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Solo developer Voidmaw on creating Katanaut: “Done is better than perfect”

PreMortem.Games

Something I want to feel in a game rather than a structured concept. Play the Katanaut demo on Steam , full release later this year. And of course, balancing everything like coding, art, marketing, and playtesting can be exhausting. Whats your creative process? It usually starts with a mix of loose ideas floating around in my head.

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Game Dev Glossary: Prototype, Vertical Slice, First Playable, MVP, Demo

Ask a Game Dev

Each of the terms are the same basic concept - a demonstration of gameplay - but they each have small but important distinctions. Prototype - A playable example of a single gameplay system to prove out the concept. Demo - A stripped-down build of the game for exhibition, either for executives, tradeshows, or public-facing.

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Minigames Revisited: How Developers Are Continuing to Tap into Trends and Drive Engagement

Game Refinery

Here are just a few examples: Cooking Madness looked at how it could further monetize the concept beyond pickaxes with Pirate Treasure, which features a $4.99 premium battle pass. Candy Crush Saga took an unsurprisingly sweet approach to the Digging craze with Baker’s Box , which swaps sand for cookies and pickaxes for spoons.

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AWS GDC 2025 Highlights

AWS Games

AWS presented playable ads for Ludeo and powering Xsollas game streaming service, to game streaming smart TVs for JackBox Games and a time-saving proof of concept playtesting workflow for Epic Games. Image 2: GDC 2025 attendees demo Amazon GameLift Streams. Learn more about the AWS for Games GDC 2025 demos.

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Parallel Experiment by Eleven Puzzles: “Put your heart into it and players will notice”

PreMortem.Games

” Once a concept is chosen, it goes through a prototyping phase where function takes priority over form. Play the demo now. We love exploring different styles of puzzles, logic, pattern recognition, environmental interactions and even experimental mechanics like cooperative dialogues.”

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Open ARPG and JRPG demos on GDquest

Mircosoft Game Dev

Over the past year, I've been working on open source demos to help people get the most out of tutorials. I also contributed some to the official Godot demo repositories. That's why we're starting to create open game demos at GDquest. We've already open sourced our Zelda-like ARPG demo from our Godot course as a proof-of-concept.

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Fly into the unknown with Void Sails by Ticking Clock Games: “We’re self-funding our debut”

PreMortem.Games

“From there, we kept exploring and experimenting, refining the concept into a story-driven adventure where players have real narrative agency aboard their flying ship, says Casals Meet deadlines Ticking Clock Games was founded in the summer of 2023 by Game Designer Roman Gushcha and Casals, who met while working in Poland.