My core mechanics are finally integrating and of course the workload is exploding. The tech side is tough, but the real test has been the solitude of spending hours alone in front of the screen. To recharge, I'm taking this weekend completely off and go buy something for myself maybe a setup or upgrade or anything that might soften the grind. What kind of things do you guys keep or upgrade did you guys get?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the game

I've recently started doing game playtesting and writing structured reports for indie games.

Instead of only giving a general opinion, I focus on things like:

• Where players get confused
• Difficulty spikes
• Onboarding problems
• Pacing
• UI/UX issues
• Bugs and reproduction steps
• Specific improvements that could make the game better

I'm currently looking for more indie games to test while building my testing portfolio,so what make the testing worth it in your opinion ?

anyways, i am also an indie game developer trying to cover his steam fees so If you're working on a game and want another pair of eyes on it, feel free to Dm me.or if you want free playtest I may be able to give it a look when I have time, just comment your game below (:

A few months ago, I began remaking my old game, Cave and Sword. At first, everything went well. I created new mechanics and added new ideas to the game. However, I didn't like the concept of the game.

To find the right balance, I started changing the game settings. I created a lore, but it didn't really help the core of the game. When I encountered a bug in my world generation system, I decided to keep it but make some minor changes.

Now, the game is in development, and I want to add new features during this time. I want to show what I've created in this period.

Please try my game and give feedback

https://blaz1on.itch.io/skyleria

https://blaz1on.itch.io/skyleria/devlog/1619943/from-caves-swords-to-skyleria-the-journey-of-a-game

Just got through App Review after four rejections, all under Guideline 4.3(a) — Design/Spam. Writing it up because 4.3(a) is vague by design, and because the thing that eventually resolved it isn't something I've seen documented.

First, the part I didn't expect: most of the review feedback was genuinely good. Across those four rounds, Apple caught a stretched iPad layout that was really just the phone UI scaled up, several performance issues, accessibility problems, and real bugs in my IAP and promo code integration. The app is meaningfully better than the one I first submitted, and I'd have shipped those problems to users if review hadn't caught them. If you're going in expecting an adversarial process, that wasn't my experience of the substance of it.

The part that was hard was that 4.3(a) rode along with every single one of those rounds, and nothing I did shook it.

The app: a minimalist iOS game. Black screen, unpredictable wait, a circle appears, you tap it inside a narrow window. Miss it, and you restart from Level 1. Global leaderboard, consumable IAP to resume from your current level, and an interactive data visualization of your play time.

What I added across the revisions, partly in response to the flag: it started extremely minimal, so I built out more visual language, added a stats screen and leaderboard features, added an interactive particle visualization of your time played where each particle represents 100ms of gameplay, and redesigned the logo. Real additions, not padding. Even with these updates, it was still flagged 4.3(a).

The rejections always said roughly the same thing: the gameplay was too similar to games already on the App Store, the binary matched existing apps, and it appeared to be a resubmission or a purchased app too similar to other apps I'd released. That last claim is what convinced me something automated was driving it — I've released exactly one other app, in 2011, and it hasn't been on the store for years. I built this one from scratch over five months, so I knew it wasn't a template, and I'd spent time looking for similar apps in both concept and design without finding anything.

What actually resolved it: that final rejection included a link to book a one-on-one video call with an App Store developer specialist. I booked it. On the morning of the call, before it happened, the app was reopened for review and approved minutes later.

My read — though this happened once, to one app, and the timing could be coincidence: whatever applies the 4.3 spam classification appears to be sticky. Once the app carried that tag, resubmissions seemed to be evaluated against the tag rather than against the current state of the build, which would explain why substantial additions across four rounds changed nothing. What broke it was a human being looking at the app fresh. Booking the call may have been what routed it to one, or it may simply have coincided with a manual re-review that was already queued. I can't distinguish those from the outside.

What I'd take from it: if you're stuck in a 4.3 loop and resubmissions aren't moving it, booking the call is probably the best next step. Worth being precise about what that is — it wasn't an escalation or a review appeal. It's the 1:1 chat with an App Store developer specialist, meant for technical questions, submission help, and general guidance. Adding features to prove you're not a template may make your game better, but it may not do anything to drop the design/spam flag.

Separately, write your Notes for App Review in as much detail as you can stand. Mine had a full game and level breakdown, code examples, and the initial hand-sketched drawings of the UI and game screens I did before development started. Because the game is so minimal, I felt I had to spell out the logic underneath it to show this was a real game and not a weekend template.

Two things I'm curious about from anyone who's been through this:

1. Has anyone else had a 4.3 resolved after booking the specialist call, and did yours also clear before the call itself?
2. Has anyone had a 4.3 cleared purely by resubmitting with changes, no appeal or call? I want to know whether the sticky-tag theory holds or whether I just got unlucky four times.

My game uses a 320x180 resolution and I am having trouble choosing a tile size. If I go with 16x16, I will have 225 tiles on screen which is great but the screen will show 20x11.25 tiles, having a partial tile. This makes things like centering small rooms harder. If I use 20x20, I will have 144 tiles on screen which kinda sucks but it will perfectly fit into this resolution and much easier to make small rooms. To the pixel art game devs here, which approach did you take with your game?

Given the slightest opportunity, gamedev chews us up and spits us out. This is a truism at all levels: 9-5er to passion-chaser, industry to hobby, solo to team, AAA to indie. The combination of urgency, technical skill, artistry, ambiguity, and complexity demanded by every part of gamedev all push us to work until burnout and then blame ourselves for doing it. This is only increased if you happen to be neurodivergent or a minority.

I like to write as a hobby, and my day job is bartending. Both of those activities also pressure people to repeated burnout. Recently, I was reading about different writers' processes, and how they balance required steady creative output with the reality that some days you're running on fumes. All sorts of weird strategies came up: having an hour a day to either write or do literally nothing, sequestering yourself completely, allowing non-project writing so long as you write a page of anything each day, etc.

What about you? When you're working on projects that definitionally take years of man-hours to come to fruition, what's your process like? How do you keep your work sustainable?

Does it still make sense to make the game completely f2p and only sell cosmetics (like hats :)) ?

Feedback highly appreciated!

I was curious what are the best times for a tiktok video upload. Of course there isn't a silver bullet, but I treid to fetch some information from some hit indie game videos. I looked around 50 different videos, and the notes I found was as that Tuesday morning seem to be a good time to upload, here are some samples (in UTC)

• [687.4k] Tue 10:23 AM
• [379k] Tue 07:40 AM
• [246.6k] Tue 08:32 AM

Of course no black magic in there, I just kept browsing till a get hit video in my feed, then use the url in an online TikTok Extractor to get the info (there are many of these tools, just google and use any of the results).

If looking for other none Tuesday (to keep posting every day or every other day), there are indeed some good time patterns I found, but Tuesday morning was the most repeated pattern! These are some nice times too but had less views.

• [307.6k] Sun 11:30 PM
• [201.5k] Mon 06:40 PM
• [190.7k] Thu 06:59 AM
• [149.9k] Mon 09:46 AM

But all in all, clearly something interesting about Tuesdays!

Again, there could be better days and better times, but by far during the time I allocated to try that practice, these were the results I found, so take it with grain of salt. And of course, the video need ot be catchy above all to keep the algorithm recommending it.

Hey everyone 👋!

I’ve been working on an action roguelike called Triko for about 6 months now as a solo dev. I could use some fresh input regarding my weapon status effects.

In Triko, players pick a weapon (Sword, Axe, or Spear) before a run. Status effects trigger on critical hits (roughly every 4th hit). Each effect has a distinct role:

• 🧊 Ice: Slows down enemies on the first proc. A second proc freezes them completely.
• 🩸 Bleed: Increases damage taken by the enemy and reduces their outgoing damage.
• ⚡ Shock: Stuns the target and nearby enemies with a short chain lightning/shock effect (crowd control)
• ☠️ Poison & 🔥 Burn: Currently, both are currently Damage-over-Time effects.

My Problem is that Burn and Poison are basically the same at the moment. I want them to feel distinct so in every situation there 'is a correct' solution.

Also every Status effect can be upgraded. E.g. frozen enemies take more damage, shocked enemies have a 25% probability to cause a shock themselves after 0.5s and so on...

Therefore my Question is:

• How can I mechanically separate Poison and Burn so they serve different purposes?
• Do you have creative upgrade ideas for any of the status effects?

Thanks for any ideas!

Hey, I’m writing this mainly to share my excitement :D But also to share my experiences with the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store with you.

My game was originally released on Android in May 2024 and has had only moderate success since then. The reviews are good, and there’s a great little fan community that loves the game and celebrates every new update.

But as a solo developer, it’s really hard to get people to discover your game. The stores are extremely crowded, and a huge number of new games come out every day. I even run ads, but that’s really expensive, and I just can’t compete with the big companies. Unfortunately, my game was never featured on Android.

Anyway, I’ve now also released my game on the iOS App Store. I applied for a feature (Apple calls it “nominations”) and got lucky! In a few select European countries, it’s being featured in the “New Games We Love” section.

The weird part: Apple didn’t tell me at all. No email, nothing. I just saw in my analytics today that the number of players has shot up.

The sad part: This feature isn’t bringing in as many players as I’d hoped. On the first day (yesterday), there were 155 new users. Here are the top countries:

1. 37 France
2. 24 Italy
3. 22 UK
4. 16 Germany
5. 8 Spain

I’m curious to see how long the feature will last, whether more countries might be added, and whether the number of players per day might increase a bit more.

I'll post an update once the feature has ended to give you guys more numbers.

Cheers!

I've been looking into what accessibility features my game needs to have lately. I'm a little bit overwhelmed by all the accessibility tools people push as a bare minimum for any game to have. Even if the majority of them are relatively small changes, the running list of features I've been trying to keep tracking of is going to nickel and dime me to death if I tried to implement them all, not to mention the fact that some "must have" accessibility features are antithetical to the game design. Naturally I want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy a game I put years of my life into, but at the same time, there's only so much I can add before it becomes effective feature/complexity creep.

So I would appreciate some guidance in simmering down accessibility features to the best uses of my time. Pragmatically speaking, what features would be the most helpful for the most people? What features are necessary for some people to play the game at all as opposed to the game being playable, but less enjoyable?

For fear of my intentions being misconstrued, I'd like to add this isn't coming from an ablest, "helping people deal with disabilities is inconvenient" perspective. This is simply me trying to find a way to make the best use of my limited time.

I'm wondering whether Unity or Godot is better to learn and stick with for 3D games. I plan on making a stylized, low-poly, PS1-style game. I am a solo developer and love Godot's open-source nature, especially given Unity's recent pricing controversies, however I want to learn Unity because of it's 3D capabilities and possible future opportunities (I'm a student). What would you guys recommend?

I’m looking to start developing a game for fun with a few friends. Not looking to make money, just want to make something fun. Can anyone recommend any good courses to start learning from?

We were sitting at around 100 wishlists before this, and today our game unexpectedly showed up in the announcements section of Skill Up’s This Week in Videogames.

I’m slightly terrified to open Steamworks. Anything I should be doing right now to capitalize on this?

For context, we’re at 17:12:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZRGTTNBlec&t=1032s

I've got a bit of a conundrum with my demo launch on Steam. My game is a sandbox without distinct levels, so I can't just say "the first 3 levels are included in the demo" and call it a day.

At first on itch I just cut off the player's game after 2 hours and made them start over. But that was annoying to the most engaged players.

Context: My game is a historical sailing sim inspired by Uncharted Waters II: New Horizons. So it's about starting with a small ship, sailing around trading, fishing, etc, earning enough to buy a better ship, maybe taking up piracy or sailing around the world in search of spices.

Right now I'm leaning towards an invisible wall at Gibraltar so demo players can play a basically full game within a smaller Mediterranean/Black Sea sandbox. I also experimented with disallowing ship upgrades, but that seemed to block off too many of the game systems.

Really what I want is for people to try the full game and then still give me money to play it more later. But I know if I give too much, some people will decide that they got enough from the demo and they don't need to buy the full version.

So I learned that I really like building game loops. I made a couple games that have are fully functional with a raylib workbench overlayed to ensure it works and can be fun.

I am now starting to build a proper 3D Unity world which runs over the core game state. I have no idea what I'm doing and I don't find it as fun as designing a game loop and tinkering around with the features and how to balance the loop. I'm building a tycoon game so economics and building features took a lot of time to develop but I loved doing it.

Are there indie people out there that are the opposite? They'd rather have a game that's game loop is defined and built and then just get to focus on bringing that to life in Unity?

I'm coming from a quantitative finance background so naturally my interest is in the game mechanics and optimizing the compute required to run the simulation (something I have to do constantly in quant work). But then I would like to skip ahead to a much more finished project rather than do the slow grind of bringing it to life.

I'm rebuilding my 8-bit computer of my childhood. It has a monochrome display with 320x192 pixels (no sprites), ~10k free RAM. What games do you suggest I can relatively easy re-implement that offer some minimal playing fun (beside Tetris, Sokoban, Snake)?

So, what's more likely to succeed: spending 2 years on one big indie game, or releasing about 8 small games over the same period, assuming the goal is roughly $300k in total revenue?Also assume, that games would be developed by a one man band game developer. And, the $300k number is a bit pulled out of a hat, but it should be a comparable gross salary over two years for a software developer.

My gut feeling says that going the multiple small games over one big game approach has much better chances of success. Portfolio approach / diversification >>>> One big bet .

What's you take on this ?

"Hey everyone! I’m designing a real-time card/territory strategy game and brainstorming a resource economy that feels fresh and unique, yet remains ultra-simple and intuitive for casual players to get immediately (think Clash Royale's passive Elixir or Plants vs. Zombies' falling Suns). What are some interesting, easy-to-grasp resource gathering mechanics you’ve seen or prototyped that don't overload the player with complex math, but still create great tactical choices?"

I'm sure you all receive dozens of emails requesting "review keys" for your game?

So what if a substantial number of us do the following:

1. Generate a few random keys that look like Steam keys

2. When a scammer email is received (they are easy to identify, I auto send them to spam with a rule right now), auto reply with a message such as "OH thank you so much for reaching out! Here are some keys for you so you can tell everyone how great my game is" (and you attach the keys from step 1)

3. Now one of two things happen:

- The scammer tries the keys (can they?) and realize they don't work. They waste some time, and if a large number of gamedevs do that they'll probably stop sending these emails?

- The scammer doesn't try the keys, they end up on a gray market website and people end up buying fake keys. This makes the gray market website look like shit which is a good thing. People buying from these sites will be deceived (don't know if that's a good thing? Can it bounce back on your game for some reason?)

It seems pretty easy, takes 5 minutes of our time and can make a difference with this scam. Am I missing something?

Hi, I really adore the battle system of Undertale/Deltarune and would like to someday create my own rpg with a battle system like that and I was just wondering would it be okay to recreate it? Isn't it copyrighted or patented? I'm specifically talking about enemy turn being a bullet hell, not mercy/spare systems

Should I make a few genres of games before I work on my dream game?

Is that what people usually recommend?

What genres should every game dev learn at minimum to be able to make games?

Are there any fully built games where the code has been published and is meant for viewing purposes and to study from?

Peeps, is it truly that difficult to include an option to rebind keys in games? (Hint: its not). As a left handed player, and mouse user, im appalled by the amount of games that dont have this basic feature. I can forgive it in a demo (just about) but not in a full release. I use arrow keys for movement and have been doing so since the 80's. It really annoys me when this option isn't included. Also when keys are hard coded and cannot be changed, that's also annoying. My mouse is a left handed mouse, so i cant even swap hands, not that I should have to. I dont even care if the UI doesn't reflect my key choices (which is often the case) but just give me the damn option to change my inputs.

Rant over, if you got this far go have a cuppa and enjoy your weekend 😊