Gamedev

Matt Sephton built BELTRUNNER for GMTK Jam 2026 as roughly 1,300 lines on Jinks, the small engine he is developing. It opens looking exactly like Asteroids, then drops the floor out: clear wave 1 and a black hole tears open where the next wave of rocks should be. What follows is a countdown race through numbered gates, in descending order, with time as the only resource. The postmortem is unusually specific about which ideas earned their place: ...

The r/gamedev mod team has published an enforcement follow-up to its August AI policy. The subreddit is not banning AI discussion — it is removing threads that amount to nothing more than a verdict on AI. The stated reason is fatigue, not ideology: yet another “is AI good or bad” post crowds out development talk. What gets removed, per the post: “I hate AI” / “AI slop” “I love AI” / generic praise for AI “Can I use AI?” “Is AI ethical?” The underlying principle from the earlier policy survives intact. The mods do not moderate based on whether someone used or discussed AI; they moderate on the quality and relevance of the contribution. A position with no production detail attached is the target. ...

Radek, a self-taught engineer who now works as a DevOps engineer, wanted to understand how fluid simulations in games actually work and found the learning material sparse and hard to follow. So he built one from scratch in GDScript inside Godot and wrote it up — CPU-only, deliberately redundant variables, readability over frame rate. The whole thing is drawn with Godot’s own _draw(), so density and velocity arrows appear on screen as each piece lands. Every chapter links a project snapshot and a git diff, which is a better teaching device than a final repo dump. ...

Patrick Hulin wanted to play SimTower again — the 1994 elevator-simulation game is effectively unplayable without an emulator and no engine spec exists. His plan was the sensible engineering one: have LLMs reverse-engineer the binary into a complete spec, then reimplement from that spec. That plan failed. The artifact shipped anyway — towers.world is a co-op clone of the original — but it only worked once he stopped asking the model to reason about a spec and started letting it hill-climb against traces from an emulated binary. ...

Claire Blackshaw ships VR games and contributes to Godot’s OpenXR work. She wrote up her Develop Brighton 2026 talk as the honest ledger of shipping Augmental Puzzles in Godot, plus the community PS5/PSVR2 port she started, plus why that port ended in a brand-new renderer. Her claim is not “Godot is bad” or “Godot is ready for AAA.” It is that Godot works, fast, and that using it early had a price: ...

Aaron Rutledge worked on champion select, matchmaking and Honor 2.0 on League of Legends, multiplayer progression on Black Ops 4, and led Experience Design on Apex Legends through Season 22. His studio’s free Field Manual opens with an argument about what games actually communicate. The thesis is in the first line: players do not learn what you value from your patch notes, they learn it from your systems — and the system’s version of the message always beats the announcement post. ...

Reconstructing large real-world environments as 3D Gaussian splats runs out of GPU memory quickly. Ka Heng Shiu hit that wall scanning Hong Kong villages and buildings for The Lost Metropolis, turned it into a dissertation, shelved it for a year and a half, and came back with ABCD — Alpha-Composited Block Coordinate Descent — presented at SIGGRAPH this year. Why the obvious approach fails: Split the scene into regions, train each one separately, merge them — and every region is optimised blind to the rest. Split a room in half and the left optimizer will still place Gaussians to explain pixels that belong to the right half. After merging, those mistakes appear as floating geometry and seams. How ABCD avoids it: ...

Doom Eternal art director Tony Garza and id Software veteran Richard O’Neal left the studio before Microsoft cut roughly half of it, and started Turnkey Games in Dallas. Their account of the move is mostly a list of things they chose not to do. On money: They bootstrapped so no publisher had to absorb production costs, and grew the team gradually so progress could continue without unnecessary risk. Spend went to the game, development equipment, software, contractors for specialised work, legal, and only later marketing. No office, no large team built ahead of the game’s ability to support it — the goal is putting as much of the budget on the screen as possible. Cheap spending buys time, and time is the scarce resource. On scope: ...

Chris Zukowski pulled GameDiscoverCo data on every Steam game released since January 2023 with a horror tag in one of its top five slots — 7,019 titles — and tested the folk rule that horror must ship in October. It doesn’t survive. October has the most horror releases and one of the worst median revenues. The reason the headline median looks flat is worth understanding before trusting any month-by-month comparison: ...

Paradox Development Studio’s Afterworld is an attempt to fix grand strategy’s oldest design problem: a genre built on total freedom is unreadable to new players. Game director Dan Lind puts it plainly — it is hard to understand that you can do anything and to find out what your own goal is. His answer is to stop teaching rules and start handing out a role. The design decisions that carry that thesis: ...

Noble Whale Studios shipped Go Up, an atmospheric incremental game, after about two years of work by two developers. Then they posted the actual numbers: 278 wishlists, 158 lifetime units, $675 gross, $517 net, 20 returns, median playtime of 1 hour 25 minutes. The roughly $500 payout went entirely to the contracted artist and musician. Neither developer was paid. Their framing for the whole exercise is worth stealing: “If you want to learn to release a successful game the best thing you can do is release a successful game, the second best thing you can do is release a failed game.” ...

Three years after the Unity runtime-fee shock, Game Developer pairs new survey data with interviews from Godotcon 2026 to answer whether developers actually stayed on Godot or drifted back to familiar tools. The numbers say they stayed: 12% of surveyed developers now name Godot as their engine of choice — an 8 percentage-point year-over-year increase (Omdia, via the Game Developer Collective) Godot was the engine of choice for 47% of GMTK game jam entrants, ending Unity’s nine-year run as the jam’s most-used engine Both figures have climbed continuously since the 2023 runtime-fee announcement Nobody interviewed switched for a feature Unity lacks. They switched for the cost of one think-edit-test cycle: ...

The stock advice to new game developers is “make a game, not an engine.” Elias Farhan argues that advice has hardened into dogma, and the market still rewards custom tech: about 13% of games released on Steam in 2024 used a custom engine, down from 71% in 2012, but those same games accounted for 43% of units sold. The post opens a series on porting Soup Raiders off Unity onto a native C++ engine targeting 60 Hz on Switch. Before the technology, he lays out the case for owning the layer between gameplay code and the OS. ...

A solo dev’s working-design post for Whalefall, a “traditional-ish roguelike set inside the decomposing body of a colossal deep-sea organism” — whale-shaped and mountain-sized, fallen from the sky, never seen alive. Instead of dungeon floors, a run descends through anatomical systems. The post reads like a design essay, not a trailer: mechanics reasoning, emergent examples from the simulation, and an explicit ask about depth versus legibility. The structure is the hook: ...

A hobbyist solo dev in r/gamedev asks how to stay motivated when an AI could “one-shot” his small indie game. He develops slowly, deliberately keeps design decisions out of AI’s hands, and fears that by the time he ships in two or three years, one-shot generated games will be good enough for the indie market. His image for it: a sculptor who lives next to a factory casting a thousand copies of everything he makes. ...

A hobbyist dev spent almost a year on a $1.99 itch.io game — code, story, and mechanics their own, visual assets AI-generated. They disclosed the AI art on the game page and inside the game itself, expecting transparency to defuse the criticism. It didn’t: commenters called it AI slop without playing the demo. At ~120 upvotes, the thread turns into a useful post-mortem on why disclosure failed. The core lesson: the label tracks the visible result, not the provenance statement. ...

RUSuper’s week-five update on the fishing game he is building entirely with AI (Dredge meets Civilization) added little new content — most of the week went into fixing UI he calls “very basic and bad.” The real news is a redesigned fishing minigame with a clean risk/reward loop, and the most actionable advice the series has produced so far: build in-game editors instead of prompting the AI for pixel-perfect placement. ...

Rabah Shihab built Babylonian Twins in Baghdad in 1993 — pure 68000 assembly on an Amiga 500 (512KB RAM, no hard drive), the first commercial game made in Iraq, shelved for years after Commodore collapsed. In 2026 he gave the sources to Claude Fable 5 in Claude Code and let it port the game to Godot — and then read what it had done weeks later. This is that postmortem, written with the same LLM but edited line-by-line over a week. What the AI shipped is remarkable; what it got wrong is the instructive part. ...

An r/gameai developer building an NPC with robotics-style perception went looking for prior art and found that no shipped game keeps a probability distribution over where the player is. The thread — part technical question, part literature review — argues that shipped game AI represents belief discretely, and the probabilistic machinery stayed in robotics and search theory. The OP’s approach: His NPC maintains a full occupancy grid over player position; noisy perception events update it, and a diffusion step spreads probability mass along walkable cells between observations It is a standard Bayes filter, the kind of thing robotics uses for target tracking The gap is load-bearing for him: “if it is wrong my project has no gap to sit in” The prior-art case for discrete belief: ...

An r/aigamedev thread argues that most AI games are slop for an entirely human reason: the tools got easy, but the design work didn’t. At ~85 upvotes, it turns into a real argument about what separates a game from slop — and nobody blames the AI. The OP’s core claim: The problem isn’t that AI is bad or that the games look bad — it’s a lack of ideas and originality The more accessible a tool gets, the more people assume the thing is easy: “AI makes games? So now it’s super easy to make my own game. Right?” Result: people try to go from A to Z and skip every step between — no idea, no story, no substance The pushback is what makes the thread worth reading. Nobody defends the slop; they just disagree on the diagnosis: ...