I'm a solo indie developer, and I've been working on my game entirely by myself.

I released a demo on Steam back in July, with the full game planned to launch in about two months.

Yesterday, I found out that there are already two separate pirated versions of my game on Douyin/TikTok Mini Games.

This wasn't just someone copying the idea or taking some assets. They reverse-engineered the actual game, changed the name, modified parts of it, removed all of the developer information, added a huge amount of ads, and published it as their own.

They also managed to access content that was supposed to be for the full version. That part is partly on me.

The demo and the full game were being developed from the same project, and instead of completely removing the unreleased content from the demo build, I only made it inaccessible during normal gameplay. I thought that would be enough, but clearly it wasn't.

So that's definitely a lesson learned. From now on, I'll be separating the demo and full-version content properly instead of leaving unreleased content inside the build.

What makes this more frustrating is that the full game is still about two months away from release, so some content that was never supposed to be available in the demo has already been extracted and used in these pirated versions.

I'm still going to continue development as planned, with some adjustments so the final release is different enough from what has already been taken.

I've already submitted official infringement complaints to Douyin, but I still don't know whether they will actually result in these games being taken down.

If anyone is willing to help report them as well, I'd really appreciate it. At this point, I at least want to get the pirated versions taken down.

I also wanted to ask if anyone has experience with getting this kind of copied product removed.

What would be the most effective way to get these games taken down?

If anyone has dealt with a similar situation before, especially with Douyin/TikTok Mini Games, I'd really appreciate any advice.

Hey y'all just wanted to call out. Got an email from an obvious scammer who is scraping github with personalized ai messages about a marketing platform. Stringing them along currently but roi ask was responded with a screenshot of a search bar with 12 million leads lol.

Fair warning, if the only info on someone you can fine is an vaguely alt name with just a github resume and an Instagram, stay clear. Hope ya see this bud, you are a bad person.

Alright so basically:

- I've submitted my game's build to steam twice now.

- The multiplayer features (built with the P2P Facepunch C# Library made by Garry of Garry's mod fame) don't work unless you own the game on Steam, as proven by me having to invite team members to the Steamworks so they have actual authority. It works automatically from there.

- Steam has denied the game twice, reporting the known issue of multiplayer appearing to not work. I've submitted a ticket asking how to fix this and I got hit back with "thank you for the additional info, we'll test your next build" (this was between builds 1 and 2 submitted)

- I'm not sure what to do, I know hypothetically I could override the steamid within the facepunch library to be Spacewar (as everyone owns it)- but as far as I'm aware Valve does not allow that and you're not even really supposed to use it while testing.

Has anyone had experience with this / knows how to give the playtesters Auth or otherwise fix this issue?

I pulled the top 10 puzzle games with the biggest revenue gains on Google Play in the US for August 2026.

The top 10 were:

1. Candy Crush Saga — $2.7M (+17.2%)
2. Gossip Harbor — $2.3M (+19.1%)
3. Royal Match — $1.7M (+11.4%)
4. Royal Kingdom — $1.5M (+23.2%)
5. Match Factory! — $551K (+14.2%)
6. Gardenscapes — $543K (+10.9%)
7. Homescapes — $526K (+17.2%)
8. Piggy Kingdom — $515K (+45.4%)
9. Flambé: Merge & Cook — $422K (+23.3%)
10. Foodstars: Merge & Cook — $362K (+144.3%)

A few things stood out to me.

Candy Crush is still at the top, while Dream Games has two titles in the top 4 with Royal Match and Royal Kingdom.

But what I found more interesting is that merge and match-style games still dominate the list.

Foodstars: Merge & Cook grew 144.3%, while Piggy Kingdom grew 45.4%.

It's a very mature category, but relatively familiar mechanics are still producing meaningful growth.

I'm planning to track this monthly to see which games keep growing and which ones are just having a temporary spike.

For mobile game developers here: are you seeing the same thing? Are merge/match mechanics still performing this well in your own data?

\Revenue figures are estimates based on third-party market data, not developer-reported revenue.**

I just remembered out of nowhere that when I was a kid I used to think games would have to have every possible frame pre rendered in the game
Like every possible combination of things and angles and places were already rendered as basically a flat full screenshot that gets loaded when the circumstances are met
No clue why I got this idea

Hello everyone! I am making this post because I have a very random but important question. So last year I had just finished the third and final volume of my book series named Moonlit Kyoto, and I couldn’t be prouder of it. However, I think it could be much more than just a regular novel. I would like to turn all three books into on big Ren’Py visual novel with different endings and it has achievements. However, I want to ask something. I really don’t like dealing with social media, and always having to make sure I’m uploading and keeping a steady viewer base. Could I theoretically after I finish developing it, just upload it straight to Steam for $5 without advertising it? I would also release it to Itch.io just to get extra players. Though I’d be developing it with Steam in mind. And yes, I’m aware that it won’t get me much sales or players, but if anyone played it at all I’d be very happy. Either way I’ll be developing the game for myself, so the extra money and players would be a bonus. Thanks for listening, and maybe I intrigued you with my idea.

You can get them all from this page here with no sign up, no ads or newsletter nonsense. Just scroll down a little bit until you see all the packs.

24 packs added for August/September including Loops, Foley, Sound effects, a lot of live recordings from around the world and some other experimental packs I had fun playing about with. Packs including recordings from Kosovo, Cairo, Dublin, Madrid and the Sahara desert in which I got to record a live Moroccan band playing into the night. I also got to record some Traditional Irish music sessions while in Dublin and have posted some of the recordings! Theres also lots of leftover foley and SFX from some past games that were not used including Character voices in the style of Sims and Animal Crossing, Monster Growls and Grunts which is my personal fav and Polar Wind ambiences along side lots of other SFX and foley. For experimental percussion sounds I made one shots from the sound of pistachio shells and another pack from the sound of pebbles falling onto tin cans which could be useful for anyone who enjoys organic or experimental percussion in the productions. There also some other loop packs that I messed around with such as 8bit Bongo percussions and an old pack of Synthetic guitar loops that i recently came across again. Hope these can be useful to someone out there.

With Squarespace it does ask for a lot of personal information so you can use this site to make up fake address and just use a fake name and email if you're not comfortable with providing this info. I don't use it for anything but for your own piece of mind this is probably beneficial.

Feel free to use anything you like, everything is CC0, so no need to credit me or the site. Just grab what you need and make cool stuff. I'd love to see what you create if you feel like sharing!

If you'd like to see what other people have said about the samples you can see here in a recent post I made in a different subreddit.

Join me at r/musicsamplespacks if you would like as that is where I will be posting all future packs and little behind the scenes videos. If you guys know of any other subreddits that might benefit from these sounds feel free to repost it there.

Phil

I mean there's some art that's uniquely mine, and I've learned a lot along the road. But it takes so much effort to do it on your own compared to the tools that exist out there. I use them at my job, and I've used them in my free time. But I always wanted my game to be, well... mine. Understand all the aspects, and every little decision that went into it. I worry that it isnt worth doing, or that it'll never even see the light of day. I worry that some day soon, a lot of simpler games like mine will be replaced by games produced in a single day by gen AI. AI always seems to get little details wrong that can be frustrating to fix, of course... but what they can produce is good enough for a lot of people. Its just... more than a little sad, I think. Gamedev is what I wanted to do for me. If I didn't have to work a job that I dont really like just to pay the bills, thats what I would have done. But this just feels like its taking the wind out of my sails. How are you guys coping?

So I made an idle game that sits in a corner of your screen. Rocks fall into a portrait arena and player installs various turrets to damage and break them into smaller pieces. The bottom has a slit filter that only lets small enough rocks go through it.

The turrets have 5-10 upgrades, ranging from AOE, attack speed, range, targeting priority settings and more. But it's not a lot of content, especially as compared to other idle games.

I made this project in the last 4 months trying to learn game development in Godot, and I find myself watching the screen for long times because it feels like ASMR to watch those rocks break into pieces slowly. This made me think, should I publish the game to steam (with some more polish ofcourse)?

I'm totally new so could use some advice. Thanks!

Hey everyone! This is my game AxeSlinger! Currently nobody really plays it or has yet to really play it but I’m hopeful! :D is there anything particular that steers anyone away from this? It’s a movement based FPS that costs less than a sandwich. Much love:)

Hello game dev community, I'm starting my master finally ate age of 42 in digital-game design and development, coming from experimental film-making, as worked many times as a visual designer too.

I kind of have a mix feelings regarding starting late, since my life circumstances lead me to start both my bachelor later, at age 31 due to my health package I was born with, than after finishing at age 36 during the covid times was a bit difficult to move forward in life even though I moved to another country afterwards, health incidents visited me, and moved back home and now I'm soon stepping into a new territory.

I would be focusing on one project for my master, which no idea how and where I will go with this after the two years, but wanted to ask about my options for jobs, and what skills I should focus in or polish in case I want to make a living in the gaming industry.

since I came from the film medium, I'm really good in everything story telling, I also worked on a 3D projects with blender, but I'm by no mean a 3D artist, and I wish to learn game development with Godot beside Unity which we will learn in the master.

I wish if you would advice me in which waters to put my feet into so to be much more skilled for the future job market.

Hi,

I've been working on a prototype for a few days now, which is quite heavily inspired by another game released 10+ years ago. While it is (will be is more accurate) different enough not to be just a reskin or a mod, the inspiration is really quite clear. I'm wondering what the general gamedev community thinks about this.

I think the games FTL: Faster Than Light and Void War are a comparable situation (although I'm obviously not yet at the quality of those games). Void war obviously takes heavy inspiration from the now 10+ year old FTL, but the reaction to Void War was overall very positive and no one took the similarity in a bad way.

What do you guys think makes a game that takes such heavy inspiration from another game's systems, different enough not to be seen as a 'ripoff' or copy?

For me, I think it's the quality of the game of it's own and what it adds/changes to the core systems, but I'm not sure if the age of the game is a factor.

EDIT:
I'm having the most trouble on the UI side of things, as both games rely quite heavily on it and it's tied closely to the core gameplay. That's why I drew the FTL - Void War comparison as they also look quite similar.

There's this misconception among indie devs that by publishing a game on Steam you are competing with each one of those 16k released games.

Assuming your game is decent, you are only actually competing with the top 1% of games in your specific genre. That makes it closer to a few dozens depending on the genre.

Most players spend their lives playing just 1 or 2 types of games. True "generalist" players who play everything are rare. Like with other things they buy, people prefer the reliable option over the risky unknown one. Your goal as a dev is not to make the "perfect game" that will attract an audience that isn't yours. It's to make a game that can become part of the reliable options that people who already play those games want to try. What you wanna get is their attention, not the whole market's.

Some might argue that "more games being released means more bad games yes, but also more good games that compete with yours". That's GOOD. You should PRAY that more good games are released.

The whole concept of playing games is to get dopamine hits (sorry). When a game gets released and it's really good it draws more people into that genre and gets people "addicted" to that genre. They start scanning Steam for similar games and that's where your game enters the stage.

i recently showed an old friend some blender stuff i've made. my life wasnt stable so i dont remember this, but she remembers when i used to make really intricate 3D models at 14. i am over twice that age now. my eyesight is deteriorated and i find it more and more difficult to make creative things, only the dev parts of game developing. but originally i've always loves the art/creative part of game dev. now im thinking to properly show what im doing i might commission and i feel sad cuz i see this as a self-expression venue (its a hobby project) so i'd like to know any advice about how to satisfy my passion for game dev while realising i used to be someone else

(sorry if long. These are almost going to be my journal entries)

I will stop with self deprecation starting now. So I made this just a video because I felt it wouldn't be worth even make it a downloadable deal.

Though this looks...well like it does, the concept of me getting them to have random hair (green on head) and end with different defeated body was HUGE for me.

I would say that the gameplay is almost the vessel of the story/animation/visuals. Hear me out with this.

If I could explain the game in gameplay/vibe it would be the gameplay of "no more heroes" and lollipop chainsaw, with the art of a 90s Nickelodeon cartoon. There's a lot of art, and will have a video with all of current art/concept/animatics.

So this game would be called a hack n' slash, and spent a lot of time getting a hold of many hack n' slash based games. The gameplay works great with a barber trying save people turned into hairy monsters.

I love hack n' slashes, but at one point I find myself pounding on a singular button to try and get to the next part of the story rather than wanting to continue the game. It was much more the story for me.

I find once you play one, you basically played them in all (not trying to be mean). For me it's usually:

- New level and using new concepts/combos

- Then going back into pressing the same button a bunch of times.

So much of this game is visual based and is the game I've always wanted to play. Though I do want to make a profit once this is done, it's a something I would be happy just playing.

We all know we need more single player games as well.

We'll see everyone next week (if that's ok with the mods. As long as I have major news and not just text. I won't go "worked a lot this week." I'll have stuff to share)

I'm looking to make a 3D top-down game in a couple of years from now. That'll be around the time that I release my current project. In the meantime, I'd like to start learning some things on the side.

I'm no artist and would likely hire 3D modelers; however, what I've learned from my current project is that even when hiring artists, I need to have some understanding of how things work to implement it properly in an engine. I.e. sprites and unity for a 2D game.

I'm looking to hear from folks on what they found to be useful resources. Any specific YouTube channels, online courses, Reddit communities, etc that I can start getting more familiar with.

Edit: to add a bit more, I've seen some things about faces and verticy counts but I have no idea what is efficient. Same with AI, how can I tell if a 3D artist I've hired is using AI (I don't want that in my games)?

I’m a Junior copywriter (unemployed rn) in creative advertising. I got into this job because I thought it’d be as creative as I thought it would be, and it’s a fine job when you find the right team and place to be sure. But that’s more rare these days I hear. I was recently at a place where I met a couple former copywriters, art directors, creative directors that pivoted into other careers that were more fulfilling to them like gaming. I didn’t get a chance to chat with them much, but it was cool to hear.

Is it possible advertising creative or copywriting into writing for gaming? I also was in creative production before; filmmaking, script writing, editing, etc. I’ve always been a writer and a big reader. I love stories, world building, narrative writing, but curious what everyone’s thoughts are (and if you recommend it)

Hi. I'm a Gameplay Developer in a startup studio working on a pretty ambitious project. I'm gonna try to stay as vague as possible while conveying the issue.

I have 2 game development degrees and almost a decade of experience making games (just none released commercially). The one thing I didnt have when joining this studio is familiarity with Unreal Engine which is relevant to the project.

As I got familiar using UE over time, there was a growing (though reluctant) reliance on my experience and understanding of technical design of game code and architecture, since I'm the only person at the studio who specifically studied Game Development.

Recognizing that need, I put myself forward to the technical lead position but was rejected because "it's too early for such roles, we will hire experienced people from the industry for that when the time comes".

And yet lately, I see that one of my colleagues who is (still) studying CS, joined the studio a few months before me and has worked on UE longer is silently promoted to lead developer. I like the guy personally, but he struggles a lot with setting up and enforcing code standards, or coming up with scalable code architecture, and relies on me heavily for those things (or fumbles it by himself and I have to redesign it after). I have even been teaching him things about UE for the last months despite him working on it longer than me.

That said, he still knows some things I don't about debugging and setting up subsystems, again, due to having had more time to fiddle with UE than I did.

I don't know why, but this is bothering me more than it should, and I'm not sure what to do about it, if anything. I don't mind being passed over for promotion considering my lack of professional experience, but having to work with someone who will get the lead programmer credit while I inevitably end up doing the work stings.

Am I justified in feeling this way? And if not, how can I relax myself about it so it doesn't bother me as much?

With my brother we are launching a mobile game in November. Why launching a mobile game now? When we started seemed like a good idea, then it took us ages to finish, I'm a dev my brother is the artist and we work on weekends mainly.

So we are launching mobile. Any advice on the marketing/user adquisition?

We are building social media, not sure if is that useful on mobile games. At the moment we are contacting blogs and influencers with the game info and no much more.

Should we hire a company to do it for us?

Instagram for the curious: https://www.instagram.com/sailndig

As I know, there are two common methods to control isometric action game character using Keyboard/Mouse. I want to know which one is more popular nowaday.

1. Use WASD (ZQSD in some keyboard) for character movement and click mouse to interact or attack. (Old school RPG style)
2. Use mouse to click the destination and let AI (not gen-ai :p) find the path and move character to the location automatically. Keyboard might use for dash or trigger attack skills. (Like UE's Top/Down game template)

If there are many different attack skills like Diablo / WOW / Lost Ark in my game, I guess I have to choose the second method. We don't want player hit the keyboard like play piano, right? But my attack logic is relatively simple. So both methods should be "workable".

If both are workable, in your opinion, which way is more "modern" to nowaday players? Any other suggestions?

(I actually use second method in my current game. But when I add GamePad support in it, the logic become more and more complex and make me rethink about this question. You know, WASD is logically similar to GamePad and should be easier to work with GamePad if player has both device connected.)

Hello,

I have created two body meshes: one male and one female.

They are low-poly meshes, designed with an old-school PC/PS1 game mindset: disjointed arms and wrists, low polygon count, 256x256 textures, etc.

I would like to be able to create my own animations, but I would also like to have the option of using animation asset packs from other creators if I need them.

I am using UE5 as my game engine and Blender for 3D modeling.

Is there a specific rig/workflow I should use to make this easier?

I was initially thinking about using the UE5 Mannequin rig, but it feels a bit overkill for characters with this kind of low-poly style. I also don't think it comes with animation controllers for Blender, and I assume I would have to use Unreal's Animation Sequencer to create animations. I've never used it before.

On the other hand, the UE5 Mannequin is a widely used rig and has a huge amount of animation assets available, which makes it quite appealing.

I was also considering buying Auto-Rig Pro, which seems very convenient. It comes with animation controls for Blender, so I could animate in an environment I'm already familiar with. I don't mind paying for it, and from what I understand, it also includes an Unreal Engine exporter and retargeting tools.

So, what would you recommend for this kind of workflow?

Would it make more sense to use the UE5 Mannequin rig, Auto-Rig Pro, or something else entirely?

Thanks!

I'm not really thinking of monsters, more like doki doki literature club or omori where the mood slowly derails and bits of the characters/past is unveiled

The theme I'm going for is God and suffering blah blah blah but with a mundane vibe. Like a routine that slowly gets ruined.

I want the game to be like you as the character being a moveable pixel but you can interact with other characters and actual cutscenes have actual art and animation. Think danganronpa.

So I downloaded a .rlMotion animation file off of Reallusion that I wanted to use in blender, as its the only motion capture I could find that fit what I was looking for. Come to find out .rlMotion files can only be opened in iClone which is a windows only software...

I just want to download this motion capture animation and switch out the characters to my own in blender.

I looked into virtual machines but it wont work for iClone.

I am new to Reallusion and made the mistake of buying this animation before knowing how this all worked.

Can anyone convert this .rlMotion file into a .FBX or .OBJ file for me?

I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks!