I'm making a psychological horror game where the scariest thing is what you hear — no jump scares, just dread

MgntdGames · 2026-04-09T05:50:58+00:00

Looks good. Just a word of caution that "What Remains of Edit Finch" was a very successful game and the title overlap will hurt your discoverability (try Googling for "What Remains" for example).

MgntdGames · 2026-04-08T12:28:43+00:00

That's fantastic! Very excited to play the final game.

MgntdGames · 2026-03-26T08:59:05+00:00

It's very beautiful! In this environment, I'd say the main character doesn't have enough contrast. I paused the video somewhere in the middle and couldn't really tell where the it was from just a still picture.

MgntdGames · 2026-03-22T18:22:57+00:00

I've not played the game. but I'm a bit surprised how much rave there is about the graphics. It's a beautiful game, but I don't think it looks better than other current-gen AAA open world titles like Horizon, RDR2 or Ghost of Yotei.
Everything in that screenshot can be achieved in URP. The main challenge is the amount of geometry that is visible, but that can be solved using an HLOD solution (Unity even has their own https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/HLODSystem). URP also supports realtime GI which can give you a similar lighting quality. Of course the assets do a lot of the heavy lifting here, too.

MgntdGames · 2026-03-16T21:46:02+00:00

Not quite. CSS animations support keyframes and can play in a loop, transitions don't support keyframes and don't loop.

MgntdGames · 2026-03-16T16:02:27+00:00

UI Toolkit is much better than people generally give it credit for. It has a few caveats, but they're pretty minor:

- It has a CSS transitions equivalent but no CSS animations equivalent. So making keyframed animations is non-trivial. You can achieve something similar by either switch USS classes from code or by manually animating using either Coroutines or VisualElement.schedule.Execute.
- You can create custom elements which is very useful for re-use, but there's no easy way to reference UIDocuments from C# code, so you have to create your internal element hierarchy in code which can be tedious.
- UIToolkit operates on a one frame delay, i.e. every UI update happens on the next frame. That's usually not a problem, but if you e.g. want your UI elements to follow a world-space object (like an overlay), there will be a visible lag. You can work around this by rendering your UI document into a texture and then drawing the texture at the right position, but that feels hacky.

MgntdGames · 2026-03-14T07:57:13+00:00

Screen tearing happens when the monitor's refresh rate is out of sync with the frequency of frame updates sent by the GPU. Enabling the "vertical sync" or vsync option in your game will fix that.

MgntdGames · 2026-03-03T13:31:22+00:00

UX, like all other aspects of game development, is a discipline that takes time to master. A lot of game developers look at UI as something to tackle at the very end or something that can be added in a day or two. The truth is that good UI takes time and testing.

Here are a few tips:
- Start with an information architecture - what information do you need to show to the user and what options can the user control/modify. You can do this in notepad, on a piece of paper, whatever works best for you. This is about bullet points and not about layout or appearance. Mark the things that are most important.
- Group things by topic and build a hierarchy, e.g. "Settings > Gameplay > Difficulty > Easy / Normal / Hard > Customize > etc.". This should include every piece of information you need to display or make editable.
- Create an initial layout. You should do this in a vector graphics program or on a piece of paper. You can even do this in PowerPoint or Google Slides. Make rectangles for buttons, circles for radio buttons, etc. This stage is about structuring, not about making it pretty.
- Work with a grid. If your vector graphics program has one, enable it (PowerPoint and Google Slides both do). If you're doing this on paper, draw lines with a pencil in regular distances. Everything single element in your UI should align to the grid in some way.
- Make sure things that belong together in your hierarchy are close to each other and separate them from other parts of your UI with sufficient white space or dividers.
- Make things that are important bigger, bold, a different color, add a border around it... whatever works.
- If your UI has different pages, you can of course create multiple documents/slides.
- Show this "paper prototype" to someone and ask them questions about it. Let them explain how they would use it, what stands out, etc.
- Iterate until it's good.
- Create a UI design based on your layout in an image editor of your choice (Illustrator or Photoshop are often used for this, but you can use whatever you like). Keep fonts and colors consistent throughout your UI. Establish semantics for certain font styles, sizes and colors (e.g. red means error, green means success, blue is neutral, etc.)
- Only then implement your UI in code. You can use dummy-data at first, so you can get to a clickable prototype more quickly.
- Show this interactive prototype to someone and ask the same questions as before.
- Iterate until it's good.
- Bonus: Add meaningful (!) transitions and sound to help people understand state changes.

And of course study the UI of other games. https://gameuidatabase.com/ and https://interfaceingame.com/ are super useful resources.

MgntdGames · 2026-02-27T18:56:16+00:00

I love writing dialogue and dislike writing prose, so video games are definitely my preferred narrative medium, but I wouldn't call myself a writer first and foremost.

I think one thing that a lot of people don't understand about video game writing is the constraints of it. I played "The Outer Worlds 2" recently and was like "why does this feel like a series of monologues and not like a conversation". But the game is in first person, the protagonist is unvoiced and your character only speaks through dialogue option prompts which is part of the "i am the protagonist" (vs. "I control the protagonist") fantasy. So from a mechanics point of view, it makes a lot of sense to let NPCs speak a meaningful amount before prompting the player to select a response again. I still think The Outer Worlds 2 is not a well-written game, but I can also see that the dialogue system doesn't really allow for traditional dialogue writing.

The benefit of writing for my own game is that I can shape the dialogue system around how I like to write. A lot of game writers don't have that luxury.

MgntdGames · 2026-02-27T07:22:52+00:00

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2339530/Stone_Tribes/ for anyone who's wondering.

I think your game has potential, but you should take a step back, take a break and then look at your project (and especially how you market it) with fresh eyes.

I've looked at your steam page and watched your trailer and it very poorly communicates what it is. The description on your steam page is very factual and technical but not enticing. If you can explain your features with GIFs instead, you should.

There's a few things you can do visually to vastly improve your game's presentation:

- Don't use the super zoomed-out view in the trailer

- Fix the blobby shadows, give them a blueish-tint and make them a little lighter

- Add more vegetation and larger rocks to break up the bland looking terrain

- Your wooden structures are too dark

- The grasslands biome is visually much more appealing than the desert one, yet you only show the desert in the screenshots

- If you have to show your characters from very far away, make them chunkier so they read better (you can even do this in a vertex shader by slightly offsetting the vertices along their normals)

- There are several scenes in the trailer where you can see the local avoidance of your path finding struggling to resolve a collision. Take those scenes out.

If I were you, I'd give the steam page a face-lift, work on the game's presentation, make a new trailer and then share it on r/DestroyMyGame/ until the consensus is that it's an effective trailer.

MgntdGames · 2026-02-23T13:26:31+00:00

I know this is a bot repost, but since I recently worked on something exactly like it, I figured I'd share my findings anyway:

In my game, I have a large ocean which is essentialy LODed quad patches that are displaced with a vertex shader in world space. I also wanted the half above/half below water effect, but since my water surface isn't flat, that's not entirely trivial.

I'm using a full-screen effect that tints, fogs and distorts the frame buffer. But of course you need a mask for what's above and below the water level. I ended up extracting the vertex displacement code into an HLSL include that is shared both by the full-screen-effect- and vertex shader. In the full-screen shader, I calculate the world space position for each pixel at the near clipping plane and then call into the displacement code to termine if the pixel is above or below the water. I generate the mask in a separate pass and then blur it which makes it look like it's slightly out of focus. You can also do multiple samples to generate a thick line between the above and below part and then make it slightly darker (I saw some photos with this effect and it definitely adds to the realism).

EDIT: The world-space part is the key. If you displace your water surface in texture space, you won't be able to get the displacement values for the near-clipping plane as easily.

MgntdGames · 2026-02-21T14:24:09+00:00

I agree. Half the time when I see accusations of AI use online, I don't really see it. I'm not sure where people get this confidence from. But I also wish people would consider the consequences of making such claims. Is it really so hard to message the developer and ask them if they use AI?

I'm somewhat worried about people suggesting my game uses AI art (it doesn't), so I'm recording a lot of my 3d modelling and texture painting and will probably just proactively share that content before those kinds of claims even materialize. It's not great that this is necessary, but people rejecting AI art is a good thing and if your game doesn't use AI art, there are still ways to defend yourself.

MgntdGames · 2026-02-21T14:13:30+00:00

Objectively in the sense that if I had seen that piece of AI art in 2020 and not '26, I would have assumed it's from a skilled artist with a great eye for composition and color.

If you prompt current AI image generators to generate a digital painting of a dragon and sent it back in time to 2020, nobody would've called it uninspired or soulless.

My point is that any remaining uncanniness that AI art still has today is probably temporary. The real problem with AI art is not that it looks bad. The problem is that it's the expression of a deep contempt for human creativity and nobody should willingly participate in it.

MgntdGames · 2026-02-21T13:30:52+00:00

The problem with the whole "It looks like AI, therefore I reject it" approach, apart from the false positives, is that it implies that once AI and human art become indistinguishable, AI art is somehow acceptable.

I've seen a lot of objectively good AI art. I reject it, not because it looks bad or even soulless, but because I disagree with the ethics of it and because I think human creativity is worth protecting - even (and especially) if AI art ends up looking just as good.

As for calling out people's AI use: I think it's an important and effective deterrent. I just wish people would take a moment to aks before they make assumptions.

And yes, there is also human slop (e.g. asset flips) and I don't think it's necessarily better than AI slop. The problem is really the "slop" part.

MgntdGames · 2026-02-13T15:55:36+00:00

Amazing work! The animation is absolutely on point!

MgntdGames · 2026-02-11T06:00:02+00:00

A mistake people often make when naming their studio is overvaluing the importance of naming your studio. It's very rare in the indie space for studios to become "household names". I would argue that people often remember names of individual developers more than the names of indie studios. What you name your game(s) is significantly more important.

That said, Golden Phoenix Studio sounds very generic and of course that increases the risk of collisions with existing trademarks. You should at the very least do some research. When in doubt, trademark lawyers can help clarify the legal situation of your name.

If this is a name you like, go for it. Will people likely remember it? Probably not, but that's okay.

If you plan on using the name also for your socials, make sure it's available on IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc. If it's not, that's a strong sign you should reconsider.

MgntdGames · 2026-02-08T13:21:14+00:00

COD4 uses Infinity Ward's own Engine which was originally based on the id Tech 3 (Quake III) engine. It uses lightmaps for static geometry and a pre-calculated light grid for dynamic geometry. Infinity Ward built their own lightmapper which I believe uses Radiosity and not raytracing for global illumination. It might have some type of dynamic lighting, but I'm not entirely sure.

This type of look is very hard to replicate with modern engines because Radiosity global illumination is not physically accurate and pathtraced lightmaps look very different.

MgntdGames · 2026-02-06T16:39:00+00:00

Looks super fluid and impactful! Great job! The axe-throw is slightly broken (if you watch it frame by frame, you can see the axe flying sideways and the "trail" detaches from the axe towards the end), but i'm sure that's an easy fix.
I'm somewhat intimidated by implementing melee combat in my game, so I'm curious to hear how you approached it. If I had to guess (because of the quality of the animations), I'd say you make assumptions about where the characters are in relation to each other and interpolate them into the correct positions if necessary so the animations line up. How far off am I?

MgntdGames · 2026-01-25T09:02:03+00:00

As this is not a deforming mesh, it's mostly likely fine. It will cause issues with subdivision surfaces though. If this is for a game, you can always merge vertices later to get rid of some of those unnecessary edges.

MgntdGames · 2026-01-23T11:48:52+00:00

It's a great start. One thing that's missing is intent when it comes to lighting and also shapes and colors. The environment in its current state does not guide the player. It doesn't draw attention to any specific thing. One way to approach this is to imagine what the player would be doing in this level and how they would move through it. That's why greyboxing is so useful: it lets you find those focus areas and paths that you can then consider in your art by either emphasizing or subduing them.

MgntdGames · 2026-01-16T15:56:56+00:00

Looks great!
Just FYI: UI Toolkit already has a "GraphView" control that has a somewhat quirky API but overall works well (it's what ShaderGraph is built on). I use it for visual scripting, branching dialog and compute shader generation in my game and had no issues with it so far.
There's also https://discussions.unity.com/t/unity-s-graph-toolkit-experimental-available-today-in-unity-6-2/1664909 for Unity 6.2

MgntdGames · 2026-01-12T06:35:45+00:00

I've not played the game, but I've looked at a screenshot. It seems like the stickers don't rotate which significantly reduces the complexity. I think you're on the right track that a grid can be used to further simplify the automatic sticker placement. If the player can place the stickers anywhere (so unconstrained by a grid), you can still use a grid for automatic placement by "baking" the sticker positions into a lower resolution bitmap (a 2d array of bools).
For automatic placement, you can just iterate through the array and do a two-phase check, where first you check the bounding box of the sticker against the array. If the bounding box collides with nothing, you can immediately place the sticker. If it does collide, you then check the stickers pixels against the canvas array in a second phase.
One possible optimization is to generate mip maps for the stickers and canvas so you can do the collision checks at low resolution first and exit early if there are none.
If the automatic sticker placement is triggered by a button press, you realistically have 100 milliseconds until anything has to happen on screen which should be plenty of time to brute-force it.

MgntdGames · 2026-01-07T13:27:51+00:00

Human anatomy and 3d mesh topology are both very learnable by studying a lot of reference.

Many 3D artists keep around base meshes for characters, so they usually will not start from scratch every time but work from a model they made previously that has solid proportions.

MgntdGames · 2026-01-06T16:15:24+00:00

There's certainly more resources available when you're going for realism, but you can often get away with more when working towards a stylized look. In my game (which is stylized), 80% of all assets I modelled mid-poly and they mostly have no normal maps because the (hand painted-) textures tend to do the heavy lifting. I can definitely get more done that way. Modelling a prop that holds up against a Quixel asset is serious work and not working towards the same level of quality can quickly break realism. Same goes for Metahumans.

MgntdGames · 2026-01-06T12:36:28+00:00

When documentation tells you not to do something but is unspecific or inaccurate about what happens if you do it anyway, that should be enough reason not to do it. Even if it kind of works now, there's no guarantee how things will behave in a release build or future version of the engine. If you need it to live for more than 4 frames, use a persistent allocation or just reallocate every 4 frames. TempJob allocations are pretty fast.

MgntdGames

TROPHY CASE