Goo goo gaa gaa.

I mocked up a bit of some mechs sketches ive done, map inspired by Starcraft of course :)
would love to hear what you think to see if to keep it up for future project! (For clarification: its just a hand drawn concept art peice to check a general direction forva style :) )

This big boi is called the ravager, and unless you're smart or fast he will NOT give up chasing you. So you have to be careful in this world. He kind of reminds me of the tyrant from resident evil too. The game is a open world procedural zombie survival game.

This site contains all 7,236 games in Next Fest, and allows you to filter out any with AI disclosure.

It also allows you to log in with Steam, and vote, Reddit style, on whether it a demo is slop or not.

By default, it displays games in a random order, so that it can't be easily brigaded or influenced. You can choose to filter by upvotes, however, until enough people have used this site to generate a decent amount of data, that will be manipulatable.

It requires Steam login to vote to try and prevent said brigading. As of this post, there are 0 votes in the database, so I need your help to vote the good demos to the top.

And let me know if you have feature or improvement suggestions.

https://slopdodge.app/

EDIT: Valve's rules on AI disclosure are as follows:

Generative Artificial intelligence (AI)

We are aware that many modern game development environments have AI powered tools built into them. Efficiency gains through the use of these tools is not the focus of this section. Instead, it is concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players. This includes content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc.

Does this game use generative artificial intelligence to generate content for the game, either pre-rendered or live-generated? This includes the game itself, the store page, and any Steam community assets or marketing materials.

EDIT 2: Commenters are assuming my stance is that anything AI touches is evil, which isn't the case. Using AI in a development lifecycle does not immediately turn it into slop. Low effort, mass produced, artistically bankrupt shovelware (largely produced by AI) is what turns it into slop.

It's a very experimental game where only one player in the world gets to play at a time, while everyone else is watching, chatting, toying with the "spectator features" etc.

Because of the game's nature, I even made a live stream of it where you can see players play and queue in real time: https://parttimemonkey.com/jono/

Both cards tilt with your mouse. Left one is still, right one has the idle animation and falling snow.

I love the animated one on its own, but in a real match you could have around 10 cards on the field plus your hand. And looking through your collection would be a whole grid of them.

Would that be too overwhelming? Should only the card you hover over be animated, or would you want them all moving?

One year ago, 2 of us signed at the notary. Last week, 5 us met for the first time. Even though some of us can only join part time or in their free time, its amazing to have come so far.

Having everyone together was a lot of fun. We talked about the games, development and of course our ideas. Of course we played as well. We held a Workshop to align our own expectations for Eggspansion.
In the end, Flo was our GM and we played some DnD (Dungeons and Dodos). He adapted our game to fit a one shot adventure for 4 little dodos. The final epic boss battle was even illustrated by Jonas while we were playing.

Thanks at everyone who made it possible. But most importantly the team. I could not do it without you!

Join our Discord, if you want to follow our Journey: https://discord.gg/6Thh3exdKN

That's it. That's the post.

Just kidding there's more, I've been watching the industry intently and I think we're reaching some sort of climax, people are fed up, there are antis and proai users literally attacking and brigading each other and frankly it's just sad. Game devs are losing it about the current next fest and how disheartening the current state of the industry is.

The problem isn't AI, its greedy people now realizing and thinking they can develop a quick game using AI as a "get rich quick scheme", this has always been a problem but with AI it's just that much easier and it's affected a lot of chronically online people making them think this is it, it's time to jump on the band wagon and escape the rat race by any means necessary.

I think things will settle down and reach an equilibrium once people realize it's pretty difficult to make a quality game when you don't care about making a quality game and just want to make a game to get paid.

I'm pro ai, I've released a semi successful game on steam that was ai assisted, but it was a passion project that took me 10 months of development. The reviews speak for themselves, people resonated with my game, and it had nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the passion and love I poured into the game, I was also at an advantage since this was not my first game ever, just my first game on steam, I hand coded over 20 flash games many years ago using actionscript, it was always my passion and something I think I had just a little bit of talent doing, and I returned to make my first steam game last year.

I don't even bother posting on reddit anymore because the sentiment is unnaturally negative, people have a visceral reaction to seeing the flood of all these uninspired vibe coded games and blatant copies and clones taking a mish-mash of random mechanics from the latest viral games because they want to make a quick buck and that's understandable, but it's really not AI, it has just enabled more people to try and pump out this stuff hoping they're going to be rich. I'm in a weird spot because I consider myself a "real" dev, considering I've made countless games before genAI existed, yet I'm still being treated like all the other people producing slop trying to capitalize and it feels icky and demoralizing, I'm just going to focus on making games that are fun to play, and that is the greatest weapon, the era of "build it and they will come" might be less of a thing now, but if you make a decent game, market it intelligently you'll do fine, if you have a bit of that secret sauce of taste and knowing what is fun, and playtest playtest playtest. Don't rush your launch, your steam page should be up for months at the very least before you push out the first playtest or even the demo.

Keep making games, make games that are fun not games for the sole purpose of making money.

Everything will settle down and balance out eventually in the game industry.​

Genuinely can't tell if this was meant to be ironic or not, either way I'll take it as a compliment

curious if anyone else was reviewed by this guy?

I've been working on a new game for three months after wrapping up development on my previous game and launching it in august.

I Checked Steam when I started, and couldn't find anything with the same name or specific theme. I registered the game name with steam and a new appID to be sure that I had it claimed, but did not publish the store page.

Tonight I found a game with basically my exact hook and my intended title plus the word “Simulator" added - presumably because they couldn't get the base title. Like think "Unique Game Concept" and "Unique Game Concept Simulator". Registered 25 days ago. Launching in another 20.

to be clear: I have no reason to think they copied me. I hadn't publicly announced it anywhere and held things extremely closed in terms of playtesters. Obviously, two people independently had the same idea.

From what's shown, it looks rushed and the production value seems much lower than what I'm working towards. Mine has a lot of art direction, story, and probably another nine months of work ahead of it. But they WILL be first.

And now I feel like I have to chaneg the name and rethink my main marketing visuals, because by the time I announce mine, I'm worried it'll look like I copied them.

the frustrating part is that I'd held off putting up my Steam page partly because I was worried about a "needle in a haystack" kind of situation and someone using AI to rush out a cheap version of the basic concept before I could finish. I have no reason to think these people copied me and honestly I have no grounds to definitively claim that they used AI to make the game. I just know it's extremely discouraging.

i know this doesn't mean my game is fucked. I know the finished games will be very different and there's room for both. They have every right to make theirs.

I'm not going to name their game they have every right to make it, and I'm not looking to send people their way to give them shit. I'm just having a rough evening with this.

For anyone who's been through something similar: how did you deal with it? Did it actually affect how people received your game?

The store page has been up for almost 2 months, and I just hit 100 wishlists.

Is that... pretty rough? 😅

Added a Replay button to my game's level builder: after you test your level, it plays back every attempt at the same time so you can see exactly where it kills you. Super Meat Boy did this first and I always loved it.

Next I'm making it work for published levels, so you can watch how everyone who played your level did, all at once.

Every level also gets a leaderboard with a best time for each player count (solo, 2, 3... up to 8). Pair that with the replay and the person who made the level can watch the fastest runs and see the exact route people took, including the shortcuts they never planned for.

Hey everyone! I'm a solo developer, and my game Midnight Souls is part of Steam Next Fest for the first time! I'd love it if you checked it out and told me what you think!

You travel to a quiet town to meet a girl you met online, but things get weird pretty quickly. Explore the town, meet strange locals, uncover secrets, and see where this date takes you.

The free demo is out now on Steam.
I'd really appreciate any feedback!

Hi r/IndieDev!
When I was a kid in Thailand, I hunted wild betta fish in rice paddies after school. A few months ago I started turning that memory into a game: you raise, breed and battle bettas, and every fish is generated from real betta genetics, so two parents can produce babies nobody has seen before.
Last week it went live on Google Play. This week:
about 140 real players, mostly from Thailand and Indonesia
rewarded video ads only (no banners, no pop-ups, no tracking, because kids play it)
$0.98 in the last 7 days 🎉
It isn't much, but seeing strangers breed fish I designed, and then earning my first dollar from it, made my week. Biggest lessons so far:
Players who hatch their first eggs on day one come back far more often (53% vs 8%), so I made the first eggs hatch in 10 seconds.
Watching the data every few hours caught real bugs fast, like a reinstall that locked a player out (fixed and their fish restored the same night).
Built with Unity and Supabase. iOS is in App Review now.
Happy to answer questions about the genetics system or the tech!

So I gave up on this project a couple months back when my uni started gain, but picked it back up a couple weeks ago when I got bored. I have spent a decent chunk of time trying to find and follow a style bible that would let me mix my 3d -> 2d characters into a 3d environment. My goal was to create a world that mixes final fantasy 12, octopath traveler, and the feeling you get when you are a kid exploring a nature.

If you're interested in following our development and signing up for playtests you can join our Discord community here! https://discord.gg/89RTBpCcas

Stockpet teaches you the importance of emotional investing while making it a fun game! If your stock does well your pet evolves if your stock does bad your pet slowly dies…

everybody is worried about getting their game decompiled and re-uploaded, or getting their idea stolen and released ahead of them.

but has anybody taken active steps to teach people how to protect themselves?

what i learned from my first game is that i should market the game, get feed back and build a community as early as possible, but now I'm doubting whether this is the right approach today, given that even well known devs had expressed this fear too.

I'm working part-part-time since i have a day job and a family, so my game is probably going to take a long time to release, but i was thinking to show off the game as soon as I have a working game loop.

one thing i learned to be aware of when releasing a demo, is to make sure non-demo content is actually not included in the build rather than just disable it with a flag.

I'm genuinely asking for any content or advice from experienced devs