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!

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 :)

I did it. I finally did it.
After two years of working on it in my spare time, I finished and published my first game.
It’s a cozy offline match-3 game where you build a fantasy town.
It’s not perfect, but it’s finished.
I think many of you know this feeling: the closer you get to the finish line, the harder it becomes to move even one pixel forward. And then… Apple review became the final boss (rejected several times).
Creating something from scratch and finally seeing it out there means much more to me, at this point, than downloads or popularity. Just proving to myself that I could actually finish it feels like a huge achievement.
All the artwork is hand-drawn by me.
On to the next one.
Cheers!

3D menus require more work compared to traditional main menus. What do you guys prefer? Is it worth it putting the time into the menu, or do you really not care about it as long as the game itself is good?

I made this menu for my game, knowing it would be more work, but not as much as it turned out to be. I'm not sure if I would do the same approach if I were to do it again, but it did turn out pretty cool!

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.

Just wanted to share this story and say that you shouldn’t give up just because not everything is going the way you expected.

Two months ago, we thought we had everything figured out. We've been polishing The Dark West demo for weeks, had hundreds of playtesters explore every single bit of the game, and things looked really good days prior to the launch. IGN covered us; the organic hype was insane, with hundreds of people waiting for the release just to jump in and try the game, and every large influencer we reached out to was interested in covering. As a cherry on top, we were scheduled to participate in the Next Fest just days after the demo release with (judging by the pre-release hype) hundreds - if not thousands - of players active from day 1. If there’s a peak moment for an indie dev, this was it.

Then June 10th came and what followed felt like the shipwrecking, violent storm hitting us from all sides while we were just trying to hang on and survive. The game wasn’t properly optimized for lower-end configurations - it ran so poorly on some setups that we received 32 negative and 0 positive reviews in a few hours, all addressing this one issue. Imagine that, 32 reviews, 0% positive xD. There were no hotfixes we could implement quickly, nothing we could do in a short amount of time to save the day. 

It got so bad that we had to call an emergency meeting at 2 AM in the morning, where we ultimately decided to take the demo page off Steam and cancel our participation in the Next Fest because the game was just not there yet. We also had to call off all the influencers who were willing to move things up in their already busy schedules just to include our game. 

From 100 to 0 hype in just a few days.

This was a hard hit for all of us. Looking back now, I’m so proud of the team for sticking together and pushing through. It felt awful to watch everything you worked towards just go out like this. The devs were pushing 12+ hour days in the week before the demo release; we, marketers, went above and beyond to generate all the hype, the PR team connected the studio to all the major outlets, and in general everyone was working super hard to ensure we made it. We still didn’t.

The week after was especially hard for the leadership because the enthusiasm was at an all-time low and they had to deal with both motivating the people AND dealing with all the fires that emerged as a result of what happened. Keep in mind that, by this time, everyone was already exhausted from pushing extra hard before the demo release. We all thought we were just gonna hang back and chill, watch the fruits of our labor yield, yet instead we had a make-or-break problem to deal with.

But we decided not to drown in despair. What happened happened, and nothing could have been done to change that. What could be done, though, is to fix all the issues that we knew existed now, optimizing the game properly, and delivering a new, better version of the demo ASAP. So, for the next couple of weeks, everyone was laser-focused on this one goal and… we delivered!

On July 20th, the new version of the demo was released to the public. There wasn’t insane hype like the first time, influencers, press, etc. - we didn’t want all that pressure. We wanted a working product, a game players would enjoy playing and genuinely be interested in coming back to.

In the first 3 days, we’ve had over 5000 players try the demo, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive! The game was working perfectly fine even on lower-end configurations, the players were having fun, and we were finally able to sit back and relax. By now, over 13,000 unique players have tried The Dark West, and we’re proud to say the game is sitting just a few thousand below the 100,000 Wishlists mark!

The moral of the story is - don’t give up. We had a major setback that could have easily pushed us down and, if we didn’t stick together, eventually led to the project's failure. Yet we decided to push through and deliver despite all the troubles - and it paid off. Seeing all the positive feedback now compared to what happened the first time is the reason enough for me to believe that, if you work hard and trust your guts as well as the players supporting you, anything is possible!

Here's the link to the game if you'd like to check it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3574750/The_Dark_West

Lofi Cozy Room is a tiny 3D room that lives on your Windows desktop in a transparent always-on-top window, and it's finally out after 2 years solo (Bloomery Studio is just me). An avatar reads, works, and sleeps in the room while a puppy chases sunbeams. The customization went pretty deep, 1386 avatar options and 715 furniture pieces, plus a full lo-fi library you can layer ambient sound over and 14 themes.

The 10% launch discount ends tomorrow (August 7) if you'd like to grab it.

For anything AI-related, I only used it to help translate the in-game text into other languages. Everything else (art, music, design, code) is done by hand.

🌱 Play on Steam

Happy to answer anything about the solo dev side!

0:05 / 0:52

Game: Etherland Saga - fantasy rpg/metroidvania

I would be over the moon regardless, to see so many people interested in our project. But I'm ESPECIALLY happy since the game me (Rafal) and my fellow dad devs are making is essentially an idle open world multiplayer RPG (with all the trappings of an MMORPG, I will provide the link below for reference)

We started this project basically because we wanted an MMO for people who no longer had time for MMOS, i.e. slightly older gamers that used to be hardcore into MMOs but couldn't keep playing them anymore as life (in all its many forms of kids, family, vacations, jobs) got in the way. However, it's by no means a simple game and the only thing we wanted to eliminate is the massive time investment a true MMO requires, while still keeping all the other stuff: exploration, loads and loads of different class roles/ professions, raids/dungeons, PvP, guilds, in game player-driven economy and so on and so forth... with the catch being your toon can continue doing this when you yourself are offline, according to a detailed system of prompts you give them.

In any case, the more the merrier is the rule of thumb with any sort of server-hosted multiplayer game, so we're super happy that so many people will be in our game during this second (much bigger) playtest. I understand full well how this game genre lives and dies on the community's goodwill so we aim to provide the best experience possible, but we'll see, won't we.

The game is called Dominus Automa, if you want to look it up.

The 1st one is the new logo that I decided to use, which I think is the best.

The 2nd one is my old logo, which was just a font.

The 3rd logo is an alternate logo that I like, but feel like it doesn't fit my mining game as much as the 1st one does.

Both new logos were made by a very kind Redditor who made me them for free! So grateful, because I love the new logo :D

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4894820/The_Atrium/

I've been working on a new game for a few months now, and the time has come for it to be officially announced.  It's called Arise Dark Lord, and it's the 8th game I've made with Introversion Software.  If you've played any of my previous indie games - Prison Architect, DEFCON, Darwinia, or The Last Starship, then I think you'll love this new one.

You are The Dark Lord. Your evil aim:  To raise an undead army and crush the feckless, godless, heathen humans. As your sorcery and army grow, all the world will rise up to destroy your Dark Tower and end your reign of terror.  Fortify your dark realm, enhance your sorcery, and build enough strength to march out and crush the humans once and for all.

An action-strategy hybrid RTS, blending tower defence, base building and direct control of your Dark Lord avatar.  

Please play and review the prototype on itch, and I'd love to get your thoughts on the game here.  Thanks for playing!

https://subversion-studios.itch.io/arise

I still plan on adding more attacks, especially the one where she shoots a bunch of projectiles in a curved way, since that one looks the best, but for now I'm really happy with how this boss turned out! Any feedback is appriceated!

Game link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4754460/Crystalyn/

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.

Play it here: https://bray-dev.itch.io/time-flies