Game Dev

Tips from making 2+ games!

One of the absolute most powerful (but often overlooked) aspects of game development is simply experience. So many developers launch just one game and that's it, they quit the industry and do something else entirely, meaning they completely miss out on the massive amount of experience you gain from launching multiple games. That's why my advice is always "make small games" so you can "make more games" which will give you tons of knowledge so you can improve more and more on each game you release.

One developer on Reddit posted a very interesting question, for developers who released more than 2 games, what were the lessons from game 1 that you applied to game 2? Here are the most interesting answers:

• Scope management. Before you finish your first game you have no idea how quickly you can build your ideas. After you finish your first game you get a much better idea as to how long things take (always longer than you think)

• Get feedback ASAP. Validate your ideas and make sure players actually want what you're making (assuming you're making games with commercial intent), that way you don't spend years working on something only to later realize no one really wants it.

• Success is not linear. I myself learned this the hard way. My first Steam game made about $100k in the first 6 months, my second game (a sequel that I thought was better in every way) only made about $20k. Even though your skills are hopefully improving, you shouldn't take success for granted. You will have hits and misses as you make more and more games. Another reason why “make more games” is great advice, you become less reliant on each individual one being a hit if you publish multiple games.

• Don't overengineer. As a programmer I love coming up with clever complex solutions to problems, but with my experience I also know that overengineering, while satisfying, is usually the wrong option. Definitely do write good high quality clean code, but don't overdo it.

• Launching too fast into Early Access. Nowadays EA players are no longer as forgiving as they once were. And if you miss your EA launch you likely won't have a successful 1.0 launch, so don't treat your EA release like "oh I'll just launch whatever I have and then keep working on it". This lesson also applies to Demos. Players want to play polished experiences.

• Learn Marketing. Probably one of the biggest ones. For your first game you likely will only have time/energy to focus on the technical aspect of actually finishing the game, but by game 2 you will quickly realize how if you want to find success it is not enough to focus just on the game, you need to spend almost as much effort on marketing as you do in the game itself. My videos with Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zukowski will teach you a lot. Oh and he’s also doing a Black Friday sale soon, so if you want tons of marketing knowledge condensed into one single place then check out his courses.

So let me take this time to encourage you to, once again, make more games! Make them small, make them fast.

More games == more learning == better odds of success in the long term!

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Tech

New VALVE Hardware!

Valve has done the unthinkable and broken the curse of the 3. They've just unveiled 3(!) new hardware products!

There's a new version of the Steam controller. It seems to be a merging of the Steam Deck with the first Steam Controller. It has ABXY buttons, 2 joysticks, back buttons, haptics, gyro, and 2 massive trackpads. There are capacitive touch sensors which enables you to switch modes by just touching buttons/joysticks. Personally I really liked the original Steam controller, I thought it was excellent for third person shooters like when I played Mafia 3, using gyro to aim, and regular joysticks for driving. It also charges using something called the Puck, it's a magnetic mini-dock that makes it super easy to charge and pick up. It works with anything running Steam, PC, Steam Deck, Mobile, etc.

Next is the new Steam Machine! It's a small cube that works as a fully fledged decently-powerful gaming PC. It's 6x more powerful than a Steam Deck, allows 4K Gaming 60fps with FSR upscaling. Super fast sleep/awake, expand storage with an SD Card, and play any Steam game or any software you want since it's really a PC.

And the biggest news of all, the Steam Frame! This is the very long rumored Valve Deckard, it's their next generation VR Headset. It's completely standalone, with inside out tracking (no base stations), and new VR controllers. You can play games directly on the device, but for more demanding games it also comes with a Wi-Fi 6GHz dongle that enables streaming directly from another device using a super fast dedicated connection. You can play both VR games or non-VR games on a virtual flat screen.

They've also showcased something called Foveated Streaming which is how the headset has Eye tracking built-in and using that they can see where you're looking and use that information to transmit higher bit rate where you're looking, and lower bitrate in your peripheral vision. This is a genius piece of tech! You might think it's similar to Foveated Rendering which already exists in some headsets, however the one big difference is Foveated Rendering needs to be implemented by the developer themselves, whereas Foveated Streaming is just video, so it works out of the box with every single Steam game! No developer input required! Awesome!

The two big questions are price and availability. There is no mention of price for any of these, and they're out sometime in Early 2026.

Gaming

Learn Morse Code playing a game!

Games that teach you a real-life skill is always something that I find fascinating. It's a nice reminder of how games aren't just mindless entertainment, like you might hear from parents in the 90s, but rather they are just interactive toys which can help you learn genuinely useful skills. There's already a bunch of awesome games that teach you things like Electronics, Robotics, Learning a language and more.

Now here is one game called MORSE which is all about teaching you Morse Code! It's a strategy game where you have a grid with numbers on one side and letters on the other. Using Morse code you define the number grid to select as well as the letter, then you fire off an artillery strike and sink the enemies battleship.

It's a very clever idea and if you play this you will learn Morse code!

Fun

Not so AAA

Steam has tens of thousands of games and nowadays it's very hard to stand out. Many of those games never find their way to players' libraries.

One developer previously made a website named Games With No Reviews which like the name implies shows games with 0 reviews. It's pretty sad to see how some of those look well made but got zero reviews, however for a lot of them it is not necessarily that surprising since they are clearly hobbyist games.

However now this dev made another website that is perhaps more interesting (and perhaps more heartbreaking), it is called Not So AAA and by default it showcases games with over 2 but less than 42 reviews, all of them 100% positive.

There are definitely quite a lot of games that look quite good, (for example this one looks like a very solid boomer shooter) but with under 50 reviews it likely means they sold less than 2000 copies. That's just a reflection of how many games there are and how high is the quality bar that players want and expect.