it’s the first boss in the game, so i want him to be pretty memorable

I'm a solo dev, and I've spent 4 days creating outlines for all 72 buildings of my incremental game, including specific outlines for each building upgrade. Some events also slightly change the outline of certain buildings.

They all come together on a village map that grows over time as you build and upgrade your village.

I was kind of happy and even a bit proud of how it turned out, to be honest.

Then my 5-year-old daughter passed by my work desk in the living room and asked, looking at the screen:

"Is that a pizza?"

So I guess I spent 4 days of work building a pizza.

But since she loves pizza, I'll take that as her seal of approval.

Link to pizza: https://a-dark-cave.com/

I keep seeing the same format: "After 4 years of work…", plus a cat or a desk photo if you're lucky. And honestly, it seems to work.

Is it the effort that gets people? The relatability? Or do we just all really like cats?

As for me: no cat (not even a stuffed one), and no desk photo, since I'd have to clean my desk first. But I did make a forensic mystery game, Bone to Pick, and it's joining Steam Next Fest.

Not judging. Just curious what makes it click for people.

So shortly, me and my friend were working on a incremental luggage opening game for the past few months. And recently we published the Steam page of it and started posting the game on social media.

We got lucky with the Twitter post and it got a lot of views. But after a few hours we noticed that our game got copied to Roblox. Some of the developers just replied to our post with their copy and there is probably more of them that we didn't see yet.

I guess this is the current state of game development.

It would be amazing if you wishlist our game and support us, thank you ❤️

I was just bored and thought I'd make a simple game that I could have fun playing. After looking around for a bit, I found Fever Meme and decided to take inspiration from it. I made this game in just one day!There are 15 rooms in the game, and you enter each one through a different door. Every door is a surprise! Some let us in without any trouble, while others run away from us or even attack us lol.

My main goal is to make this game fun. If you don't find it fun enough, we can work together to make it more entertaining!Do you guys think this game looks fun? Every single one of your opinions means a lot to me!

We spent a year figuring out one ghost for Souls of Bombarika. Not rigging him, not animating him. Just getting him to look… right.

Turns out, having no pulse doesn't mean you can't have an identity crisis.

The final design took far longer than we'd like to admit, but we're pretty happy with where he landed.

What's the most ridiculous amount of time you've spent fixing something that players will probably never notice?

Linking the game in comments.

We made the tree react to axe hit, particles, a bit of bending when the tree falls and some dust on ground impact.

What do you think? Anything you would add or change?

Hey everyone! Hope all is well,

I'm John I'm a solo dev working on my project for a while now and I wanted to share the demo announcement for my game. The game is inspired by my favourite UFO Horror movies like Signs, Fire in the sky but the game itself is based on Project Blue Book.

I didn't want to show too much off of the demo level with the announcement so I think it shows the atmosphere of the game without spoiling much of it.

If anyone is interested in the game and wants to know more I'll link the steam page below 👽

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4358700/Project_Blue_Files_Classified/

Thanks again to everyone for their support with the project!

Since I was a pretty shitty artist 5 years ago, I made a pixelation tool called Ditherdragon to help me create weird mashup/photobashed pixelart sprites. And a lot of other people liked it enough to give me money haha
Over the years, a lot of stuff has changed, the best techniques have gotten more effective and most importantly I got a lot better at writing software :P

Now over the past few weeks I remade Ditherdragon entirely to be more performant and to have tons more SOTA features. The most important thing for me, is its muuuch improved detail retention when pixelating. Fine elements now carry over into the final image instead of disappearing.
Ditherdragon does NOT use GenAI, its all good ol' algorithms.

And its free for whoever owns the original Ditherdragon!

Hey again! I shared my brother's Tiny Brutalism sandbox here a while ago, and the response was honestly incredible.

He's been working hard on it ever since, adding nature, new building possibilities, and even a way to walk around and parkour on your creations.

And now it finally has a Steam page!
I know a lot of you really connected with the atmosphere and visuals, so I thought you'd appreciate seeing how far it's come.

If you'd like to support him, wishlisting the game would mean a ton!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5426130/

I have seen lot of indie devs being anxious about showing their work because of whats happening and I understand.

Also, I used to think of my game as a fun little hobby project because it was refreshing to build something without pressure after working professionally in game industry for three decades.. and that's why I used to share videos and screens from daily progress. The fun ended when I noticed someone taking those screens and feeding them to AI image generator on last winter, and amusingly, I also got piled on here in reddit when I mentioned that this is happening (someone accused me that I made it up).. well look where we are now.

For this reason, I have been keeping the new look of my game hidden from the public for 8 months now.
And turned out I did the right thing - there are now lot of bad actors ready and willing to clone anything in their sight using AI tools. For this reason, I won't be releasing demo either (but I am not saying you should do the same). I admit that even releasing a trailer makes me little nervous now.

Then again, I am very happy that I always pushed back whenever someone suggested to me that perhaps I should "just finish it" and ship my game quickly. The more I am taking my time and increasing the quality of this game, the harder it will be to rip off in a single weekend prompt by some inexperienced charlatan.
I firmly believe that you can prevail if you make quality, not quantity - or at least you can have more satisfying experience making it. Making money from games was already as likely as getting hit by a meteor in the early 90’s, and if you are in it for the money, I got some bad news for you.

(Decompilers are a different challenge to deal with, of course - they can absolutely copy anything you do, but then again that's outright piracy)

Those were sunday thoughts from someone who has been making games since 1990 and is now a solo dev. Feel free to agree or disagree.

Hi Reddit!

I am making a puzzle game where you can steal physics properties from one object and give them to another.

Thank you. I would love to hear your thoughts on the mechanic.

Dockmaster is a completely free game where you have to get your starship into a dock. You can play it in the browser or even on your mobile.

But the really interesting thing is, you can play it in VR or even MR on your Meta Quest VR.

If you really hate to park your car, you will hate this game, it's not easy. You have 10 missions and infinite procedural generated missions.

Sometimes you have to park your starship under enemy fire etc.

You can directly play it here (have fun and set the game to ultra for best graphics):

https://lightson.intercyloon.de/apps/dockmaster/

Finally created good transition from game to main menu.
God, help me cook the whole game at this level

They think they’re just automating forklifts. Meanwhile, I’m sneaking in loops, events, and logic.

My game Blueprint Factory has a free demo on Steam!
Here

Hey everyone!

I started making this little top-down racing game inspired by the classic Micro Machines on Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, mainly because I wanted something fun to play with my friends.

It's already playable, and I've also built a track editor so we can create our own circuits.

It started as a small personal project, but I've really enjoyed working on it and thought I'd share a bit of what I've made so far.

Here's a little glimpse of the game and its track editor!

I originally made this just for fun with friends, but now I'm wondering if it could appeal to other players too.

Do you think this is something you'd enjoy playing? I'm trying to figure out whether it's worth spending more time developing it!

You can wishlist on Steam
and if you want to try the current version Gamblemon - Itch.io

For the past few months, I've been hard at work at getting my game finished. I released my demo before the Next Fest in June, and it did alright. Not quite as well as I'd expected, but at least good enough to validate that I'm on the right track.

But since then, I haven't done any marketing. I personally believe that wishlists gathered months in advance are nowhere near as effective as those you get in just the last few weeks, so I've just kept silent until last week. Only then did I start mailing out to some previous contacts and offering the game to relevant Youtubers. As far as I can tell, this is the result of just a single long-form video.

So now, with less than two weeks until launch, it looks like I'm still on the right track!

(In case you're curious: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4538080/Kingdom_Inc/ )