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Ask HN: Hacker News-like forum, specific to game development?
66 points by seattle_spring 6 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments
I'm a game development hobbyist and I'd love to find a community similar to HN, where a mix of technology and industry-related news is shared and discussed. Does something like this exist? Any other communities or publications useful for someone interested in the gamedev space? Bonus points if they have "Who is hiring" type threads with actual participation from gamedevs, rather than the typical job listings that are outdated and opaque.

This was posted 2 years ago [1], and some good resources were shared there. Would love to know if there are any new spaces to check out in 2024.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30993317




Also used to be good, newsground. Been around for a long time. Big indie games hit started as jams/browser based experiments there.

It has a forum, some great threads come out, sometimes, such as this one showing how an artists sketches for games:

https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1531517

Many aspects come into play for game dev, a catalog of games built by the community is a great source of inspiration and can lead to technical discussion and commenting. The whole artistry side of things is a big part, text as a medium isn't ideal. Newsground is a hub for all game related materials.

For more technical threads and "professional" discussion I suppose unreal/unity forums and channels are the defacto go to


https://www.newgrounds.com/collection/assassin

Thank you for the refreshed memories


It's sad games and so software just "disappear" from history.

The misconception platforms will keep our data indefinitely is very unfortunate, things haven't even changed since those days.


Dunno if game dev is in here but,

Related:

Ask HN: Sites like HN on other topics?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37611708

Ask HN: What are some communities like HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616919


Back in the days Gamasutra was just that I think. I wasn't a game dev as such, but I was into 3D programming, and there was a lot of nice articles and news to read.

I also loved reading the contributed postmortem articles. It had a fairly active forum too, as far as I recall.

They've rebranded and I don't know if they're any good these days, but at least a lot of their postmortems are still online[1] which is a nice touch.

[1]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/search?q=postmortem&sort=oldes...


There's https://hero.handmade.network/forums , which is sort of a part of https://handmade.network/forums, which has a jobs board. And there's an associated discord chat, and loosely associated Handmade Cities conferences: https://handmadecities.com/


Closest might be gamedev.net, but I'm not sure there's anything out there that qualifies as a HN for game development.

Might need to spread out. Go to engine-specific forums, programming subdomains (eg, graphics programming), news and industry etc.


So, discord, unfortunately.


https://gamedev.city/


Get on Mastodon:

https://peoplemaking.games

https://mastodon.gamedev.place

https://indiepocalypse.social

https://gamemaking.social


I'd start with https://itch.io/

Then find a small community or maybe YouTuber and join their discord. Try to find a smallish community of people in a similar boat with similar qualifications as you. Lots of YouTubers with discord communities. Try to find one of these and take from there


There are quite a few communities for game engines and platforms on programming.dev , but this also their general game development community for the same instance:

https://programming.dev/c/gamedev


It's gone now, during the 90's they maintained the "The Game Developer's email list" that literally had over a hundred emails a day, all being from active employed game developers, often collectively fixing console bugs and sharing them without knowledge of our employers. Lot's of well known 90's games would never have shipped without that collaborative help that was "The Game Developer's email list". The best of that list is archived, and can be found here: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/


RIP GDNet, what a slow motion train wreck.


Take a look at https://80.lv/ There's a lot of game dev stuff on there, I'm subscribed to their Telegram chat feed and it's one of my favourites

https://t.me/LevelEightyNews


Would have suggested Discords, but most of them feel soulless. It makes the mediocre shine with stupid memecandy and punish the extraordinary. I miss IRC. You were eirher interesting in text or banned. And the interesting stuff was not swept away that fast.


USED to be good, but now, meh... https://gamedev.net

For indie devs:

TIG Forums

https://forums.tigsource.com/

Syntax Bomb. Very small.

https://www.syntaxbomb.com/


> USED to be good, but now, meh

Agreed.

Reddit has some game dev forums. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/ They're OK, not great.

gamedeveloper.com doesn't have a forum.


The more technical forums seem to be platform-specific. There's plenty of traffic on Unreal Engine and Unity forums, specific to the ins and outs of those platforms.

The forums for Rust game dev are very quiet lately.


I'll suggest checking out specific subreddits - they do act like a website in its entirety and you'll find developers, enthusiasts and people in between!

Although the community can be quick to discard or shun you if you appear too salesy btw


Man, i was going to suggest the Rock, Paper, Shotgun forums, but that site seems to have jumped hard on the enshittification train; their forums don't exist anymore, and i'm not even gonna link their site.


There are a lot of issues outside the platform and engine vendor training ecosystems.

1. Poison Assets on popular e-stores that will get your team DMCA'd and or sued eventually

2. Submarine copyrights on content (i.e. the usage rights may morph in time, and thus that cool artwork people shared is now a liability again.) Even CC0 does not guarantee some ambitious fool won't drop a turd in the punch-bowl later.

3. Outright plagiarism, competitiveness of established medium studios (in a maintenance cycle) will often crush indie teams if its a low-hanging fruit project (see app store ecosystem)

4. Open source is great in some ways, until you actually go to build something commercial... Then the RTFM support response on rigging/shaders/mocap broken 35% of the time out of the box... or extortion-ware delusional licenses... makes you immediately regret paying some amateur to maintain a design pipeline. You will not save money given your labor is the biggest burn rate on budgets. (wasted $10k grand investigating a few dozen projects in hopes people would get off their ass, but there were a few groups that truly were worth every penny.)

5. Use of many common recommended applications is not necessarily going to help get product out the door. You probably don't need to learn ZBrush, as most games are all about low-poly... so you will be retopo'ing that sculpt anyway, end up manually rigging as an amateur team, and resort to sprite aliasing in the engine of your choice (teams will lose momentum eventually on a large project.)

6. Even on HN, the ecosystem is far from encouraging on many topics. It seems a lot of "content" is forum spam Astroturf for personal products and services. And a few people really don't want feedback on their nonsense content.

7. As a developer you have likely never been at the mercy of IT customer support. I'd recommend meditation or Vodka to try and maintain a constructive dialogue with some folks.

6. Start small, focus on the hard parts first, and anticipate the Internet is often less than helpful for esoteric hard problems.

7. People disagree because autism. Stay away from DDS files, as many esoteric formats are just broken in most applications.

8. Don't mess around... look at Unreal+xbox (desktop/console) or Unity+steam (mobile/low-end) pipelines... UE is often more work, but a game can look great as even your baked lighting will remain consistent.

9. If something isn't fun or entertaining, don't waste your time... brogrammers hyping shovel-ware games was always cliché. The world doesn't need 120 Tetris clones, no matter how bad EA's version is...

10. Consider anyone working a 60+ hour week is not going to be hanging out in forums giving free tech support. These folks will take mercy on juniors once in awhile, but only if you show at least minimum effort to solve something on your own.

11. Irrational competition is a thing, so just follow your dev schedule. Some people go bankrupt before admitting defeat, as they argue over how fake the grass looks while their RTX4090 warms the house.

12. Freeze your build tree in a VM OS backing image. That way when someone upstream does something silly the entire project doesn't get foobar'ed.

13. Game reviewers will bitch about chocolate ice-cream.... If your game is fun, than tell them to go pound sand.

Most forums died with the rise of social media, and the sad fact is one really can't rely on community support most of the time for niche problems.

Best of luck, go build something fun and beautiful =3




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