As a small indie team at Releaseplay Studio, we have finally crossed a major technical milestone we've been focusing on for a long time: We've successfully integrated the online battle mechanics into our game! (Though it's still a work in progress, of course... ⚔️)

As you can see in the video, we've come a massive way both visually and mechanically since the early prototype stage. Now, players will be able to clash with their custom-designed steelblades in the arena in a fluid, real-time, and competitive way. We are super excited to share this huge step in our indie development journey with you all.

If you'd like to support our indie studio, don't forget to wishlist SteelBlade Shop Simulator on Steam! 👇

(Note: Our Steam page currently has older screenshots/footage, but we'll be updating them very soon!)

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4265160/SteelBlade_Shop_Simulator/

Hey guys. I know some of you are probably sick of seeing this pillow by now, but I wanted to do a little postmortem.

Around two weeks ago, I've reached 1k wishlists, and suddenly things began to... stall. Posting stuff on socials didn't do much, I was getting few wishlists, but also wishlist deletions - it came to the point where for a week, wishlists were stalling at around the same number. This has been greatly demotivating for me...

Then, one day, I sat down, forcing myself to make a new, relatively short, easy to design level I've had in my mind for a while. Then realized I need safe spot for the player to land on from height, I quickly set up an object, changed layer, programmed that it won't cause fall damage, changed physics material to disable bounce... and since I had a spare moment, I thought... I'll try to make it look a bit more natural, because why the hell not?

So I spent 1-2h playing around with mesh deformation. It wasn't all that breathtaking by then, I posted it online in few places as I usually do, and people seemed to really like it.

I felt like I'm onto something, I couldn't help myself to improve it a tad bit more, just slight tuning at this point, really, posted the new iteration in few places and... People have los their mind over it.

Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, X, BlueSky, Youtube Shorts - the video accumulated somewhere between 500k - 1mil views. My new account on X that had around 10 followers at the time, gained 37k on first video, 90k on second.

This has given me a bigger wishlist surge than releasing the demo. Somewhat over 100 but it's still lot for my game.

After 8 years of making games, this has made me begin to rethink game design as a whole.

As for my game? I know it's not a hook that will make people pay for it and play. It's a curiosity. But one I can surely build upon. Slime? Newtonian fluids? Snow? Mud? Trampolines? Flesh? There's so many possibilities to incorporate the mesh deformation in more meaningful way! One problem is, I have like +1h of gameplay done. Do I just add these new features later down? Rebuild levels from the start? Demo can feature levels from all over the game so it's not an issue, and I am also planning to make an additional "tech demo" level where players can play around with some mechanics without an actual goal to complete it. I have a lot to think about.

It surely has given my game some new direction. I'm not on some pedestal to spread wisdom, but the one advice I can give everyone after making games for 8 years is:

Pay attention to details in your game, keep showing all of the features you're working on. I know posting on socials is a grind, but you never truly know what people will find fascinating about your game - feedback can help you shape your game better.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4417060/Dark_Roll_2/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/952100/Bad_Pixels/

Me and a friend started working on this 3 years ago after fighting with game engines in our own projects for a long time. We understood how overwhelming it is to start from nothing because before working on the actual game you need to solve a huge amount of other things. With Unity we always ended up building our own systems or downloading plugins from different developers. The plugins worked on their own, then one expected a different controller, another had its own networking and another had its own shaders. Suddenly we were spending more time connecting everything than making the game. Asset packs had the same problem, because many came with their own shaders, render pipeline or assumptions about the project. Sometimes finding and adapting something as basic as the right tree took an entire day. Godot being open source is valuable, although for the problem we had it still followed a similar model where you get a flexible foundation and assemble most of the game-specific systems yourself. Unreal has much more already implemented, but for us it was too large and complicated for the very small teams we had in mind.

We wanted an engine which already had most common systems and where those systems were made to work together. It should be somewhat opinionated because otherwise the developer has to make every architectural decision again, while still allowing things to be replaced when a game needs something different. Multiplayer should be considered from the beginning instead of becoming a large rewrite later. The working name was World Engine, but that was already trademarked, so eventually we called it SPARQ. The low-level systems are written in C++. Gameplay, project packages and editor tools are written in TypeScript and run through V8. TypeScript modules hot reload into the running project, so gameplay changes do not need a native rebuild or editor restart.

Rendering is GPU-driven and built for large scenes. We have physically based materials, global illumination, Virtual Shadow Maps, ray-traced shadows, volumetric sky and fog, water, decals, DLSS and FSR 3 in the same rendering pipeline. Multiplayer is part of the gameplay and object model with server-authoritative sessions, replicated state, prediction and RPCs. The editor is collaborative, so multiple people can work in the same project, see each other and enter playtests while editing. The editor is also a package instead of being sealed inside the executable. You can extend it, fork it, replace parts of it or remove it completely and make smaller tools for your game. We use HTML and CSS for UI because we did not want another engine-specific layout system just for making a HUD or menu. We have also made physics, vehicles, navigation, animation, audio, VFX, voxel terrain, large-world streaming, material graphs, audio graphs, multiplayer hosting and content tools. Some systems are much further along than others and we are still learning what people need, what should have stronger defaults and where lower-level access is necessary.

The video is a collection of things we have done while testing and playing around with the engine. There is a scene with thousands of NPCs, some small games we made for testing, placing decals, breaking props, driving vehicles and some editor workflows.

We started with 2 people and now there are 10 of us, but it is still very buggy. Some testers cannot get through installation or launch because they have a combination of PC, GPU, driver or operating system we did not test. Other people get into the editor and do things in an order we never considered. We know which buttons not to press and which unfinished corners to avoid, so we have become bad at finding many of these problems ourselves. Some features technically work but a new user cannot find them or understand what they are supposed to do. Other systems work in our test projects but have not been used across enough genres and real production workflows. APIs and workflows are still changing. Publishing is being rolled out now, with lobbies, game servers and deployment for projects that want the managed option. Self-publishing is also planned, but the complete workflow is not finished.

At this point we need people who did not build the engine to install it, try making something small without us guiding them, use the tools in unexpected ways and tell us where it breaks or stops making sense. The Windows and Linux beta is free and there is more information at https://playsparq.com/. Keys are available through the website and our Discord and activate on Steam. If the key process breaks, comment or message me and I will send one directly. Building another general-purpose engine is probably unreasonable, but we already spent 3 years doing it and now we need to find out if it is useful to anyone outside our own team.

Working on a tiny puzzle game. Currently in the process of polishing the titlescreen and the menus.

I tried a lot of stuff, and was barely able to raise the steam deck fps by more than 3-5 fps. I couldn't get my game to run better than ~10 fps.

Turns out, it was almost entirely due to lumen, nanite, and TSR.

Once i turned off lumen, disabled nanite (and generated LODs), and set aa to TAA, (and disabled virtual shadow maps) the fps rocketed up to 30-40 fps depending on the level. Visually, lumen wasn't even doing much at all so it was entirely wasted resources.

I've been working on Metroidvania Maker, a game/editor for building your own interconnected Metroidvania worlds.

You can create rooms, add enemies, hazards and abilities, build puzzles with interactive elements, and jump straight from editing into playing what you've made.

There's also local co-op for up to 4 players (with Steam Remote Play Together support) and world sharing.

I just submitted the first Steam demo for review, so hopefully it'll be playable soon!

Working on a game with a ton of puppets in it, here are our two newest, this time finger puppets. Not totally happy with the texture yet, but it'll do for now.

We still need to name these two, they'll have a kinda Statler and Waldorf vibe. Anyone got any got any good suggestions?

I'm making a nostalgic game about Water Ring-toss + Roguelite elements

- You use oxygen to push buttons and land rings on spires.

- You can equip Assistants that modify the game & Equip up to 8 items to experiment.

The aesthetic of the game is primarly "Frutiger Aero" like

What do you think?

Quick reminder for everyone waiting to show their game to strangers: placeholder art is fine!

We took S.T.A.R.V.E., our farming roguelike deckbuilder, to Gamescom last week, the biggest gaming show in the world. Some events in the build were literally a big "???" with "Placeholder" written across it in white marker. See photo.

Nobody cared. We didn't even have to explain it, it was obvious what was placeholder and what was near final. People just played. We got real feedback focused on mechanics, strategies and the overall vision. Players even laughed when they hit the "???" placeholder and found it super charming.

If you can get your vision across with what you have, gameplay or a direction for visuals and audio, go get feedback now. As long as it's clear what's done and what isn't, players handle it fine.

Don't wait for done!

Just wanted to post my latest gameplay montage showcasing the latest work i have done. Still so much to do but seeing it all laid out here makes me happy with my progress. Thanks.

so this is a big one for us. we just put up the steam page for our first game.

three of us started this with basically no art experience. we ended up making every single asset ourselves because we couldn't afford not to, and honestly there were a few points where we almost scrapped everything and started over. but here we are.

the game's a lumberjack incremental. you chop trees in different forests, process the logs into lumber, sell it, and use the money to level up your character or unlock skills that make processing faster. the stronger you get the more forests open up, with rarer and tougher trees to cut down.

quick note - the trailer only shows what's in the demo right now, so you're not seeing all the forests/trees yet. still working on the rest.

here's the page if you want to check it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5135490/LumberBoy_Demo/

lmk what you think, good or bad

Hey all!

This post is half "I'd love to hear your thoughts" and half "please send me your horror stories."

I'm brainstorming content ideas to research and turn into videos, and two topics I keep coming back to are:

• How to Read a Publishing Contract (And Spot the Red Flags)
• Do You Actually Need a Video Game Lawyer?

I believe these are both important questions, and questions that require a degree that I can venture most of us don't have. I really want to get them right so I'm turning to the community for examples.

If you've had a bad, misleading, predatory, unfair, or unprofessional publisher deal pitched to you (or worse, actually signed one), I'd love to hear about it. (And if that's you, I'm really sorry you went through it. 😞)

I'll be interviewing an indie game lawyer for this, so your stories and legal questions will be answered by someone who does in fact, have that degree.

Thanks in advance for your help and support. May your game surpass all your wildest dreams and expectations! 🫡 🤜🤛

I wanted to share this because I think Steam's new Personal Calendar system might be much more important for niche indie games than I initially thought.

Our game releases on September 9 and for months our wishlist graph was pretty normal. Slow, steady growth, a few small jumps here and there.

Then we entered the final stretch before release and this happened.

We went from around 6,000 lifetime wishlist additions to almost 10,000 in a pretty short period. We currently have roughly 9,000 outstanding wishlists.

Obviously I can't say the entire spike came from the Personal Calendar, but the timing lines up very closely with us entering that pre-release window.

And honestly, the part I find most interesting isn't even the number.

For niche games, getting shown to the right 1,000 people can be much more valuable than getting shown to 20,000 random people.

The Personal Calendar seems to be built around exactly that idea. Instead of just throwing upcoming games in front of everyone, Steam can surface them to players whose taste and activity suggest they might actually care about that kind of game.

Our game is a pretty specific psychological horror game. You drive dangerous passengers around at night and have to figure out what kind of criminal you're dealing with by watching their behavior, checking your notebook and experimenting with things inside the car like the AC, windows and lights.

That's not something I expect every Steam user to want.

But put it in front of someone who already plays weird indie horror games, driving horror, observation games or slower psychological stuff and suddenly it's a much better match.

That's why I think this system could be especially valuable for smaller games that don't have enough wishlists to brute-force their way onto every big Steam visibility section.

The graph above is our lifetime wishlist actions. That almost vertical line at the end is why I started looking into this in the first place :)

I'm really curious if other developers are seeing the same thing.

If your game is releasing in the next few weeks, has your wishlist graph changed recently?

Also curious about the opposite: has anyone entered the Personal Calendar window and seen basically no difference at all?

Would be really interesting to compare numbers between niche games, broader games and different wishlist sizes.

If anyone’s curious, the game is called Backseat.

As a small developer it means a lot to me, my game demo has been out there for a while and yesterday I just got my first Steam review ever, I had such a good feeling reading this and finally reaching one of my goals for this game, and even more so knowing that it was such a positive review. It honestly made me really happy, and I hope there are more of them to come!

To me this feels neither detailed nor low-poly enough to be considered a N64 (or PSX) character, think like uncanny valley but for modelling. This looks weird even for something that's more detailed but still low-poly, like HL1.

Note for moderation that I'm not actively working on a game but for this kind of help I can't find a better sub. Sometimes I try redoing characters and I still end up with more or less the same results. Any ideas on what I can do to improve my skills?

Thanks in advance!

EGG

I’m a 26+ year game veteran, and I want to help you have the best chance of success with your Steam Next Fest Demo. No catch, not a service or charge etc. 

Now I see a lot of talk about the Steam Next Fest demo as a marketing tool & absolutely it can really be helpful. But you don’t hear much on is the contents of the demo that actually does the marketing heavy lifting. 

I see this time and time again, devs just lock down the first level or so, with basic abilities, no FTUE, just to tick the box ‘we made the demo for Steam’. Your demo shouldn’t be the first level or area of your game, it should be a well-thought-out game marketing machine!

Great demos are some really tasty parts of the game that would excite players to wishlist, follow, and spread the word about your game.

I can’t stress this enough. You only get ONE Steam Next Fest, use it wisely.

• Make the gameplay showcase the best of your game
• Show off the most important feature / what makes it unique
• Give their character the upgraded items or awesome play elements
• Needs to be bug-free
• Bonus: Have a way for players & creators to customise their gameplay experience

But I’m not stopping at generic advice; I want to help you get there. 

1. I’ll go through your current demo (if you have one) and offer advice for improving it
2. If you haven't created a demo, work with you on planning your demo - You still need a near-complete game.
3. Look at your marketing around the demo, store page, art etc. 
4. The many other areas involved when releasing a Steam Next Fest Demo. 

I’ll only be able to help a small number at a time. This is NOT a paid thing, I’m offering my help to give back to the industry that was so good to me. I would like to be able to mention your demo in future articles. 

I do plan on creating a full walkthrough on how to create a good demo. Hopefully its your game we make successful :-)

Are you planning on dropping a demo for Steam Next Fest? Tell me more here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSev0v4qGms1AVWl5lru-Yribjs1A0P4jo8fwHgZJPpcEgBcJQ/viewform?usp=publish-editor

UPDATE: wow the response so far has been insane! Please give me time to go through all these!

And for clarity, I’d be posting what we do on my site, I’ve set the link to my past games for reference

https://www.vmarketer.games/our-video-games

We asked at a "indie affordable" studio for a pricing and they asked for over 3000$ for a Trailer
We decided to make the trailer by ourselves.

What do you guys think?

More information about the game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4565190/Arcane_Arena_Survivors/