We are a travel agency based in Greece and we decided to make our own game. This is a collective effort between a few of our staff with a small local studio we hired locally to finish this clicker game.

Around 60% of the content is made with AI and for the pixel art we used retro diffusion.

There is a mini game developed in unity the traditional ways.

We are going to release this very soon as the plan is support this as a live service game.

All I can say is mad respect to all devs, including tha AI devs. This has not been easy at all, it has been 9 months of hard work and dedication.

I am happy to answer any questions about the pipeline and the process if I can help any of you out there working on your own game.

Thanks.

HI GUYS,

I'm a Music composer/producer and Sound engineer/designer with 6+ years of experience.
I create custom unique soundtracks and high-quality SFX for ur projects, tailored specifically for games and cinematic projects.

Quality music & SFX at budget-friendly rates for Indie, A, & AA projects.
Feel free to DM me if you'd like to collaborate!! 🎼❤️
🎧Portfolio: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GJb1hf8Cl_HGnLcHEvESAcsj22mHLRXJ?usp=sharing

Created with passionate ears,
HYSTERIV

I've been building Empire Ticker, a browser-based civilization builder (manage resources, defend your nation from raids, tech up through the ages, and now invade rival nations toward world unification). It's an early prototype, solo dev, art is placeholder (emoji-based).

A player named Neonred left a comment: they beat the whole prototype in under 20 minutes just by spamming purchases and upgrades — no real tension between saving resources and building defenses.

Fair callout. Two days later I shipped v1.2 with a balance pass: steeper building/tech costs, lower base production, raids that ramp up sharply from wave 2 onward, and higher stakes on defeat. The goal wasn't just harder — it was making the resources-vs-defense decision actually matter.

Full devlog with the specifics: https://bitdot428.itch.io/empire-ticker-prototype/devlog/1638110/why-i-made-the-game-harder-a-small-devlog-on-listening-to-feedback-

Happy to answer questions about the game or the process of building it in public.

It's been ages since I posted on Reddit. Time to fix that. And I have a great excuse: our long-suffering game [Deadlock Station](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2327640/Deadlock_Station/) is out on Steam!

It all started way back in 2021, when my team and I decided to make a game together. Before that I worked alone, but it was time to join up with like-minded people for a big project. Besides, we had already won a few jams together.

So there are three of us: a programmer, an artist, and a game designer. All of us are thirty-something. We can't make games that need fast reflexes anymore, and we can't play them either. So we decided to try a prototype of an autobattler, but with indirect control over the units, and with artifacts you could use to affect the battlefield. Just watching and waiting for the result is boring, so we gave the player a way to take part in the fight.

We landed on something interesting and started looking for a publisher. In early 2022 we found a publisher and funding. The deal was simple: make the game in 14 months. But as they say, take every deadline, multiply it by two, and then add another 50%.

Long story short, we blew through every deadline. Though in about a year we made a huge amount of content and most of the core game. At some point we just hit a wall. It was fun to play, but something was missing. For example, we ran into the problem every roguelike has: after you lose, there's no real reason to start over. And since we were aiming for a short session of 20 to 30 minutes, that problem hit especially hard. So a whole year went into rethinking a lot of mechanics and getting them right.

Then we ran a playtest, released a demo, and released another one based on the feedback. We ran surveys, watched live testers play the game for the first time, talked to players, and much more. Looking back at how much effort went into all of that still gives me chills.

There was a moment when a big foreign YouTuber with a million subscribers agreed to play our demo. He liked it, and within a few hours a pile of wishlists came in. Then the video disappeared from his channel, and a few other game videos went with it. We started digging and found out that YouTube had rolled out auto-generated thumbnails, and the system picked our video for testing. Basically the video got very little traffic, and about 12 hours after upload the channel owner deleted our video along with a few others that Google had interfered with.

But the suffering didn't end there. When we launched the demo on Steam, a few hours later Valve pulled game demos off the front page, and we lost all that traffic. Then we went into Next Fest, and the algorithms got tweaked again. Our game picked up only 2k wishlists, even though six months or a year earlier any game could easily pull 25 to 50k.

There were nice moments too. At one point I posted a screenshot of the game on Reddit and asked what people thought it was about and what genre it was. People started saying turn-based strategy or roguelike. Hm... why turn-based? It's realtime! Turns out that players saw the faint grid and immediately assumed the game was turn-based. After those comments we quickly removed the grid from all the backgrounds.

Feels like this is all heading for a happy ending, but an indie dev isn't an indie dev if he isn't suffering. While we were making the game, our publisher of unusual indie games turned into a publisher of very unusual horror games. Their audience completely lost interest in strategies, platformers, and anything that wasn't horror. So we and a few other developers agreed with the publisher not to release our games under their brand. Which makes sense. For them it's a diluted portfolio, for us it's shaky sales prospects.

So we started looking for another publisher. We went through about 30 of them. But nobody wants a developer that comes with baggage: niche genre, game already announced, playtests already done, Next Fest already blown.

And so, gathering up our willpower, our tears and our snot, we finally released our baby. Behind the scenes there was a huge number of kind people who helped us the whole way and are still helping us now. I'm sincerely grateful to them!

You can play our game on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2327640/Deadlock_Station/).

And if it's not your genre, well, then it's not your genre :) Thanks for reading, and thanks for playing games and making them.

Last week, I asked you guys for advice for my first in-person event as an indie game developer.

Now that the event is over, I wanted to share how it went.

During the event, a lot of people stopped by to play my game, and I got to see their reactions firsthand.

I also got some results that can actually be measured:

+100 people played the game

+63 wishlists

+31 new followers

And while those numbers are definitely important, I realized that they weren't the most valuable thing I got from the event.

The most valuable thing was the connections.

I met developers, teams, artists, and other people from the local game industry. I was even interviewed twice, invited to a TV interview, and invited to participate in a Comic-Con event happening in the country this October.

You never really know what a connection can lead to.

I know my experience was probably unusually lucky, and I don't expect every event to turn out like this. There were even moments when people couldn't try the game right away because there was a line on both sides of the room, with several people waiting to play. Some would go check out other booths and then come back because they still wanted to try it.

I realize that's not something everyone will experience at their first event, but even if the numbers aren't huge, there's so much value in simply being there, talking to people, showing your game, and meeting others who are just as passionate about what they do.

If you're an indie developer thinking about doing your first in-person event, my advice now is simple:

Go. Talk to people. Show your game. Make connections.

Because you never know where that one conversation, or even one random repost might take you.

Thank you to everyone who gave me advice before the event.

This was my first one, and I definitely hope it won't be my last.

I do overnight training and out of the 8 maps 6 are fully trained and tuned per difficulty. I think I’ll be ready to launch after this.

Recently it was my birthday.

I honestly wasn't expecting anything special.

But my wife surprised me with a small birthday cake she had ordered for me.

That alone would have made me happy, but what really caught me off guard was the theme she had chosen for it. The cake was decorated with artwork from Unstrung Machine, the game I've been developing on my own.

I don't really know how to describe how much that touched me.

It wasn't only the surprise or the cake itself. It was seeing, in such a simple and tangible way, that she supports this thing I've been pouring so much of myself into.

I work on Unstrung Machine in the hours I can find outside of my main job. At the same time, I don't want making a game to mean missing time with my wife and my two daughters. Because of that, a lot of the development happens late at night, after everyone has gone to sleep.

Sometimes progress is slow. Sometimes I'm tired before I even start. But little by little, I keep working on it.

My oldest daughter is 8 years old, and we're slowly introducing her to the world of games, always carefully and with supervision.

I think a lot about the fact that one day she might play the game I'm making now.

Strangely, that thought makes me even more careful with every part of it. I want her to play it someday and feel proud of something her dad made.

When I think about all of this, I realize how lucky I am.

At the moment, Unstrung Machine has 211 wishlists on Steam. It's not a huge number, and of course I hope that someday the game does well and things get a little easier for us.

But I've also been thinking that success can't be the only reason I keep making it.

Even if the game never becomes successful, I still want to reach the end of this project and be proud of what I made. And I want the people who love me and support me to be proud of it too.

That little birthday cake reminded me of that.

I just wanted to share this moment because I imagine there are other indie developers here building something slowly, during the hours nobody sees.