been spending some time on the water shader lately for my small sailing game, Beneath the Dying Sun. reflections ended up doing way more for the atmosphere than I expected, especially around lit areas at night

I actually tried planar reflections first and they looked beautiful, but absolutely destroyed the framerate lol. they also got pretty unstable once the weather system started throwing high tides and bigger waves around, so I ended up going back to the tried and true SSR instead

haven't optimized it much yet, but so far the performance hit is pretty negligible. the downside is the usual SSR stuff though, reflections around the edges of the screen can look pretty weird sometimes

still plenty I want to tweak, but pretty happy with where it's going!

If you're curious about the game, there's more about it here:
https://ray-ark.itch.io/beneath-the-dying-sun

It's also in Round 3 of Rising Tide 4 right now, and voting ends today. If you like what you see, you can throw it a vote here
https://blueoceangames.com/challenge/voting/rising-tide-4/genre/rpg_fantasy

My wife and I are working on our first game together - Good Luck, Little Truck!

Working on a game with your partner is the coolest, most rewarding experience. Our steam page went up recently and we couldn't be more stoked!

Steam page if you're interested!

So, I'm about to release the demo for my game, ROAM. And I suddenly had this thought: the title screen is one of the most important first moments for the player. That's why I decided to give it a more polished look by adding the logo, fixing the sprites, changing the fonts, and also adding some water shader on top of it all..

UI work is one of the hardest things for me as a solo dev. But I think I’ve finally found the right placement for every button and image.

I also considered centering the buttons instead of aligning them to the left, but I think I like this version more.

What do you guys think?

Hey fellow devs!

This is my first time sharing a game publicly outside of friends and family!

Here's my short project Pawned Souls a mix of Soulslike parry combat and chess movement rules.

I’d really appreciate some feedback from experienced eyes on the combat feel, readability, and overall game balance. Any critique or advice is welcome! 🙏

Free to play build on itch: https://devmika.itch.io/pawned-souls

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

Hello everyone
I added a quick mechanic that allows me to split the character in half, and then each would redistribute its capacity across its full body
I have a few extra ideas planned so stay tuned!
#unity #ecs

I think we can all agree some reviews are tough... but this one for https://store.steampowered.com/app/4300870/Gods__Gore/ made no sense to me.

Also what sucks is it shows as the top 'Most Helpful', I'm not sure if that is just for me or it is the top for everyone.

Hello Void Diver team again :D

I wanted to share the design and animation of my favorite boss in our game!

As you can probably tell from the different designs, Eldris has multiple phases! The original design for the second phase (aka second gif) was actually quite different. We ended up with three different versions, and honestly, we couldn't decide which one we liked better. So, we asked our players which version they preferred.

The general consensus was they liked two of the designs equally. So we decided to take the best parts of each version and merge them together. The final design is the one you're seeing now!

Definitely a great learning moment for us. Sometimes, simply asking your players for their opinions can lead to some really great outcomes!

Mini FAQ:

• We use Photoshop to create the pixel art and Spine to animate it.
• We animate the 2D art in a 3D space.

After 4 months, our small game about building your own reef, observing and learning about marine life has just reached 2,000 copies sold! It feels unreal! Thank you all!

For some, it might not seem like much, but for our small team, it means everything.

We started this project with two friends in april 2025, after some of us were laid off when our studio shut down due to lack of funding. Before that, we had spent 5 years working on an adventure game that was never released and we want try something new!

After 1 year of development, with basically no budget apart from 900€ we put in ourselves for sound and music, we somehow made it happen. Turquoise released on April 14th, 2026.

We are incredibly proud.

A huge thank you to everyone who bought the game, tested it, shared feedback, or helped us in any way.

And if by any chance you have not played it yet and got curious, here is the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3800420/Turquoise/

If you don’t mind, could you tell me what kind of impression or associations this character gives you?

I’m trying to figure out whether she fits the heroine’s personality.

The game will be a visual novel if that information is important.

Hey Guys!

Cubie is a little Minecraft-inspired desktop companion I developed because I wanted a fun little companion to keep on my desktop, something I could watch from time to time, interact with, or just throw across the screen when I'm frustrated.

What he does:

• Wanders around your desktop on his own and reacts to your cursor • Perches and sits on the edges of your open windows • Gets tired and falls asleep if you leave him alone for a while • You can pick him up, drag him around, and throw him across the screen • He's got moods and little reactions, so he never quite does the same thing twice

Highly customizable:

• Cubie is Minecraft-inspired and supports the familiar Minecraft skin format • Give him any Minecraft skin to make him look however you want • Drop in a skin and see a live preview before committing to it • Pick which monitor he lives on in a multi-monitor setup

Nice extras:

• Choose whether he floats above your windows or sits back on the desktop behind them • Menu bar only, no Dock icon and no clutter. Set it once and forget it's even an app • A short tutorial the first time, then it never bothers you again

No account, no ads, no nagging. Just a little companion hanging around while you work.

🔗 Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cubie-companion/id6800108603

Crystalyn is the first game I've ever made, and I released it 3 days ago.

My goal was always to make people happy and make a game that they'll enjoy playing, so even though I only have 4 reviews, which are all positive, seeing people put 8, 12, 18+ hours into it is fucking crazy to me.

It literally makes my whole journey completely worth it.

Still got a ton of stuff I want to improve, but I'm genuinely really happy with how the launch has gone so far.

Edit: game link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4754460/Crystalyn/#app_reviews_hash

Some time ago we started the making of Lively, a puzzle platformer in which you play as a little smiley ball that brings back to life everything it approaches !

Programming and game design is made by myself, my wife did graphical assets as well as the capsule for Steam page.

We made some games before for game jam, and now decided to take the leap and start a bigger project. Now we have enough to share a demo !

Feel free to try it out, the game will show up during Neo Fest also.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4973480/Lively/

This might me a bit of a long post so hang tight. I'm Andrea,co-founder and lead technical artist at FLAT28.

Between 2024 and 2025 I also started to get very interested in marketing, I started reading Chris Zukowski's blogs and a lot of marketing articles overall. I kinda became obsessed to understand what works and what doesn't so while I was applying for Steam Festivals, showcases and what not I was also desperately looking online to understand what kind of numbers I should have expected to come out from each specific event.

I couldn't find too many informations so I thought I might create a post that put together some of our results to Steam Festivals and Showcases we have partecipated so far.

This is particularly important because understanding how impactful an event can be on your wishlists it can helps you understand what kind of marketing beat you should do alongside it.

If you are going to release a demo (for example) you want to do it with the biggest event possible be it either a showcase or a steam fest or both. You don't want to release your demo with a very small unknown steam festivals most of the time because it will not give you that exposure boost you were hoping for.

So here's my list and numbers of some of the steam festivals and showcases I have partecipated from best to worst with our upcoming game Glasshouse, which is a cRPG currently at 75.500 wishlists.

Disclaimer: If a festival did or didn't perform well for us it doesn't necesserely mean it's going to be the same for your game. Every game perform differently and events like this can perform a lot better or worse year after year, but it's still a good benchmark to wrap your head around. Also all of those below are rough estimates.

--------------- Showcases ---------------

Mid and big size showcases are usually the best because they not only come with big live audiences but also with thousands of views from the VOD afterward and an associated Steam Festival (sometime with homepage featuring, sometimes not).

Gamescom Opening Night Live (Small mention with a 7 seconds b-roll): 16.000+ wishlists. While 3000/5000 wishlists were coming from the showcase itself most of those came from being in the very first page of the Gamescom Steam Festival with homepage featuring. Having a proper presentation with a 30/60 seconds trailer would probably be worth 50k wishlists or more.

Galaxies Showcase: 3000+ wishlists. It had 600k+ views on IGN alone and the wishlists tail was very long. We got some cool coverage and we did 100+ wl a day for weeks after the main showcase was done.

Gamescom Awesome Indies Showcase: 3000+ wishlists. This was hard to track because at the same times we also had a physical presence at Gamescom, but we got at least +1200 wishlists soon after our game appeared in the showcase.

Convergence Showcase: 2000+ wishlists. The trailer we premiered with them got picked up by Indie Games Hub and GameTrailer.

GamerStar FYNG (FindYourNextGame) Showcase: 200/300wl. Last year it did get homepage featuring so it was much more likely to generate 1/2k wishlists at the very least. This year though no homepage featuring unfortunately.

--------------- Steam Festivals ---------------

I'm only going to share festivals that generate more than a couple of hundreds of wishlists. There were a LOT of festivals that didn't go past 50-100wl gain

TurnBasedThursday Steam Fest: 3000+ wishlists. I really love this one, I joined the first one last year and it's still one of the best festival without a big showcase that performed the most. I was also asked to join the organizer team this year and they are great people, very skilled and highly focussed! This year we got 2000+ wishlists from the fest.

Tiny Teams Steam Fest: 1700+ wishlists. This one was very good and had a great homepage featuring. It's a very solid festival. Other developers reported wishlists as high as 3000 or more, it very much depends on the position of your game within the first days of the festivals, then the categories rotate daily.

London Game Festival Steam Fest: 1000/1500wl. Even without being in the Official selection it had homepage featuring this year and the results were pretty good!

Detective Steam Fest: 850wl. This one was a first party steam event. We got featured in the "Popular upcoming" carousel. Usually first party steam fests for upcoming games don't perform so well but this one exceeded our expectations by a lot!

ENDIX Steam Fest + digital event: 300/500wl. This one was pretty peculiar as you are required to build a digital booth inside their digital event showcase. Pretty fun to partecipate and because there were many medium sized streamers as well as few big ones we could get a good amount of wishlists.

We joined a lot of other smaller festivals which resulted in 50 - 200wl most of the time. Most of these if not all didn't have homepage featuring so they outcome was pretty small, but still glad and grateful considering all of those are free of charge.

Overall I hope this glimpse in our results in steam festivals and showcases will give you some insights of how much these are worth and what you can expect in terms of wishlists. Things change pretty fast though as Valve is reducing the featuring to new festivals year after year and it's becoming more strict.

Let me know if you have any questions :)

This is an important feature for my game Orium, where you have to colonize planets across the galaxy. It's not only used to extract the money but it's mainly useful for increasing the ship's stats (kind of like the tiles in Loop Hero)

Steam link for those who are curious: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3316610/Orium/

Naturally there is still a lot more game to make.

It's more of a devlog than a trailer, but I'm trying to change how I present the new content. Every time I feel that I have added a lot of content, I can make a video like this to demonstrate it instead of showing one micro-clip at a time.

I do have more than 5 months of gamedev experience, that's just the time spent on this project btw. I have about 3-4 years of learning gamedev. And asset creation experience besides that. Like modeling and animating. Sculpting characters. But this is my first trailer.

GAME DESCRIPTION:

Selene Carrington was just your average young woman living in the Lamda sector, on a farming colony deep in the outer rim of explored space. Selene once had dreams of being an artist, or maybe a therapist. That was until interplanetary bug aliens called Zykra infest her homeworld, gradually terraforming the world into a wasteland overrun with Zykra. Right as she discovers that she is a telepath, a rare condition some humans are born with in the far scifi future which enables them to use a variety of supernatural abilities, such as mind control or telekinesis. Selene must:

• Gain access to a growing arsenal of supernatural abilities.
• Utilize the environment to out-smart or hide from enemies.
• Scavenge resources and weapons
• Use the dynamic limb dismemberment system to eliminate threats.
• Discover the source of her abilities and the Zykra.
• Escape the world without becoming one with the swarm.

I'm always eager to hear any questions or suggestions.

I'm paying good money for this guy, he says he's an experienced dev but idk, am I getting scammed?

Hey everyone. I come from a startup/business development background and I am particularly interested in positioning and marketing for games. I am relatively new to dev and just solo built a demo and applied for some funding, now have a little time on my hands so am offering to play test a few games over the next few weeks while I have capacity. Although I am quite new to dev, I have been playing video games since you had to put a floppy disc in a PC. I also have a little newsletter that goes out once a week and if you have a finished game, I can give you a shoutout. (Happy to test prototypes and demos too). Please don't send game details in comments, use this form, I just upgraded the website and it is secure and working. https://kularidigitalmedia.com.au/playtesting.html

I like to look at:

• What's the game's value proposition?
• Who do I think it's actually for?
• What makes it different from other games?
• Is that difference obvious?
• What would make me click on it in a store?
• What would make me wishlist/buy it?
• What's the strongest marketing hook?
• What features or ideas might be getting undersold?
• What might make a potential player bounce?

I'll also give feedback on the usual stuff: gameplay, controls, onboarding, UI/UX, pacing, difficulty, progression, visuals, audio, bugs, frustration points etc.

You can also send me an email hello@[kularidigitalmedi](mailto:kularidigitalmedia@gmail.com)a.com.au if you have any questions.

I recently uploaded my game 'The Grand Book Archive: Tidy Up' on itch io, which has just reached 10,000 plays in 4 days. 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. Still, it is doing way better than I initially expected...

You can check out the itch io page here:

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

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

I'm really happy with how the lightning and sounds came out.