r/gamedev

I spent about 30 hours reverse-engineering the code of Silksong, one of the most successful Unity games ever. And found some genuinely impressive (and aggressive) optimizations.

Highlights:

• Movement Code Breakdown: I broke down the exact frame-windows for Coyote Time and Input Buffering that make the platforming feel so responsive. The Elegance of Silksong movement as is :]
• Hidden "Demo" Mode: There’s a left-over IsExhibitionMode check. With a small patch, you can actually boot the Gamescom demo version from the retail files.
• Dev cheats, Debug view, Performance overlay, etc: We recover and re-enable everything to see how it was used by the developers.
• Performance: Team Cherry implemented a Manual Garbage Collector and a custom reflection-to-delegate compiler. It’s a 100x speed boost over standard Unity methods.
• Much, much more in the video.

Full Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC9bIelizlw

Soon spore will be 20 years old. I've never seen another famous (non-niche) game come close to what was possible in the creature creator for spore, certainly a lot of games would benefit from a similar mechanic, why no other game was able to replicate this tool?

(I mean specifically the general creature creator, not just good editing for a fish, a dog or a bird)

EDIT: Games that I think would be better with this feature:
- No Man's Sky, clearly.
- Any game where you can customize your mount (just limit the editor to horse parts, or lion parts or whatever after choosing a mount type)
- Any game where you're supposed to be attached to a monster/mascot that you customize at the start of the story and follows you through the whole game
- PokeMEN like games, capturing and training a range of monsters you can still keep the sporepedia online features for multiplayer

I am feeling guilty about this. I have game projects I put together, half done etc. The real enjoyment I get out of the hobby is making the mechanics work well and the project structure organized. But the actual "game" part I am not as fond of.

I will spend hours/days perfecting the best way to do something but never really finish out the game once I get the mechanic to work.

Does anyone else feel this way? How to reconcile this with an actual game project??

Some important info:

-I have most interest in being an artist for games, but would like to start making indie games (meaning I should learn the basics of most game dev roles). I think programming, writing, and designing things like puzzles or mechanics could be fun, as well.

-I have no idea how to code, and have never had any real interest in compsci before realizing this is what I want to do. (also, what is the best coding language to learn, as a wannabe game dev?)

-I exceed in school, and am especially good with writing, arts, and math (as well as a general passion for video games), hence why I feel I would be a good fit for this sort of career.

To clarify my title question a little, I mean like, what should I be doing right now to better prepare me for a job in this industry? What type of education (ideally in Canada or Australia) should I be looking towards? How does one even GET a job in game development..?? This is definitely my dream career, but in my view, it seems practically impossible to be anything more than an indie dev.. (@__@;)

I’ve had a idea where guns and melee are in the same game. I recently told a friend about my idea for the game and he told me that it’d be horribly unbalanced.

My initial idea was to make reloading and rechambering processes manual so that guns (while also having guns have one-shot headshots) would be balanced with melee but he told me that it’d wouldn’t be fun and that the guns would still end up being overpowered.

Is there any way to actually balance guns with melee without making one too tedious or overpowered?

Our NVIDIA GDC 2026 session recordings.

Hey there,

I've worked on a Demo for 6 months full time, I had no programming background, but I've been working as a 3D artist for a while before that. So in that 6 months I've learned a lot and established a good base for the game.

It's my first game as a solo dev so, I don't have any prior knowledge of if my game is doing good and if it's worth continuing full time for at least another 6 months.

At first without any big promotions and no demo, some reddit post here and there I got to around 35 Wishlist in 2 weeks.

Then a month later there was a festival I was able to get into and got around 350 Wishlist there.

Then a month after that I released my demo and got lucky... a big streamer played my game and getting around 150k views on his video, some other streamers played here and there and liked it. But the conversion to Wishlist is really low bringing me today with a total of 1100 Wishlist.

The demo has a median playtime of 33 minutes and going up because of my updates.
The feedback i got from streamers playing it is that it's either a 9/10 or Meh 5-6/10

I plan to go into the June next fest, but I don't know what to expect of that.

What do you guys think?
Should I put another 6+ months to finish the full game?
If you had my data would you do it?

Finally i reached a point where decided which game idea i want to make, but im little confused with the start. Which part you start to develop first?

In college - and while I did make a few games - they were mostly small projects and recently I got the results from my beta review for a game I been working on for a year and man it got a lot of problems and its rough. Obviously I'm going to turn around and fix these problems but how do you handle the feeling of disappointment and fraud?

Thank you

So... when we started our isometric game I stupidly thought the content implementation would be easy. These games have been around since the '80s after all!

However, turns out that there's a tons of issues around sorting... and this is true both in 3D and 2D. Basically, isometric art presents as 3D but it is 2D. How do you know when a player is behind a sprite or over it.

All 2D sorting revolves around position, but that doesn't work for isometric. There's a few guides online about splitting the sprite vertically into rows, but that seemed like a real spanner in the workflow.

Instead I created what I'm calling a BoxSprite. Basically, you look at the picture and work out the pretend depth based on the sprites points. Then you map this into the scene and create box where the sprite is pretending to be.

Then you project the sprite onto the box from camera position, and use that as the material. This creates a "box sprite". It's the sprite but mapped into 3D. This has worked great for us and (after the initial the code struggles) is incredibly efficient... Just don't the change the camera angle!

Happy to answer questions, including getting more technical into the code for those who feel this approach will help them with a project.

At some point feels like every project hits this wall. You can keep adding mechanics, systems, content or you can lock the scope and make what’s already there feel really good.

Players always say they want more content but then they bounce instantly if the game feels janky. But a super polished shallow game doesn’t last long either.

So what actually matters more in the end -- depth of features or quality of execution?

i.e. more stuff in the game, or making what’s there actually feel good?

I was just browsing this post about long press UI buttons (where you have to hold a button down to trigger an action).

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/fdokkd/how_do_you_feel_about_longpressing_buttons/

Seems a lot of people hate it, and some going so far as to call it bad design and bad for accessibility.

I'm currently implementing it in my game. I have a design constraint where the game needs to be played with minimal input controls for accessibility. Basically, it can be controlled via:

• WASD + E for interact
• analogue controller + 1 interact button
• Mouse with left click.

In my game, a door might have two ways to interact with it. You could either open the door (which is very dangerous in this game if you're not sure it is safe), or listen at the door. I'm using a short tap interaction to listen at the door, and a long press interaction to open the door.

Is there a better way to approach this or is this a legit good use of Hold To Interact?

We recently held our first online playtest, and honestly we were pretty nervous about the outcome. If we get any useful insights from it, we’d love to share them later.

Before this, we had only done a small closed offline playtest in our country. We did get the kind of feedback we were looking for, but we also felt that local players might be a bit more forgiving or biased, so we wanted input from non-local players as well.

One thing I’ve noticed is that some developers seem to run playtests very frequently, and it made me wonder: do frequent online playtests usually have more positives or negatives?

By frequent, I mean running a new playtest every time you fix major bugs, add new features, or improve existing systems.

For developers who do this often, has it been worth it? Or can it become too overwhelming for both the team and the players?

We’re hoping to learn how to approach playtesting in a better and more structured way, so any opinions or experiences would be really appreciated.

So I've gotten on a focused tangent recently about how games market themselves to the public and can sometimes undercut themselves when linking their games themes to their marketing direction and wanted to rant about it.

The basic idea is that games that have certain words or imagery in them are mainly going to attract players of certain genres, and if your games genre doesn't match the player expected genre you are turning away your core audience for an audience who doesn't actually have interest in your product.

The words Rogue and Survivor are generic words that mean something specific to players now. If you make a stealth game about a thief and call it Knavish Rogue you might get clicks from people who like roguelikes, but when they figure out it's a story based thief-like they'll move on, or if you make a survival crafting game called Planetary Survivor and you get people who are looking for things like vampire survivors. At the same time people who are tired of those two genres see your name and assume it's one of those and never click on it.

Cooking can be another one. I've seen a few action platformers, hack and slash games, and friendslops where cooking is the theme of the game, but when most players see the most forward-facing marketing material such as steam capsules and game names rather than screenshots they'll make the assumption that it's some kind of cooking business sim, or a chef making combinations to order game. Food games often fit near the calm or cozy space of games, rather than games focused around hunting and gathering materials.

I think having certain themes to incentivize and contextualize interactions for the player is valuable, but if they do not match genre expectations then perhaps they should be withheld from being part of the core identity of the product from a marketing standpoint. Just seeing a trailer or screenshots can show the theme because then it sits within the context of the genre, but because many people rely on first glances from lists of tens or hundreds of new games putting those ideas within the capsule or game name without making the genre of game crystal clear can set marketing off on the wrong foot.

Let me know what you think of this concept, whether I'm overthinking a situation where a good game will push past first glances and pass more word of mouth anyway, or whether it's valuable to consider how one presents perceived genres down to this level of granularity.

I think as a community we've collectively agreed many times that the game that you decide to make is the crucial part of eventually marketing it. So what can we actually do to not pour 3 years of hard work into a dead idea?

I've been following the market for decades, thinking hard about all this and I still feel clueless when faced with deciding between a few potential ideas for my next game. What are your approaches?

I just compiled my first list of bugs from a set of prealpha playtests that I did and there are over 118 unique issues i identified! i've put them into a spreadsheet but feeling overwhelming, how have you guys been organizing the number of bugs or software changes you need to deal with as a solo developer or otherwise?

Hey everyone, working on a 3D platformer in Unity 6 and got into a debate with a teammate about our character controller setup.

The player can switch between normal movement (platforming, jumps, ground pound etc.) and a rolling mode that's fully physics-based, so slopes, momentum, the whole thing.

Right now we're using a CharacterController for the normal movement and a Rigidbody for the rolling, with a motor class that switches between the two. It works well and honestly we're happy with how it feels.

But this teammate is saying we should drop the CC completely and go Capsule Collider + Rigidbody for everything, handling grounding and slopes ourselves.

I don't really get why. The normal movement needs to feel tight and precise, not physics-y, and the CC does that job fine. The rolling already uses a Rigidbody where it makes sense.

Has anyone here shipped a platformer with a similar hybrid setup? Did you run into issues with the CC down the line, or is this one of those "if it ain't broke" situations?

Thanks!