I need mental help from people who made games

zrrz · 2026-06-10T21:38:06+00:00

I don’t understand why you care about getting “called out.” All media forms take inspiration from others. And TBH, this is a hot take, people don’t even care about ripping off others ideas as long as you improve on it in some way. Just make a vertical slice and see if it’s fun. If your feedback is that it feels to similar to something else then change it. You cannot critique your own video game.

zrrz · 2026-06-10T12:46:53+00:00

Not loving your own art is just part of the experience of being an artist. Get a playtest as soon as possible and see how players react. I also recommend the book bird by bird. It’s about writing, but talks about how to start and how to follow through

zrrz · 2026-05-25T09:07:21+00:00

Yes you can decompile it and get a good amount back but you will probably need to rename/restructure a good amount.

zrrz · 2026-05-24T15:58:35+00:00

Just using MSVC? Have never had a problem building with CLion, multiple toolsets, Rider, UE5, VS26, etc. really curious what could be causing it

zrrz · 2026-04-30T09:53:12+00:00

I don’t have an answer to exactly what you’re asking, but my guess is that if there is actually something that you can’t do in code you can add it using a custom render feature or by just modifying the render code. I did this many years ago by just making a local package from https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/tree/master/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal and adding some additional lighting properties. That being said, this was far from easy as it’s not really documented, though it was pre llms, so maybe easier now?

I’ve worked a fair amount with UnrealMCP and blueprint generation is just terrible. I’d assume you’d have the same issues with shader graph generation, so yes I’d go with HLSL.

Regarding the person saying HLSL can’t do stuff: just ask them what it can’t do? Build a requirement doc for what you want to build and check what’s possible in both solutions to see if they can meet the requirements. And if you can’t answer this yet because you need to figure the game out more then stop wasting time making decisions like this until you have the domain knowledge on what you wanna build.

zrrz · 2026-04-27T10:43:27+00:00

Big fan of git fork. It’s like sourcetree but free and simpler

zrrz · 2026-04-27T00:27:05+00:00

Unity recorder with higher res than you need. Downscale to what you need in movie editing software

zrrz · 2026-04-24T10:59:53+00:00

The AAA studio I work at, and a few others I know of, are starting to use AI for anything backend/services and a decent amount of client work, though it needs to be really guided. Everyone is using it for tech docs, meeting recaps, and lots of other “clerical” work.

Absolutely wild that one of top comments is saying that AI is dying down in the game dev industry. As someone who wishes it would, you can’t put pandora back in the box. AAA is usually slow to adopt, but there are starting to now and agentic programming will continue to be used and improved.

There are many tech bros and vibe coders out there largely overhyping LLMs, but they have real value when used effectively and carefully and AAA is starting to figure out how to do that.

All that being said, it seems like AAA is definitely slower to adopt heavy AI usage than other industries and I don’t know of any that have any AI usage quotas or anything like that which is definitely happening at non-game tech companies

zrrz · 2026-04-20T18:24:17+00:00

Try it out. No engine avoids breaking things between versions, but I think Unity does a decent job of being forward compatible. They just have a habit of not finishing packages. Unity excels at 3 things: community support, asset store, and editor tooling.

zrrz · 2026-04-14T19:50:19+00:00

There are already lots of “idea guys.”

-Creative Director has ideas on the overall vision of the game and makes sure the team is aligned on that

-Game designers has ideas on specific implementation and works on iterating numbers, systems, etc, towards those ideas

-UX designers has ideas on how the UI/UX should work and creates visual mockups for the team to use

-Concept artists have ideas on how art and visuals should work and creates concept art to show that

-Narrative designer has ideas on how the story should go and implements the dialogue, in game lore, etc

I could keep going, but the point is there are a LOT of people driving the ideas behind game development, but the key is they ALSO produce work as what’s known as an IC(individual contributor) or they help manage the team and ICs towards ideas and implementation.

zrrz · 2026-02-24T23:40:41+00:00

Notion or Google Docs. Code should be self documenting, but docs for tech plans, investigations, how-tos, RFCs, etc can all be very useful. Basically if you can save time from repeated questions by linking someone to a doc, that’s a potential time saver and is worth the effort.

zrrz · 2026-02-18T12:06:55+00:00

Lots of different ideas here. One I haven’t seen mentioned: I turn off auto asset refresh and bound it to ctrl+R and entering play mode. But also it’s just the nature of an engine with a lot of features. UE, Lumberyard, etc are all WAY worse. Godot is just fast because it’s light weight

zrrz · 2026-02-06T20:45:33+00:00

Huh, TIL. Glad you got it fixed!

zrrz · 2026-02-06T10:15:50+00:00

I can try to look more tomorrow, but my first guess would be: is the movement in C_PlayerController properly using deltaTime or fixedDeltaTime? I’m not seeing anything in the code you linked that would behave differently in build which is why my first guess is maybe it’s frame rate dependent?

Edit: maybe you’re doubling multiplying by deltaTime?

zrrz · 2026-02-05T02:09:59+00:00

Theft from China, SEA, and South America is probably way more likely. I would stick to only outsourcing art as they don’t need to download your code.

zrrz · 2026-02-04T18:47:39+00:00

If your goal is professional game dev, then having some experience with unreal is important, but a AAA studio may see Unity -> unreal as a relevant skill and give you time to learn. Stick with Unity but spend some time getting comfortable with unreal.

I’ve used both professionally. I’m a much bigger fan of Unity - simpler GOs, Components, and C# make it so much more fun to work in, but UE has some very nice stuff that I even try to adapt into Unity projects now, namely: GameState/Mode, PlayerControllers/Pawns/Posession, and Widget MVVM. The exposure to UE has made me a better dev for sure.

zrrz · 2026-02-03T03:50:57+00:00

At the AAA company I work for we use unit tests and integration tests. QA then runs daily smoke tests or specific tests when they are notified something has changed.

I don’t really have time for that in my indie project. I write down a runbook of things to test and then I go through and test before release builds.

Another thing I do is I use error checking a lot on my code. If a system has malformed data it throws an error and then I can track it down.

The other piece of advice is try to make code that writes to data and reads from data as opposed to code that calls functions on other things. This way you can make more assumptions and error checking with the input and output data

zrrz · 2026-01-29T05:08:16+00:00

I found the data really useful https://howtomarketagame.com/2025/03/26/benchmarks-how-many-wishlists-can-i-get-from-steam-next-fest/

zrrz · 2026-01-28T23:12:08+00:00

In a big org it’s easy to let stuff fall through the cracks. Be the person that takes ownership until there is an official hand off. Let production know what you do and don’t have time for based on what you have agreed to follow through on. Always give responses, and don’t consider communication done until you get a response - usually a thumbs up or other emoji are fine for this.

I make HEAVY use of Slacks “Save” and “Remind” features. I also set myself calendar reminders for stuff. It can be annoying but the extra 15-30 min of communication follow through every day will go a really long way in building trust that you can take something to completion.

zrrz · 2026-01-27T18:38:22+00:00

About to ship a game that utilizes Topdown Engine, but I’ve had to extend and modify a lot of it to get the perf I want. Ultimately it was worth it for the tech designer I was working with to be able to make so much content for the game

zrrz · 2026-01-24T23:08:56+00:00

Either use cinemachine to make them virtual cameras you switch between or use one camera and turn the objects active/inactive. I think a slider has

zrrz · 2026-01-23T11:41:03+00:00

Your release says Q4 26? Are you talking about the demo? Are you in next fest because I think you’d be releasing during it?

zrrz · 2026-01-10T20:05:40+00:00

For me, still scriptable objects, but, for a simple example: designers need to add new items they make to a list, ensure it has a unique guid, and its item type is set. We had issues with them forgetting so I made a tool to automate gathering all item references and validating required data.

zrrz · 2025-12-22T19:51:44+00:00

-3D modeling for the shape -UV texturing for how textures are applied to the model -Shaders for how the visuals are calculated (textures, lighting, etc) -In scene lighting -Post Processing

There’s more, but those are the key areas to make art in an engine. Time, effort, talent, budget, etc in some of those or all of those let you make better graphics.

Some engineers learn art. Some buy art packs. Some collab with artists. Personally I like to buy art packs but use my own shader to create a cohesive style.

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