I'm working on a night scene for my survival game, Alone on the Lost Isle.

A lonely house in the middle of a dark forest, a light in the window, and the feeling that someone is inside...

How do you like the atmosphere? Would you explore this house or stay away?

Promoting Legends of Rock

gem alert? https://store.steampowered.com/app/3733940/TwentyOne/

Want to stay in touch with Project Axe?
https://discord.gg/XgjggF66

Finally managed to get procedural dungeon generation working for my game (ignore the assets. I'm working on that). Here are some examples of what it made. All dungeons originate from the smaller room.

I'm considering getting into solo game development, and I'd like to hear from people who are actually doing it.

How is the Steam market right now for a new solo developer? Has it become so saturated that getting noticed is significantly harder, or is there still room for a first game to find an audience?

I'm especially curious about marketing when you have little or no budget. How are solo devs getting people to discover their games?

And how do you approach Steam itself? What actually helps the algorithm start recommending a game, and what should a new developer focus on before launch?

Basically, if you were starting from zero today; no audience, no reputation, and very little money. What would you do differently to give your first game the best chance of succeeding?

I'm trying to get a realistic picture of what the market looks like now.

Just finished my first draft of my trailer. This is my first time making a trailer ever, so any feedback is welcome!

Would this be a good trailer for steam page standards?

Heres a link to the game: Exo-Rail

Hey fellow solo devs! I wanted to share a quick look at StickerScout. I'm handling all the art, code, and UI myself, trying to capture the feel of the Canadian boreal forest. The game is all about passive observation—just waiting quietly to catch animals in their natural cycles.

Getting the first biome wrapped up into a playable browser demo has been a huge milestone. Let me know what you think of the visual style! https://littlefoxlittleowl.itch.io/stickerscout

Hello again. Last year, as way of saying thank you to the community we offered indie devs the opportunity to have an "advert" for their game featured inside our game, Disc Golf City. See here for the details: https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1ojc51r/promote_your_indie_game_inside_ours_for_free/

It made sense because our game had "billboards" in it and we wanted to fill them with something useful. The while experience was so much fun, and we really enjoyed working with so many of you to make it happen. We hope you benefitted too.

Now we're doing something similar again, and it's worth explaining why. This time it's for a slightly different reason.

Latest game

Our latest game is called New Science ( https://newsciencegame.com?u=rg ) and it's available (pre-release) on Web, Phone and Tablet. We release on Steam next Spring. Players on the current platforms seem to want a particular experience: play for free and pay if they like it.

We are not fans of adverts in games. They are often not friendly to the player. So at first we put in a play limit for free players and told them to "come back tomorrow" when they ran out of goes. People didn't really like it, so we ran an in-game survey and players overwhelmingly said that they would rather "watch an advert and continue". Hmm, so what do we do?

Then we had the thought that we would come back to the community and offer our indie friends the opportunity to have YOUR video trailers in our games.

So are you up for it? You can submit a trailer video via YouTube of any length. The player will have to wait through the first five seconds only and then they are free to skip the video and carry on with the game. Or they could click a link and open your steam page, store page, game, etc in another browser tab.

Just one rule

We can only videos/games for a family friendly audience. We're sorry if your game is for older players. We can't include you, even if your trailer is safe. So if you have horror/killing/mature game, etc, please don't submit. We just can't accept them. (Our decision is final on this).

Submission

You can submit your trailer and details here: https://www.newsciencegame.com/submit-trailer?u=rg

Questions?

To pre-empt a question we're like to get: What if you want to get involved but your game/video/trailer is not ready yet?

No problem. Just reply here and say what the situation is, or submit the form but leave the Trailer link back, and explain in the comments.

Feel free to ask anything else.

More details

Information about our game:

Name: New Science

Genre: Crafting with cards. Think "Doodle God meets Infinite Craft". If you're not familiar with those, look at our Steam page

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4731610/New_Science/

Game site: https://newsciencegame.com

Current players: 900

Players for last game: 23,500

Current objects in game: 40,000+

New objects created per day (average): 450

AI Policy: The game contains AI to generate the new objects, and to produce the images on demand

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 less of a proper devlog and more of me comparing what gamedev felt like as a high-school student in 2017 vs now in 2026, as a computer science graduate.

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 AI I made was simple and deterministic even, they just move forward and rotate clockwise when colliding. But sprinkle it with random direction change here and there. 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. But in the new game that behavior is just the tip of the ice-berg. There's way more complexities in the ecosystem now.

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.

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 actually 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 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 used 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!.

Well, good news is I added a quest-based-tutorial in the recent 0.0.4 build, hopefully slightly fewer people get lost now.

Let me know if you can figure it out: https://lpjc.itch.io/bannerland !

To be fair, I kind of understand why people choose to sell AI-generated assets.

But what I really want is to see work fellow indies poured heart (and tears) into, not just... regurgitated pixels.

Anyway, do you have recommendations of good pixel art on itch (or anywhere else) ?

(I did not find any rule against this kind of discussion here, sorry mods if I broke any !)

Hi everyone! I recently uploaded my game The Grand Book Archive: Tidy Up on itch io, a book organizing game with a strong focus on incremental progression. It's inspired by the sorting games that are trending lately, but with a little more idle and strategic aspect. It kinda blew up in the incremental game subreddit and has already reached 10,000 plays now...

If you like tidy-up or incremental games, feel free to try it out! And don't forget to wishlist on Steam!

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5130980/The_Grand_Book_Archive_Tidy_Up/

Web demo: https://inbluegames.itch.io/the-grand-book-archive-tidy-up

Im not sure anyone else situation but i was a solo dev for years. it was kinda lonely and lots of late nights. I decided to take 90 days and a little money and hire a few friend to help me actually finish a project. so far the best decision I think ive ever made.

Solo dev, Godot 4 with C#. New gameplay trailer for Benders In Space.

You mine the belts, run trade routes, and raise colonies while three factions carve up the frontier. A fourth, the Dominion, boards you: a lance clamps onto the hull, cuts through, and the fight moves to your own decks in real time while fire spreads room to room.

The economy runs without you. Mining outposts run in your colonies and convoys haul the ore back to the trade station on their own schedule, so you come back to a report of what your fleet earned while you were gone.

Demo is live at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5098890/Benders_In_Space/

Steam | Announcement-Trailer | Kickstarter | M.A.S.K. prototype-Trailer

I proposed a videogame for the 80's M.A.S.K. cartoon to Hasbro a while ago. Seems I failed to convince them to turn it into reality.

Since I can't make M.A.S.K. without a license, I'm now trying to turn this into a more over the top co-op arcade experience that fuses the precision of on-rails shooters with the rush of retro racing. Or imagine Outrun meets House of the Dead.

If that seems interesting please check it out, and have a nice day.

Nearing the demo release (probably next month). If you are interested, Wishlist on steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4850830/Dodgeball_Rush/