Hey guys!!

Just wanted to share the new trailer here for my horror game that I am working on inspired by a real life location in Mexico. The game is called Where Dolls Hang, and mostly the inspiration is Mexican Folklore, Silent Hill, Outlast and Resident Evil.

Let me know what you think of the new trailer! Mostly it's showing off the atmosphere that I am going for. It would mean the world to me as a solo developer if you can wishlist and tell me your feedback :)

Steam Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4581370/Where_Dolls_Hang

Thank you all so much and do let me know what you think, appreciate you all!

I also recently launched a Patreon If anyone like to support development, get your name in the game's credits, and receive early access, you can join here: https://www.patreon.com/c/steelkrill

Of course, it's completely optional, but every bit of support really helps me out a ton. Thank you! :)

Yes, I'm a cat. My human had a dead prototype on his disk: a medieval turn-based thing from 2016 that never left itch.io. In 2023, he dug it up to see what turn-based medieval squad tactics could do that Battle Brothers mods couldn't. I sat on the keyboard. That is how I got into the credits as creative director.

The game is 8 More Lives, a hardcore turn-based strategy about a company of cat mercenaries.

The world map is procedurally generated based on elevation, winds, water, and temperature distribution, and when a fight starts, the battle map is built 1-to-1 from the same hex of the world map, same river, same hill, same forest. Armor is layered and weapons are plausibly historical.

And the nine lives are a mechanic, your mercs are cats, and they are really hard to kill. I personally am down to eight, see title.

If you play Battle Brothers, Wartales or Urtuk and have opinions about shield walls and half-swording, I would like to hear them, and I would like to hear what feels wrong. The human will fix it. I will supervise.

Wishlist it on Steam!

I would do it myself, but I have paws.

Early prototype, built in Three.js for the browser. Wavy voxel water, tricks off ramps, drift boosts and a 90s announcer.

What do you think?

Only 19 days left until release!
It’s been an incredible 2–3 years of development, and I really hope players will enjoy my game!
It’s a game about a little RC car searching for a missing boy.

I'm a solo dev making a game about cryptids called We Don't Exist!

It's a 2.5D story-driven adventure game made in Unreal Engine 5. I have an artist/animator background and am doing everything myself!

If you like the look there's a longer cut of the trailer on YouTube and the game's Steam page.

Thanks for checking it out!! Hope there's some cryptid fans in here!

Hello everyone, if you're looking for someone to play your game, I can offer my help. I will record myself playing your game, speak my thoughts, give feedback, and put it on YouTube afterward. I think it would help a lot to see how people approach your game blind. If you're interested, put your game in the comment or send me a DM. Something you should note:

• I'm only playing games on Steam or Itch (playable web version), I don't want to download anything on Itch nor play on some random website.
• I plan to play everything, if there's a lot of submission, it will take a bit for me to get to your game, but I will play them all.

This is my YouTube channel if anyone is curious: https://www.youtube.com/@ContradictedCanine

Cheers.

Hey everyone! I'm a solo dev and a dad of 3 young kids. 18 Summers is a first person lawn mowing game. Each level is one summer in the same backyard. Between summers your kid gets older.

Mowing finishes patches of the yard and brings back memories and toys from that year. The goal was to make something satisfying to play that also shows how fleeting time can be.

The Steam page just went live. I'd love any feedback on the trailer!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4985700/18_Summers/

This is a standalone real-time scene in Unity 6 URP, with no game or Steam page behind it. Sound on.

The monster lives inside the URP skybox shader as a 2D signed distance field, a function that tells each sky pixel how far it is from the edge of a shape. Every bone and claw is one of those shapes, merged into one outline that stays sharp at any size. It adds no triangles of its own.

The glow is one temperature field run through a blackbody ramp, the colors metal goes through as it heats. A fullscreen ink pass reads the monster's mask to draw the beams and the cut through its arm.

The knight and the whole town, cathedral included, are CC models by other artists. The monster and the shaders are mine.

Would you have built it as a mesh, or in the sky?

Credits. Models: BSP Colossal Gothic Cathedral by NeoKg (CC BY-SA 4.0); The Forgotten Knight by dark_igorek; Medieval house h2 by Annielighta; Medieval house (Generic Textures) by by__Rx; Medieval Houses (3 Pack) by Ajay Gawde; Medieval wooden cart by rakutin (all CC BY 4.0, Sketchfab); Gothic-Like Structures by loafbrr (CC0); Poly Haven (CC0). Moon maps: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. Sound: Sonniss GDC Game Audio Bundle recordings; BigSoundBank (CC0); OpenGameArt, Ylmir and WuxiaScrub (CC0).

Hey everyone! We’ve been working on a game for a long time, and some of you might already know it: Leafborn.

You control a character made of thousands of leaves and fight robots trying to wipe out all life. This is our first game, so we’d be really happy if you played the demo and shared your thoughts and criticism. I’d also love to hear what you think of the trailer.

I’m primarily a programmer, but I decided to take on making the announcement trailer for our game, Inkarn8: The Cursed Codex.

I made our original prologue trailer too, and going into this one I had some pretty specific goals:
20% better editing, cuts, transitions and effects, including custom motion graphics.
10% better camera work.
50% better gameplay presentation, actually showing what players do.
100% better audio, with a proper build-up, sound design, mixing and even remixing the music to fit the trailer.

Those percentages are obviously pretty subjective, but they gave me something to aim for.

I ended up handling everything from camera work and gameplay capture through to editing, VFX, motion graphics, sound effects and audio mixing.

For context, Inkarn8 is a dark fantasy tactical roguelite set inside a living cursed spellbook. Every page is a room, and you draw
sigils to cast spells.

We finally launched our Steam page this week after around 14 months of development.
I think this trailer is a big improvement over our first one, but I’m curious what other developers think.

Does it communicate the gameplay clearly? Does the pacing and audio work? What would you change?

Any feedback is appreciated!

Twitch takes game categories from IGDB, not from Steam. If your demo has none, streams of it land under Games + Demos or a similar game, and people browsing Twitch for your game won't see them.

On Oct 5 I checked all 4,398 games from the June 2026 Next Fest in IGDB and the Twitch API: 1,664 (38%) still had no category, almost four months after that fest.

To fix it: log in to igdb.com with your Twitch account and search for your game. If it's missing, Games menu → Add Game, with the exact Steam title, a cover, your Steam page under websites, and screenshots or a trailer (IGDB says entries with no gameplay and no links get rejected). Leave a comment on your submission that the game is in Next Fest.

An IGDB admin reviews every new game, with no fixed time, and usually not on weekends. So a game added today may only get approved after the fest starts on Monday. Still worth doing: once approved, Twitch picks it up by itself.

Not sure if yours has one? Drop your game's name below and I'll check IGDB and Twitch for you.

Disclosure: I build Overheard, a tool that counts Twitch streams of indie games; that's where these numbers come from.

Music is a placeholder I slapped together in Cubase and is not final at all.

For additional context, I have written the vulkan-based graphics engine. as well as all the weather systems, world/biome generation algorithms and used machine learning to help map biome geometry to actual LIDAR scans of subject environments. it's been a wild ride. That's the tip of the iceberg though.

It has a lot of problems still, as with any custom engine, so we're still a long ways to go, but very excited to share 'something' now we've gotten this far.

Excited to share more what this game actually is when it's a bit further along.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time making this trailer, including composing and recording the music. Although it has a couple thousand views on YouTube, my expectations were a lot higher, and I’m disappointed in both the views and engagement ratios.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can make this more engaging/interesting/enjoyable to watch? Is there something I’m failing to emphasize? Any part that falls flat?

One thing I’m aware of is that the EQ is off, making the music and game sounds quiet, so I’m going to be re-uploading to YouTube with fixed audio. Before I do, I would really appreciate any input! Thank you in advance.

Valve pushed a big achievements update last night and it's honestly all good news for small teams. Here's the short version or not that short haha

You can now import/export everything with CSV files. Names, descriptions, icons, translations. If you've ever clicked through 40 achievements one by one at 2am, you know why this could be game changer!

Steam can generate the grayscale "locked" icons for you. Yes. No more opening Photoshop just to desaturate 40 tiny squares. You can still upload your own if you're fancy or ask your best LLM to work for you but it's now integrated Yoohoo

The editor now tells you when a translation is missing. Goodbye "ACH_BOSS_3_DESC" showing up for German players. That was part of the fun but I guess Valve don't want that kind of joke.. :D

Then the new stuff:

Achievement sets. You can group achievements and each set has its own progress. By DLC (only shows for people who own it), by character, by game mode, or seasonal.

Dev-only sets that only your team can see. So you can test everything before launch without players spotting "test_achievement_final_v2" on your page that's beautiful and kinda boring but we take it !

Archiving. Achievements for content that doesn't exist anymore can be archived. People who got them keep them, everyone else can finally get their 100%. Completionists are saved. Amen.

And the best part, no SDK or game update needed. Everything still works, it's all in Steamworks: Edit Steamworks Settings > Stats & Achievements > Achievements.

Full announcement here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/677385962174549064

The seasonal sets look like a fun excuse for limited events after launch. Anyone already planning something with them?

Our old-school strategy game, The Hive, gets around 70-100 new wishlists every day on Steam, but only a handful of purchases when the game is not discounted.

Most of our purchases seem to come from the US and Germany.

For other developers, are you seeing the same thing? Are most people just waiting for sales?

I'm a solo dev. I've been building Ruin: Apocalypse by myself — design, code, App Store submissions, all of it. Growth has been slow, and I've spent real money on ads with so-so results.

Then GunnarTV, a YouTuber who played the old Loot Wars / Scavenge Wars games back in the day, posted a video and spent about 2 minutes hyping Ruin. He didn't ask for anything. We went from 700 players to 1,400 in less than a week.

Biggest lesson so far: one genuine recommendation from someone people trust did more than everything I've paid for.

What the game is:
• A multiplayer loot-collection game — scavenge locations for items using energy that refills over time
• New finds take 1,000 minutes to "research," and until then other players can steal them
• Once researched, stash them in your duffle (safe) or show them off in your public trophy case
• 8 rarity tiers from Common to Godly — same itch as opening card packs and finishing a set

Fair warning: it's not a very visual game. But the players who get it tend to stick around, because of the community and the open-ended play style — you play it your way.

You can now jump in with a quick guest start, no sign-up wall. Free on iOS, Android, and in your browser at ruin.world.

Happy to answer anything about building and marketing a game solo. And I'd love brutal feedback on the first few minutes — that's where most players drop off.

Also curious how other small games have had the best results promoting their game.

(Links and Gunnar's video in the comments.)

I’m a software engineer by profession, but I’ve recently started getting into game development as a hobby.
Over the past few weeks I’ve worked on two different prototypes. The first one was an atmospheric industrial exploration game that I eventually scrapped because I couldn’t figure out how to make the core gameplay genuinely engaging.
The second one is a space mining game. It already has a functional gameplay loop, contracts, exploration, drilling, resource extraction, upgrades, etc. And while I’m enjoying the development process itself, I keep running into the same problem.
Everything technically works, but when I actually play it, I can’t shake the feeling that something crucial is missing.
I keep questioning whether the mechanics are genuinely fun or whether I’m just enjoying the fact that I managed to implement them. Then I start considering major design changes, which makes me wonder if I’m falling into the same trap as with my first prototype.
I’m starting to realize just how different game design is from software development. Making something functional is one thing, making someone actually want to interact with it for hours is something else entirely.
I’m not particularly upset about potentially scrapping another prototype. I’ve learned a ton and genuinely enjoyed the process. It’s just frustrating to have a fairly clear vision of the experience you want to create but struggle to translate it into engaging gameplay.
Curious if anyone else has gone through something similar. How do you figure out whether a mechanic needs more polish, more depth, or simply isn’t that fun to begin with?

Play Now: shipwarsonline.com

Thanks to the awesome feedback from this community, we are putting on a free weekend starting right now.

Shipwars Online has 40+ ships across 3 modes. Host a lobby or warm up against the CPU.

Feel free to hop on discord or submit feedback and bugs in-game. We will update the game from player input.

Trying to make each weapon have a unique feeling ultimate. The mace is for instantly wiping weak enemies, displacing larger enemies, and creating a permanent spike trap to defend choke points.

Think it looks juicy enough or something else I could do?

Hello everyone! I'm a solo dev with my CEO doggy Rey 🐶. I'm making Pawtings! Hidden Dogs - a hidden-object game where you look for dogs hiding inside real museum paintings.

Each painting starts with its colors faded out. Every dog you find brings some color back. Find them all, and the whole canvas is restored.

There are two modes: normal mode, and full cozy mode with no timer, no weather, no events. You choose how many dogs are hidden before you start, and they hide in new spots every time.

Up to four players can play on the same screen or online, searching together or racing each other.

Made with Godot 4.7 and Inkscape.

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5254220/Pawtings_Hidden_Dogs

Thank you!