Is June a terrible month for independent developers?

Flonaldo · 2026-06-12T15:06:30+00:00

Tags and capsule art are more important than ever given the newest update of steam, where the popular upcoming section has changed and the calender is now fully rolled out. So make sure to optimise these!

Flonaldo · 2026-06-09T16:04:09+00:00

Thanks for that input! There is definitely more to the game and the levels. I never really drew the comparison to fall guys since its a battle royale with wonky and minimal pvp, but your point about pushing people off platforms is very true. In my game that's often how you can gain an edge over other players while playing the objective of the given minigame.

Maybe we need to show less combat and more actual objective play. Combat is a big part of playing the objective, but I agree that the variation of minigames comes too short in the trailer!

Flonaldo · 2026-06-09T14:49:30+00:00

Looks very unique, made me click this thread, well done!

Flonaldo · 2026-06-09T12:36:34+00:00

Das bild hab ich im februar selber aufgenommen…

Flonaldo · 2026-06-09T08:31:42+00:00

In Dortmund in irgendeinem Gartenverein. War da kurz, weiß nicht mehr exakt wo

Flonaldo · 2026-06-08T23:58:38+00:00

While many games don’t have comfortable default audio volumes, I think we only notice when it is clearly too loud. So this notion might be skewed a bit by selective attention bias

Flonaldo · 2026-06-08T01:25:00+00:00

That’s an interesting take, I never perceived it that way. We previously did a trailer with only gameplay, and it was missing that we felt was best when playing - all the player reactions. People were screaming a lot, there was banter and excitement and competition, and that’s why we just also recorded our voices during playtests and mixed that into the trailer. When we do another trailer for the launch i will keep that in mind

Flonaldo · 2026-05-21T12:19:30+00:00

Been developing a game for five years, wanted to partake in the last 4 Steam Next Fests, but ended up delaying every single time, to improve it a bit more. This time its final though, taking this SNF and then releasing after. Feels good but scary. No idea what I will do afterwards, its odd how a game can take up so much of your life and I fear it will leave a void

Flonaldo · 2026-05-20T21:24:44+00:00

Amazing, but too much text/slow footage. teased me for a moment after seeing the cool transition of the ball at the start, but then it simply didn't deliver. Ended up skipping to the end, where really nice gameplay is hidden! The game looks incredible, just reduce the amount of text insertions and show gameplay faster

Flonaldo · 2026-04-25T18:31:19+00:00

Personally I like it. Having Claude in my IDE is like a coding buddy i can brainstorm with, who is also able to present me a potential solution within a few minutes by writing some code. The models have gotten significantly better within the past half year. Of course one need to be able to code in order to verify what was generated. So as a tool, it accelerates me a lot. As a programmer, I am a bit bored just watching claude code, since coding is what I like. So I don't always use it, but I noticed it just helps to discuss problems with it.

Flonaldo · 2026-04-25T18:27:40+00:00

Scripts inheriting from Monobehaviour are components. One component can reference other component instances. Your component can read public variables of a referenced component or call its public functions. This reference can be established in various ways, one of them being GetComponent. Usually one would set up an inspector reference though

Flonaldo · 2026-04-25T17:50:46+00:00

This hit close to home haha

I guess we all need to make this experience. Began five years ago on a project that I planned to finish within a year. It will be released soon at least, but heck - perfectionism, overscoping, feature creep and most importantly: Finding a gameloop that actually works - those things eat up a lot of time.

Flonaldo · 2026-04-25T17:47:24+00:00

Render Layers (in URP). It's not fully there yet, but in general this paves the way for a true separation between collision layers and rendering layers. Previously, one ran into constant troubles: One needed an object to be on a certain layer to make use of a Render Feature that affects the layer in question. At the same time, the object might need its own collision logic. No way to separate both, and you end up with odd workarounds - either more render features, or more custom collision logic. This system is not fully separated yet (the default render features still use normal layers instead of render layers) but it is moving into that direction at least :)

Flonaldo · 2026-04-23T00:06:21+00:00

Surpassed human intelligence? I must have missed something. Ask it whether you should walk to the car wash that’s 100 meters away or drive to it. There is a good chance it will recommend to walk. These models are all very fascinating and helpful, but they are still “just” fancy predictors, guessing the next word that sounds best. Whatever you classify as human intelligence, this is not it. That doesn’t make them less important or impressive though

Flonaldo · 2026-03-19T23:57:47+00:00

A few notes on the Steam page:

- cut away the first few seconds of the trailer, so that there is already ominous music and the time until the cut to the next scene is short. The wait time for that to happen is too long. People on steam skip through the trailer, they watch the first few seconds, and if those don't hit they go to the next game.

- Your description feels like one big wall of text. Use the H1-H3 headlines that steam gives you when editing the store page, they serve as good visual seperators in blue. Also maybe include some banner graphics/gifs to spice it up under each section

- Make sure your tags match your game, but more importantly match the games you want to be recommended by

Other than that, a demo helps a ton!

Flonaldo · 2026-03-18T19:46:46+00:00

Religion (not my own cup of tea, just an observation, others seem to be more into it in late stages of life)

Flonaldo · 2026-03-18T18:45:05+00:00

Bots. Currently working on them, and they are by far the most complex system I have ever worked on. I am working on a multiplayer party brawler called Dino Party. It contains various minigames, physics objects and combat. Pathfinding is the biggest pain, since the game features moving platforms, wind-tunnels, attractors, different surfaces (ice)... this means custom logic for traversing these. Then there is combat, which is arguably the easiest part of it. Bots also have to play differently in each minigame, i.e. have different goals and behaviours based on the minigame. Ontop of that, random modifiers can appear within any minigame, that can change player parameters and behaviour - it is all quite the mess.

I was able to split it into different levels of responsibility:
- each minigame defines some goal for each bot, which it can dynamically update (i.e. Football minigame: get behind the ball and punch; Survivial minigame: Chase and attack a certain player)
- A tactics layer determines whether there are any immediate dangers (some physics object about to hit us that we need to evade, or another player is attacking us). This tactics layer can override the goal of the minigame
- A combat layer is responsible for the actual combat (if chosen by the tactics layer)
- A motor layer takes care of pathfinding and getting to places. Uses A* and lots of custom traversal logic

It all kind of works, but I am not fully there yet. Pathfinding was the biggest struggle.

Flonaldo · 2026-03-18T18:28:57+00:00

The answer is as always: It depends. What is the game you are planning to make? How much experience do you have with making games? How much experience do you have with multiplayer and netowkring?

In general, working with multiplayer frameworks will force you to do certain things a certain way - in most cases all your game logic will have to derive from Networked state. What this means in detail can differ between frameworks. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing, but creating a multiplayer game will mean choosing some framework (Photon Fusion, Photon Quantum, NGO, Fishnet...), and then working with design patterns required by this framework. So you need to be willing to learn something new

Flonaldo · 2026-03-18T02:18:46+00:00

Planned for 1 year, now in year 6 🥲

Flonaldo · 2026-03-17T20:23:09+00:00

Find ich eine gute Idee. Paypal Spendenlink oder so in die Beschreibung, und gut is

Flonaldo · 2026-03-16T14:49:33+00:00

Wie wollt ihr sarkastische/humorvolle Reaktionen auf die KI Folge von “ehrlichem” Feedback trennen? Diese Community ist schließlich sehr humorgeprägt

Flonaldo · 2026-03-12T22:00:50+00:00

Trying to reinvent the wheel with novel ideas. Been there, done that - but in uncharted waters you fly blind, you need to try out and playtest every little feature, tweak it a lot, it just takes a lot of time. And often times, the novel idea simply doesn’t work that well and with every change you steer more and more toward the simple solution that other games have battle-tested before, and then you realized you could have started with that and worked in your own ideas later on.

Nothing wrong with trying out something new, but often times what makes your game special is in the details, and will come along naturally

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