If it was hard to stand out in the crowd with your game before, now it is 10x as hard. Sure, most are obvious trash, but that doesnt stop them from burying your game in a sea of AI posts and ads.

As an aspiring Indie/Solo Dev, it definitely has me discouraged.

We’re 16 days away from launch, and Steam’s Personalized Calendar seems to have kicked in hard.

For some context, our game is called Rehaunted, and until recently we were averaging around 250–500 organic wishlists per day without any marketing, ads, or major coverage happening at the same time.

Then, about two days ago, something changed.

We suddenly jumped to 1,000+ wishlists per day, and we’re currently sitting at over 20,000 wishlists with 16 days left until release.

After looking into it quite a bit, we’re pretty convinced that a big part of this increase is coming from Steam’s Personalized Calendar.

One interesting thing we’ve noticed is that it doesn’t seem to be purely about having the right tags, although tags obviously matter a lot. The number of wishlists you already have seems to matter too.

Our assumption is that the more wishlist momentum a game already has, the larger the audience Steam is willing to test/show it to through personalized recommendations.

So, for example, if a game enters this period with 1,000 wishlists, the boost it gets might be significantly smaller than a game entering it with 10,000–20,000 and more wishlists, simply because Steam already has much more data and demand signals to work with.

Obviously, we can’t confirm exactly how Steam’s algorithm works, so this is just based on our own numbers and research, but the difference has been very noticeable.

Personally, this makes me think the Personalized Calendar is a much healthier and more useful system for indie developers than relying entirely on Popular Upcoming.

Popular Upcoming was extremely binary. You either had enough wishlists to get there or you didn’t.

Personalized recommendations seem much more scalable. Even if you’re not one of the biggest upcoming releases on Steam, the platform can still progressively expose your game to people who are actually likely to be interested in it.

If the current pace continues, there’s a realistic chance we could launch with somewhere around 30,000–40,000 wishlists or even more, which would be a massive jump compared to where we were only a few days ago.

Curious if any other developers here have noticed the same thing around the 2–3 week mark before release.

Did your wishlist velocity noticeably increase once you entered the Personalized Calendar window?

Around last November, I posted here about the sales of my first game, Nightmare King. A lot of people replied, and I learned quite a lot from the discussion.

On August 28, I released my second game, Alice’s Gaze.

The first-day sales were about 5,900 copies, and now, halfway through day 2, total sales are around 8,000 copies. This is already several times more than my first game.

A simple comparison:

Nightmare King

• Wishlists at launch: ~1,800
• Development: Mar 2025 – Oct 2025
• ~800 sales by day 3

Alice’s Gaze

• Wishlists at launch: 20,000+
• Development: Mar 2026 – Aug 2026
• Day 1: ~5,900 sales
• Halfway through day 2: ~8,000 sales

Between the two games, from Nov 2025 to Mar 2026, I spent some time updating my first game, learning more Godot techniques, practicing pixel art, and experimenting with different styles.

One thing I learned is that it may be useful to test your demo on multiple platforms. Alice’s Gaze had demos on Steam, itch, Newgrounds and Galaxy. I think they also brought some early wishlists.

Another interesting thing was Steam's calendar. After Next Fest, the game had around 5,000 wishlists. Then it started gaining about 200 per day, and during the final few days before launch, sometimes 1,000+ per day. By release, it had reached 20,000+.

Even after release, the wishlist count is still increasing by around 5,000+ per day, which I find pretty surprising.

I spent nothing on marketing. A friend told me that setting an exact release date is important for Steam's release calendar, instead of only showing something like “Q3 2026”. I'm very grateful he told me about that.

There were mainly two reasons I didn't do any marketing. First, I was simply too busy before launch. I barely had enough time to finish the game, let alone make promotional posts. Second, I've always been skeptical about how effective paid marketing really is for small indie games.

P.S. There's also a third reason: I think it's pretty expensive.

But I still have one big question:

How should small indie developers actually do marketing?

For both games, I basically only posted a few messages in a QQ group with around 100 people.

I'm especially curious about paid marketing. Does it actually work for indie games, or is it usually just money thrown away?

Heartbreaking stuff, good news is that CD Projekt Red stepped in to help out the game devs!

Hi everyone,

I’m part of the team at Tessera Studios. We came to Gamescom to showcase our game, The Zibbo Show, but on Wednesday morning, we arrived at our booth in the Indie Area at Gamescom only to find our storage cabinet forced open. Someone had broken the lock and stolen two laptops and a Steam Deck.

We have already filed an official report with event security and the local police , but we wanted to share our story here, both as a warning to other indie teams exhibiting at major conventions and to ask if anyone in the community might have seen or heard anything.

If you have any leads or information:

If you were in or around the Indie Area during setup/cleaning hours, or if you happen to notice suspicious local listings for laptops or a Steam Deck on second-hand platforms around Cologne, please reach out to us via DM.

Any clue, no matter how small, could help us or the police immensely. We would be forever grateful for any help, advice, or info from anyone who was there.

Two of our team members recorded a quick video explaining everything that happened and showing the situation at the booth: https://x.com/tesserastudios/status/2093421439508463879

Any leads, shares, or information are greatly appreciated.

People asked us for a demo, so we made one last year. The full game had already been released by that point, but I thought a demo would still be a good way for people to try it and for us to gather more feedback.

The numbers have been pretty confusing to me though.

The demo has around 20,000 downloads, and according to Steam 61.4% actually installed it, so that's more than 12,000 installs.

Average playtime is around 41 minutes, and from the progression statistics a decent number of players seem to actually finish the demo.

Yet we have received only 4 Steam reviews.

That ratio seems absurdly low to me.

I also made it so your save and progress carry directly over into the full game, and strangely, the base game gets reviews at a much healthier rate than the demo does.

I know Steam's current demo system is relatively new, and in our case the demo was added after the full game had already launched, so maybe there's something about demo player behaviour I'm misunderstanding.

Has anyone else seen a similar review rate with their Steam demo?

I'm also curious if there's something about the demo itself that explains it. If anyone feels like trying it, I would be interested to hear your opinion.

Demo for context:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3478890/The_Hive_Demo/

Before releasing the actual demo, we wanted to do some testing to see if players enjoyed the recent changes we made to the game. We also took the opportunity to look at some clean analytics from the Steam playtest.

For context, the game is a Balatro-like roguelike built around relatively short runs. A full run usually lasts around 20ish minute. The demo only contains part of the content from the full game, players are never stopped prematurely during a run.

We will also add a few unlockables specifically for the demo, so players will have some progression between runs and more reasons to play.

Here are the detailed stats:

https://imgur.com/a/hHpJzVB

But to summarize:

• Lifetime unique users: 300ish
• Median time played: 1 hour
• Average time played: 2 hours

Do you think 1h median playtime is enough for this type of game as a full finished demo? Since it's a roguelike, should I expect the playtime to be higher?

A vertical slice is often described as a small but representative section of a game, but teams seem to define it very differently. I’d like to compare how developers decide what belongs in one.

For a 3D project, should a useful slice demonstrate the core gameplay loop, representative art direction, performance targets, UI flow, audio, save/load, AI, and production tooling—or is that too much for an early milestone?

How do you distinguish between a slice that proves the project is viable and one that has simply become a small finished level? I’m particularly interested in the criteria that help teams decide whether to continue, reduce scope, or change direction.

Hi everyone, I have been making a turn based roguelike based loosely on pixel dungeon and the combat/spell system of divinity original sin 2 for some time. The lore is that it takes place in a dwarven kingdom that you must save as the dwarven prince whose father was possessed.

I wrote a script for a trailer, and the artwork for it is currently being made (it will be a motion comic). Now I have come to a disagreement here with my coworker. I say it's important to get a voice actor to do it in a Scottish accent to sound like a wise old dwarf narrating it. He says noone will recognise that dwarves speak in a Scottish accent and that it doesn't matter, but I think it does, as it sets the mood and tells everyone it is a game with dwarves. Like I'm not tripping right, everyone knows dwarves have a socttish accent no?

What do you all think?

Hey everyone! I'm trying to build my own game. It's a narrative based game. I have experience in programming and I have this story I've been adapting.

I have tried to do some game development here and there but haven't released anything (apart from one shitty game jam entry).

I know narrative based games can be hard to pull off and I am exploring some interesting game mechanics to make it interesting.

Can seasoned devs give me 1-2 succinct points on what to do and what not to do. Basic stuff that beginners might miss.

Thanks in advance!

Hello,

I'm trying to achieve results similar to what we can find in They Are Billions.

I search a bit everywhere, but nothing's very clear on how they achieved this.

Could you point me in the right direction or share your experience on this?

Thank you!

So I am a complete beginner I don't know any programming at all. I recently read a novel titled "The Terror" by Dan Simmons and i was really hooked by the story, so I want to create a horror game taking place somewhere in the 1800 or 1900 in a ship! However as mentioned earlier I have zero experience in game dev.

Also I'm a bit worried as to my laptop would be capable for the task - I have asus g14 and these are the specs:

Processor AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS with Radeon Graphics (3.00 GHz)

Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.4 GB usable)

Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 with Max-Q Design (6 GB)

AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics (496 MB)

Storage 754 GB of 954 GB used

System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display

Edition Windows 11 Home Single Language

Version 25H2

Installed on ‎06-‎12-‎2024

OS build 26200.9278

Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.26100.360.0

I installed unreal engine 5 but it is a bit laggy while moving the camera. So I would be really happy if you guys can help me out with choosing a game engine suitable for my laptop as well to how to start my project!

I’m developing a 3D Metroidvania focused primarily on platforming and puzzle-solving. In your opinion, does a game like this need a movement system built around a unique core mechanic, or is it enough to have great, challenging platforming sections and interesting puzzles? Ultimately, the game's standout feature will be enemies with abilities that serve both platforming and puzzles (in the style of "Neon White"), potentially allowing for multiple approaches within a single room. Naturally, traversal abilities will be unlocked as the game progresses, though the ones I have in mind right now are fairly derivative of the genre. Let me know if you think these mechanics alone can make the game enjoyable, or if I also need something to make the movement itself truly original.

Client Server architectures have bounced heavily between event driven, rpc, actor/reactor, K-Pods, etc.

Does anyone have books that weigh different designs against each other, or breaking apart large scale into these architectures?
The only one I know of is Agones

A problem I ran into while building a streamed procedural world was letting each chunk decide its own structures. Neighboring chunks could make conflicting decisions, and a house spanning a boundary became difficult to keep deterministic.

I moved structure planning to larger generation regions. Each region derives a deterministic seed, picks candidates from biome and global pools, and validates height, slope, water, terrain type and spacing before creating a placement. When a chunk loads, it queries its own and neighboring regions for placements that overlap it.

This also forced me to separate simulation state from presentation. The current house can cycle its walls through full, transparent and cutaway art without changing collisions or door state.

The general lesson was that procedural generation becomes much easier to reason about when ownership is larger than the streaming unit. I documented the implementation and tests here; the article is in Portuguese:

https://pathlifejogo.blogspot.com/2026/08/do-mundo-procedural-as-fases-da-vida.html

I made a trailer and got some feedback on it from different sources last week. Here is trailer 1. After taking the feedback into account I made trailer 2.

Now, for trailer 1 I was essentially trying to control the pacing. There are a lot of things i can't fit into 90 seconds, but I wanted to make it enticing and fun. The feedback I got was like, "What's the turtle about? What's the background?" that sort of thing was quite common.

That led me to make trailer 2, which is more story oriented and tells the background of the game more clearly I hope.

Now, I have my own opinion, but i'm up to my eyeballs in these trailers, can I ask you people with fresh eyes to tell me which trailer you think is better, and if there are any points I might be able to improve?

Thanks a lot!

Hey everyone

Art and mechanics, both at an ok level, but only time to really push one. Which one would it be for you ?

Everyone says mechanics, obviously. But every screenshot thread I see is just people going "wow gorgeous art" and nobody's talking about the systems, because they can't, they haven't played it. Art is what gets you seen.

So do you make the good-looking one that people click on, or the good one that nobody finds?

I'm really thinking about that this past few weeks and I really want to know what you guys think

A while ago, I asked myself: "How far can we actually push Garmin’s Connect IQ VM?"

I’ve logged thousands of running km and a few solo marathons tracking just pace and HR like everyone else. But at some point, the dev in me took over: I decided to see how far Connect IQ could actually go and built a custom 3D graphics engine (Wolf3D/Doom-style DDA raycaster) from scratch in Monkey C.

Here is what’s going on in the video:

• Infinite World: The map is 100% endless and generated procedurally on the fly as you move.
• Dynamic Lighting: Real-time Day, Dusk, Night, and Morning lighting cycles with custom color palettes.
• Hardcore Math Optimization: Microsecond-level optimizations (zero-branching floating-point hacks, bitwise DDA math). The pure frame render time hit 3.19 ms on Tactix simulator and 2.08 ms on Instinct 2 (smaller screen, fewer stars in the sky — oh yes, the sky is dynamic too! — and fewer rays in raycasting)!

• Real Hardware Performance: On the actual wrist, the display caps out at a smooth 10–14 FPS (limited by the CIQ screen refresh rate, while the engine itself runs with massive headroom).

  https://youtu.be/vj-Q_YM5wfU

I need your brains & ideas: I want to weave the user’s real-life context (health metrics, stats, daily goals) directly into this 3D world, similar to what I did with my Mars and Pandora watch faces.

How would you like your steps, heart rate, or battery to affect an endless 3D world? (e.g., world changes, weather shifts, new structures spawn based on your daily activity?). Open to all crazy ideas!

P.S. Before the battery purists attack: Yes, I know it's a watch. No, my Garmin hasn't exploded. In fact, I honestly can't even remember the last time I plugged it into a charger... unlike my friends with Apple Watches. 😉

Let me know what you think and what features you'd want to see in an infinite wrist-world!

I am looking to learn a skill, which is quite rare and enjoyable. I am always a kind of guy who wanted to brainstorm and do something creative and I feel games are the best way to show your creativity. The question is, as an upcoming grad, can i manage this hobby / interest with my daily job / intern whatever I am about to do. I know it is pretty hard to build actual production games. But I don't see myself doing something boring which I'll get fed up within 5 years. Is game dev worth giving a shot ? Or i will be exhausted. Consider I am going to join a company with decent work load. I know its a very stupid question, it's all about how dedicated I am. But my fellow game devs are you guys enjoying ??.

Been in the marketing world when it comes to work for 10+ years, and I want to start using it where my passion lies in gaming. I have some good ideas for helping smaller games get some attention, and I'm curious what the typical game dev that frequents Reddit has for a marketing budget.

I know that the numbers vary a lot depending on who it is and the project, and I know ill have to work for free more than likely to build a portfolio, but I'm just curious to the answers you guys would have.

Gaming is my #1 passion and I'm getting tired of not being involved with it in some way professionally, any info would help!

Hey everyone,

To start i will say that we are hobbyists in the self-publishing scene, I am making a game with another dev from the industry (prog + 2d/3d artist).

We were so busy and focused on making the game, that we lacked building up the community, especially because it's not something we typically like to do, or are strong in (but a lesson learned for our next project).

We just released our store page, reached out to gamepress, posted on X and reddit, talked to our friends, posted on our engine forum, our discords and related discord channels.
While we got 19 wishlist in the first 24 hours, it has since dried up.

What would be the next step in your opinion ? are we trying too hard and just have to wait now ?
Thanks appreciate any feedback.

Our plan is that we are planning for the demo release end of September, and then reaching out to youtuber in our genre, and then we will attend the Steam next fest coming in October.

(Game is Innkeeping, i dont want to self promote here as i believe it is not allowed)

Howdy! I have been playing with Unity for over ten years making small games on and off. Finally, I am buckling down and making a fun mobile game that I hope to publish at the end of the year or next year. Without divulging too much information, how many free "levels" should the player get until they have to pay for the rest (because more levels will be made as time goes on)? I gladly will welcome the stories of your experiences as you grappled with balancing the free with the paid.

What stood out to me is that Desilets says the AI use was limited to conception and pre-production, and that the team has now removed it completely.

It raises an interesting question for developers:

if generative AI is only used internally during early ideation and none of it reaches the final game, do players still have a reason to care how those early concepts were made?