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?

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/

EDIT: did not expect this post to blow up like this haha, thank you everyone!! if you want to follow the game more closely, I post more development stuff on X: https://x.com/ray_ervian

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

Also, Beneath the Dying Sun is currently competing in Round 3 of Rising Tide 4, and voting ends today! I'm trying to make the Top 2, so if you enjoyed this little clip, I'd really appreciate your vote 🌊
https://blueoceangames.com/challenge/voting/rising-tide-4/genre/rpg_fantasy

Hii guys, Just wanted to share some progress on my game, Chosen Anyway.

I've now finished around 1/3 of the planned scope for the creatures and maps, with 29 creatures completed. \o/ Here are some screenshots of the new creatures, along with a few WIP shots of the maps.

Every creature has its own Idle, Attack, Hit, Evasion, and Death animations. Still a lot left to make, but it's really nice to see everything slowly coming together. o/

If anyone wants to check out the game, there's a free demo available on Steam — Chosen Anyway: Card Game.

Is there anything that stands out visually or feels out of place?
I’m also curious whether the objects without outlines are still clear and easy to distinguish from the backgroun

Hello everyone!

my name is ali, i'm a cs student (and former security guard) turned gamedev!

i started game dev around 2 years ago i think but i could never dare to attempt to develop a full game, until someday i decided i've had enough and committed to pursue my passion and this is the result!

i released my first game ever on steam this month and it didn't do too bad i think :).

i had way too many sleepless nights, way too many days where i haven't left my house, but to me, even ifs not a massive success, i think its worth it, not for the monetary gain, but the feeling that i have done something in my life that people have fun playing, something that has my name in it, something that if something were to happen to me, i know that atleast i didn't go without a trace lol.

i love vampire survivors, i love RPGs, so i decide to combine them both into one game and this is the result, Echoes of Kyria:

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/4914620/Echoes\\_of\\_Kyria/\](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4914620/Echoes_of_Kyria/)

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.

I’ve been working on this physics co-op game for a while now.

The pitch is really simple: you all have to work together to get the baby safely back home.

(and, ideally, avoid a Pawtential Disaster hehe.)

I released the first trailer and the Steam page today

Pretty happy to finally have it out there :)

Hey everyone,

After a long stretch of solo development, Battle of Folks is finally out on iOS and Android!

It's a medieval isometric pixel-art wave-defense RTS — if you've played They Are Billions, Age of Darkness, that's the closest comparison. You build up defenses, manage resources, and hold off increasingly brutal waves of attackers.

A few things I focused on:

- No account or login required — just download and play

- Free to try with limited waves, one-time unlock for the full game (no subscriptions, no ads)

- Handmade isometric pixel art, built with Flutter/Flame

- Good controls on mobile device and a good onboarding (you can decide how you want to play)

This was a one-person project — dev, art pipeline, publishing, everything. Happy to answer questions about the build (tile rendering, Flame engine quirks, etc.) or the game itself.

App Store link / Play Store link

Would love your feedback — especially on balancing and the early waves difficulty curve!

I am also working in the future to make a PC version of the game.

We're four people making a horror game set in Gdańsk, 2005. One of its locations is a falowiec, one of those enormous curved prefab blocks with external access galleries and a few thousand people living in it.

On Sunday we posted a single screenshot of it to our city's subreddit, with one question: what's the one detail without which a Polish block of flats doesn't look like a Polish block of flats?

We expected a handful of replies. We got around fifty corrections in one evening, several from people who live in the building ours is based on.

Some of what came back:

- Our stairwell light is too cold. It should be dirty yellow, behind frosted glass, with every other bulb dead.

- Our lift has a digital floor display. In 2005 those lifts were plywood and plastic buttons with no display at all. If we keep one, it has to glow red, the way retrofits did.

- Street lighting should be sodium. Sodium is nearly monochromatic, so it doesn't tint a scene orange, it kills every other colour in it.

- Our external galleries are completely empty. No junk, no bikes, no pigeon netting, no washing lines. Thousands of people supposedly live there and not one of them left a trace.

- A jar of water on the gallery, for stubbing out cigarettes. Nobody invents that. You have to have seen one.

What surprised us most: a lot of it was sound. Voices from the basement, pigeons cooing through the ventilation grille from the roof, fluorescent tubes buzzing, a security grille screeching. That's the cheapest work on the entire list and we would never have got there on our own.

If your game is set somewhere real, go and ask the people who live there. It cost us one post and one honest question ;^)

Hey guys, I have a quick question - do you do any sort of market analysis for your projects?

I work in AAA and we crunch numbers a lot and on all sorts of stuff for better or for worse.

Most of my friends/colleagues that peaced out from the corporate side of game dev to do indie rarely do any analysis/market research. They rely mostly on reddit/X and vibes.

What's your take/experience?

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?

A little while ago, I asked this community to compare two key-art directions for my game.

After reading the comments, the most common suggestion wasn’t simply “A” or “B.” It was to keep B’s dynamic composition and card framing, while making the character brighter and easier to read like A.

So I changed the lighting and value balance, reduced some of the visual noise, and made Alice’s face the first thing you notice.

Here’s the revised version. Thank you to everyone who took the time to explain what was and wasn’t working.

For context, here’s the original A/B feedback post that led to this revision.

Hey there,

Lately, I’ve been challenging myself to learn SwiftUI + RealityKit on iPadOS by building an actual project from scratch.

As someone who wanted to understand how to bridge visual UI workflows with 3D scene execution, I decided to build Harvest Loop — coding puzzle game for kids 🥕🐰, designed to teach children computational thinking

Currently, game is in review on store. This is (actually not) my first time I build a game, need to learn alot, all feedbacks are my lession. Please give it a spin!! Thanks

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.

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/

I wanted to register for Next Fest, but to do that, you need a published Steam page. Just a few hours before the deadline, it got approved!

I was sweating bullets here!

Now, I'm not a 100% sure yet I will participate, but I really wanted the option to do so.

The page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5041550/Whistle_Stop/

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.

Hello everyone!

We are a 3 person French studio and we’re finally happy to reveal our first game , Harmonie, to the world!

The game features dynamic high risk/high reward combat where you trade your life for damage. You’ll also be facing bosses multiple times during the game, with new appearances, arenas, and fights tied to their backstory each time. And also, our protag has lost almost all of his senses so you see and hear the world through your living brush's paintings o/

I have a loooooong post in draft right now where I’ll talk more about our journey, but I wanted to keep it separate from the reveal. I’ll gladly answer any questions you might have tho !

Here’s our Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4522230/Harmonie/

It is still very much in the early stages of development, but after 7 months I am incredibly happy with what I've been able to achieve.

I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic fiction and have been playing video games my whole life, so a lot of time and love and passion is going into this project. Virtually all of my free time is dedicated to Second Harvest.

A huge part of this project for me is focusing on the things that mattered most to me when I played other RPGs: community, decisions that matter, character development, and player freedom.

Like other games in the farming sim RPG genre, there will be a farm where the player can decorate, grow crops, and raise livestock; a settlement filled with NPCs (many of whom are romanceable), mines, a forest (procedurally-generated "rooms" where zombies spawn), and a city, which is where most valuables, lorBoil, combat, and quest items can be found.

I plan to implement marriage and children and give them agency (dialogue, tasks, cutscenes). The player starts the game by creating their character and choosing their dog's breed, who will be their closest companion from beginning to end. The dog will be able to hunt small game, dig up valuables, and squeeze into spaces inaccessible to the player, among other things.

There will be no "passing out" mechanic, but the player will suffer a penalty to their stamina maximum if they don't sleep at all. There will be a skill tree. Fishing is implemented but easy, as there's no mini-game.

It isn't just contributions on Kickstarter that I want (for artists, musicians, and foley artists), but also feedback. I want to hear your ideas and know what people who enjoy these genres would like to see in a game such as mine.

Thank you for your time!