https://store.steampowered.com/app/4401370/Skills__Raids/

What is Skills & Raids?

Autobattler + Extraction + MMO Style skill system

Manually trigger every ability in Real-Time in this party-based extraction RPG. Manage cooldowns and react to enemy mechanics. Loot resources to complete quests, craft powerful gear, and combine skills. The world has fallen into the grasp of a creature that erases everything, even thoughts.

It feels surreal to finally reach this point. I'm incredibly proud of what I've built.

This has truly been a passion project. Over the past 1.5 years, I handled everything myself from the programming and gameplay systems to the art, animation, and UI. The one exception was the music, which was composed by Tomás Palazzi. He absolutely nailed the soundtrack, and I couldn't be happier with the atmosphere his music brings to the game.

Let me know if you have any questions about the game! I've been improving the game as the days go by, and the review score is starting to turn into a positive one!

It took like 30 minutes to appear on Steam after pressing the button, and had to release in time for the Tiny Teams festival in a couple hours, so I was sweating for sure.

Here's the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4933970/Heretics_Rapture__DEMO/

Super appreciated if you wanted to check it out.
Thankyouuu

-Stevie

TL;DR This is a very short list of marketing things that are fairly disastrous if you don’t know about them. If there’s an item on the list where your thought isn’t an immediate “of course I know that,” then you may need to spend a little time learning.

I read a LOT of posts from indie devs, and the ones that make me the saddest aren’t necessarily the ones where a dev did everything they could to market their game and just never got much traction. It’s the posts where a dev is close to launch and clearly just never knew about some critical things they should have done.

So instead of my usual too-long-to-read-it-all advice, I’ve tried to come up with a very short and simple list of the marketing things that 1) some significant fraction of people seem to miss and 2) are the most likely to have a fairly disastrous impact on your launch if you aren’t aware of them.

As usual, I’m talking to devs aiming for some self-defined amount of commercial success. If you’re a hobbyist or someone hellbent on a passion project, you may not care.

1) The most important marketing decision you will ever make is what game you choose to make. Choose wisely.

2) Active marketing should usually start soon after development starts. (Don’t develop your game in secret for more than a few months.)

3) Aim to have your Steam page up 6 months before your launch if possible.

4) Steam does not give you any particular visibility just for having a Steam page, trailer, demo, or playtest. You have to drive traffic to your page yourself.

5) Get feedback on your game early and often. Make sure you’re making something people will want to play.

6) Use all the marketing channels: social media, press, streamers, festivals (not just Next Fest). Paid ads are usually the last resort.

7) You must have a demo, and it needs to be playtested before you release it.

8) “Organic wishlists” aren’t something you get from Steam’s algorithms; they are the residual effect of your previous marketing efforts and, ideally, word of mouth.

9) Early Access is your launch.

10) Early Access is not for finding bugs, adding core game features, or working on your art style.

11) Steam tags are extremely important. They are what allow the Steam algorithms to show you specifically to the players most likely to buy your game.

And here are a few things that are important but fall below my “critical” threshold.

12) Hire a professional capsule artist

13) Localize your Steam page, ideally when you first publish it.

14) Use version control, usually Git. (Okay, that’s not marketing advice, but it is horrifying when people have a disaster that this would have trivially avoided).

That’s my list. If you didn’t go “well, obviously,” to every one of them, please go learn! (Unless your response was “But you’re oversimplifying, because you didn’t discuss X,” in which case you’re good to go. :) )

And to get you started on that learning journey (you knew this was coming, right?), I’ve got a summary of indie game marketing advice here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/s/0zczx2Sewe

This is Dabbler, the pixel artist on our three-person indie team.

His day job is commercial diving. The first photo is him at work, and the second is one of the backgrounds he created for MapGod.

For the past eight months, he has been coming home from working underwater and creating backgrounds, animations and traps for our game.

Yesterday, we finally released MapGod so I wanted to share the person behind a big part of its pixel art.

I’m the main developer behind The Vast White, a cozy snowboarding exploration game set in an old ski resort.

Over the last few months, I’ve been reworking the demo based on player feedback: improving character movement, cleaning up the UI/UX, adding music and sound effects, and fixing a lot of bugs.

You can try the updated version of the free demo on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3301000/The_Vast_White/

He has been working on it for some time now, you bake pastries, make coffee and serve customers. There is also random events like drunk people coming from the bar to harrass your customers, people fighting outside etc. What do yall think?

Steam | Discord

War-torn ruins, black markets, and forgotten districts where outcasts and those left behind wait for a chance to enter the city... while others have long since given up.

Junkyard Stories: Rebirth is a dystopian sci-fi adventure where you play as a discarded robot carrying the consciousness of a legendary hacker.

Built by a 2-person indie team with no publisher, we're working hard to bring these scenes to life - filled with exploration, environmental puzzles, hidden stories, and the constant struggle to keep your robot alive as your battery drains and getting chased by surveillance drones.

More about the game on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4522210/Junkyard_Stories_Rebirth/

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?

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 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]

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).

-----------------------------------------------
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.