Game trailers which take their time to show gameplay can perform way better than trailers which are cut fast and make a hard sell. See a before/after for the Sheepherds' Announce/Launch trailer to see what a difference the editing style made!

I explain how to make a game trailer which lets the viewer see what’s special about the game and how to apply it when you edit a gameplay trailer.

Are there any benefits of GDD over a noun-verb diagram for game development?

I’m the solo developer of Bitiverse, a persistent browser MMO that I’ve been building in public alongside a small group of actual players.

This has gradually become something different from ordinary playtesting. These aren’t people running through a temporary build and completing a feedback form. They have persistent characters, homes, guilds, businesses and relationships with other players. They progress normally while I watch where they struggle, listen to what they discuss and turn useful feedback into updates.

It has been enormously valuable. Players experience systems together in ways I never could alone. They discover confusing onboarding, broken progression, economic oddities and unexpectedly fun social behaviour. A throwaway joke about owning seventeen chairs resulted in players filling their houses with chairs. Feedback about having no direction led to new narrative onboarding. Requests for things to do together became house parties and playable table games.

The difficult part is finding more people willing to participate in that relationship.

A fifteen-minute first-impression test is useful, but an MMO also needs people who return, progress and eventually encounter its deeper systems. I want players who genuinely enjoy inhabiting the world, not unpaid workers being asked to hunt bugs. In return, they get unusually direct access to development and can see their experiences influence the game around them.

For anyone who has developed a live or community-driven game:

How did you find your earliest long-term players? What made them feel invested enough to return? And how do you listen closely without letting community feedback turn the game into design by committee?

free software shooter inspired by tribes

I am pretty certain that you all were eagerly waiting for this update. After I was frustrated about a Unity game on itch.io not having gamepad support I channeled that frustration into adding that to my own game Diarrhea 4.

I also added credits which was honestly harder than adding the gamepad support. It was super easy in Godot. You just go to the project settings and add the buttons to whatever function you want. So there is no excuse to leave them out. Go do it for your own projects!

Next step would be to offer a way to rebind them. But that game is so simple, I don't think that's necessary. I am also out of energy.

Before - After

I finally open sourced my game!!! I was mainly working on getting it a better title (it still may change in the future) and figuring out licensing.

This game comes from me playing with the minecraft mod computercraft and my friend pondering the idea "what if you played the game from a bedrock box by only controlling a turtle" and everything just kinda spiraled out of control from there. The game is in a very bare bones state, just with a basic interpreter for Hive--, the truly god awful programming language you use to command your workers. The automation aspect of the game is very much meant to encapsulate both the diegetic resource gathering and processing you do as well as the tools you create to make writing the code easier. It's very much not a game for most people and isn't trying to be commercial or have a large audience. This is solely a game for people who are as autistic about programming (and slightly insane) as I am.

You can keep track of development using the git.gay

What do you think of the new mechanics and stage?

ALIS asks two survival questions: can the player survive the world, and can the world survive its creator?

The first is gameplay. The second shapes the project: a real place whose geography can be checked; public source and GPG-verifiable release checksums; modular boundaries; a pact against predatory mechanics; and a direction toward community hosting and transferable stewardship.

That is the direction, not a fake launch claim. The public release today is an early single-player Windows prototype. Community-hosted servers and open governance are still long-term work.

The 58-second trailer shows the world. The play page shows what exists and can be inspected now: https://fall.is/play/

For people who build games or infrastructure: what actually keeps a game world alive when its original maintainer, storefront, or master server disappears?

Available on the Play Store and App Store!

#GameDev #IndieDev #Videojuegos #blackjackgs #hellboundknight

Available on the PlayStore and App Store!

#GameDev #IndieDev #Videojuegos #blackjackgs #disturbedprotocolzero

Hey everyone!

I'm a full-stack dev from Italy. I built a project solo that started as one thing and became another, and I wanted to share it here — mostly for the technical side, but I'll explain the whole thing.

It's called vibeAI, and it's two halves that fit together.

━━ THE CHAT SIDE ━━

• Create your own AI characters: personality, backstory, avatar, tone of voice
• Chat one-on-one, or put several of them in a group chat and let them interact
• Discover and chat with characters made by other users
• Free daily messages for everyone

━━ THE GAME SIDE (Vibe Battle) ━━

There's a full fighting game inside the app, and the enemies include the AI characters you created yourself.

• Timing-based combat, not button mashing: stop a moving bar in the green zone to hit, tap a shrinking circle to parry — watch out for feints
• Campaign of 60+ opponents: 50 presets plus your own characters, shuffled with a seed so every run is ordered differently
• A boss "cameo" that ambushes you mid-run — unbeatable by design, it wrecks you and leaves
• A 3-phase final boss that scales to your build
• Skins with permanent HP/damage bonuses, premium moves limited to one use per match
• Live 1v1 PvP, matched by XP
• Global leaderboard

━━ THE TECHNICAL PART (the reason I'm posting) ━━

The thing that took longer than everything else combined was the multiplayer anti-cheat. The first version was client-authoritative — each client computed its own damage and reported it. Took me five minutes to realize you could just open the console and claim "I did 9999 damage." Useless.

So I moved all authority to the server:

• Match state (HP, turns, rounds) lives on the server, not the clients
• Clients NEVER declare damage — they only report how accurate their timing was (perfect / good / miss)
• The server rolls the damage by reading real stats from the database
• End-of-match rewards go through signed, single-use sessions with daily caps, so tampering with the browser client gains nothing
• Real-time sync runs on Supabase Realtime broadcast, with a REST fallback for when the websocket doesn't deliver

Stack: React + TypeScript, Supabase (auth, Postgres, Realtime), Stripe, Vercel. It's a PWA — no app store, installs to the home screen on Android and iOS.

━━ ON MONETIZATION, to be upfront ━━

Free to play, no content locked behind payment — campaign, final boss and PvP are all accessible. Optional purchases (cosmetic skins, in-game currency) exist to cover API and infra costs. Saying it upfront rather than hiding it.

━━ ━━ ━━

Heads up: the UI is in Italian — it was built for the Italian Gen Z crowd, and the preset characters are local archetypes. But the combat is bars, circles and timing, so it plays fine in any language, and the characters that matter are the ones you create yourself.

If anyone here has worked on real-time multiplayer or Supabase Realtime, I'd love to compare notes — there are a couple of choices (abandoned-match handling, the broadcast fallback) I'm not sure I got right.

Me and the girlfriend participated in the GMTK Game Jam 2026, this was our first time doing a full project on Godot! It is loosely inspired by the Lost TV show, and references it quite a lot.

It's an exploration game where you are in a bunker in a mysterious island. You must enter a code into a computer to prevent the timer from reaching 0, you get progressively more of the code on clues spread in the bunker and across the island, which increases your maximum time, which allows for further exploration.

Since it was done in 4 days with quite a few breaks and sleep, it is quite janky here and there, but we had fun making it, please enjoy :)

I did write about the evolution of D&D, and the learning from other RPGs around. I know that this isn't exactly digital game design and development. But I think it's connected enough to be valuable for the discussion.

All the comments, discussion are welcome.
Thanks in advance.

I run a tiny private multiplayer alpha built on Minecraft Java. Before asking more people to test it, I audited the application page because several visitors reached the form but nobody submitted it. The audit found two avoidable funnel failures.

First, the post-submission referral panel had a native hidden attribute, but an author .panel { display: grid; } rule still made it visible. Visitors could see "Application received" before doing anything. I had assumed the attribute would always win. The fix was an explicit [data-alpha-referral-panel][hidden] { display: none !important; } rule plus a browser test that checks both the DOM property and computed display value.

Second, the mobile form started 1,098 px from the top because the pitch and a large proof image came first. I shortened the mobile introduction, kept the real world image for desktop and link previews, and moved the form start to 481 px. I also changed free-text availability to four clear choices and detect timezone silently, while keeping the founder-vision answer and CAPTCHA.

It is too early to claim a conversion win: the verified result is still zero new applications since the fix. My next question is what minimal funnel events other developers would measure here without adding invasive analytics. At present I can distinguish a page request, full asset/API load, CAPTCHA load, and a real submitted application from server logs.

The secondary playtest ask, for anyone who also owns Minecraft Java: Neviroth is testing whether three founding players having concrete authority—founding kingdoms, naming places, building landmarks, and changing progression or economy—creates better long-term investment than treating them as ordinary bug reporters. Alpha access is free, unstable by definition, and every application is reviewed manually.

Live page and founder application: https://neviroth.net/community/alpha/apply?src=programming_dev_gamedev&campaign=alpha-social&ref=ed5372cdb30c&content=alpha-funnel-postmortem

I've wrote about the first few weeks of my hobby project. It's a self-hosted, agnostic cardgame. I've the release on this post (if you want to read about), I'll keep improving, refactoring and generating more information.

All comments, feedback is appreciated.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/63537270

I've been experimenting with an idea that sits somewhere between a game and a productivity app.

Instead of treating habits like a checklist, I designed a progression system where real-life actions become game mechanics.

• Completing habits earns different powers (Strength, Wisdom, Focus, etc.).
• Powers can be combined on a strategy grid to discover stronger abilities.
• Your hero evolves as you stay consistent.
• Missing a day doesn't punish you or reset everything, it's built around positive reinforcement instead of loss.

As a game developer, I'm curious about the design side of this.

Do you think progression systems that work well in RPGs can create long-term engagement for real-life activities, or does the novelty wear off once players realize there's no traditional gameplay?

I'd love feedback specifically from a game design perspective. What mechanics would you add, remove, or rethink?

If you'd like to see what I've built so far, it's here: Habit Hero

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/48395665