Game dev guides with code you can paste
Practical how-tos for Unity systems, the PSX and low poly look, and selling an indie game. Each guide ends with the asset or system that does the job for you.
Horror game dev
Top 10 free horror game assets on itch.ioPopular
Start with Horror Texture Pack, the Modular 3D Hospital, Sewers and the PSX Dungeon: all free on itch.io. This is a curated list from itch.io's free horror and PSX listings, not a ranking by downloads.
How to make a horror game: a step-by-step guidePopular
Pick one fear, build a small space with one threat, and control what the player can see and hear. Horror comes from limits: little light, little ammo, little information. Ship a 20-minute game first.
Horror lighting in Unity: flickering lights and fog
Turn ambient light almost off, add short exponential fog, and put a flicker script on your few lights. Noise-based flicker feels more organic than random values. The script below is a drop-in component.
How to make jump scares that work
A jump scare works when it follows quiet and breaks a pattern the player learned. Build tension, cut the sound, then hit once. Use it rarely, because repeated scares stop working.
Free PSX characters, weapons and horror audio packs
For a horror prototype you can get characters, first-person arms, weapons, cars, sound effects and music for free on itch.io. Here are 10 packs to try first. Read each licence before you ship.
Free alternatives to Photoshop, Substance Painter and Aseprite
Krita, GIMP and Photopea replace Photoshop for most game art. ArmorPaint and Material Maker cover much of what Substance Painter does. LibreSprite and Piskel stand in for Aseprite. All have a free option; check current terms.
Horror game sound design for indie developers
Build a quiet low drone as a bed, add sparse sounds from far away, and keep silence as a tool. Players fear what they cannot place. Save loud stingers for rare moments.
Top 10 free tools to make a game
A full game can be made with free tools: Godot for the engine, Blender for 3D, Krita for 2D, Audacity for sound and Tiled or LDtk for levels. Here are our top 10 with what each is best for.
How to make a PSX-style horror game in Godot 4
Render the game at a low resolution (320x240) with nearest filtering, snap vertices in a spatial shader, add thick fog, and keep the player's light small. Then add one threat that hunts the player with a NavigationAgent3D. That is a complete PSX horror loop in Godot 4.
Game dev basics
Which game engine should you use in 2026?Popular
Pick Godot for 2D and small 3D games you want to own end to end, Unity for the widest range of tutorials, assets and platforms, Unreal for high-end 3D, and GameMaker for fast 2D. If you cannot decide, choose the engine whose beginner tutorial you will finish this week.
How to publish a game on itch.io, step by step
Create an account, make a new project, set the kind of project and price, upload a build for each platform, add a cover image and screenshots, write a clear description and publish. Use tags, devlogs and a good cover to be found.
How to market an indie game with no budget
Start before launch. Define who the game is for, show real gameplay in short clips, post devlogs, join communities honestly, and collect wishlists and emails. Marketing is repeated, visible progress, not a single launch day.
Low poly modeling in Blender for games: a beginner workflow
Start from a primitive, block out the shape with extrude and loop cuts, keep clean quads, apply scale, unwrap the UVs and export FBX or glTF. Low poly is about readable silhouettes, not removing detail at random.
How to make textures for games: pixel art, PBR and hand-painted
Choose the style first. Pixel textures are small images drawn by hand and shown without filtering. PBR textures are a set of maps (base colour, normal, roughness) made in a painting tool. Hand-painted textures are painted colour on a simple map. Keep one texel density across the whole scene.
How to scope your first indie game so you actually finish it
Write the core loop in one sentence, build only that until it is fun, then add features from a ranked cut list. Size the game to the hours you really have each week, not the hours you wish you had. A finished small game beats an abandoned big one.
How to animate a character in Blender for a game
Give the model an armature, bind the mesh to the bones with automatic weights, pose the bones and set keyframes, loop the clip, then export FBX or glTF with animation baked. Start with a walk cycle and an idle, because almost every game needs those two.
How to join a game jam and finish a game in a weekend
Find a jam on itch.io, join it, pick one small idea, plan your hours, build only the core loop and submit before the deadline with a clear page. Finishing a tiny game teaches more than starting a huge one.
How to optimize low poly games for mobile and web
Profile on the slowest target device first. Then reduce draw calls with shared materials and batching, bake lighting instead of using many real-time lights, keep textures small and compressed, and set a triangle budget. Draw calls and overdraw usually cost frames before triangles do.
How to organize your game project with a kanban board
Use four columns (Backlog, Doing, Testing, Done), keep at most three cards in Doing, break tasks into pieces of a few hours and review the board once a week. Finishing cards, not starting them, is what ships a game. A free board that saves in your browser is linked below.
Game store image sizes: Steam capsules, itch.io cover and social previews
The itch.io cover image is 630 × 500 pixels (315 × 250 minimum), the Steam header capsule is 920 × 430, the small capsule 462 × 174, and link previews and YouTube thumbnails are 1200 × 630 and 1280 × 720. Design at the largest size and scale down.
Dream games
How to make a game like GTA 6: a realistic roadmap for indie developersPopular
You cannot recreate GTA 6 alone, but you can build a small GTA-style game: a compact city, one drivable car, a few pedestrians and one mission. Build it system by system: open world, driving, traffic and pedestrians, police and missions, in that order.
How to make an open world game: from small map to streaming world
Start with a small map you can cross in minutes, build terrain and landmarks, place content by density rules and add streaming only when the map needs it. Open worlds fail on content, not code, so keep the map small and the points of interest meaningful.
How to make your own Hollow Knight: a metroidvania roadmap for small teams
A metroidvania is tight movement, an interconnected map locked by abilities, and a few memorable bosses. Prototype the movement first, design a small map on paper, add one ability that opens new routes, and expand. Scope the map to five or six areas, not forty.
How to make a 2D platformer character controller in Unity
Move a Rigidbody2D horizontally, check the ground with an overlap circle, and add three feel features: variable jump height (release to jump lower), coyote time (jump just after leaving a ledge) and jump buffering (jump just before landing). The script below does all of it.
How to make NPC pedestrians and traffic AI for a city game
Use waypoints: draw a graph of lanes and sidewalks, let cars and pedestrians pick the next waypoint, and add rules for junctions. Add a heat counter for police and spawn chasers when it rises. Spawn only near the player and recycle NPCs to save performance.
How to make a driving game in Unity: an arcade car controller
For an arcade feel, drive a Rigidbody with forces: accelerate along the car's forward direction, turn based on speed and cancel sideways velocity for grip. Use WheelColliders only when you need realistic suspension. The script below is a working starting point.
Start here
What do you need to make a game? Skills, tools and budgetPopular
You need a computer, a game engine (several are free), time, and four skills: basic programming or visual scripting, game design, art or the money to buy it, and the habit of finishing. A team is optional, and a budget of zero is possible.
How to make your first game: a 7-step plan for beginners
Pick a tiny idea with one mechanic, choose one engine, build the core loop with grey boxes, add art and sound, test with real people and publish it on itch.io. Finish something small in weeks before you attempt anything big.
How long does it take to make a game? Realistic ranges by game size
A game jam game takes a weekend. A small first game usually takes a few months of part-time work. A mid-size indie game takes one to several years. These are planning ranges, not statistics, and games almost always take longer than the first estimate.
Why is making a game so hard? Nine reasons and what to do about each
A game combines programming, design, art, sound, testing and marketing, and each is a profession of its own. Most projects stall on scope, motivation or a missing skill. The fix is a smaller game, shorter milestones and borrowing what you cannot yet make.
How to make a game without coding (and what you can really build)
Use a visual scripting or no-code tool such as Unreal Blueprints, Unity Visual Scripting, GDevelop, Construct or Bitsy, and lean on ready-made assets and systems. You can finish real games this way, but expect to learn logic thinking, because that is what code is.
PSX & low poly art
How to Make a PSX-Style Horror Game
The PSX look comes from hardware limits: low poly models, small textures with no filtering, vertices that snap to whole pixels (the wobble), textures that warp because they aren't perspective-corrected, a low render resolution and heavy fog. Recreate those limits and keep the game short.
Low Poly PSX Weapon Packs Compared
Pick by the fantasy of your game: Survival for zombies and scavenging, Hunting for rural horror, Police for urban crime and SWAT, Military for war, and the Blocky Arsenal for arcade shooters and roguelites. No model repeats across packs, so combining them never gets you duplicates.
How to import .blend files into Unity, Godot and Unreal
Unity and Godot 4 can open a .blend file directly when Blender is installed on the same machine. Unreal can't, so export FBX from Blender. In every engine, set pixel textures to nearest-neighbour filtering or they turn blurry.
Awards & events
Game dev events calendar for 2026 and 2027: festivals, jams and Steam events
The next big dates are Steam Next Fest from October 19 to 26, 2026, The Game Awards on December 10, 2026, the Steam Winter Sale from December 17, GDC from March 1 to 5, 2027, Steam Next Fest from February 22 to March 1, 2027 and gamescom from August 23 to 29, 2027. Confirm dates on the official sites.
Game of the Year 2025: who won at The Game Awards, GDC, BAFTA, Golden Joysticks and Steam
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Game of the Year at The Game Awards, the GDC Awards, the BAFTA Games Awards and the Golden Joystick Awards. Hollow Knight: Silksong won the community-voted Steam Awards. At the IGF, Titanium Court took the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
Success & money
How to make money making games: eight paths for indie developers
Indie developers earn by selling games, selling assets or tools to other developers, working at studios, freelancing, teaching, running ads or in-app purchases, selling merch and joining bundles. Selling assets and tools is often the fastest path to first income, because the work is smaller and the audience already exists.
How to make a successful indie game: what the hits have in common
Successful indie games usually have a clear hook that fits in one sentence, a scope the team can finish, an audience built before launch, a store page that sells in five seconds and enough polish where players spend time. None of it guarantees success, but missing it makes failure likely.
Unity systems
How to Make a Save System in Unity with JSON
Put everything you want to keep in one [Serializable] class, turn it into JSON with JsonUtility.ToJson, and write it to Application.persistentDataPath. To load, read the file and call JsonUtility.FromJson. That's the whole core; the rest is deciding what to save and when.
How to Make Breakable Objects in Unity
Prepare a broken version of the object ahead of time (pieces with Rigidbodies), and when the intact object is hit hard enough, replace it with the broken one and push the pieces with AddExplosionForce. Cutting meshes at runtime looks cool but costs far more.
How to Make a First-Person Inventory System in Unity
Raycast from the camera to find an item, pick it up on a key press by storing it in a list and parenting it to the player's hand, switch the held item with the mouse wheel, and drop it by unparenting it and turning its Rigidbody back on.
How to make a first-person survival game in Unity
A survival game is a loop: stats drain over time, the player gathers items to refill them, and progress is saved. Build that loop with three scripts (stats, pickup, save) before you add crafting or enemies.
How to make a first-person inventory system in Godot 4
Describe items as a Resource, keep the slots in an autoload so every scene can reach them, pick items up with a RayCast3D on the camera, and switch the selected slot with the mouse wheel. Save the item ids to JSON.
AI & game dev
AI-generated art in games: store rules, copyright and risks
Before you ship AI-generated art, check the store's disclosure rules, read the AI tool's licence terms, expect copyright to be uncertain, and consider how your audience will react. Be honest on your store page. Rules change, so read the current policy on each store.
How to use AI coding assistants for game development
Use an AI assistant for boilerplate, explaining code, shader and editor-tool drafts, and refactors, and review everything it writes. Keep your project in version control, test each change, and state the engine version in your prompt, because assistants can invent APIs that do not exist in your version.