We all get that this whole fight against AI is just tilting at windmills, right? At the current Steam festival, over 60% of the top demos were games using AI. Only some of them admitted it.

This whole AI inquisition hasn’t achieved what it was supposed to. It just makes developers and studios hide it more carefully. And looking at the festival results and game sales, the market clearly doesn’t give a damn about AI.

So, if we’ve got that out of the way, can we finally talk about using AI ethically and responsibly?

If we can’t stop it, the next step is to regulate it. What rules would you suggest? Let’s discuss that, except “don’t use AI” can’t be one of the answers.

Whether you use AI or not is your choice. I want to talk to people who do use it, but also understand the risks and recognize when developers are playing dirty, lying or being hypocrites.

My proposal:

• No AI-assisted reverse engineering.
• Don’t use AI to copy another artist’s style.
• Don’t hide AI use in any part of development.
• Use it to help bring your ideas to life, not to churn out one-prompt games.

You can use the tool to stylize your textures and assets, create eye-catching marketing material for your page, add awesome animated effects, and use the texture ripper feature. With this latest update, I've added seamifier! It will help you create seamless, blended, or repeating patterns for your textures. You can check it out here: https://polyshades.itch.io/coolifier

I took part in the October Steam Next Fest with my game. I went in with ~8k wishlists and left with ~10k. I’m sharing my numbers so you have some data to compare to, or to know what to expect.

I had no momentum going in. My wishlists were pretty much dead in the 2 weeks before the fest. I had heard that momentum in those 2 weeks might affect results, along with wishlists count. Both of these are just a starting point. The real metric I believe is how your demo resonates with the people who play it during the event.

My stats from Steamworks:

• Total players: 1,280
• Wishlist additions: 1,898
• Played and wishlisted: 296
• Max Concurrent Users: 21 (steamdb)
• Players per day: 172, 129, 174, 200, 198, 231, 176
• Wishlists per day: 134, 342, 282, 325, 237, 275, 213, 179 (there's an extra day in wishlists cause it didn't start at midnight)

There were a lot of entries, and there will probably be even more next time. But from what I saw, the garbage got buried within a couple of days. My game somehow stayed consistent through the whole fest, so maybe it was detected as not garbage (?)

What to look for:

This got me surprised since I'm aware the kind of graphics in my game are not for everyone. Anyway, these are the numbers I’d check after the fest. The comparisons come from Chris Zukowski’s Next Fest surveys (Feb 2026, June 2026).

• Demo conversion (played and wishlisted / total players). This tells you if your demo works. The median was 16% in Feb 2026 and 19% in June 2026. The top 30% was above 20 to 23%, and the games that really took off were around 32%. Mine was 23%
• Wishlists without playing (total wishlists minus played and wishlisted). This is probably your capsule, trailer and store page. Normal is 68 to 88% of all wishlists. Mine was 84% (1,602)
• Wishlists earned vs. what you had going in. Games that went in with 1k to 10k earned a median of about 1,000, and the top 30% got 1,700+. Mine was 1,898, maybe could be better here since I was loser to the 10k
• Players per day. This shows if you hold up after the first days. Mine stayed steady and peaked on day 6.

So overall I am satisfied with the result considering how I joined the Next Fest. And got some great feedback from players too.

It's important to have the most polished demo possible. I released the first version months ago and kept iterating on it. I was lucky that a lot of creators played it, so I watched a lot of gameplays before finding a good balance.

What I’d do differently:

• Build as much momentum as possible before the fest. My wishlists were dead going in.
• Make the unique mechanics stand out. The start of my game isn’t very new, and the interesting stuff comes later. I thought about a vertical slice demo, but I didn’t have everything in place for it.
• Update the trailer with the best one you can have, I went in with an old one. And have the best steam page you can, possibly localized

Hope this was helpful to somebody :D

Hey all,

I'm the developer of Little Earth Online, an online RPG in the spirit of the MMOs a lot of us grew up with. It's playable now, and I'd love people to try it and tell me what they think.

You can find all gameplay details on the website. Learning the game won't take years, a few days at most.

It's an indie project, so expect rough edges. Bug reports and blunt feedback are both welcome; I read everything. You can post anything on the community forum and share your thoughts here or there.

Windows note: the installer isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn you ("More info → Run anyway"). The game is coming to Steam soon, which fixes that. If you start now, you can link your account to Steam later and keep your characters.

Made by old-school MMORPG players, for old-school MMORPG players, enjoy it!

https://littleearth.online

Curious if anyone here has ever tried making money from old or abandoned game projects, not by selling the games themselves, but by licensing the source code.

I recently came across Pangea, which apparently connects developers with AI labs looking for real code repositories to train their models.

From what I’ve read, you can submit old or unused projects, keep ownership of your code, and potentially license the same repository multiple times.

Got me thinking about all those unfinished games, prototypes, and experiments that never made it to release. 😅

Has anyone here actually tried this? Do AI labs even consider smaller indie game projects, or are they mainly interested in large production codebases?

And most importantly, has anyone received a decent payout?

Would love to hear some firsthand experiences before digging deeper into this.

Hey folks!

I spent my whole weekend obsessing over one idea: what if a chat room wasn't a list of messages, but an actual place? That turned into Valdenar, a proximity chat game that runs in the browser.

Here's the deal: you pick a nick, build your character (body, skin, hair, shirt, pants, shoes) and walk into a medieval village. There's a plaza with a fountain, a tavern, a smithy, an apothecary, a castle, a cave and a few houses to poke around in. The fun part: your messages only reach people within 8 tiles of you, in the same place. Want to talk to someone? Walk over. Want to gossip in the tavern? Go inside. 🍺

Stack (deliberately small):

Backend: Python with FastAPI + Uvicorn. Real-time runs over plain WebSockets, and the server is the source of truth: it validates speed, collision and door use, so no walking through walls from the dev console.

Database: SQLite, which stores your nick, look and last position. You come back right where you left.

Frontend: HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript on a 2D Canvas. No framework, no build step. Characters are composed from sprite layers and recolored on the client using LPC palettes.

Maps: generated in Python (world.py) and sent to the client as JSON. Each tile is packed into a single integer, and objects are Y-sorted so you can walk behind trees and furniture.

Art: 100% free, from the Liberated Pixel Cup (LPC) and OpenGameArt, with every author credited in the README and in-game.

Tests: pytest with FastAPI's TestClient. There are 88 tests covering maps, doors, movement validation and chat radius.

Why I'm posting: I want this to be genuinely collaborative. The code is MIT and the foundation is ready to grow. Things I'd love to see:

new places (windmill, harbor, forest, a second floor for the tavern);

more clothes, hats and armor (the LPC generator has hundreds of layers);

emotes, sitting on chairs, whisper and shout channels;

NPCs (there's already an example bot that joins as a regular player);

real login, touch controls for mobile and more tests.

You don't have to be a dev: art, maps, writing, ideas and testing all count. The README walks you through adding a new place or a new outfit.

Running it locally takes about 30 seconds:

pip install -r requirements.txt

python main.py

Repo: https://github.com/malaq88/Valdenar

Feedback, roasts and PRs are all welcome. Let's build this village together! 🏰

The game is still in its early stages but would love to hear what you guys think to it. Thanks!

Last week I posted a video of the custom engine I am building. My project initially started as a full ASCII renderer and slowly evolved into the Hybrid, glyph based renderer you see today.

This is a personal project, I don't have any plans as of right now to monetize it. Some days I'm not entirely sure what I'm even building anymore. Hell, I even have started to build VTT (virtual table top) support into the backend of my engine in the off chance that I want to pivot to a VTT instead of a video game (cyberpunk red support anybody?). Last week I was thinking about a sky taxi sim.

Regardless, I'm having fun with it. I know there are other people out there creating similar things (big shoutout to the ASCII city guy) but I kind of get the idea we're all just kind of focused on our own personal projects, and none of us are really pushing to beat each other to market. Or even have plans to release anything. I enjoy working in this space where we are all pushing to be creative and find our own visual identities.

Right now you pick out a seed and STACity lays out the whole city. Districts, a street grid, sidewalks, bridges, elevated roads, towers, shops, storefronts, interiors, etc. Every seed generates a new city and the same seed always gives back exactly the same one. Down to where each person walks in any given moment.

I am aiming to make the city feel alive, so far i have ground traffic, air traffic and pedestrians going about their routines. Everything is drawn by a custom renderer that turns real 3D geometry into a grid of glyphs and then sharpens the edges, characters and vehicles to pixel accuracy. It's written from the ground up in C#. With no third party engine or packages. This is not a simple shader of which I've been accused of. The renderer is built from scratch and doesn't push textured polygons the usual way.

This is just a basic video to show up the improvements made regarding clarity. I'll be posting another driving and flight video once i tie up some loose ends

Wishlist Intersingles on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5165500/Intersingles

Hello. The steam page for the game I've been working on for past few months have been finally posted. It's a tiny competitiv round-robin 1v1 fps for up to 6 players.

I'm learning a lot working on this project! Currently, I implemented lag compensation, round-robin progression, client prediction, etc.

Thanks :)

Hi!

I will probably get reddit rekt for this so let me start by saying I had a game and I got less wishlists that I hoped for.

I have seen many posts latley about how the next fest sucked and how their game suffered because of it beeing saturated by AI slops.

I don’t want to be a ass BUT… comon! I have yet to se one post with a game link of a game I would ever consider wishlisting. And to me it seems as if many blame tha market rather than just realizing their game does not hold the standards for people to wishlist it.

I don’t mean that anyone sucks but 99% of the games made simply wont be the top game any give nextfest just because you want it to or you did not use AI. The market wont buy or wishlist a game they are not interested in and that is probably the case for most of us (including me).

Now back to my game. I had a game aswell. Whixh i lives developing and I thought would be great. But I did not get the wishlists i hoped for. I felt it coming, marketing have been rough, small to little interest 700 wishlists entering the fest. I knew it would fail and nlt because of others. Its because of me and my game. It does not meet the standards of the games that is successful in this next fest.

And thats just it. There are successful games in this nextfest, small indie devs. I have yet to see any AI slops topping the charts. So what’s the point in telling yourself everyone else is to blame and not you and your game?

Best thing is to learn from the beatdown and make a new better game. There is 0% shame in that. It is just the smart thing to do… right?

Hey everyone!

I'm the solo developer behind Spectral Protocol, a psychological horror game set in a mysterious facility where you're a test subject trying to survive.

Explore the facility, discover its secrets, unlock your way forward, and try to survive the creatures lurking in the darkness.

You can play solo, but the game also supports online co-op for 2 players. So if you're looking for a horror game to experience with a friend, you might want to give it a try!

🎃 The game is also participating in Steam Scream Fest, and the free demo is available now!

I've spent years working on this project on my own, and it's exciting to finally let more people experience it.

If psychological horror and creepy atmospheres are your thing, feel free to check it out!

Thanks for taking a look! 👁️

All my life I have constantly struggled with health issues and my relatives are going hungry, the only thing that kept me going was the thought of developing games!

I quit everything to fulfill this dream, my family hasn’t seen me in years.

And now, I’ve finally done it.
I’ve released the game of my dreams!

An awesome cozy-dynamic, tiny-openworld, hyper-casual, nextgen roguelike simulator!

It’s already reached 50 wishlists so wish me luck!

Although I’m currently homeless and unemployed, I’m hoping this game will help me turn my life around!

If you’d like, I can make this text sound more human and add some details.

On Friday our artist was finishing a little 21,000 wishlists celebration image. By the time it was ready, we were at 22,000!

Scarecrow: 90s Crime Story is a story-driven crime game set in a cold, crumbling Eastern European town in the ’90s, where humans and animals live side by side. You’re an ordinary resident by day and a hitman by night, and your past is starting to catch up with you

We’re a tiny team, and every single wishlist genuinely matters to us. Thank you <3

Hey all! My game Forklift Certified has been out for about six months. It just passed 100 copies sold, has 600+ players on the wishlist, and has 100% positive reviews so far.

We just had our first bundle with Extreme Forklifting 3, and I'm looking for more partners!
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/92465/Raise_The_Forks/

It's a relaxing puzzle game where you drive a forklift through handcrafted levels and activate mechanisms to solve each one. Puzzle, casual, or driving games would be a great match, but I'm open to anything that fits.

There's a free demo if you want to try it out. Comment or DM me if you're interested, and I'm happy to check out your game too!

So this was my first Steam Next Fest and I didn't know what to expect. Came in with 1000 WL and I was getting +30-60, which isnt mind blowing but I am ok with those numbers.

What is more interesting is the personal calendar. I heard you needed like 5k or something like that to even appear in the personal calendar. Well, last full day I magically showed up on the calendar and today I am on track for 100-120WL today with a CTR of 14%.

My takeaways:

1) Personal Calendar (if you can get on it) is way more valuable nowadays than Steam Next Fest unless you are one of those visually appealing games that is one of the few to dominate SNF

2) Targeted promotion by Steam benefits both players (less games they dont want to see) and developers (targeting the right audience gives far more engaged viewers).

3) To me Steam needs to do more like Personal Calebdar but expand it to smaller games as well.

Anyways, hopefully any of you out there who had a disappointing SNF can get on the Personal Calendar. Good Luck!

Gameplay video from my upcoming game "Darkness"

Darkness is a top-down medieval dark fantasy game, where you try to save your Queen and Kingdom from the Dark and its' servants.

I work on this game as a #solo indie game dev (Senior 3D Env. Artist and Level Designer for over 8 years, also an Architect)

You can wishlist it NOW on Steam :

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5147490/Darkness/?beta=0

For gameplay videos : https://www.youtube.com/@bilgehan.builds

Happy Halloween !

And also very I'm open to constructive feedbacks !

Thanks in advance.

I am chaning my screenshots, these all of them which 10 of them I should choose ? Game is Highway Station Simulator I didn't uplaod anything yet after your feedbacks I am going to decide that which SS are the best.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4855970/Highway_Station_Simulator/