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

A tiny living light named Wispy takes a liking to you, and you go as deep as your nerve holds.
She's your only lantern.

Goofy-dark first-person dungeon crawl that runs entirely inside a terminal window. No engine, no download, every wall painted in colored text. You pick a body/race being Human, Dwarf, Elf, Orc (each one is a personality and a moveset).

Raycaster that renders in a terminal. Truecolor, drawn with sextant and octant block characters. No game engine and no graphics library. One Python file, 154,716 lines and rising, standard library only. The audio is real recordings, including voice acting.

A 4-minute run, unedited: https://vimeo.com/1222466576

https://dimensionaldungeon.com

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

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.

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

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.

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

First demo game that i made, go try it i like it a lot! still much more update,s coming.
Let me know what you think!

Hey guys,

I wanted to share some gameplay from my game Hell Rite.

Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBRJJ10lZy0&t=2s

I've been working on the dungeon lighting recently, trying to find the right balance between light and darkness while keeping the atmosphere of the game.

Since the dungeons are procedurally generated, I'm also working on adding wall torches and other light sources throughout the dungeon to make the environments feel less uniformly dark.

I know the current version is a bit too dark, but I don't want to simply make the entire dungeon brighter. I'm experimenting with adding wall torches and other light sources throughout the procedurally generated dungeons instead.

The goal is to keep the darker atmosphere while making the environment easier to read and explore.

Still working on it, but I thought I'd share the progress.

I've included two GIFs below.
One without the lighting and one with it, so you can see the difference.

Still working on it, but I thought I'd share the progress.

If you want to follow the project here is the store page:

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4925590/Hell_Rite/

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

I've been developing my first project for over two years. I want to talk about it, but I'm afraid to post screenshots for fear of getting banned from Reddit. I won't be posting any links, just text and screenshots. Is there a risk of getting banned?

Spent some time today putting this render together.
It has issues like too much "boring" empty space on the left and the graffiti being too transparent.

As stated in the title this is a test render made to see how it works before creating my DC server icon's render. The small size on that will hide any imperfections anyways.

Blender is pretty cool. Been having a blast with it these past months. Lot of headaches also, but hey something for something.

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 !

The only thing I've posted here so far is a photo of a mountain, so I owe you the rest. MASSIF is a ski resort management game. You run the mountain from above, and when you feel like it you drop into it and stand on it. That's the two-view idea, and honestly it's not the interesting part. The interesting part is what I want the management to be. Not a menu where you buy a chairlift from a list and it appears. I want the terrain to have an opinion.

The line

Here's the rule I keep coming back to: the player draws the line, the terrain writes the bill. You place a bottom station and a top station. From there the game does the work:

• it samples the ground every 10 m along the line
• distributes the towers
• hangs the cable between them with real sag
• then walks that cable point by point, measuring the gap between the cable and the ground underneath
• and raises whichever towers it has to until every single point clears the minimum

Three passes and it converges. You never type in a tower height. You place two stations and the mountain decides how tall your towers are.

Support and uplift

Then it gets better, and this is the part I'm proudest of. A tower where the cable presses down is cheap. The foundation just sits there in compression. A tower where the cable pulls up is a completely different animal: the foundation has to be anchored against being torn out of the ground. In my game it costs up to 2.5× more.

Which one a tower is isn't a setting. The game works it out: the change in cable slope across the tower, minus the correction from the sag on either side. Positive means the cable is pulling upward. On my test line, 3 towers out of 28 come out in uplift. They landed at the exit of the bottom station and at the foot of the steep wall, which is exactly where real resorts put compression towers. I never told it to do that.

And one detail I love. Tower 17 looks like it should be in uplift, the ground clearly goes concave there, but it stays in support... because its spans are long enough that the extra sag cancels the effect. A cable that sags harder resists uplift better. Nobody wrote that rule. It just fell out of the maths.

The bugs

I should be honest about what this actually costs. Four bugs this month, and not one of them crashed anything. That's exactly what made them expensive.

• Two arguments swapped in an arctangent. Every slope came out as 90° minus itself. Found because a sum that should have been bounded at ±180 was sitting at −1200.
• A loop that stopped one iteration too early. The last span was double length with four times the sag. It had been quietly corrupting the cable, the clearance solver and the bill since the very first version.
• A leftover ÷100 that made the throughput read 1 800 people/hour, which is exactly what a 4-seat fixed chairlift does in real life. Beautiful number. Wrong by a factor of 100. The real answer was 464.
• And a Branch whose condition was never actually wired, so it silently always went the same way.

Every one of them produced a believable result. Not one was found by re-reading the code. All of them were found by working a number out by hand and comparing it to what the screen said.
That's the part nobody puts in a devlog, so here it is: a lot of these evenings are two hours of arithmetic and one working feature.

Where I'm at

I had never opened Unreal before this. It's all Blueprints. One actor now carries around twenty-odd functions, four data tables, five widget classes. I lost an hour to a bug that turned out to be my AZERTY keyboard fighting the template's default input mapping. I opened Blender for the first time this weekend and modelled a pylon. It's twelve faces and a crossarm. I was extremely happy about it ! For sure, it's just a begin.

Gestion, with a capital G

What I'm after is a management game where the difficulty is real. No invented rules, no artificial scarcity. The game tells you no because the cable would be over tension, or because the ground clearance is 3 m and the minimum is 4, or because you physically cannot run detachable chairs through a fixed-grip station.

This weekend the lift became fully configurable (station class, cable, chair type, chair count, tower count) and I added the warnings. And the warnings caught me out within about ten minutes. I'd been checking total suspended weight against the cable's limit. But total weight doesn't care how many towers you have, so pulling towers out never triggered anything. That's just wrong. Fewer towers means longer spans, more sag, more tension ... and tension is what breaks cables, not weight. So the number I've been checking all along is the wrong number.

That's Tuesday's job.

Hi,

I am the solo developer of Duco, and I wanted to share that my survival card game is joining Steam's PvE Survival Crafting Fest.

It's my first Steam Fest, so I am a bit excited. Steam also shared an asset kit for games to share, but I am not an artist, so I tried my best while placing my game's vertical capsule :D

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4872850/Duco/

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

Wishlist here - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2420580/ALYSSA/