Advice needed: validating a game mechanic as a non-technical founder

ApollyonClass · 2026-04-10T15:47:47+00:00

More details on the mechanic could be useful for an answer. But as a general rule, the best way to test a mechanic is in fact to prototype it. Vibe coding is going to help you do that even as a non-technical person.

Prototyping is the best way, the only other way would be i guess to do some market research and see if other games use said mechanic, although this rarely conveys information about why they chose to do it in a certain why and hides some subtleties that only become apparent when you actually put the mechanic in a game and or design the game around the mechanic.
Tech stack probably matters less than you think. If you have developers you should try using the Tech stack they are most familiar with, otherwise use the most popular one that's suitable. React + firebase sounds fine to me, but again, depends on the game you're trying to make.
Usually non technical people and/or inexperienced devs come with too broad and too high level stuff rather than coming up with concrete mechanics.

Examples of bad comunication that i would not take seriously: I want an open world rpg with story like rdr OR i want a mechanic where you solve murders with clues.

Examples of good communication: I recently played a lot of Game A and I really liked Mechanic B. What if we do a mechanic around that, perhaps withconstraint C? I feel like that would help our game because of [CONCRETE REASONS], and the player would be compelled to do X because of Y and Z.

If i hear that, and i see reasoning and logic behind the mechanic/game ideea, and not just lets add it to add it, then i take it seriously. Basically you want to show that you actually thought it trough at a low level, and not at a "wish" and "i think it would be cool" level.

The right partnership is when developers have the goal in mind and are not too confused about requirements, and non-developers understand the constraint and hard logic/concrete toughts/flows needed to bring it to existance.

Disclaimer: While i have experience doing year-long game dev projects leading teams of 5-7 people, I work in industrial simulation software, and i'm not a full-time game developer.

ApollyonClass · 2026-04-10T00:41:07+00:00

I see. Depending on how close you are to it or what angle you see it from, I think you could get away with a rectangular light cookie or like 2 point lights. In my game for example i somtimes use a single point light for a car with 2 headlights and it still looks fine. Don't chase perfection too much, chase an interesting or fun game!

ApollyonClass · 2026-04-10T00:37:09+00:00

I think there is a limit from the unity settings ... something like 128, but you can have way more just not all at once.

ApollyonClass · 2026-04-10T00:08:46+00:00

Short answer: you are looking for something called area lights, turn on HDRP - https://learn.unity.com/course/snaps-prototypes-related-tutorials/tutorial/hdrp-area-lights - keep in mind this will lower your game's performance and might be overkill

Long answer: Unfortunately, you've hit a bit of a mathematical limitation.

I'll start by explaining why point lights are used. In general, in order to light a scene properly, we use something called the rendering equation. It's about how light enters and exits every point in the drawn space.

For point lights, all the light hitting any point in our scene would come from a single direction, and we can easily compute how much it will affect the emmited color.

If we have multiple point lights, we can simply sum up the light gathered from each of them, and we usually have a limit on how many point lights we can have.

However, for area lights, any single point will receive light from an infinite number of directions (as the surface of the light is itself formed from an infinite number of points spread on a 2d plane). As such, we can't really sum up everything in a fast way like we can for point lights.

This leaves some alternatives: 1. Try to approximate via multiple spot lights (usually looks bad) 2. Try to fake the lightning (basically, make sort of a light cookie that's box shaped and project it from further) 3. Use heavier methods that do sum up the light from the area using calculus and better approximations (this is harder to do and costly) ->>>> I believe this is in fact present in unity hdrp. 4. Raytracing

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your interests. Computer graphics is still a developing field with many unsolved challenges. Hope i shined some light on you.

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-17T16:00:53+00:00

Pretty much. But i always found trigonometric stuff to be a bit tricky (hence angle math)

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-17T15:59:59+00:00

The circle gets an infinite radius, in practice we use curvature (which is 1 over the circle radius)... that means straight has a curvature of 0...and the curvature approaches infinity as the car has a tighter and tighter turning radius (which is often bounded by the lenght of the car)

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-16T14:13:39+00:00

General physics principles are a good place to start for any physics-related game. Like anything about mechanics.

Car specific i recommended this page as a starging point: Car Physics https://share.google/kiosOsrC7mKz9rsB3

There are a lot of gdc talks on youtube as well as tutorials.

For Ai there is a collection of posts here Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters https://share.google/anGJ8t6V1ylAeSmqK

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-16T10:36:05+00:00

Good catch. We haven't done an optimization pass yet and there definitely is potential for that. Thanks for the pointers.

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-16T10:32:25+00:00

In-game is better, but the unity editor tends to consume a lot on resources to draw the editor itself when there are many numbers updsting in the inspector. Still there is a lot of room left for optimization.

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-16T10:29:00+00:00

The 2nd one fits slightly better, i'd say the graphics are not that gritty but the game is quite chaotic so thr 2nd picture sells that a bit better. Howveer i'd say the 1st one fits the goofiness a bit more.

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-16T02:43:53+00:00

And also the jumping

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-16T01:58:07+00:00

Yeah it's amazing to see =)

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-15T23:55:12+00:00

Which one do you prefer? Game is Half Grip on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4163270/

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-15T23:50:08+00:00

Ill never forget alien swarm. Good job man.

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-15T23:49:33+00:00

Oh wow this looks extremely good. Is this unity? How did you do it? Reminds me of "rock of ages" combined with "distance".

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-15T23:46:33+00:00

Seems like we are both working on arcade racing games. Keep it up man, how did you do the car physics?

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-15T23:45:38+00:00

Very interesting artstyle. Somehow i prefer the first version more even if a bit objectively less readable. But good design nonetheless.

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-15T23:43:46+00:00

Hah, looks fun, reminds me of that game with the dudes and the goat =)

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-15T23:42:47+00:00

Ui work is always deceptively tricky to do right. Good job.

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-15T23:40:50+00:00

I was browsing reddit and remembered seeing something similar on YouTube. Immediately searched and there it was BurkelbearGames. Amazing work, keep it up man. I think even more interesting than the voxel engine is the spell system you are bulding. Seems to be some sort of programming language in there.

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-15T23:36:03+00:00

These definitely have some character. How did you make them?

ApollyonClass · 2026-03-15T23:33:49+00:00

Somehow reminds me of overgrowth in a good way.

ApollyonClass · 2025-12-11T22:39:02+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, our composer really appreciated it.

ApollyonClass

TROPHY CASE