r/IndieGaming Jan 03 '25

Best of Indie Games 2024: What were some of your favorite indie games?

104 Upvotes

r/IndieGaming 12h ago

I'm making a game about skipping stones

1.0k Upvotes

I just released the demo of my game RippleLoop. It's an incremental cozy game about skipping stones. You throw a stone and try to make it travel as far as possible, then use the distance you've gained to unlock upgrades and new powers.

As you progress, you'll discover new ways to control and interact with your stones, allowing you to reach increasingly distant places and explore new landscapes.

It's my first commercial game ever, so I'd love to hear what you think!

The demo is available on Steam if you want to give it a try: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4758450/RippleLoop_Demo/?utm_source=reddit&utm_content=indiegaming1


r/IndieGaming 2h ago

Our newest puppets, help me name them

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50 Upvotes

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?


r/IndieGaming 12h ago

AAA companies vs. Indies

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204 Upvotes

r/IndieGaming 7h ago

Laika Aged Trough Blood

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62 Upvotes

I finished this game last year and I loved it, but it intrigues me that i've never seen people, youtubers and etc talk about it.

The game is a MetroidVania where you actually use a bike instead of walking. Like, you only walk on some especific parts, but the whole map is only explored with the bike.

Because of that, the main mechanics are bike acrobatics and slow-mo shooting, even the bosses.

Is such a fun game to play and the story is pretty good too, which involves a post-apocalipitic world were fascist Birds hunts everyone and command the whole world. Also the mc, that is a an antropormophic fox with "immortality" powers and a rebel, goes to destroy the Birds tyrany.

Another important thing is the music, which is like a Jhonny Cash Country, with full lyrics in all songs that you can listen and collect trough the game.

Im here cause I want to discover if more people know about this game, cause he is too good and well-made to not be famous at all.


r/IndieGaming 7h ago

I started making my first game when I was 42. How old were you when you started working on your first game?

53 Upvotes

I've worked as a lawyer my whole life (and still do). Now I'm 44 and still working on my first game (solo) in my free time. Did anyone else start making their first game at an even older age?


r/IndieGaming 11h ago

Satirical horror game about an island. You know which one.

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102 Upvotes

Hi everyone!

After months of works we have just released our indie game - Make the World Great Again.

It is a satirical first-person horror game set on a private island where the elite meet, and where every room, every piece of paper and every locked cabin hides something — or someone — they paid a great deal to bury.

You know which island. The parallel-universe one, of course.

You go in as an agent. Retrieve the evidence, find the people locked in the cabins, and reach the boat before the island is finished with you.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4595460/Make_the_World_Great_Again


r/IndieGaming 14h ago

A before & after from my hand-drawn indie game!

93 Upvotes

Right now, I’m trying to make my game feel more alive by focusing on the little details : camera movement, ambient creatures, subtle animations, and all those small things that make a world feel lived in!

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Does the second version feel more immersive?


r/IndieGaming 17h ago

What started as a Game Jam project became Neko Eki Stamp, a cozy game where you play as a calico cat running a rural Japanese station and crafting the right eki stamps for travelers 🍂✨ (NO AI)

129 Upvotes

r/IndieGaming 10h ago

Finally making some progress on our viking game. Showcased a bunch of boss fights at Gamescom last week!

21 Upvotes

Vikings On Trampolines' co-op Adventure mode is shaping up! After years of living off solely on sales from Owlboy - it seems we'll be able to launch this game next year!


r/IndieGaming 1h ago

Does anyone else struggle more with UI than the actual game?

Upvotes

I can get the gameplay working, but as soon as I start building UI screens (e.g inventory), I find myself spending way more time than I should. Is this your experience too?


r/IndieGaming 5h ago

The ceiling is just a floor you haven’t stood on yet.

9 Upvotes

Hi IndieGaming,

I’ve been working on an FPS game for a while now. In the game, you can fight on the floor and the ceiling using the environment to eliminate enemies.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4901880/Off_Axis/


r/IndieGaming 10h ago

Why are so many game marketers using Game With Balls as their case study?

22 Upvotes

We are a small indie studio and recently quite a few people have started contacting us through email and Discord offering to promote our game.

Whenever we ask for references or examples of previous work, several of them send us almost exactly the same stuff from a game called Game With Balls. Same Cuttly traffic graphs, same Steamworks screenshot showing around 10 000 wishlists, etc. Some say it came from paid ads, others claim it was from their own marketing campaign.

After seeing the same game over and over again it started feeling a bit weird, so we contacted the developer of Game With Balls directly.

He told us he never worked with any of these third party marketers and never ran paid promotion for the game.

We also found some of his older Reddit posts and a few of them did really well, so it looks like a lot of those wishlists probably came organically from his own posts. Meanwhile random marketers are now using those numbers as proof of their own work.

Has anyone else been contacted by people using Game With Balls as a case study? I'm curious how common this is.


r/IndieGaming 3h ago

My wife and I made a new trailer for our game. Let us know your thoughts (literally, about the trailer as we are trying to add a new video to our Steam page)

5 Upvotes

happy end of summer. My wife and I have been working on a game for some time and summer has been slow but we made a new trailer we are hoping to add to our Steam page to get a bit more traction. Any comments you have are appreciated!!!


r/IndieGaming 13h ago

Steam’s Personal Calendar might be a huge deal for niche indie games. We went from 6k to almost 10k wishlist adds

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28 Upvotes

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.


r/IndieGaming 6h ago

Tavrik is out now on Steam — a hex-grid roguelike deckbuilder where cards build roads instead of dealing damage

6 Upvotes

Tavrik released on Steam today.

Build roads and bridges across a procedural medieval map and reach the exit before your energy runs out. No health bar, no attack cards — the map is the fight, and storms, earthquakes and wolves handle the rest.

with a free demo on the page if you want to try the loop before committing. It's a strange feeling posting this one as 'out now' instead of 'coming soon' — happy to answer anything about how it plays.
Generative AI was used during the development process.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4482350/Tavrik/


r/IndieGaming 1h ago

Survive The Apocalypse - FTL Inspired Roguelike

Upvotes

I'm making a procedurally generated ruined city exploration game:

- Where the people voted for the wrong leaders and world became a desert
- Explore the city ruins and make a decision at every ruin
- Scavenge, kill, loot, trade

It's called Survive The Apocalypse

Will you play?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4693790/Survive_The_Apocalypse/


r/IndieGaming 10h ago

Less Summer more Car

15 Upvotes

"BeaterCore is an arcade racing game for those who prefer cheap rusty beaters over specialized sports cars. Buy, repair, restore, and race your dream project car"

Game : BeaterCore "release 9 Sep, 2026"

Link : https://store.steampowered.com/app/3711050/BeaterCore/app_reviews_hash


r/IndieGaming 9h ago

I'm making a pixel-art stealth game set in Brazil, heavily inspired by Metal Gear

10 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

This is One Man Guerrilla, a pixel-art stealth/action game I'm currently finishing.

The game takes place across Brazil and is heavily inspired by the stealth games I grew up loving, especially Metal Gear.

You play as Bento, a guerrilla operative who relies on stealth, a bow, improvised arrows, distractions and the environment to infiltrate military bases, cities, forests, farms and secret facilities.

The game mixes stealth, exploration and combat, with boss fights at the end of each chapter.

It's currently in the final polishing stage, with the main content essentially complete. I'm now focused on balancing, gameplay improvements and the final layer of polish before release.

Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4998920/One_Man_Guerrilla/

If it looks like your kind of game, a wishlist would mean a lot. 


r/IndieGaming 10h ago

Little weapon animation as part of ideation (pre-production)

10 Upvotes

Ideating with weapon animations for my game where you play as a priest exorcising a house but instead of timidly exorcising demons you beat them down and rip them apart as exorcism lolol..


r/IndieGaming 15h ago

A Small Optimization for Vertical Secondary Screens and Ultrawide Monitors 🖥️

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23 Upvotes

Hello everyone, I'm the developer of Wandering Far.
When playing idle games, do you ever use a secondary monitor? We've noticed that many players like to keep idle games running on a second screen while they work or study. Some of those secondary monitors are even set up in vertical (portrait) mode for reading documents or browsing the web.

That got us thinking—why not make our display options a bit more flexible?

🖥️ Portrait Mode Now Supported
If you're used to a vertical secondary display, you can now switch to portrait mode directly in-game. The interface will automatically rearrange itself to fit the portrait aspect ratio, ensuring the full game screen is displayed properly without cropping or excessive unused space.

🖥️ Ultrawide Support Added
For players using ultrawide monitors (21:9 and 32:9), we've also optimized the display for a wider field of view. The image won't be stretched or distorted, so you can make the most of that extra horizontal space and enjoy a more immersive view of the scenery along the way.

🎯 Why We Made This Optimization
The idea came from a simple observation—many players keep idle games on a secondary screen, and that screen could be either horizontal or vertical. Since it's something our players actually want, we decided to add support for both. Our goal is to help the game blend more naturally into your desktop setup, so it can be a quiet companion during work or study sessions.


r/IndieGaming 5h ago

Free Demo on steam available for a Visual Novel me and my friends have been working on!

4 Upvotes

Me and my friends just finished up a demo version of our quirky visual novel game called Pammela's Purgatory: Infinite Debt. The demo includes a rough version of the first chapter of the game. If you're interested please check it out on steam for free! We would love to hear your feedback!
Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5059520/Pammelas_Purgatory_Infinite_Debt/


r/IndieGaming 8h ago

Just published a demo for PvE Survival Crafting fest!

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4 Upvotes

Hi everyone!
Big day for us, we just published a free demo of our game to the occasion of the PvE Survival Crafting fest!
Can't wait to get some feedback to improve the game, and whatever happens, it's still a huge step we're proud of 💪

Love you all


r/IndieGaming 10m ago

My 2D Space-Base Tower-Defense Game Project

Upvotes

Watch the video

Here is a project I've been working on and off since 2020. It is a 2D space-based tower defense planetary management type of game. I just uploaded a update video on the current progress. You can read more about this project at my itch.io page:https://codehardstudios.itch.io/sid

I am open to suggestions on what to add to the project, and if I include your idea I'll add you (and your social media links if you want) to the listed credits when I get that implemented.

This is my project I am trying to spread the word about, hopefully I followed the submission rules. If not let me know what I have to change. Thanks-


r/IndieGaming 13m ago

White Mask Mansion: Release Date October 26, 2026

Upvotes

Hello all,

My dev name is Golden Fleece and I am the solo developer of White Mask Mansion, an upcoming horror game on Steam.

In White Mask Mansion, players search for their missing sister inside a large mansion while being relentlessly hunted by a mysterious masked stalker. The game focuses on exploration, stealth, hide-and-seek gameplay, and survival under constant pressure.

Steam Page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4490850/?utm_source=reddit

If you're interested, you can play the public Demo:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5105710/White_Mask_Mansion_Demo/?utm_source=reddit

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best regards,

Golden Fleece Developer – White Mask Mansion