management sim myself, I want to pose the question: do people actually find interest in these "personal" gain usages for money earned in a management sim? Do you find these enjoyable?

(sorry about bad english, it's not my first language)

I have been working on a game for 2 weeks and eventually one day I opened the project and got tons of errors while fixing them i had to delete my project later my linux crashed and i had to reinstall the whole OS and tools,

I took 1 year drop from college and hoped i would spend my year for this project but till this November all i did installed window, linux, editor and i spend most most of day just fixing problems

If i work for 20min on a project it will cause an issue which will take hours, days to fix it and i come back to get started.

I was using unity 2022 lte from 7 years and every time i try to work my pc gives me surprise, sometimes my project crashes or shows errors which i could never fix and even my ssd died once and cost me a lot still couldn't work.

I Tried to change my unity editor versions, packages, but nothing feels working for me. Today I'm so exhausted i just reinstalled linux as my system crashed again,

Like i can work on blender it's going good but every time i try to work on engine i feel more like headache.

Well after all this year's I'm really feeling hopeless and depressed idk how to explain it, i had lots of ideas dreams which i wanted to express in this projects but i feel like i have to fight for every single thing i want but eventually it breaks again and again,

I work, i spend time, everything wipes off and as an idiot I repeat it again my whole life, not like it have any fix I'm trying to do everything from months to fix it SSD seems healthy still breaks everytime, i couldnot afford another one and I do open this shit every morning just to find it worthless again.

I don't know how everyone's life is going but mine i surely hate i can't take the year , from next year i would be in college and part time job i ain't getting single minute for this, I'm so exhausted i don't even know about my future I'll be thinking this whole night so i thought I'll share it

System: Laptop: Lenovo IdeaPad S340-14API

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3500U (4 Cores, 8 Threads)

RAM: 8GB DDR4

GPU: AMD Radeon Vega 8

SSD: 256GB NVMe

HDD: 1TB

OS: Linux Mint 21 (could not install win 10, and 11 sucks)

im a solo indie developer currently working on a zombie themed store simulator for PC.

The game is still in development I've made some progress on the core gameplay and environment but there's still a lot of work to do before it's ready for release.

im considering launching my Steam Coming Soon page early so I can start building an audience and collecting wishlists while continuing development

However im not sure if it's the right time

I'd love to hear from developers who have already launched games on Steam.

• Is it better to publish a Steam page as early as possible or wait until the game looks more polished?
• How complete should the gameplay be before creating a Coming Soon page?
• Can launching too early negatively affect wishlist growth or player interest?
• What would you recommend focusing on first: improving the game or starting marketing?

I'm working on this project independently, so I'd really appreciate hearing about your experiences, especially if you've released a simulation or survival game.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Yesterday, I launched the Steam Coming Soon page for my latest indie game, and I wanted to share what the first 24 hours have looked like as a solo developer.

So far, Steamworks shows:

- 6 wishlists

- 177 lifetime store page visits

- 139 lifetime impressions

- 39 visits classified as bot traffic

- 0 wishlist deletions

Most of the traffic arrived after the page went live, although the lifetime numbers also include some earlier visits.

I spent the launch day posting gameplay clips on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Reddit, Bluesky, and other platforms.

What surprised me was how difficult it is to reach people organically. Some videos barely received 30–60 views, while others reached around 200, usually with very little engagement.

It's still extremely early, and I know one day isn't enough to draw meaningful conclusions. But it has made me realize how challenging discoverability can be when you're starting without an established audience.

I'm sharing these numbers because I find other developers' real Steamworks statistics much more useful than general marketing advice.

I'll be interested to see how they develop over the next few weeks.

This roundup covers neural rendering with DLSS 5 and RTX Kit on RTX Spark, plus on-device AI characters with NVIDIA ACE. Eight core RTX Kit technologies now support RTX Spark, spanning neural rendering, geometry, and realistic character rendering. It also covers Unreal Engine updates, Nsight profiling tools, and the latest open-source MotionBricks research for real-time character motion.