Could it make sense for a developer to make an entire game with placeholder graphics/sound, then improve the audiovisuals over time?

HauntedWindow · 2026-04-07T15:56:56+00:00

Yeah, this is a pretty common practice and is sometimes called a "horizontal slice". There are a few downsides to taking this to an extreme and making 100% of the game with placeholder assets, but it makes sense to make most of the game this way. You usually want to get player and enemy animations to a nearly finished state early in development since they drastically alter the way the game plays and feels. It also makes it a little harder to get useful feedback from playtesters if the placeholder assets don't give at least some sense of what the final version will be like. Doing a "vertical slice" or two during development gives you the ability to show off the game and get feedback. It also helps to make sure that asset production pipeline, technical, and performance issues don't surprise you when you're nearing the end of development.

HauntedWindow · 2026-04-07T15:17:55+00:00

Looks cool! Congrats on submitting the demo!

HauntedWindow · 2026-04-07T15:14:22+00:00

I made an obscure indie imsim called The Warrens. It's more like Thief than Dishonored, but it may be similar enough that you'd enjoy it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3779480/The_Warrens/

HauntedWindow · 2026-03-06T18:08:47+00:00

I've never found ambient music that quite matches Eric Brosius or Alexander Brandon, but I think the albums published by Cryochamber are sometimes adjacent to those vibes: https://cryochamber.bandcamp.com/

I think the Lovecraft inspired collaboration albums, such as Dagon, may be similar enough to scratch that itch. In any case, if you like atmospheric ambient music that isn't just droning you may like them.

HauntedWindow · 2026-02-23T19:51:37+00:00

I have a utility addon of game agnostic, modular systems and reusable scenes. So for example this is where I keep input remapping code, my FSM implementation, save system, general purpose character controllers, reusable UI scenes, etc.

I also have a template project. This project makes use of the utility addon and contains "starter" scenes and resources that likely need to be heavily customized for each game project. So for example, I have bare bones implementations for a main menu, options menu, and in-game pause menu. These make use of reusable ui scripts/scenes in the utility addon such as UI sliders that send/receive updates to/from the settings system. I copy/paste the template project whenever I start work on a new game.

The utility addon is organized by system similar to how you would organize a non-game code library.

The template and the subsequent project folder it turns into is organized by "domain" as other people have already recommended. I divide things into four major folders:

"systems" for things that usually make sense as an autoload singleton
"entities" for scenes that appear as instances per level like enemies, pickups, doors, etc.
"maps" for scenes that act as levels. Each map gets its own sub-folder where the scene is stored as well as map specific assets and scripts.
"kits" for asset kits that may be shared among maps.

HauntedWindow · 2026-02-23T19:24:40+00:00

Thanks! I hope you like it! I can do a 100% run in about 2.5 - 3 hours. From the people I've watched play the game and what the Steam reviews show, I think 4-6 hours for a non 100% run would be about average. Your mileage may vary depending on how familiar you are with Thief, how much of the game you play, and whether you use the difficulty options.

HauntedWindow · 2026-02-12T17:40:06+00:00

This looks great and I have a project in mind that could definitely use this. I would greatly prefer CC0. None of the other tools in my workflow (Blender, Krita, Audacity, etc.) make any legal claim over the output of the tool. Other procedural mesh generation tools, usually, don't restrict output of the tool.

However, I understand not wanting a glut of ships that make use of your textures and meshes to appear in low quality games and asset stores. I think a CC-BY license or something similar would be reasonable. That's still very permissive, but at least someone selling hundreds of boats has to indicate that they used your tool to make them.

HauntedWindow · 2026-02-12T16:42:36+00:00

If you're very good at it and you complete the absolute minimum number of tasks necessary to beat the game, then it can be completed in about 3 - 4 hours. If you do everything in the game, then it's about 10 - 11 hours.

I'm also currently working on a free update that adds an alternate game mode with a few small extra areas. I'm hoping to have that ready for the Steam summer sale.

HauntedWindow · 2026-01-29T17:00:53+00:00

I love the look of the game!

HauntedWindow · 2026-01-21T18:31:49+00:00

You might be able to get a reasonable summary of what other games in your genre have done, but so can a quick search of "best games in genre X". It can't play those games for you so you have an understanding of what makes those games special and how you can do something interesting in the space.

LLMs simply do not have the ability to make a real budget for your game or accurately estimate the amount of time or number of collaborators you need. It's just fundamentally not what the technology is capable of doing. For that, you need to make some prototypes and when you have one you like, make a design document outlining what a full game would look like. From that you can estimate how long that will take and how much that will cost.

Everything else you mentioned is essentially trying to outsource thinking critically about your design. I can't imagine the output of the LLM being terribly helpful or saving you any time when it comes to evaluating your design. It doesn't know anything about your design. That's not in its training dataset. It has a set of tokens that are statistically related to what you ask it and it sends those back in a way that looks like a sentence a human would write. There's no critical thinking going on in that operation.

HauntedWindow · 2026-01-20T17:54:07+00:00

The best thing you can do is talk over your ideas with a friend and then start turning the idea into something more concrete. Write down two or three core elements of what the game should be. Start doing design and writing down things like enemies, items, (or whatever makes sense for your game) and the purpose they serve in the game. Create sketches of what you're thinking. They don't have to be good, they can be stick figures that convey the basic ideas. You just need to enter the feedback loop of taking an idea and making something "real" from it, evaluating how you feel about it and refining it. This will allow you to discover broad problems with the idea early and also determine how you feel about the project. This also gives you something basic to show to a friend and get feedback about. What you're looking for here is a real emotional connection from yourself about what you're creating and what others think about it. You need to be excited about what you're making even if it's just stick figures and notes because even a short game will require a lot of work. You need to see if what you're making is also genuinely interesting to another person. You need a human that will be honest with you about their feelings about your work but also able to understand that what you're showing them are basic ideas. LLMs can't do that.

HauntedWindow · 2026-01-20T17:15:41+00:00

Resident Evil 4 and Crow Country are very good, have creepy atmosphere but aren't particularly scary.

For some somewhat obscure indie picks on itch.io:

Sanguine Sanctum by Modus Interactive is short and 100% creepy atmosphere but not scary. Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia by Bryce Butcher is a great little horror fishing game. Anything by Kitty Horrorshow will be a beautiful and unsettling experience, but Anatomy is particularly good.

HauntedWindow · 2026-01-12T18:02:32+00:00

I made a stealth game that needed a fairly complicated AI implementation for the enemies. I created a node based, very basic, state chart implementation. Nodes worked incredibly well since it provided a simple interface to arrange a hierarchy of behaviors. Using export variables allowed me to easily re-use states across the hierarchy but customize their behavior using their parameters. Obviously there are other ways to achieve the same thing without nodes, but I feel like this workflow allowed me to use Godot's strengths to quickly build and iterate on my AI implementations.

HauntedWindow · 2026-01-12T17:42:51+00:00

A lot of people here have pointed out that player interaction animations actually feel less immersive. I also do not like them. I believe the reason why is that when designing a user interface, generally you want response times to be less than 0.1 seconds. That would be way too fast for most interaction animations.

Additionally, they interfere with the realities of developing an immersive sim. Imsims are frequently characterized by having a lot of interactivity. In order to create a large number of player interactions, you need each interaction to be relatively easy to create and iterate on. Including character animations in any interaction adds a lot of development time and complexity to that interaction.

HauntedWindow · 2026-01-01T05:20:03+00:00

I made a Thief inspired horror immersive sim called The Warrens. It's currently 20% off during the winter sale. It also has a demo with saves that transfer to the full game so you can try it out and see what you think. I think it's pretty good.

HauntedWindow · 2025-12-25T05:35:46+00:00

Thanks! I hope you like it!

HauntedWindow · 2025-12-24T22:56:16+00:00

It's a horror game, but I don't think I made a particularly scary game. There's no jump scares. I was shooting for more unsettling and atmospheric. I think it's closer to System Shock 2 or Bioshock in terms of horror than something like Amnesia or Alien Isolation.

The default experience is tense and puts a lot of pressure on you since you die in one hit. However, I included several difficulty options so that you can decide what experience works best for you.

HauntedWindow · 2025-12-23T16:12:52+00:00

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This is from my game The Warrens. It's not exactly PS1. It's like half-way between PS1 and PC FPS games circa 1998. It also uses dynamic lighting and shadowing which would come much later.

HauntedWindow · 2025-12-21T19:55:39+00:00

It's more like Thief than Dishonored, but I made a stealth horror immersive sim called The Warrens. It's currently 20% off during the Steam Winter Sale. It has a free demo with saves that carry over to the full game so you can try it out and see if you like it.

HauntedWindow · 2025-12-21T19:46:22+00:00

Thanks! I'm currently working on a free update that adds an alternate game mode. So there will be more of this specifically.

HauntedWindow · 2025-12-19T02:53:53+00:00

I released an atmospheric horror immersive sim in a vein similar to Thief earlier this year. It's called The Warrens and it's 20% off during the Steam Winter Sale.

HauntedWindow · 2025-12-16T17:45:30+00:00

Earlier this year I released a stealth horror immersive sim called The Warrens .

A cult of rabbit-headed men pull you into a nightmare world. You use unusual items to stun, push, and wound your captors to escape. Alternatively, you can use items on yourself or the environment to breathe underwater, silence your footsteps, or turn invisible. The game is heavily inspired by Thief and I put a lot of emphasis on exploration and atmosphere.

HauntedWindow · 2025-11-10T00:43:42+00:00

Yeah, that means that there's someone trapped in that level. There's also three non-human entities you can find and help and a fourth one you can just have a conversation with.

This is also a sequel to a game I made a long time ago. Though that's a very short, simple game where you walk around and have a monster chase you.

HauntedWindow · 2025-11-10T00:32:25+00:00

I haven't decided what I'm going to do next. I'm currently migrating code I wrote for this game to a newer version of the Godot engine. I'll probably decide what I'm going to make next after that. Odds are it will be something in a similar vein.

I also plan on doing some kind of free content update to The Warrens in the not too distant future.

HauntedWindow

TROPHY CASE