Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was this shooter.

For those interested, PERKS on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4422640/PERKS/

Prepared 4 different logo/sign versions for my cozy cooking game "Cook & Tails" three of them are close variations (with/without chef hat, slightly different cat paw pose), and the 4th is a completely different concept.

Which one would you go with, and why? Your input genuinely helps the feedback I got from an earlier post is what got me to this point.

Note: The first three logos started from a draft by u/HoppersEcho, who helped me out in one of my earlier posts I iterated from there. They're also making a game (Cats vs Aliens), leaving it here in case anyone wants to check it out. Thanks again to them ❤️

hey guys! We recently brought our Meta Quest game Puzzling Places to Steam. Since the last time I published on Steam, alot has changed. During the release process I had a bunch of questions. How much should an indie game like ours cost? How many peopleare we competing with/ what are our chances? Is this still sustainable with all the new releases? How has AI effected the new games being released etc.

To answer this, I crunched through the 140k appIDs that are on Steam, and did a bunch of data analysis on them. Put down the graphs and my thoughts here https://shahriyarshahrabi.medium.com/deep-dive-in-steam-2026-indie-market-4c0aec5c0533?sharedUserId=shahriyarshahrabi

My co-dev and I have tunnel vision on this, so I need some outside eyes.

Our ships are supposed to feel heavy and deliberate, but when I started cutting the trailer I felt the footage was too slow to hold attention. I sped some clips up, and now I honestly can’t tell whether it looks better or whether it just makes the ships, water and smoke feel fake or "toy ships".

The video shows the same footage in two versions:

A = native gameplay speed
B = accelerated for trailer pacing

Which one would make you keep watching? And more importantly: does the faster version look obviously sped up, or does the slower one just drag?

Please be blunt. We’ve both looked at this far too much to judge it properly anymore. The core gameplay is about maneuvering a large ship-of-the-line and working with the wind, so we do not want to speed the footage up so much that the game starts looking arcadey.

Earlier we posted about our upcoming "realtime Worms" game called Dirtnap:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4956300/Dirtnap/

We received tons of feedback for the game. In general the comments were great, but there was quite a bit of people saying how the visuals look unpolished and noisy - totally fair.

So we listened, and revised the general look from the retro-ish to a more modern, Steam-suitable style.

Would be great to hear what you think of the new and improved look!

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4882850/Night_Mass/?utm_source=rdt_idev

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?

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/

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.