Game Devs Struggle with Technical Hurdles
22 posts across 5 communities in the last 60 days; 50% from r/IndieDev.
“Heya, I am a unity dev, and I have been working on a teeny action game for a bit, I have made multiple 3D games before but each time I have used an existing asset pack of some kind. This time the project is alot more ambitious so I chose to animate and model things myself…”
“I hope those changes are for the better. I wanted to give this game a bit more realism. How do you feel about them?”
“felt so laggy and slow due to blocking my mouse speed, game has opportunity to grow imo.”
Many game developers are facing common technical challenges, from animation glitches and terrain generation to marketplace design and data storage. These issues often require significant troubleshooting and learning, highlighting the complexities of game development.
SOURCES (53)
“We've had our game out as a demo on steam for a while now but recently got a report from a user that the game got blocked by Smart App Control because it could be unsafe. Have you experienced this and what was the solution…”
“Since quite a few of you were interested in my water shader post , I thought I'd share some more progress as we work through other parts of the game. This time, it's snow. I think snow is one of those things you really need to get right in a driving game. Not just because it needs to look good, but because of what it lets the player do. The same way convincing water can add so much to the atmosphere of a game, things like snow, mud and grass can make the world feel that much more alive w”
“I hope those changes are for the better. I wanted to give this game a bit more realism. How do you feel about them? submitted by /u/radolomeo [link] [comments]”
“felt so laggy and slow due to blocking my mouse speed, game has opportunity to grow imo.”
“Very happy with the new asset pipeline. Finally I can turn 3D models into isometric 2D assets I remember from my childhood games (SWAT 2, Commandos 2, Diablo 2, etc.) Thanks to AI I was able to build a tool that interacts with Blender and renders these assets with very much customisations (shadow angle, animations, equipment layers, and more). What do you think about that art style? Would you prefer it over real 3D Games? submitted by /u/CheddarGoblinDev [link] [comments]”
“Every upgrade in my game gets its own mesh… well, almost all of it for now :D submitted by /u/Odd-Commercial-2447 [link] [comments]”
“I modelled every prop, weapon ect myself in blender. The game is actually made in Godot 4.7 You can check the full thing out on the storepage. It's still in early development, but I think that the last 50% of a game's feel and polish comes together in the last 5% of work. Do you guys think this is a cool feature? Every main feature in my game (besides vehicles and NPCS) are shown in the tech demo. submitted by /u/Leather-Smell4558 [link] [comments]”
“Currently terrain isn't supported because BS1 crashes because of it. It would be really nice if there was a way to convert UE2 terrain into a static. It's one of my favorite aspects of UE2 as it makes making very organic maps so easy.”
“My game is a courthouse management game where, I and a few players who have tested, wanted to build as big as we can, but performance quickly hit a wall. Who would have thought that hundreds of fully skinned animations are bad for performance? I was reluctant to add VATs (vertex animation textures) because it looked too daunting and I had my fare share of issues when I was testing (far more than the start of the gif). Overall I've replaced most of the people with less complicated animations”
“A while ago I've shown off some pillow physics I've put into my Dark Roll 2 game and... people loved it more than I could anticipated! It made me experiment more with mesh deformation, as I wanted to incorporate it to my game in more meaningful way, and I came up with this sludge - that actually affects gameplay more. submitted by /u/Levardos [link] [comments]”
“Been playing around with first-person animation again. I'm really bad at it, but here's an early version of a power-up for my game. Still some cleanup to do. Does anything look awkward to you? Happy to hear what you'd change. I was somehow inspired by Bioshock (i know is not even close), but i honestly feel really proud i was able to accomplish this. The clunky movement is intentional as i wanted to give a retro feel, but maybe it just look bad The game is NULLGATE: https://store.ste”
“Apparently, if you aim too close to the player, the game decides to turn the character into a ragdoll. And somehow the cloth physics make it 10x funnier. submitted by /u/Ashamed-Walrus-369 [link] [comments]”
“I was working on an aiming and throwing mechanic, but apparently aiming too close to the player has… consequences. The funniest part is the cloth physics. submitted by /u/Ashamed-Walrus-369 [link] [comments]”
“It’s still very early in the development. Any thoughts or feedback? Currently working on the UI 🤠 submitted by /u/GetInGetOutGame [link] [comments]”
“After weeks of making models in Blender and painting weights so all the animations work properly, I finally have a working character creator in my farming game! If you want to follow the game, you can wishlist it on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4639140/Dough_it_Yourself/ submitted by /u/Ill-Brick224 [link] [comments]”
“What do I need to do to make textures look more realistic? I only use Panda3D no engines. submitted by /u/EverythingBOffensive [link] [comments]”
“I don't fully understand what had happened, but my game is pretty much destroyed. I tried everything to get it back, but nothing worked sadly. I (stupidly) did all of my work in one scene, and unfortunately did not use any version control. I still have the models, scripts, anim, textures, etc. However, I was pretty lazy and didn't make many prefabs for important objects, or areas in my scene. I have already moved alll important assets, scripts and the few prefabs I had into a new stable”
“I can get the gameplay working, but as soon as I start building UI screens (e.g inventory), I find myself spending way more time than I should. Is this your experience too? submitted by /u/ButtonClub [link] [comments]”
“What is the best tutorial video for building system for Unreal Engine real-time or ingame for players to build stuff. submitted by /u/BigBlu2k7 [link] [comments]”
“Been noticing a lot more PS1/PS2-style horror and platformer games popping up lately (the low-poly, low-res texture aesthetic). Curious how devs here are handling the texture side of that pipeline. I'm thinking about building a simple web tool that generates that specific look — proper dithering, limited palettes, resolution downscaling — instead of doing it manually in Blender/Photoshop each time. 128px to 1024px range, probably free tier + pay-as-you-go for bulk generation. A few questions”
“Hihi. I like talking about Game UI (ex Midway, EA, Id Software, Glu Mobile, more Indies than I can count), and I understand not everyone can take a Mentorship or Bootcamp, so every once in awhile I like to take the lessons learned in class and write them out so that everyone can benefit. So let’s talk about how to improve your Inventory screen, which I would qualify as one of the most complicated screens in your game. Beyond that - it’s also an intimate part of the core loop, with powerful hooks”
“There is still some stuff I want to tweak but at this point I feel like I should have just put some more effort into actual gameplay 😄 submitted by /u/Numerous_Pen_5639 [link] [comments]”
“Was trying to make an ocean shader a couple months ago for an automation rts game and came up with a totally busted shader. The folks on r/solodevelopment convinced me to keep it though so after a while I revisited it to turn it into a ferrofluid shader. I kinda like it? (This is in Godot 4.6) submitted by /u/PGJonesAndCo [link] [comments]”
“I've been working on developing a factory builder for a while. I wanted to make the game easly moddable since I started working on it. To clarify I dont mean just make the game easy to mod as in adding existing mods to the game, but instead allowing people who dont know how to code to mod the game easly. My current implmentation of this system bakes most of the data for the diffrent buildings and biomes and stuff into JSON files. That way say you wanted to add a custom building to the code y”
“Each enchantment gets its own shader so you can tell what you’ve installed to your machine at a glance. Still tweaking them and adding more, but I’m really happy with how they look already! submitted by /u/Music-is-fun [link] [comments]”
“Just this past week, I decided to change the composition of my game's level one melee enemy in a platformer from Unreal Engine's paper 2D to a full 3D model, hoping that the separate paper 2D character which comprises the player character's structure would stop bouncing it around. Unfortunately, it didn't work - the bouncing is still going on with this and other enemies so I'm chalking it up to a paper 2D quirk and will not be screwing around with it any further. Consequently”
“Do you think the following could be a good idea for a story? When making the 3D game engine, implementing skins and animations was very difficult to figure out for me. Even just figuring out how to properly extract the data from the gltf scene file was confusing. So to help me better understand what to do, I constructed this graph in Figma, as I read through the documentation, that maps out exactly what to do and how/where to multiply the various vectors/matrices. It helped massively and was rea”
“I've been trying to update the visual feedback for my project Danger Parade, and one of the issues players had mentioned was visual feedback. Was sometimes hard to tell if their build was effectively damaging enemies. I had avoided adding in health bars due to visual clutter (most levels have lots of little enemies like above) so was concerned that those bars would be too extreme. But, I wanted players to be able to see how effective the health was of remaining enemies. I played around with”
“Game dev here Eventually we will reach to stage where Ai can create GAME READY ASSETS But rn mostly these are just slopes. Unusable, unless one wants to use for school project”
“Tutorial is available here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/b0aX9E I'm solo developing an Indie Game - Bunkerhold and one of the systems that i wanted to put in place is Skin Transformation, this will be one of the key elements in the game. I made a system that is compatible with any Skin material and in theory can be replicated in most of engines and decided to share it with everyone interested in replicating same effect =) This is my first multiplayer project, and building a co-op game”
“It's Unity URP with a bunch of shader and post-processing assets stacked together. I'm unsatisfied with the animations and some of the colors. submitted by /u/volta_verve [link] [comments]”
“Finally got a build out to the discord an this one bug is glorious! Discord can be found here :) submitted by /u/EarthynsIron [link] [comments]”
“Hey, I’m wondering how y’all approach using texture maps. For context, I work in Unity and am making a mobile game so performance is the main focus, but also interested to hear what people think generally. How do you decide when to use a certain texture map? Is it truly just “whatever looks good” or do you guys have a sort of system? E.g, always use a normal map, ambient occlusion only on certain types of objects, roughness on others… it seems like you could go back and forth trying a million di”
“I would really like to see cool physics destruction in more video games like this. Thoughts? submitted by /u/Maxwell10206 [link] [comments]”
“Making it look good and making it performant at the same time has been such a challenge... numerous failed atempts and i'm still not totally happy with it. It's always ugly or costs too much performance. submitted by /u/fpechmann [link] [comments]”
“Hi everyone! I'm one of the developers behind Permafrost. Instead of focusing on zombies or supernatural threats, we wanted the frozen world itself to be your biggest challenge. Staying warm, finding food, scavenging abandoned locations, and deciding how far to push into the wilderness are all key parts of surviving. You can play solo or with up to four players in co-op. Along the way you'll gather resources, craft tools and equipment, build and expand shelters, repair abandoned vehicles”
“I'm making a game about surviving and driving in an arctic world procedurally generated. This community gave me a lot of feedback some time ago and now it's time for the v2! What could be improved? The game is called Arctic Drive, Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4009490/Arctic_Drive/ Sorry for the little glitch in the video, the in-engine recorder can be pretty wanky... submitted by /u/muclem [link] [comments]”
“I've been trying to crack down on the jankiness and have been trying to make my game look, feel and sound better. tons of weapon rebalancing, health changes, trying to make the drones look less static and cooler. any advice? submitted by /u/F117lionhart [link] [comments]”
“Found the wackiest bug after a wild goose chase. Sharing here to spare others! submitted by /u/IronRebellionDev [link] [comments]”
“Hello! I am 14 and i am working on my game, on GameMaker Studio 2. I want to hear you feedback on the game and art! submitted by /u/TvixTheDev [link] [comments]”
“I'm staring at a plane with lighting on UE. There's walls so that I don't fall off (currently testing walk/run/attack animations), a target I can whack on, some objects I can pick up and put down and throw. Basic stuff. But on another window (separate project), I'm staring at the full 3D maps of a game that I'm taking inspiration from (Deus Ex 3). My game's also stealth (but it's third person), and it does come in modular closed components like DX3 (not open world), b”
“Thank you for the feedback! Swapping to pistol (unlimited ammo there) on empty is top priority. Were you using mouse and keyboard, controller or touchscreen when the movement stopped working?”
“I should focus on art production but I couldn't let go of a physics bug that prematurely ended my last 2 playtest sessions submitted by /u/handlebardev [link] [comments]”
“Heya, I am a unity dev, and I have been working on a teeny action game for a bit, I have made multiple 3D games before but each time I have used an existing asset pack of some kind. This time the project is alot more ambitious so I chose to animate and model things myself, whilst am able to do it, its extremely painfully slow... A single walk, run cycle took me weeks to get right. And with the ideas I have for combat, I cant even begin to picture how long simple combat animations will take in th”
“Making scary location in my game,added sounds,screams,crys and ambient,how does it feel? submitted by /u/BetWooden5917 [link] [comments]”
“Every time my character picked up an SMG, their entire upper body would violently collapse inward like a crumpled soda can. I spent days completely rewriting my inventory blueprints, disabling physics, and messing with Blender export scales because I was convinced the asset was cursed. Turns out, I just selected the wrong animation asset from a tiny dropdown menu in my AnimGraph, forcing my character's spine to blend into absolute nothingness. 10/10 game dev experience. submitted by &#”
“I've tried both Gaea 2 from Quadspinner and World Machine, but not World Creator 3 yet or the other one that's really expensive Houdini or something like that. Curious what people enjoy using? submitted by /u/flowerdragon2934 [link] [comments]”
“Hey, We built a player-driven marketplace into our mobile game Puck Rush. The idea: players unlock pucks and stickers through gameplay, design their own versions, and sell them to other players for in-game currency. On paper it sounds great. In practice I'm running into a design problem I didn't fully anticipate: \- If we feature top-selling designs, the same few creators will dominate permanently \- If we randomize the feed, good designs get buried and creators lose motivation \- If we”
“I've already: Audited Harvard's CS50 Lectures Completed Learn GDScript From Zero Completed Godot's Your First 2D Game and Your First 3D Game tutorials Been following Playable Workshop's Make Your Game series (it's still in early days) Completed Heartbeast's Make an Action RPG series Last year I did a fair amount of Apple's Swift Playground challenges I have some other tutorial series picked out, and they're definitely helping me learn Godot's interface and mec”
“I'm a beginner working on a multiple choice quiz card game. I want to store all the questions, potential answers and correct answers for each card somewhere, but I'm not sure the best way to do it. The only ways I can think of are a massive array or some kind of database (this may sounds extremely stupid, I don't know I'm truly a beginner). How would be the best way to store something like this to be accessed and displayed onto a card? submitted by /u/cavetown08 [link”