Best of Game Development — March 2026

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    Article
    Avatar of devtoDEV·9w

    I Built a Pixel Art Village Where AI Characters Have Real Emotions

    A developer built Persona World, an open-source pixel art village simulation featuring 12 AI characters with dynamic emotional states. Each character has a HEXACO personality profile (six dimensions) and uses a 9-dimensional cognitive appraisal model to compute emotional responses in VAD (Valence-Arousal-Dominance) space. Personality shapes how characters react to interactions like praise or betrayal, relationships accumulate over time, and mood shifts gradually rather than instantly. The tech stack uses React 19, Canvas 2D, TypeScript, and the molroo SDK for emotion computation. The project is open source with a live demo available, and the author invites discussion on continuous emotion models in games.

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    Video
    Avatar of codetothemoonCode to the Moon·8w

    1000x Faster Than Your Database??? SpacetimeDB Explained by Creator Tyler C.

    Tyler Cloutier, creator of SpacetimeDB at Clockwork Labs, explains the architecture and performance characteristics of SpacetimeDB, a database originally built to power the MMO BitCraft Online. Key technical insights include: transactions execute inside the database (eliminating network hops), a thread-per-core model keeps data in L1 CPU cache, and interactive transactions are traded away for extreme throughput. Benchmarks show 4,000 TPS with Node+Postgres vs 104,000 TPS with SpacetimeDB (TypeScript reducers) and 167,000 TPS with Rust reducers. The conversation covers the database's real-time subscription model (streaming query derivatives to clients), ACID durability guarantees via pipelined async disk writes, the new SpacetimeAuth OIDC system in v2.0, and honest limitations including no interactive transactions, incomplete Postgres compatibility, and single-node write architecture. Tyler also responds to criticism from Vicent Marti, clarifying that the alleged data-loss issue was based on a misreading of the codebase.

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    Article
    Avatar of 80lv80 LEVEL·7w

    Check Out Updates for RPG Paper Maker 3.0, the No-Code RPG Game Engine

    RPG Paper Maker 3.0, a no-code game engine for creating 3D RPGs with 2D sprites and 3D objects, has received a major update. Created by solo developer Wano, the new version brings a renewed UI, browser compatibility, and additional small features. It supports Windows, Linux, and macOS, and is backward compatible with 2.0.11 projects. While designed for beginners with no programming or 3D modeling knowledge, experienced developers can also extend it via JavaScript plugins and custom .obj 3D models.

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    Article
    Avatar of 80lv80 LEVEL·9w

    See How This Godot-Powered Game Combines Destruction & Water Physics

    Tenkemo, a cozy exploration game developed by a two-person team using Godot, has launched a Kickstarter campaign. The game blends Minecraft-style creativity with Animal Crossing charm, featuring water physics, destruction mechanics, character design overhauls, and multiplayer support. It is planned for PC, Nintendo Switch, and mobile.

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    Video
    Avatar of developedbyeddevelopedbyed·9w

    I am making a rogue like typing game...

    A developer shares a work-in-progress roguelike typing game inspired by Monkey Type, where players fight creatures by typing words. The demo showcases mechanics like items (quill of precision, lost hourglass), boss fights with word-flipping abilities, and a shop system. The creator details their AI-assisted workflow for generating sprite animations using ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok (image-to-video), then extracting frames with ffmpeg. For coding, they use OpenCode with Claude Opus and GPT, noting Opus consumes far more credits than GPT for similar tasks. T3 chat is also mentioned for running parallel coding sessions.

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    Video
    Avatar of codemonkeyunityCode Monkey·8w

    Solo Game Devs are Making MILLIONS!

    Solo indie game developers are achieving remarkable financial success, with recent examples like Schedule One earning $50 million and Supermarket Simulator and CCG Card Shop Simulator each earning around $30 million. This trend is attributed to increasingly powerful development tools that allow a single person to build games that previously required large teams, and Steam's uncapped revenue ceiling. While most games on Steam earn under $1,000, the potential upside is unlimited if the game resonates with players.

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    Article
    Avatar of unityUnity·7w

    Esoteric Ebb: Tackling The Challenge of Interactive Writing

    Christoffer Bodegård, solo developer of the nonlinear CRPG Esoteric Ebb, shares how he managed eight years of complex interactive writing. He outlines three constraints for interactive writing: a high choice-to-text ratio, over 50% dynamic content, and open-ended design. He explains his use of the ink scripting language (by Inkle) integrated with Unity as the core tool enabling fast branching dialog. He also describes his custom Story Variable (SV) system using tag-based prefixes to track thousands of player choices without a database, and how Notepad++ kept his workflow lightweight. The post concludes with a note on bugfixing challenges and alternative narrative tools like articy:draft, Arcweave, and Yarn Spinner.

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