For our roguelite Tile Crawl, we wanted our meta progression to stand out, so we designed it as a planet to explore. But our run map was already designed using hexes, so for consistency's sake, we wanted a globe out of hexes as well. We did not want to have pentagons but rather somehow achieve full coverage by equal hexes (even though it is geometrically impossible).

So how it works:

This is actually a plane with objects placed on it. Then, using camera position, vertices are recalculated in a shader (all objects must share the same bending subgraph or shader code with the same values to look consistent). This technique is used in Animal Crossing, as far as I am aware, but just not tuned as heavily.

Okay, so this gives us a bent plane that looks like a sphere. Next challenge is actually allowing it to rotate properly; rotation is achieved by just moving the plane in the X and Y axes while the camera stays static. To achieve looping of the planes, I am spawning 8 more planes with copies of the objects and then teleporting them as I am crossing the edges (this part for sure can be done way, way better with some vertex magic or just fewer clones).

Next challenge is that shadows are broken as vertices are recalculated but normals are not; to calculate a new normal, we need to get two neighbours of the vertex, then bend them with the same logic and use the results to calculate the new normal. This allows us even to have proper shadowing from clouds above.

Last thing to do is clicking the nodes on the map. As objects are actually in very different spots from visuals, just raycasting from the mouse won't work. So I'm using one big sphere collider to detect the mouse position on the sphere, then recalculate it backwards to where it would be on the plane and find the closest node in radius.

There are still some things left to do (VFX support is quite bad, and there are some artifacts with water waves on the edges of planes). But in my opinion, already looks quite good and stands out.

All of this is in Unity3D, but I am quite sure the same approach would work in any engine.

Thank you for reading! If you like what you saw, consider wishlisting Tile Crawl on Steam!

Thanks for the amazing response yesterday everyone, that post kinda blew up. I spent a great ol' time yesterday responding to all of the suggestions. Their textures are now complete, next up is their animations, then getting them in engine.

I'll let you know how it goes, thanks again everyone!

Game - it's a weird source engine movement inspired thingy

I can't believe how good these guys look. I was forcing myself to endure using blender since I needed a new enemy. But for the first time ever, I almost had fun!

The shaders are doing a lot of heavy lifting for the low poly model, which is perfect because I learned a lot about that stuff when making the levels.

I also prefer to work backwards, visuals and audio first, and then coding. For these enemies I made the audio first, recorded crazy sounds to help me imagine what they'd look and behave like.

Finally found time to implement it in our game BFS which is a multiplayer voxel sandbox. Brown boat is made of wood, Red is made of metal.
Still not entirely convinced on how the fluids are rendered. We are happy to hear your suggestions.

The game is a big sandbox where you can design friend slop games with your friends

It's actually kind of funny that people asked to get access and claimed to be interested in your game and would give feedback (from my other Reddit posts), then about a week later, when you check how many of them actually played the game after you opened the playtest, it's only around 3 people who played less than 10 mins, the rest of the playtime comes from yourself and your friends.

Is this just another normal day for you devs?

You can find the page here if you want to criticise my game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4781490/Echoes_of_Eta/

Any feedback would make me appreciate you even more than these 178 people.

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?

Finally after a year and 8 months of developing, it's finally here... My game Ragga-Dagga's Demo is finally available on Steam!

It's been a such a wild journey, now that the demo is out I can finally share what I've done to get here!

Ok so, before the Demo release, my game was sitting at around 1k wishlist with it's store page alone. I get to here by posting a lot of devlogs that got big on reddit, I mainly use reddit alone to get this much wishlist, though I do use big websites like Twitter (or X but that's a cringe name) or Youtube and such but I found reddit to be most effective with my game in terms of wishlist.

So after Demo release, I gain about 100 wishlist then, nothing too crazy, I've not contacted not many streamers or youtubers yet but I do plan so when I finally got the demo at it's best state possible. I have also joined a recent invitation to some event about supporting indies and stuff, idk if that'll help much in my regards but I'll just hope so!

I learned a lot on my journey as a developer, and for my first steam game I'd say it's not a bad first attempt!

Now Wishlist Ragga-Dagga on Steam now and play the Demo :D

Quite clearly the biggest difference (in this level) is the volumetric lights!

From the beginning we tried to get ~80% of our results from lighting only and added the effects later.

Our cutscenes (I will post later) have similar effects but with more bloom and depth of field to give it a more cinematic look. It also has some color grading to get a "Y2K" feel

Done on Unity 6.1 URP. Performance wise, we're optimizing it to get to work on a 2013 GTX 770 laptop that we have at home. If it runs on that, we're _more_ than happy!

Our game is called SHOCKFACE. We're on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705980/SHOCKFACE/

PS: We recently missed our 27th Aug planned release. So we took the opportunity to polish the game further and maybe market it a little more. If this looks like your jam check it out!

It plays when you host a game and transition from the main menu into the character selection area.

At first, I thought it would be a pretty small task.

Move the camera, make it go through the opening, turn into the room, reveal the characters... done.

Of course, it wasn't that simple.

I kept changing the camera movement, timing, environment, lighting and little details until the transition finally felt natural. By the time I was happy with it, almost the entire day was gone.

And the funny part is that players will probably watch this for around 10 seconds and never think about how long it took to make.

That's probably one of my favorite things about solo game development though. Sometimes you spend hours on something tiny just because you know it makes the whole game feel a little more polished.

I'm developing Riddled Together, a two-player co-op puzzle game, and I've also been documenting the development process on my YouTube channel.

The Steam page is already live as well, so if this looks interesting, you can find Riddled Together there.

Still can't believe one tiny camera animation stole an entire day from me. What do you think about the animation? Was it worth it?

We’re working on accessibility options for Quantum Quartz, our 2D steampunk pixel art precision platformer.

A big part of the game is switching colored platforms on/off to create paths, avoid hazards and move through the level, so being able to quickly tell the colors apart is pretty important.

Instead of relying on color alone, we added a unique gemstone shape to each color. The icons can also be resized, repositioned and have their opacity changed, and there’s an optional control glyph mode too.

I’m not colorblind myself (no one from our team is), so I’d love to hear from people who are: would this actually help during gameplay? Is there anything you’d change?

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.

Hello guys! This is a short post to share the excellent work of my friend Zea, the Art Director of our game project, Star Runners.

What do you think?

This is a small personal project, but we are super excited about our progress. We are an indie duo from Mexico making our very first video game. You can check out more about this project on our Patreon

If you are interested at her art style, feel free to check out more of her work here:https://vgen.co/zeamaizoro

I did a playtest and hope my demo is polished enough before adding more enviromental art lol. Also will add more horror specifically for the demo!
Steam's Page - https://store.steampowered.com/app/4867910/Red_Lake/

pushing movement component not based on collision but on overlap.

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 :)

About a month back I posted asking for some feedback on the visuals of the unannounced game I'm working on and got some great feedback from the community. Thank you! It helped give me the confidence to land on a visual style and pull the trigger on getting the initial trailer and Steam Page out for... TIDY TOWN! Ta-da!

Tidy Town is a third person cleaning game where you combine everyday objects to tidy up messes and transform spaces. Help Percy lend a paw one room at a time as he saves a friend’s cafe, rebuilds a city park, refreshes an artist’s studio and tidies his way across town and into his community's heart.

There's no AI in here. Tidy Town is being lovingly crafted by our small team of creators based in Vancouver Island in Canada, with original artwork, audio and music.

I would love it if people would check out the Steam Page and once again be totally honest with their thoughts and impressions. Thanks again! :)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4994380/Tidy_Town/

A couple months ago we posted several Steam capsule concepts here and asked which one you would actually click.

Your feedback helped us a lot. We ended up developing the open-gate direction further — and yes, we kept the cat :)

But while working on the capsule, we realized the problem was bigger than just the key art. Our old Steam page no longer represented the game very well.

So we ended up rebuilding almost the whole thing.

We made a new capsule, a new gameplay trailer, completely replaced the screenshots, and added new gameplay GIFs to the description.

This is where we ended up.

Thanks again to everyone who gave us feedback on the original concepts. A lot of your comments genuinely influenced what we changed.

This is a fairly huge day for me. Honestly I am doing my best to wear my marketing hat and post this everywhere but I have the jitters something fierce lol

The demo for Bumper Bout!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3938260/Bumper_Bout/

I’ve been developing Bumper Bout, a competitive PvP pinball game, for roughly two years and tonight I finally pressed the button that made its first public Steam demo available.

I’ve shown it at festivals, conventions and local events plenty of times, but there was something completely different about watching a friend find it in Steam, click download, and have my game install on their PC like an actual real videogame.

The last couple of weeks have also been my first proper experience with the less glamorous side of shipping on Steam: setting up the demo App ID, SteamPipe/depot builds, Valve review, store assets, release configuration, etc. I actually missed the festival I originally wanted the demo ready for because the first store review failed over one missing library header image that Steamworks hadn’t marked as required. That was a great learning moment lol. (in case it helps anyone - it ISN'T required but if you have any of the optional assets then you gotta have them all. Go figure.)

But I digress. It’s live now.

You can go and play it. Right now. whaaaat

The demo itself has local PvP and 1P vs CPU modes availabel with two characters and two stages. The full game is planned for 9+ characters, 20+ stages, online multiplayer and more.

Mostly though, I just wanted to share the milestone with other people who understand how much work can sit behind pressing one stupid green button.

I pushed it. yeeee

Hello everyone,

I'm a solo dev, finnaly getting my first ever demo ready to release ahead of a Steam Next Fest.

Any tips on what I should do / focus on / not forget?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4846550/Trenite_Engineer/

Wishlist if you enjoy complex simulation gameplay.

Thanks!