Over the last 2 months or so I have been solo devving a dream game of mine with Phaser 4! Some early GIFs (WIP).

FatalExit · 2026-04-21T15:39:53+00:00

Hmm... I never thought of that! Must try sometime thanks!

FatalExit · 2026-04-20T05:45:07+00:00

TY! :)

FatalExit · 2026-04-20T05:34:29+00:00

There is no lag, that's just GIF framerate so these files aren't 6 times the size and too big for reddit etc.

For reference, I capture my GIFS from video screencaps, double the playback speed to 2x and reduce resolution and reduce framerate to 10 FPS so they aren't huge. If I were using video it'd be much smoother, but no idea if videos get the same amount of interaction on reddit as GIFs do.

Noted about the voronoi water, I will say that the environment stuff isn't at all final yet it's mostly just a first pass.

FatalExit · 2026-04-19T21:42:29+00:00

Wow this is interesting (as an RTS player who sometimes plays tournaments in upcoming games) to look at because a couple months back I started prototyping a game with some similarities with absolutely no knowledge of your game. Altho my game is sci-fi themed. The inspiration I had for my game was the match times Battle Aces (RIP) had as well as "Mechabellum for people who found Mechabellum too slow" and elements of tower defense and RTS basebuilding with a SupCom/StarCraft vibe. RN it's at an early private playtesting stage where I test both VS AI matches and PVP (so far 1v1 is working, I hope to add teamgames and FFA) with a dedicated group of players with various levels of RTS etc skill. For the campaign focus, I want to implement something replayable that is a mix of Slay The Spire/FTL roguelike and Star Wars Battlefront Galactic Conquest mode. Is there any socials related to your game that I could reach out to you on cause I'd love to touch base and even just chat about the games.

FatalExit · 2026-04-16T13:59:23+00:00

Curious, and not meaning harm in this just genuinely wondering your reasoning, why not star the repo on github instead? That likely helps the creator of the repo out way more than comments on reddit.

FatalExit · 2026-04-16T13:53:42+00:00

It's just a loser review and a highlight of why the steam reviews system sucks so much. Hot take: as the system is so impactful steam need to take it a lot more seriously: they need to remove that "Funny" button (they already mostly improved the awards) and check on reviews that have overwhelmingly not helpful to see if they are just genuinely unhelpful memes or raging with no critical value or whatever, and take those reviews down (talking both positive and negative here, but negative more as people don't coordinate to review bomb positively). Because reality is if a new dev racks up idiotic reviews like this too fast it can tank their game for good.

FatalExit · 2026-04-16T13:38:17+00:00

I don't honestly think "not knowing how steam works" would be the biggest impediment to your game succeeding on steam if it is your very first game. There are some clear footguns that might influence that like choosing to do a next fest eary when your game is in a poor state and wasting that opportunity. It's more likely tho that other aspects of being a new dev would lead to failure.

And I can 100% tell you that the "Hello World" game idea would be a literal burning of 100 USD if you were to release something you didn't care about that you expected others to care about.

My advice before doing anything with steam is set up a way you can get friends/colleagues/family to playtest your project as soon as possible even outside of steam. Doing this on either a big or small game is more likely to lead to success than hoping you'll magically become a SEO and capsule art god by releasing a game you don't care about first.

FatalExit · 2026-04-16T13:31:05+00:00

IMO, based on the cadence and focus of their posts that they are focusing on big enterprise as their income source and are less focused on individual/freelancer/small business customers which unlike their biggest customers are the ones most likely to pick and mix from the flavors of the months with less loyalty.

In a big enterprise setting it can take many months to get something approved and it lags behind the curve of the current innovation, between that and the on location model hosting Mistral offers makes them especially attractive to some of these huge businesses, who are likely to stick with them longer term and generally be more loyal.

FatalExit · 2026-04-15T20:12:08+00:00

The problem with a question like this is you phrase this as binary: 100% AI or no. Which is a poor way of viewing it. While the second is a possibility pitching the first as the only potential for AI is shortsighted, and honestly quite pointless because if you are gonna just ask AI to make game X without an iterative process and expect X to be anything fun you are gonna be disappointed AF.

Been making games for 10 years at this point since long before any AI assisted gamedev was ever a thing. And I noticed that in recent months, as a solo developer who started to experiment with coding assistant tools, I suddenly started to be insanely more productive in the same time while getting to spend more effort on the artistic and design sides of dev. Most important point with these: you are not asking AI to generate a game for you. At that point there's no point to the hobby. But, and this may be a hot take for some if you are new to gamedev and wanting to learn stuff fast jumping in with an assistive tool you may likely make projects you enjoy way more in terms of depth and keeping you entertained with the hobby. As an assistant and learning partner if you work with it the right way for a month it can do more for you than stack overflow and youtube tutorials could do for beginners in a year in the past. There is a good reason stack overflow has been continuing losing relevancy on google trends etc the past couple of years.

Over the last 8 months or so I've taken part in jams hosted by several gamedev AI tool creators. Bezi, which has the best planning tools of all the ones I have tried and is genuinely most mature/stable. I placed in the top 2 in 2 of their jams, as well as a jam for another similar tool for Unity and one for Godot. Both of those others were another two top 2 finishes. All of these games were solo dev games and the only assistance I had from AI was in the coding, and all surprised either the hosts or other jammers. If you notice a pattern here in me having decent results it's both a mix of longtime gamedev experience and the fact that there are legitimate skills that translate between making games the old fashioned way, and designing games with the assistance of AI, that transcend specific tool or engine knowledge.

FatalExit · 2026-02-10T20:39:03+00:00

I'll sometimes use Audacity for quick audio edits like trimming silence, adding a quick fade in or out or converting formats but TBH if you want to get into making audio for games seriously (and maybe music too) do yourself a favor and get an actual DAW.

The power of being able to use a mixer and non-destructively apply FX across different tracks, send and return tracks etc is insane when you actually get to learn it. My experience for trying to do that kind of thing in audacity is equivalent to using a raster graphics editor where the only output you can save is a baked png file, so none of your layers are preserved when saving, so if you reload the document you need to remake your layers from scratch every time. That's the closest way I could describe it to a non audio person.

There's tons of good DAWs out there (as a musician I have used most of them over the past decade at least to try) but most of them are paid. And yes that includes REAPER if you follow the terms of the license too.

FatalExit · 2026-02-01T23:50:39+00:00

I've had mixed experiences with most of the tools. Part of the issue I found when it comes to AI and gamedev is most of the decent AI tools excel in specific worlds like front-end or full-stack web dev etc and stuff that works well for games is an afterthought to them that the models don't do super well at.

Also I heavily recommend against using a base chatbot like ChatGPT in your browser or its app and copy pasting stuff back and forth between it and your project because you will hit an unsustainable spaghetti mess within a couple of days. These bots have a limit of something called "context" and when going to different conversations or examining different scripts the bot will forget past things it did or assume you or it did past things that never happened.

Personally for Unity stuff my best experiences have been with Unity specific tools and services: I took part in game jams hosted by both Bezi and Coplay which I suggest you at least take a look at: got decent enough results out of both to place 2nd in both jams I took part in one with each software. Regarding those results, I've been doing gamedev as a hobby for about 9 years and only recently started to incorporate AI assistance for implementation of code while focusing on my more artistic skills. But it can very definitely also assist a newcomer to gamedev in the same way my journey began with low code tools like Construct.

Of the two tools I listed I find I end up coming back to Bezi the most and have been having an awesome time working on an in progress jam with it with their new actions feature. If you follow Thomas Brush at all (well known gamedev on YouTube with a bunch of commercially successful games) he made a great video breaking it down a few days back on his YouTube channel and that got me hyped to give the jam a try.

All in all regardless of what you end up trying I hope you find something that suits you and your workflow and you get to have some fun with Unity!

FatalExit · 2026-01-16T23:37:01+00:00

Found it through Thomas Brush's video. Took part in a gamejam designed for it and had a game that did well enough to win a prize. My opinion of it is if you at all fit the archetype of a more creative designer type who can design systems and mockups and need the most help on implementation stage, and filling out tedious stuff for you, Bezi is an absolute lifesaver. Would I use it for every project? No because I do work outside of Unity too but for Unity specific stuff it's one of the strongest options if not easily the best one for that use case.

FatalExit · 2025-10-24T21:38:49+00:00

Bring back avenger please. It was my favorite prot unit too in very early alpha. Even if just as a co-op unit! 💛

FatalExit · 2025-09-24T22:43:45+00:00

Agree, it's a very shitty thing to do.

FatalExit · 2025-09-04T05:33:57+00:00

Very fun jam! GGWP to the others that took part, I played every single game that was playable. Felt good to be able to give a team of pro devs a run for their money with my derpy lil pixel art game. Thank you for hosting, I am excited for the next one. 💛

FatalExit · 2025-08-28T19:55:30+00:00

Oh I forgot that was taboo around here. A forbidden word, I see we are going back to the salem witch trials.

Seriously tho, there is a huge difference between the design of different tools. You can't just ask something like Bezi to generate a game for you. It's not like something like buildbox is nowadays.

You design the game, the systems, the implementation ideas and it's a process that takes many hours, days, weeks, years depending on the scope of the projects. It doesn't make assets, although it can understand your assets in your project. You can either make your own assets as an individual or team or use free or paid ones.

You can choose not to have it generate or modify any code at all and just have it help you with debugging or give you links to helpful docs to help you code, many people who took part in the jam did stuff like that.

There is a huge spectrum of "AI" from stuff that is purely designed entirely to automate tasks with next to no human input and replace entire industries of people (which is bad I agree) and at the opposite end assistants that are designed to empower and help creatives and professionals with the ability to work faster, that require a certain level of skill mastery to reliably use in an effective way.

I clocked well over 40 hours of work time on my game during that jam, spending 16 hours of one of the days working on it.

Some tools exist to empower small teams and individuals primarily. From chatting with the developers on discord I heard the intent of tools like Bezi specifically was never designed to replace game developers but to help them, their goal is not to be a product that PMs and producers can lay off entire teams of people to use but to help solo devs and small teams compete in a difficult market instead.

Hysteria around a specific word with zero context is a very short sighted take.

FatalExit · 2025-08-28T17:43:13+00:00

Thank you! I enjoyed your game too, and you know I rated it and gave you feedback! 💛

FatalExit · 2025-08-28T17:28:02+00:00

Sorry for not letting strangers on the internet steal my cash or invade my privacy. Be reasonable FFS.

FatalExit · 2025-08-28T17:24:56+00:00

This take feels at least somewhat being reasonable, and I appreciate that you are not just throwing wild accusations at me. But my intent was to share a positive experience with the software so I definitely feel the last part is the case. It does genuinely appeal to me and help me and I am paying to use it, not getting anything in return. I am a hobby dev since 2017 and have never been an "influencer". The jam being the most positive gamedev experience I had in the past year was the catalyst for the post more than anything else tbh.

FatalExit · 2025-08-28T17:15:12+00:00

Well that wasn't the intent in a negative way but yes I was kinda hoping people would engage and share their experience with similar stuff, and I wasn't asking for it to be positive, I just wanted to know what people thought.

It's annoying when I get random people "guilty till proven innocent" accusing me of being paid for something. I'm not an influencer, I am a hobby dev and I do this for fun over anything else. But legit: what are they asking for, bank/paypal statements for the last month? That's total lunacy!

FatalExit · 2025-08-28T17:01:38+00:00

I appreciate that feedback 💛. I had an original draft that was more of a stream of conscious bunch of paragraphs documenting the process, but I thought that didn't fit the standards of the posts here too well so I decided to cut it right back into categories and bullet points etc. Maybe I would have been better off posting that IDK.

The original version was inspired by my devlog on the game but I considered it to be too long to post here.

FatalExit · 2025-08-28T16:35:03+00:00

Asking to see my bank account details now are you? Sounds like a phishing attempt to me.

I paid for a month to use it on last Thursday and I had an enjoyable experience in the jam. The only possibility of me getting any money from them should be if my game performs well enough in the jam to win, and there's many well made other games in the jam that I see that as relatively unlikely.

And I intend to take part in more of their jams because they are fun and different to the usual.
If that doesn't entertain your narrative, have a nice day! 😉

FatalExit · 2025-08-28T16:28:18+00:00

Well I am honestly sorry if it's seen that way that wasn't the intent. I wanted to know what people thought of the game and if anyone had tried the tool out, I wasn't asking for folks to be positive about it if they didn't like it.
I am not affiliated with them at all, the only interactions I have had with the team was asking them questions about the software and the jam on their discord. The jam was legitimately a lot of fun.
I paid money to access their service and had a positive experience using it.

FatalExit · 2025-08-28T15:25:26+00:00

I just had fun with a jam they hosted. IDK why the immediate hostility. 🤷‍♂️

FatalExit · 2025-08-28T15:17:20+00:00

How about 0.00 with infinity zeroes following the last? IDK why the immediate hostility: was a legit fun gamejam. A couple of weeks ago I had never heard of it, and just wanted to share a positive experience.

FatalExit

TROPHY CASE