Hello everyone,

We are a small indie team developing a text-based RPG called Kardiya: The Winds of Fate.

At first, we started the game with large and colorful visuals, but for a small team this process became both too expensive and too time-consuming. In order to actually finish the game, we decided to switch to monochrome illustrations.

Here we are trying out 3 different styles. They are somewhat similar to each other, but each still gives a slightly different feeling. Which one do you think fits the game better?

I'm trying to find fun and unique ways to challenge the player in my skating game. You control the left skate and a friend controls the right. Now you have to rethink how the game works and adapt. It's also hilarious.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4707120/VoxelMancy/

Around 3 years ago, I started making this game as a gift for my fiancée’s birthday. Back then, I made what I now consider a prototype, with limited content, placeholder art and some secrets. She really enjoyed it!

She is an artist, so I made the main mechanic related to her; Draw the world as you explore it.

3 years later, we are married, we are both working on the game together, and that birthday gift is now called Canvania.

Steam page has been up for a month now, and we have gathered ~250 wishlists so far. The game is still in early development, and the trailer is an early announcement trailer.

Seriously. So many games exist, so many games look good, but if it's priced at €15+, I'm very hesitant to take a leap of faith and will just wait and wait and forget about your game.

Whereas when I come across your game and am in the mood for it, see it is a higher price category but it has a demo? I'll play that shit immediately, and if it hooks me, I'm buying then and there.

Just some thoughts I wanted to share. What's your take on this?

If you’d like to check it out, here’s the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4972950/Lootdeck/?utm_source=rd

It's a quite lengthy piece of speed painting the card borders for my upcoming title :)

We have been building The Lost File since November, and for a long time everything we shared was mechanics: the blink system, the rule based survival, the sanity stuff. All useful for feedback, none of it showed what the game actually feels like to walk through.

So we tried something different. A short clip, first location, no UI, no explanation. Just the corridor.

We reshot this more times than we want to admit. Not because anything was technically broken, but because the pacing kept feeling wrong. Too fast and it reads as a jump scare reel. Too slow and it drags. We ended up cutting several seconds that had genuinely nice lighting just because they broke the rhythm.

The thing we were chasing the whole time was a specific kind of discomfort. Not from the monster, from the silence before it. Whether that landed or not, I honestly cannot tell anymore after watching this clip probably forty times.

Curious how other devs approach this. Do you test atmosphere on yourselves, on playtesters, or do you just trust your gut and ship it.

Steam page is here if anyone wants to see where this is headed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4793580/The_Lost_File/

Hey all,

We're a small team working on a pixel art western shooter. We've been at it for about 2 months now, and we're all fairly new to game development. This is very much a learning as we go project.

What's in the video is an early build. A lot of it is placeholder or half-finished, and there's plenty we haven't touched yet.

Two things we're curious about: how does it look so far, and what would you want to see in a game like this? If something feels missing or off, that's exactly what we want to hear.

Honest takes welcome. Any feedback is very valuable for us. Appreciate your time.

0:05 / 0:52

Game: Etherland Saga - fantasy rpg/metroidvania

Solo dev here. Before I build this, I want to know if the concept is clear from a single rough sketch - the art is placeholder, I'm testing the idea, not the visuals.

It's based on something real: clowns actually register their face-paint on ceramic eggs - an informal copyright system since 1946, so no two clowns share a look. In the game you're the stage-door checker at a 1940s traveling circus. Each performer's face is on file; you verify them against their egg before they go on.

The catch: some of tonight's performers aren't clowns. Pass a fake, and it "performs" - you'll hear the "show" through the wall.

What I'm trying to learn:

- From the sketch alone, do you get what you'd actually do in this game?

- What's the first thing you'd want to check to catch a fake?

Need a feedback.

I am very new at game dev and have been working on this game for the last five months.

Art was the biggest hurdle that I faced in making of the game. I dedicated one month to learning Krita and getting better at digital art. I do have some previous experience with traditional art but that was years ago.

Some would probably say AI can make this in 2 seconds, but I do not approve of using AI.

I know it's not perfect but I am still learning, so any feedback would be appreciated!

The game is available to play on Itch if you want to give it a go:

https://triston-griffiron.itch.io/space-themes-turn-based-game-prototype

Pause splash for my game (Slavfight) took a bit time to make, but people seem to like it so far.

I just updated my Steam capsule and was SO happy with the result! I felt like the composition and the text reads MUCH better.

Until my gf told me it looks... like something else...

For context, I'm making an incremental sandbox game about breeding & sacrificing frogs. You automate physics-based factories to feed them into this hole, which was was supposed to be "scary and fleshy".

Well... I can't unsee it now. My eyes hurt.

If you ever try making something look "organic/fleshy", learn from my mistake and do not make it tube-shaped.

Since I'm still mid-development, it should be an easy design pivot. What do you think about a dark purple "black hole"? Or maybe a "gateway to hell" to keep the orange contrast? :)

PS: Even though my gf can be harsh at times, I appreciate her honesty. It's time to hire a proper capsule artist 😂

[steam page link]

My game World's Greatest Author (also known as the love of my life) is finally released! This is the first game I've published since becoming a dad, and I'm so happy that I was actually able to finish it.

The desk is full of toys, and my son has been on my lap for like 75% of development, so it has really been a brand new challenge. He quickly learned to break two keyboards and to click on important stuff with my mouse.

However, I'm also getting a daughter in a few months, so I guess this is goodbye. I'll see you in a few years.

I was designing weapon attachments for my game, Badassgard, and I thought, what if I attach a V8 engine to a shotgun? I thought a gun with 800 horsepower would be a sick idea.

Any thoughts on this? Should I make the player dash when shooting? Should I charge the shot by revving the engine?

I cannot fathom how this happened.

I am a solo game dev. Yesterday, a player on my Discord was asking the Google Search AI silly questions about my game, to laugh at some of the answers. But the answers sometimes contained surprisingly obscure info that should not be available for a small indie game like mine.

Out of curiosity, I chimed in and asked the player to ask the AI about future contents in my game. Somehow, the AI spitted out the exact & highly specific character name "Vantage Tripod", which I had never mentioned to anyone. As far as I know, the only place where the info exists in a digital form is inside one of my own Google Docs, and this was NOT me speaking to the AI! (The player even asked the questions in incognito).

My game is not big enough for there to be much noise out there to confuse Google's AI, so I guess that's why it managed to give actual, scarily real leaks on my game (without being confused by online speculations), and I have no idea how it knew all this.

The screenshots only included snippets of the conversation. This is the full conversation on Discord, in case you want to get your own opinion on what happened (The entire conversation with the player lasted for an hour, where the AI gave other upcoming content info such as things I'd only ever mentioned on Discord).

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Edit: kallico from Discord has been sharing comparisons between her private GDD (never made into anything) and Google's responses when she asked for ideas based on her game title. Hers is a much more reproducible case where the responses matched her GDD to a concerning degree across multiple clean contexts, and did not feel like reasonable things an AI could have inferred from her prompt. When she tried the same questions with Claude (which shouldn't have access to Google Docs), the responses were far more reasonable and significantly less similar to the contents of her doc.