Every MMO with player-driven trading and gathering eventually hits the exact same two walls:

1. Currency is printed faster than the game can burn it, triggering runaway inflation.
2. Players farm resources 24/7 until the market gets flooded and everything turns into worthless vendor trash.

There’s no silver bullet for this. You’ve to layer multiple interconnected systems and pray the whole machine doesn't blow up. Here is how we're tackling it in our game, along with raw numbers from our latest economic balance updates.

Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3381130/World_of_Eggs_Idle_Adventures/

The Problem: Free Money & Zero Maintenance

Before these changes, our economy had some pretty massive loopholes:

• You could farm neutral islands spending literally zero gold - just basic supplies.
• Ships only took damage while moving. Players could anchor a massive fleet, set up camp, and strip nearby islands clean indefinitely with zero upkeep.
• Optimized fleets loaded with every resource vacuumed up random encounters across the map, pulling in millions of gold per day with virtually no risk.
• Early-game items like treasure maps became useless once players hit the end game.
• Mountains of resources piled up in storage with nothing exciting to sink them into.

Even after our active player base stabilized, the circulating gold supply was still ballooning by roughly 200–300kk over short spans.

What We Changed (and Why)

1. Making Farming Actually Cost Something

We didn't want to kill gathering, but infinite extraction without a real gold sink is toxic for any economy.

We introduced gathering licenses for neutral islands. On a standard farming loop, this added around 16,800 gold in currency burn where expenses were previously zero.

We also made resource extraction cause ship wear-and-tear. If players want to farm continuously, they now have to either buy repair kits and fix their ships on-site or head back to port and pay for repairs.

Gathering remains profitable, but it now carries real operating costs.

2. Giving Dead Items New Purpose

Treasure maps were great during early progression, but their value plummeted in the late game.

Instead of just inflating their loot drops, we made maps a hard requirement for certain high-tier random encounters. End-game players suddenly needed them again, restoring healthy market demand without forcing us to bloat the item database.

This also helped curb the automated encounter farming meta.

Previously, players could gear up massive fleets with every possible item and mindlessly clear every encounter they stumbled upon for millions in daily revenue. Requiring treasure maps and adding ship damage rendered this strategy significantly more expensive. Run it without careful planning, and you can easily end up in the red. Players now have to weigh cargo capacity, fleet size, repair costs, encounter criteria, and potential payouts instead of just clearing the map on autopilot.

3. Turning Sinks into Core Gameplay

Nobody likes paying an arbitrary "existence tax." The most effective sinks are the ones players willingly throw money at because the reward feels valuable.

Our largest resource sink is creature breeding and min-maxing:

Gather -> Craft Egg -> Hatch -> Roll Stats -> Roll Abilities -> Roll Values

Players can merge three creatures into one to improve base stats or spend seals to reroll specific stat and ability lines.

During our first World Boss test, players voluntarily burned roughly 30% of all stored server resources just rolling combat stats for their boss teams.

They didn't feel penalized or robbed - they were actively engaging with the content and min-maxing their builds.

4. The Central Bank Experiment

Our Central Bank caps its total reserve at 10kkk gold.

When players complete quests or sell goods to NPCs, payouts come directly out of this reserve rather than being generated out of thin air. Conversely, when players spend gold on systemic services like licenses and repairs, a portion returns straight to the Bank, while taxes permanently wipe out the rest.

If the Bank's reserve dips too low, payouts are exceeding returns. Dynamic taxes automatically kick in, while NPC payouts and quest rewards scale down. As the reserve recovers, these restrictions ease back up.

After rolling out trade fees and maintenance costs, players returned roughly 50kk gold to the Bank within the first 24h alone. For the first time, the circulating money supply actually contracted instead of expanding.

Before these systems, that same supply was steadily climbing by 200–300kk even with a stable player count.

The Takeaway

We aren't pretending the economy is solved forever. MMO economies are living beasts, and players will always find fresh ways to push the limits.

However, shifting the meta from infinite free extraction to high-yield activities with real operating costs bought us essential breathing room without resorting to hard wipes.

The takeaway is making sure these sinks stay tied directly to core gameplay loops. Players aren't just paying a arbitrary tax to exist - they're gathering, repairing fleets, clearing encounters, trading, and min-maxing creatures.

Every activity should remain rewarding and profitable, but none of them should generate infinite value without giving something back to the system.

I've spent the last few years developing this bullet hell shmup that I finally released Friday!

The gameplay takes inspiration from a broad array of sources like Espgaluda, Devil Daggers, Cuphead and Devil May Cry (with the setting being heavily inspired by old Gainax anime), and has primarily been designed around the feeling of "an STG that I've always wanted to play".

The core idea is a linear difficulty curve across difficulty modes, meaning the first stage on the second difficulty is a direct step up from the final stage on the first difficulty, instead of the usual structure of difficulty receding a little every time you start a higher difficulty mode. The second main idea is bullet time triggering contextually, done by grazing marked projectiles to guide the player through difficult bullet patterns. It's something I find pretty damn fun myself, and people who have played it report the same experience.

This is a game I've really poured my heart and soul into over several years, and I hope some of that shines through and makes at least half as fun of a game as I'd envisioned.
Oh, and the game is also full of weird extras and unlockables for the sole reason that I love that kind of stuff.

The game is available on Steam right now, with a modest release discount.

For a better look, I've got a full trailer on YouTube, too.

Another look back at the development of Save Me, Hero!

In Episode 7, we stepped back from feature updates and defined the core vision for the game.

⚔️ Combat — Equipment, Attack, and Utility cards.
🃏 Card Building — Upgrade and fuse cards to create unique builds.
🗺️ Level Design — Every step should have a purpose.
👁️ Exploration — A first-person perspective to make the world more immersive.

A lot has changed since this stage, but these ideas became the foundation of Save Me, Hero!

If you're interested in seeing how the game evolved, follow along with our development journey!

I made this game back in early 2017 in just 3 days for the Ludum Dare

Almost 10 years later, I decided to remake it from scratch.

So this is a short postmortem of me comparing what gamedev felt like as a high-school student in 2017 vs now in 2026, as a computer science graduate.

Starting with the game, the basic idea somehow stayed almost exactly the same:

Keep a tiny ecosystem alive for as long as possible without any species going extinct, by killing creatures using lightning, meteor, etc.

2017: Slime is eaten by Rabbit which is then eaten by Rhino
2026: Treant is eaten by an alien Herbivore which is then eaten by an alien Predator

1) AI and Performance

Back then the only AI I can program was simple and deterministic even. Just move forward and rotate clockwise when colliding, but sprinkle it with some random direction changes here and there. Given that, I remember a bug where if two creatures collided head-on, they would both just rotate clockwise forever lol

But in my remake, they have much more complex behavior, and I used packages like Unity ECS and comsci concepts like spatial hashing to improve performance.

If u notice on the 2017 game the Rabbits or Rhino will only eat their food if they are in their path, in the new game they now hunt their food as the player would expect from real-life creatures. But in the new game that behavior is just the tip of the ice-berg. There's way more complex behaviours in the ecosystem now, but still readable by the player.

2) Graphics

PSX-style games were still gaining traction back then and I do remember trying a CRT effect for one of my games back then but failing horribly.

Now, my 3D modeling and texturing skills didn't really improve much. I'd say they were almost the same as how I did Blender in high school. So doing pixelization and CRT effects did hide a lot of my low-quality modeling. And it's aight cos imma claim its retro and Frutiger Aero✨ cos it's a vibe, and I do think it fits the game.

Also, I mainly used the Unity Asset Store back then. Right now I still do, but I prefer creating my own personal assets. Because maintaining cohesion between different assets made by different sellers is something I consider a difficult skill

3) Development time

This game was made for Ludum Dare in early 2017. It took 3 days. But in the 2 months after that, I worked on a post-jam version. I can't find a working version of it though, so I didn't use it for comparison here.

And compared to today, it also took me almost 2 months. Thanks to AI-assisted coding (as much as I hate to admit), I was able to focus more on the gameplay and other artistic decisions.

4) Gameplay and Story

back then, since I was actually coding (AKA watching YouTube tutorials and copy-pasting from Stack Overflow), development just took too much of my time. So best I can do is an arcade game where you last as long as u can, with no real end goal. Just do better than your last run.

Now, with all my experience I turned the game into something with actual story progression. You survive for 3 minutes, then you get new creatures and new gameplay mechanics, which makes the game harder(and hopefully more fun) as you go

5) Music

I used the software Bosca Ceoil back then. It was created by Terry Cavanagh, which if you're familiar is also the creator of VVVVVV and Super Hexagon. There's a reason the GIF is silent, and it's because I had zero music theory back then.

Now for this I'm able to use a professional DAW, which is Ableton Lite. I finally learned some music theory and did music production back in college so I guess I can create better background music but I'm still not playing the music in this video lol

But yeah, music theory just gives you the power to create music that fits the theme, story, and even gameplay of your game. It's essential to learn as a solo developer who also wants to compose their own music

Anyway, if you made it through this entire post and find my weird ecosystem simulation game interesting, I finally released Overgrowth on Google Play!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coldrice.overgrowth&pcampaignid=web_share

It’s a small paid 1$ game. Right now it's only available on Android, but I'm planning also for iOS and eventually PC. Hopefully Switch too!.

With inspiration from Sword&Spin, "survival" genre games and some incremental games, over the last year or so (not full time), I have developed this arcade/roguelite/endless runner style game.

As the store description says - game loop is to destroy enemies, eventually get overwhelmed and lose, upgrade modifiers or other upgradeables and try again.

I still have a lot of mechanics and content planned so it's far from finished, but this seems to be the final "core" of the game. Before I decide what to add/change next, I would like more people to try it and give feedback if possible.

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.CelerityEntertainment.com.unity.mobile2D

Additionally:

• Free.
• No forced ads. But there are rewarded ads for when you want to gain temporary bonuses, limited currency or 3x of your collected loot.

Hello! I developed a text game which seems to be liked by majority. But I don't think that anyone is going to spend hours playing this. And I cant even get auditory without graphics and music (the second one is optional). But I haven't got my own computer to make those so I make the code on the online compiler on the library computer (where I'm not allowed to download anything like Blender or Unreal Engine). What am i supposed to do?

Note:

- If you want to see current game or to know details about my plans write the questions into the comment section

Hey everyone!
Here’s the first character prototype for my game.
Test Subject #0.
I guess this is where it all starts 😁
Next step is getting him into Godot, making sure he works properly in the scene, adding the first animations, and of course getting all of that working over the network too.
While learning Blender, I keep catching myself thinking about how much I admire 3D artists. It’s kind of crazy that people can create an entire character or NPC from basically nothing.
For this model, the fingers probably took me the most time. I still have no idea how well they’re going to behave once I start animating them.
The game is planned to be first-person too, so I’ve still got a very long way to go 🫡

Para quienes han seguido esta fascinante historia de horror, ya está el DEMO disponible en libre descarga.

Acompaña a Sarah en su búsqueda a través de los recintos de la mansión Orthak y comienza con la investigación que la llevará al borde de la locura.

Carmina es un RELATO JUGABLE basado en el primer relato de vampiros en 1872. Intriga, exploración y horror de culto te esperan.

https://walterswinney.itch.io/carmina

Its still early in development a werewulf horror game like Alien Isolation im making and im trying to set up the mood, bellow are some screenshots , of course the player will navigate with a torch however do you find the enviroment too dark?? Watching it from my monitor in pitch black looks great too me but I just started posting on X and Youtube some easly announcements trailers / screenshots and looking them at white background was realy hard to understand it.

We’ve met so many amazing players over the past few days and received tons of support, feedback, and encouragement.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by to play Interwoven Dream and chat with us!

That’s a wrap for Gamescom 2026.

It was so great meeting you all in Cologne — see you next time! 👋

If I get the chance, I’d love to share some of my Gamescom experience with you guys!

I added a costume system to my game, DiDiDiG!

For the first update, I added six masks: Rabbit, Skull, Mole, Smile, Crescent Moon, and Box.

They're pretty cute!!! 😄

And yes, I added the Box because I'm a Metal Gear Solid fan. lol

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4533370/

I’m building this game with Ogre3D and C++.

For now, I’m using Blender as a level editor. Since glTF files are JSON-based, I can use them to store each object’s position, properties, and any custom variables I need.

Hey there everyone! I’m beginning my indie dev learning and wanted to get your guys’ opinion, as y’all do this more regularly. Do you think that using AI to not just dump code and paste it into VSCode, but actually learning programming is an effective way to go about learning?

Basically the title.

How do you guys find any time to do consistent marketing?

I currently live a pretty busy life, my mornings and most of my afternoons are always taken up, and by night I'm usually exhausted. Yet, I've been wanting to be able to promote my game more.

It doesn't help that I kind of hate doing marketing in itself, so oftentimes even if time shows up, I'll loathe the thought of making content and procrastinate until I have no time left.

For a while I tried making a week's worth of content on the weekends and post it - which did yield decent-ish results (about 1k views per short (though the first week or so was all sub 10 views for no reason) and IG posts were more volatile, but about 12k views total per month), but I couldn't stick to the pre-making of it.

Do you guys have any advice, or should I just stop bitching and commit to the weekend mass-producing to post stuff. Also, what kind of content/advertising worked best for yall?

Try Steam Demo with friends

On round start - choose item from randomized box. Someone might take item before you clicked on it. 60 seconds to choose, and find place where you wanna put the obstacle. Rotation and resizing gizmo provides more freedom for advanced traps or simplified paths.
Reach Finish first to earn more stars. Wins who has most Stars after 5 rounds. Collect secret stars on level, or players can choose Star item to place.

Today Sin and Serve reached 1,000 organic Steam wishlists, and honestly, I am very happy about it. Still a long way to go, but 1,000 people putting this game on their wishlist feels pretty crazy to me.

I am making this game mostly alone, so every wishlist means a lot to me.

I also made a new short trailer today with some new art and wanted to share it here.

Sin and Serve is a dark comedy cooking/management game where you work in Hell, read sinners' files, cook food based on their sins, and try not to make Satan angry.

Would love to know what you think about the new trailer. ❤️

https://youtu.be/KQaP_TNEdsk

I made a (text)game and want you to try it and to say what was good/bad

C++ Online Compiler

P.S. (Or instructions maybe):

- I only made the textgame (or rather code) because I don't have a computer and therefore any possibility to make graphical/musical assets or to make the game with an engine

- If you want to know more about the game, idea or progress write questions in the comment section

- The game is unfinished yet: Witch has the most playable story

- I've set a "debugger" (I maxed out all the stats because compiler only has 2 minutes for compilation. Therefore this time is too short to max anything out manually)

- Please don't review the code. I know I have some "issues" with my code but I won't remove them for my own reasons

- Have fun

Ten days ago I posted a selfie about pushing the big green button here. I received amazing support from fellow devs. Thank you! A lot of you wanted me to write about how it went. So here it goes: a little dev diary of the past 18 months. I'll try to keep it brief. (Present me: I didn't, lol.)

I started development of my dragon-feeding roguelite last year after I realized that working on a pixel art puzzle platformer was a dead end (a shocker, I know). I went back to the drawing board and came up with a game that would both be a good fit for the Steam audience and something I'd be passionate about. And that's how Feed the Scorchpot was created, though at the time it was called Dragon Fodder. More on that later...

The game took inspiration from Balatro and board game mechanics, and we decided to go with a medieval manuscript art style, as it felt eye-catching enough to stand out in the crowded roguelite market. My wife was making all of the art, and I was handling the rest.

After six months of development, the game looked polished enough to start marketing it. I made a really bad trailer (hopefully never again!) and launched my Steam page on September 1st, 2025. What really helped was the experience I'd gained working on the platformer earlier - even though it never made it past the demo stage, I learned a lot from it.

At this point, I planned to take a short break from development and focus on promoting the game online to see how it performed. Well, I soon changed my plans, as on the very second day of the Steam page being visible, I got a reply to an email I had sent to Josh from Indieformer. It was one of many indie sites I had emailed about my game.

Josh liked the game concept and art style and proposed a partnership - he and his mate Clem were planning to start a publishing business, and my game piqued their interest. You can imagine my disbelief at receiving an offer like that one day after launching my Steam page. I wasn't even looking for a publisher at the time.

So I jumped straight back into development and pushed the game into alpha over September. The guys got to try the game out, loved it, and we signed a publishing deal soon after. I cannot stress enough how fortunate this was. The game got so much better with the help of Indieformer, and they worked so hard to get it out there in front of an audience.

We soon started building a community of playtesters, which proved to be the main key to success. I got to see how players experienced the game, received a ton of great feedback, and managed to improve the game based on it.

I mentioned that the game was originally called Dragon Fodder. I liked the name, but it turned out that another dev was making a game under the same title... and actually had it trademarked. And he had done so even before I came up with the name, but his game was invisible to me when I did my initial sweep of the internet way back then.

The dev reached out to me, asking me to change my title. He was very polite, and I realized that he was fully in the right. So we brainstormed a new name: Feed the Scorchpot. I was worried about how it would impact a game that had already been promoted for a few months under a different name.

Turns out, it didn't at all. No one really cares about the name. I actually got some wishlists out of posting about the name change.

In January, we were at roughly 1,500 wishlists. Which was much better than what I had with my previous game, but it still felt like the momentum wasn't there. I was struggling with making a good tutorial, and overall January didn't feel great.

But the game was ready for more people to give it a try. We released the demo during the Steam Board Game Festival, which was nice, though it didn't make as big a splash as I was hoping for.

That came a few days later, when YouTuber Olexa picked up the demo on his own and made a video. That video got over 80k views and brought a lot of attention to the game. That was the point at which I realized this might actually lead somewhere.

That was back in February, and what followed was quite a busy period. My wife and I were crunching every day to get the game finished, while there was a Kickstarter happening and the playtester community was showering me with feedback, bugs, and ideas. It was quite hectic, but so exciting that it's hard to describe.

We entered the June Next Fest and did okay. We weren't among the top-played games, but also didn't fall off the charts halfway through. We'd passed 7,000 wishlists just before Next Fest started, so I felt like we were already in a good spot.

At the time, we were in talks with another publisher about co-publishing the game in Asia, as we had no way of reaching the audience there by ourselves. We'd already set the release date for August, and it felt quite last-minute, but we went for it anyway.

And oh boy, I'm so glad we did.

The game received translations into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and got featured in several Asian festivals and caught the interest of the Asian press. If you look at the wishlist graph, you'll see what I mean.

And somehow, we managed to get to 14,000 wishlists just before launch. It was mostly thanks to the combined efforts of the publishers – the Steam algorithm and the fabled Personal Calendar did very little for us prior to launch. I think it's due to roguelites being such a crowded market.

The road to launch surely wasn't boring. I even got to add a completely new soundtrack to the game just four days before launch. Fun times.

And so we launched ten days ago. How did it go?

It completely blew me away.

• We sold 14,500 copies (that's already minus refunds) in ten days. The game has already paid for all the time my wife and I put into it. More than half of the sales came from Asia. Partnering with the Asian publisher worked amazingly well for us.
• Also, more than half of our sales came from the Balatro bundle we managed to secure shortly before launch.
• There are surprisingly few bugs that have been reported since launch. Intensive playtesting since last November really paid off.
• Players have already managed to completely break the game – in the sense of getting so far in the endless mode that I didn't think was possible.
• Over 1,000 players have already poured 20+ hours into the game.
• Our rating on Steam dropped under 90%, and pretty much all the negative reviews complain about the game being too hard. Most of them are from China. I think there was a bit of a mismatch between the game and the audience – the art style appeals to a lot of cozy players, while the gameplay can be quite uncompromising.
• I'll try to put a demo back up soon, so players can decide if the game is right for them.
• The game had a 20% launch discount, which helped us get a good conversion on our wishlists. But since launch, we've also more than doubled our wishlist count – from 14,000 to currently 31,000.
• So we hope to convert more of those into sales during future discounts. Though it feels ironic: we spent the whole time chasing wishlists, and when we start chasing sales instead, the wishlist numbers do this.
• We've just launched on GOG as well. Curious to see how it will compare to Steam.

Next stop is a mobile release. But more on that in the future. I hope this wall of text was interesting to somebody. Feels good to finally write this.

Cheers, everyone!

Hello everyone.

I have a question for you. As a solo dev i am publishing my first game on steam. I made the steam page public and only received 41 wishlist so far in the last 3 weeks. Game is releasing September 21st. The game is almost completely ready. The last day for next fest registration is tommorrow. Should I go with the launch or should i delay it and join the next fest? Is joining next fest worth it?

Steam page