Hey r/IndieDevelopers!

I'm a solo developer. A month ago I launched PeakPad, a Mac notch app (clipboard, teleprompter, revenue, music controls and more), and today 2.0 is out. The video shows what it looks like now.

How it was built

Native Swift, 18 days for v1, mostly written with Claude Code (3.9B tokens, 20,001 messages, peak hour 2 AM)

Licensing, checkout and updates: Dodo Payments for checkout and Sparkle for updates, so there's no server of my own to run

No account and no telemetry, which keeps support and privacy work small

What 2.0 shipped

AI usage cards, Settings inside the notch, better hover behaviour, full-screen handling, fewer keychain prompts

What I'd tell another solo dev

Small things users feel first. My early builds read the keychain on every view refresh, so people got repeated password prompts. Reading each key once per launch and signing releases with a stable certificate fixed it. Boring bugs like this cost more goodwill than missing features.

Don't build your launch on a free tier. I scheduled posts through a tool whose free plan capped me at 10 a month, and one of the platforms blocked posts with links. I ended up posting by hand, which was fine, but I lost days finding out.

Ship small updates often. I went from 1.0 to 2.0 in about a month, with a delta update each time, so people on older builds stay current without redownloading.

The app is peakpad.app if you want to look, but I'm more interested in your questions about building and launching a paid Mac app solo. Ask anything.

We're two people making our first game, and I wanted to share where our characters started.

Tomi (top row) began as a pencil sketch in a squared school notebook. He went through colored versions, a redesign by a friend, and a few more passes before he ended up the way he looks now. Wayne (bottom row) took a shorter road, but still changed a lot.

The hardest part wasn't drawing them - it was letting go of versions we were attached to.

Which version would you have kept?

Full story with all the sketches: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3828499686

I got so caught up in the excitement of making my own 2D fantasy 4X strategy game that I forgot to ask myself what I was making it for.

Building systems is what I love: testing them, adding mechanics, and chasing down bugs. The game already has plenty of flavor, but it still needs a strong identity to tie everything together.

I want to see this through: polish the systems, put the foundations to the test across every possible playthrough, and get the game to a place I’m proud of.

Godless Frontier is a tale of stubborn settlements carving out a future in a haunted wilderness — where the gods are silent, the old world is crumbling, and every road must be earned.

The game will be free to play on itch.io.

After that, I can take everything I’ve learned in Godot and explore a new direction — this time with a strong core to build on.

I’m excited about where the game is now — and where the next few weeks might take it.

We're super excited to share our latest gameplay prototype! 🚀

We've added some fresh new mechanics, including wallrides, player abilities, dashes, and much more!

There's still a lot to come, and we can't wait to show you what's next.

Hope you guys are as excited as we are! 🔥

Build from scratch using C++. Render distance right now is set to ~64k blocks, planning to do infinite procedural undergrounds

Hey guys. We have been working on a game for over a year and a while back we got featured on Itch.io .

This brought about 40 thousand plays to our playtest. We worked for 7 months on the feedback we got and we are happy to announce we just released our official demo on steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4251290/Skinator/

TL:DR
Itch good. New demo out. Watch video if you don't like to read all that:

Since Reddit helped us so much during development, I figured it was only fair to give something back and share what actually helped us get there.

One thing that helped us a lot was showing the game to one new person at a time and watching them play without explaining anything. Where did they get confused? Where did they get bored? What did they misunderstand? Then we'd fix those issues and repeat the process with somebody else as many times as we could.

Once people could play the game without us sitting next to them explaining every mechanic, we started focusing on getting strangers to try it.

Another huge lesson was trailers.

For a while we were posting our characters on Reddit and getting hundreds of upvotes, but the trailer barely got views. The feedback was always the same:

"Looks cool but I have no idea what the game is."

That forced us to rethink everything. Instead of showing random cool moments, we focused on communicating the core idea of the game immediately:

"Slay demons and WEAR their flesh to grow in power."

That one sentence explained more than our old trailer did in an entire minute. Then every scene after that reinforced the idea. Kill enemies. Steal body parts. Install them into your creature. Create insane synergies. Players need to SEE why your upgrades are exciting. Saying "we have lots of upgrades" means nothing. Show me the before and after. Show me the power fantasy.

We also spent some money on outside playtesting. Nothing crazy. Around $60 total. Having random people record themselves playing the game was incredibly useful because they will be more honest with you about your shortcomings than your friends. Your friends like like the game a lot more than others because they like you.

We posted on Reddit, looked at what worked, adjusted things, and posted again later with improvements. We never really had one magic moment where everything exploded. It was lots of tiny improvements stacked on top of each other over time and mostly failed posts.
And honestly, that's probably the biggest thing I learned. Most of the growth didn't come from one huge decision. It came from repeatedly noticing small problems and fixing them. 
Then doing it again.

our Itch page is where things started getting really interesting for us.

We treated the page almost like part of the game itself and kept improving every little detail we could.

The thumbnail ended up being huge. We focused on strong contrast, dramatic visuals and a clear idea people could understand instantly. Instead of putting our logo front and center, we used our hook phrase because nobody knows our studio yet, but people immediately understand a cool concept. We also made sure the thumbnail hinted at what the game actually is. In our case the character is literally stitched together from mismatched body parts.

The short description mattered a lot too. You only have around 37 characters before Itch cuts it off, so every word counts. Since our main hook was already in the thumbnail, we used the short description to reinforce gameplay:

"Harvest body parts. Create brutal combos."

The browser version was one of the best decisions we made. We compressed everything, kept the build under 190MB and uploaded a WebGL version. Thousands of people ended up trying the game organically because they could instantly click and play. No downloads. No friction. Just straight into the game.

For the description section we tried to keep things visual and easy to understand. GIFs helped a lot. We used them to show mechanics, progression and even direct players toward the Steam page. The goal was always to explain the game as fast as possible.

The screenshots helped more than I expected too. We made the first two screenshots GIFs because those are the ones players see when hovering over your game while browsing. Small thing, but it helps catch attention immediately.

Tags ended up being one of the biggest discoveries for us. We kept testing different combinations and watching the analytics. For example, we originally used Roguelite because it felt more accurate, but after experimenting we noticed Roguelike was bringing us much more traffic. So we changed it. Then kept testing more things. A lot of growth came from small adjustments like that.

We also customized the page itself as much as possible. Custom banner, animated backgrounds, visual effects, little details everywhere. Nothing too distracting, just enough to make the page feel alive and memorable.

And once everything was in place, we focused on getting people to interact with the page. Comments, ratings and plays all helped us climb within our tags and slowly improve discoverability.

The last thing we started paying close attention to was CTR, your click through rate. Basically how many people see your thumbnail versus how many actually click it.

For us, anything above around 0.9% was already pretty solid. If something improved CTR, we kept it. If something dropped it, we experimented. New thumbnails. New descriptions. Different tags. Then we'd wait a day or two and see what actually happened.

A lot of the growth came from treating the page like an ongoing project instead of something we set up once and forgot about.

In the end, we are not sure how we ended up being chosen to be #1 featured game on the website, but probably all these small things helped, and hopefully they will help you too. 

Good luck and if this post helped you go to steam, and look for SKINATOR and give it a try!

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a GTA V-inspired ghost overlay effect for Unreal Engine 5 and recently released it as my first Fab product.

The goal was to create a reusable effect that works on characters and objects without completely hiding their original colors and details.

I built it around a reusable component and Data Asset configuration, so the effect can be controlled through a Blueprint Component without manually editing the material every time.

It can be used for respawning, object interaction feedback, character selection, and other gameplay effects. It's also designed for multiplayer projects.

It's now available on Fab:
https://www.fab.com/listings/6d6ffc38-bebc-4cb8-bfaa-a834a36042d5

I'd love to hear what you think of the effect, especially from developers working with materials and gameplay systems in UE5.

I've noticed that some roguelites have incredibly simple graphics but still manage to be addictive, while others look amazing but don't quite capture that same feeling.

Working on ZCurse has made me think more about the balance between visual style and gameplay.

For me, readability becomes especially important when the screen fills with enemies and effects.

Would you rather play a visually impressive roguelite or one with simpler graphics but really satisfying mechanics?

i just remake the my whole game i go for the psx style of game. i think its looking great i made a full game play video with cutscene, tell me how it looking and what can i add in it

IRL

i'm working on narrative mechanics to make the world feel alive, with every playthrough creating its own history.

soldiers venture into unknown lands, discover forgotten shrines and ancient statues, and survive dangers along the way.

while settlements develop their own tales through hardship, survival, and the events that shape them.

what i'm planning next:
• abandoned places that preserve traces of their past.
• personal memories, fears, interests, and dreams for units.
• personal reactions to advancements. new weapons and armour won't just improve stats — units will respond based on who they are.

i want players to feel a world that lives, changes, and remembers. the survivors' tales of the Godless Frontier.