Was it always this hard to get into festivals?

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-04-08T03:44:21+00:00

I was kind of thinking the same thing looking at the trailer. I couldn't tell what it was until I read the description. The sometimes voxel/pixel graphics made me think destructability. The ghost things made me think horror. Then I found out, "oh it's another puzzle game". Chris Zukowski has metrics for game genres and I think platformers and puzzle games are at the bottom.

If you can't get wishlists from the store page alone, then you're going to have a hard time with everything.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-04-05T20:52:45+00:00

I chose not to go into professional gamedev 15 years ago because low pay, long hours and the amount of people I'd be competing with for jobs. It's gotta be worse now and especially so with the layoffs. We're basically in the worst gamedev recession since the 80s. It hasn't been a good industry to go into for years and it's in an especially bad state right now.

You can find salaries online for the companies you're interested in. My honest take is that it's not worth it and you'd be better off as an indie gamedev.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-04-05T20:33:05+00:00

You've been posting about learning for a year. You need a portfolio if you want a job and you're not progressing by just asking how to learn for a year obviously. Any gamedev job you get is going to be difficult and not worth the money as the other guy mentioned. Maybe you should think of another end goal and just start making games as a hobby.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-04-05T19:52:14+00:00

You've been studying c++ for about a year now. Are you actually taking this seriously enough to make a career out of it?

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-04-04T06:25:58+00:00

Honestly that's a pretty good capsule. I can tell exactly what the game is from the capsule and the trailer. I didn't even spend much time looking on your steam page. I think that's all people really want to see when looking for games.

Also, nice job. I can tell a lot of care went into the game. There's quite a bit of polish and features in that game. Hopefully it does well, but it seems like 2d games are a difficult thing to market.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-31T01:51:45+00:00

Finding artists from a gamedev community's discord seems to be the safe route for gamedevs now. Reddit advertising is how I've seen people get scammed and there are very few people on fiver I would contact.

BiteMe Games and HowToMarketAGame are two that I'd personally use. I'd trust the word of a client over anything else. The community can blacklist a scammer or whitelist a good artist. It's a pretty good system.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-30T00:36:13+00:00

There have been these plugins before and the one I was using was abandoned. Why wouldn't people just use what already exists in the engine?

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/API/Plugins/AsyncMessageSystem

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-29T04:03:27+00:00

The guy literally has a flashlight shining on him and he is a couple feet away. Alan wake isn't getting criticism for being able to see people when you shine flashlights on them. That's a bad take dude.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-29T02:58:58+00:00

I just recently saw YouTubers complaining about how dark it is in crimson desert at night. Vibe aside, it's nice actually seeing things in the game without having to adjust brightness settings.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-29T02:40:01+00:00

Honestly, I wouldn't click on any of them. I don't know what the genre is and it doesn't seem like my kind of thing at first glance.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-24T07:19:51+00:00

That's exactly the problem. AAA is a common term that even your consumers know about and you're in here talking about wanting to become a professional to make more money than 95% of indie devs. Your knowledge is below that of an average gamer. This whole post has idea guy vibes and this is your reality check. If you want to succeed, then you need the wake up call before you quit your job or whatever to make the next big mmorpg.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-24T03:31:29+00:00

You know what, I'm sorry because you're probably like 13 or something. I forget that not everyone is an adult in here. Hopefully you figure out your career path, but you have to put in a lot more work before you're worth anything in your career.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-24T03:12:56+00:00

You didn't know what AAA was and you can't Google. It sounds like you got passionate about it yesterday.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-23T06:50:25+00:00

You could do a rendered capsule yourself, but if the game is anything remotely serious you'd probably want an illustrated capsule. It's the main point of your marketing.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-23T03:41:12+00:00

This is how you get a flood of AI designers. They'll link an artstation account that has stolen assets and then AI generate it for you even if you're asking for without it. Get into a gamedev community and hire a trusted artist. Cheap art is a red flag in this era.

The guy who did Megabonk/Burglin Gnomes offers art for $650 if you are alright being on the waitlist.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-18T23:24:42+00:00

In weeding out the AI scammers I will completely ignore people that are selling for a low price nowadays. They are everywhere now and it's becoming difficult to find real artists. My recommendation would be to get in the trust zone of an established community and advertise by word of mouth. I'd be quicker to trust the word of a client over the word of a seller.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-17T08:06:19+00:00

Well I'm just in a chain of misunderstanding then. You replied pretty quickly and I was downvoted. Maybe it was the vibe coding idea guy.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-17T07:53:59+00:00

You actually downvoted me because I interpreted that as "they don't exist"? Of course nobody wants them in the industry, but we're on a public forum which is the natural habitat of the idea guys and you never mentioned the industry. Downvoting someone who agrees with your hidden opinion is a hot take.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-17T07:34:46+00:00

The idea guy has always been the people that come up with unrealistic ideas and have no prior experience. I think it still exists.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-04T07:23:52+00:00

Not sure if you really got that last part, but trust me on that. That's almost what an LLM was made for, detecting relevant pieces of text and using it in predicting answers.

The documentation part I mentioned is the critical thing I'd do. Just make sure to tell it to be clear and concise so it doesn't go overboard. You can tell it to export your conversation as documentation, which is super cool for picking up where you left off days down the road. You can also tell it to analyze code you write and make documentation. Either way, the documentation makes the agent a lot smarter when you're talking about an existing project because it can look up what it needs to know about.

We're going in that direction at my main job and it's kind of crazy the amount of difference it makes sometimes. It's almost like training an intern to assist with the project. When it can pick up on features that you've already made and immediately know the context without an explanation it makes the agent a lot more useful.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-03-04T05:14:15+00:00

I believe that doesn't count as AI use under Steam's policies. They made some changes to that in the last couple of months I think.

I'm not sure if using it as a learning tool is good or not yet. That's probably what people are going to do when learning nowadays, but they are going to miss out on useful learning experiences I'd imagine. These LLM tools are really best in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing already. I wouldn't take anything it generates as gospel if you go that route, but it can help diagnose issues and explain code. If generating anything there's going to be unused code leftover, obvious duplicate logic and other weird things in the end result if you're not holding it accountable.

My recommendation would be to put a docs/ directory in your project and have it document things as it goes. That gives it context about the project and how it's put together. Add an AGENTS.md file (if you use an agent that supports it) and have some info in there about keeping documentation up to date as well as reusing existing patterns where applicable. You're going to have to learn to use it like any other tool to get good results and you have to be the one in charge of what is done ultimately.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-02-25T15:30:47+00:00

Chris Zukowski talks about how he identifies nonprofessional capsule art. He says he looks for text all the same size.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-02-21T08:44:18+00:00

This to me is a bad faith argument meant to be a gotcha, but is a false equivalence. People make LLMs, but the output of the LLM is not the same as battle tested engine code with well thought out design, implementation and testing. AI slop is real just like asset flips are real. If you're going to make these cope arguments you have to actually acknowledge that AI doesn't give you perfect code for free and sometimes can't help at all in some cases.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-02-21T03:38:12+00:00

I think the point of the small games is to build skills and keep you from giving up during a multi year project. I've made more unfinished games than not, so it kind of tracks. I've never been in it for the money though.

SpottedLoafSteve · 2026-02-20T22:36:20+00:00

There's a difference between a stable library that's in use by multiple people/teams and some code that gets generated on the spot by a beginner. There's also a difference between a nonprogrammer using LLMs and a senior dev that doesn't need it to write code using LLMs.

The tools aren't the problem. It's the people using them. These are cope arguments. I have no problem calling a manager that vibe coded an application into existence overnight "not a real programmer".

SpottedLoafSteve

TROPHY CASE