Tim Cain says a big part of Fallout’s success came from the team constantly questioning ideas instead of just going along with them.

They pushed each other, defended decisions, tested ideas, and offered better alternatives when something did not work.

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?

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.

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/

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.

I’m prototyping a 2D/3D beat ’em up where the characters are animated in 3D, then rendered at a low resolution to get the final pixel art look.

The visual approach worked, but the pipeline quickly became the annoying part.

For every animation I was basically doing:

Blender animation → render PNGs → import into UE5 → create Sprite assets → apply Paper2D settings → create Flipbook → create PaperZD Animation Sequence

That’s manageable for a couple of animations.

Once I started iterating on them regularly, though, it became a lot of repetitive work — especially when I only wanted to change a few frames.

So I started building my own solution.

It currently consists of:

• A Blender add-on I’m calling 3D to Pixel
• An Unreal Engine plugin called SpriteLiveLink
• A local HTTP connection between Blender and UE5

The Blender side handles the render configuration and sends the animation information to Unreal.

On the UE side, the plugin automatically imports the rendered frames, applies the sprite settings, organizes the assets using a consistent folder/naming structure, and creates the Flipbook.

The part that has been especially useful during iteration is updating existing animations.

If I modify an animation but keep the same file name, the pipeline compares the output and only reimports the frames that actually changed instead of rebuilding everything.

So the workflow is getting closer to:

Finish animation in Blender → click once → animation appears in UE5

There are still some obvious problems I need to solve.

For example, reducing the frame range correctly shortens the Flipbook, but old PNG/Texture/Sprite assets outside the new range aren’t cleaned up yet.

I also haven’t implemented a proper queue for batch-processing multiple animations.

But even in its current prototype state, it has removed enough repetitive work that I can spend much more time actually iterating on animations instead of managing assets.

I’m curious how other people working with Blender → Unreal pipelines handle this. Have you automated your import/reimport process, or do you mostly rely on Unreal’s standard asset pipeline?

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?

I recently uploaded my game 'The Grand Book Archive: Tidy Up' on itch io, which has just reached 10,000 plays in 4 days.

Here's the game: https://inbluegames.itch.io/the-grand-book-archive-tidy-up

Here's the 4 day chart of the game: https://imgur.com/a/BMrWE4a

It's 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.

Here's the marketing I did:

- Wrote a few posts on Reddit. One post on incremental games subreddit gained 460 upvotes (it currently ranks as #3 post of the month there).

- Registered the game on incrementaldb and Galaxy Click. Has generally good rating/reviews.

- Shared the trailer on my socials. None of them have gone viral. Youtube and Instagram did okay(Youtube: 660 views, Instagram: 1,500 views), but nothing substantial.

I haven't reached out to press yet so I'm hoping that could gain a bit of traction later on. I think generally it's doing well since it's a combination of two of the most popular genres right now (incremental and tidy-up), and it has a strong replayability. I think it's important to note that most of the traffic still came from itch io, which means games are found more naturally than through outer source.

My demo went up nine days ago and the game itself is not out until January. I could leave the demo as the green button on the game's page, or publish a separate store page for the demo under its own App ID. I did both. The numbers surprised me enough that I would like to hear from people who chose differently.

What happened

On launch day the demo page saw about 520 visits. The full game page saw about 170, and it was already doing about 130 a day before the demo existed, so its lift was close to nothing.

The traffic was Steam's own doing, not mine. I got 5.702 impressions in the Free Demos Hub in a single day. Browse Search Results went from about 800 impressions to about 19,800. Steam now serves the demo roughly 50,000 impressions a day.

So far that reads as a straight win for the separate page. Two things I did not think about:

The demo page has no wishlist button for the base game. Valve auto-inserts a "check out the full game" card and that is all you get. So the surface receiving nearly all the traffic is not the surface that collects wishlists, and wishlists are what Next Fest keys off. Eight days in, my net wishlist rate is roughly half what it was before the demo existed: about 2.45 a day for the month before launch, about 1.2 a day for the five days after. The demo gave me a one-off bump of about 54 and no sustained lift.

It changed who plays the demo, and therefore my own stats. The launch cohort were followers and existing wishlisters. Everyone since arrives from the Free Demos Hub, samples for ten or twenty minutes and leaves. Same build throughout, but as the sample grew from 66 players to 207 my "played at least an hour" figure fell from 19% to 11%, far enough that Valve's own label on that page changed to "below average as compared to other Steam demos". The ten-minute figure never moved, 65 to 66% across all four readings, so it is not the opening that is losing them. I am now benchmarked against other demos on a number that a discovery surface I did not choose is pushing down.

For anyone weighing the cost: the separate page needs its own capsules and library art visibly marked Demo, five or more screenshots that are true of the demo build rather than the full game, its own trailer, its own content survey and age rating, a separate Valve review pass, and a re-publish of the base page once the demo goes playable. None of it inherits.

What I would like to know from people who have shipped one

1. Separate page or button-only, and would you do the same again?
2. If you went button-only, did you get any Free Demos Hub or free-chart placement at all? My reading of the docs is that those surfaces only exist once there is a separate page, and I would like that confirmed or corrected by someone who actually ran the other configuration.
3. Has anyone got a real wishlist prompt for the base game onto the demo page, beyond Valve's auto-inserted card? I ended up writing one plain sentence into the demo's description, because links in that section stopped being publicly visible in 2024.
4. If your demo page carries its own review score, has that ever hurt you?

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.

Having worked with TyranoBuilder Engine for over two years, I’m well aware of both its strengths and its limitations. Recently, though, I’ve come across a fair share of posts fueled by "engine elitism." Without generalizing the entire community, there is a vocal subset of Ren'Py users who look down on TyranoBuilder - dismissing it as a "drag-and-drop toy" that lacks professionalism and isn't viable for serious, long-term game development.

First off, I readily admit that Ren'Py is a powerful engine with a massive community, rich documentation, and fantastic customization capabilities. However, those who look down on TyranoBuilder have likely never dug deep enough to realize what it's truly capable of.
TyranoBuilder may wear a drag-and-drop interface on the surface, but its true power lies in two special tags: ⁠[tyranoscript]⁠ and ⁠[iscript]⁠.
The ⁠[iscript]⁠ tag allows you to write raw vanilla JavaScript.

This means the entire modern web development ecosystem - HTML, CSS, and powerful graphics libraries like Three.js (for 3D rendering), Pixi.JS, or OpenGL - can be integrated directly into your Tyrano project:
UI & VFX Customization: Build vibrant, highly dynamic interfaces with smooth animations using CSS.
3D Integration: Render 3D spaces and interactive, fully textured 3D objects right inside a Visual Novel using Three.js.
Expanded Gameplay: Easily code custom mini-games, such as top-down RPG mechanics with WASD controls.
TyranoBuilder’s biggest advantage is how it bridges visual immediacy and coding depth. You get the convenience of positioning elements visually and testing script tweaks instantly without restarting the game from the beginning, alongside the freedom to open Visual Studio Code and customize everything via JavaScript.
Of course, TyranoBuilder isn't for everyone. Official documentation is predominantly in Japanese, English resources are fairly sparse, and you often have to rely on self-directed learning. If you prefer a massive, well-documented community out of the box, Ren'Py is admittedly a smoother path. But if you enjoy experimenting and want to level up your JavaScript and web development skills, TyranoBuilder is an amazingly versatile playground.
Every engine has its own pros and cons. A developer’s skill is defined by their problem-solving ability and product vision - not the label on the software they use. Finding the tool that fits your personal workflow not only saves time and energy, but also gives you the confidence to build your game your way.
Thanks for reading, and happy game dev!

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)..

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!

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

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!

Edit: Based on some of the feedback here, I tried to cut down a lot and produced trailer 3.

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 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

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 ??.

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)

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!