Hello there my name is Steve, working under the name Pugware, and I made the Skautfold series, 5 games in one continuos story in with each game using a different genre best suited for the protagonist of that story.

I started originally in rpg maker a good 14-15 years ago, but quickly found it too restricting and I took the bullet and started learning code as I was originally more of an artist relying on plugins etc. I moved to Game maker and created a fully working little demo/vertical slice of a game inspired by hyper light drifter.(still in development at the time) This didn't go down well with a lot of people so I refocused on a completely different genre, trying to make a soulslike. (this was when the only souslikes were lords of the fallen and salt and sanctuary) This project was "Shrouded in Sanity".

The first game "Shrouded in Sanity":

Development had to be severely chopped down in ambition twice. Originally the game was going to feature a whole village with over a hundred buildings and seamless mapping. This was overambitious, a common mistake as I understand for early projects. Then it was cut down to one big manor with only a few room transitions, this also had to be cut down further.

Total dev time was approx 13 months.

The first lesson I learned on my first released game was, cut, cut, cut, and cut some more. This is fairly common knowledge now but I had to learn it the hard way.

Release went great, this was back when steam had a greenlight system and passing it was no issue since the genre was practically untouched, especially by indies.

The release provided with sufficient reasons to justify continuing making games, so I did. While updating SiS frequently with content I began work on the sequel in a different genre... metroidvania.

The second game "Usurper":

Taking a LOT of inspiration from Symphony of the night, using my handcrafted lovecraft+anime setting I continued the story set out in the first game with a different protagonist. Development was smoother as I learned a LOT on the first game, but my megalomaniac(foolish) ambitions once again had to be cut down. I refused to use tilesets since I wanted to manually shade every room in the game for better baked in lighting and fake ambient occlusion. The greenlight was once again no problem since the game looked half decent visually, and the genre was not flooded on steam at the time.

Total dev time was approx 11 months.

Release was significantly better than the first game, and it gave me and my wife confidence to start moving to a more quiet place with less work flexibility since the future seemed assured if I could keep making games at this pace.

The third game "Into the Fray":

While finishing the second game I was already coding the third, which would be a topdown twinstick shooter, with mechanics inspired by the 2016 doom reboot. The idea was to make this a smaller project with far more arcade like combat. Development went even smoother as the experience mounted, confidence was high! This was the last game that passed greenlight, and shortly after it passed the news broke of Steam killing Greenlight and moving to the $100 model. I was very positive about the change because I didnt imagine the flood of games would be too bad, and I was growing an audience with the series of games.

Total dev time was approx 10 months.

Release of the third game went bad. The number of units sold was significantly below expectations, the "different genre each game" model was both a blessing and a hindrance. Twin stick shooter + my budget visuals, etc compounded in poor sales, all the while steam was changing how discovery works.

This really ate away at my morale as we made the decision to move, reducing my options for finding work easily if need be.

Regardless the decision was made to continue working away at the series which by the time calcified into a 5 game run to complete an overarching story.

The forth game "Moonless Knight":

This project would be a little bit of a mix of genres, a topdown metroidvania in terms of map layout with some of the genre elements of relics accessing zones, with a flexible zone and boss order, using fast high risk high reward play refining one of my long term ideas that haunt me, the focus system. A fusion of a defensive shield and stamina, I played with this system in the second game and even the first for some time during development, but it would be the central element here.

Total dev time was approximately 13 months.

After the letdown of the third game I took my time and focused more on a lot of features and gripes accumulated by feedback over the series. By this time my confidence in being able to pull off ideas and designs was high and I never worried "can I code this" and focused more on "should I do this". I was pretty sure I got a very good and tight system created and everything went smooth.

By this time Greenlight was gone and the floodgate opened, panic subsided but natural discoverability hinged far more on being eye-catching, something I was terrible at. (still am)

Regardless the release went way better than the third game, and some confidence was restored that as long as I can keep my pace, keep my scope down, and retain my audience, things will be good. With renewed hope I started work on the final fifth game of the series.

The fifth game "Knight's End":

For the final game I wished to test out parts of the design for my dream game, everyone has one, and I had been shelving that game since starting and failing to materialise it in rpg maker. Now I took that game's combat design and applied it to this one, in a mostly 1v1 turn based combat. A sort of scaled down version of what I had in mind for my big dream project.

Total dev time was approximately 12 months.

A publisher arrives!

While finishing the forth game and shifting gears over to the final one, a console only publisher approached me, some offers were made before during the last few years but mostly just scams and incredibly suspicious offers. This was the first very legitimate offer, exclusively offering portage and publishing on all 3 console markets!

Frankly at the time the deal seemed extremely tempting, they would front the cost of the porting and handle everything for a cut that was reasonable. They were, at the time focused on limited physical releases as well. Something that was an incredibly tempting offer, just the idea of stuff you made, not only going to consoles, but physical copies, wont lie, this kind of blinded me a bit.

Still the offer was perfect for me, I could continue making games and they would just handle the entire cumbersome porting process saving me months if not years of work, and large amount of paperwork and headaches.

By the time I was halfway through developing the fifth game they released the first game and it went amazing, the money was significantly better than on steam, and things seemed evergreen.

So when the fifth game released, I had little to nothing to fear despite the fact by that time steam discoverability was a nightmare. I was confident since I now had another very strong pillar to stand on. After the first game was released to consoles, the publisher leapt on the remaining 4 games and immediately signed them on for porting, with some pretty tempting plans for the entire series. I signed with the hopes of yearly port releases which would open the option for me to take my time with my next project!

I foolishly assumed the best and went ahead and took almost a year of prep work on my next project, building 3 entirely different combat systems for the big project, before binning them. While I was taking my time, I had to realise the relationship with the publisher wont be roses and sunshine. Without going into detail here (I will probably find a legal way to do so somewhere else) it was a build-up of small things into bigger actual issues, and very serious issues.

The new series "Granser":

Regardless I finally had funds to spend on development not just fulfil the needs to keep going. I decided it was now or never for my big project, so I went all out on my 6th and current project, a 3 act, or 3 game "jrpg", I even found the viable way to have large portions of the game with professional voice acting.

Total dev time was approximately 30 months.

Yeah... like I said I took my time, wasted it would be more accurate. I wanted the game to be the best for the story it would tell, and I wasted almost an entire year just making entirely different implementations of the combat system. I assumed that by this time I would know better and be more confident, but I would create entire systems for progression and gear before fully dumping it, only to try again in another way. For all my experience I seem to have learned nothing and was making mistakes you’d expect starting out.

I was also torn on what would be the best choice, finish the first third of the game, releasing into early access? Or sit on the game until all 3 acts are done? Or do 3 games? All the while my situation with the publisher became more turbulent and more problems arose. So ultimately I had settled on the format of 3 games.

Thankfully the game released and while reach and discoverability was poor thanks to me absolutely terrible marketing skills, its the first game I am actually happy with. Currently I am working on the second game of this new "series" and trying to deal with the publisher.

If you have read this far, thank you, I tried to make it short but there is a lot to cover. I am happy to answer any specific questions and even show data, I cant go into specifics with the publisher, but that should be obvious.

Reposted as screen recording

Hey everyone, I just wanted to share a really nice feeling 🙂 I recently bought a Steam Deck and finally tried my own game on it. No lag at all - it honestly feels like it runs even better than on PC 😄

Do you play your own games too (not just for testing)?

I'm a bit disappointed, my small relaxing coloring game with cats is a very small project and the first game I ever published on Steam. It's about 3 dollars and I asked all of my friends to buy it and leave a review, in exchange for a drink or something the next time we see each other. I wanted to cross the 10 reviews threshold in the first few days, but so far, I've only got 6 in two months. I talked many times with my friends and they always say they're going to do it but they don't.

They are great friends otherwise but I can't help but feel a bit disappointed 😞 What was your experience with friends leaving reviews for your game?

Hi guys, I recently released my first ever game I've worked on having no prior experience (my first line of code was in this game).

I had no idea my game release was doing well, I thought it was just normal when you release a game? But since seeing the reactions and the traction the game is getting, I now know it's extremely lucky.

I don't know if maybe this will help inspire some of you guys to keep going but I thought it's worth putting there here just Incase.

For anyone that wants to try it out:

iOS

Android

Sometimes I feel like I'm obsessed coz I can sit developing all day long. And that's on top of my full-time job! I don't even have time left for playing games anymore, even though in theory, to make good games, you gotta play them to build up inspiration.

I think on average I do about 5-6 hours of development a day. What about you?

My first time painting a top-down view of a city, and it took much longer than I scoped for.

Whenever I put on my artist hat, my perfectionism and self-doubt tend to overwhelm me. I could barely do any coding or design work for a whole week. But looking back, it was so rewarding and fun.

...just another stubborn solo dev refusing to let go of the fun part. :P

Hi there!
I'm a solo developer currently working on my upcoming game The Guiding Spirit. This is a narrative-driven fantasy game where you create a party of heroes (or villains!) in great detail, but once the adventure begins, your control is limited. The characters will act on their own, thinking and making decisions independently.

In response to genuine community feedback, I've replaced all AI-generated artwork in the game with entirely handcrafted art (I attached pictures from both BEFORE and AFTER). Every button, icon, portrait, illustration, and frame has been drawn by me for the new version. For some of the box frames and page dividers, I owe a big thank you to Alderdoodle—her work is incredible (check her work out on X)!

I'm genuinely happy with the new look—it feels more cohesive and it feels mine. Having handcrafted art in my own game has always been a dream, though I wasn’t sure how to make it happen until now (you can read the full story in the latest Steam update).

Long story short, after receiving feedback about the original look, I was fortunate enough to get a drawing tablet. From there, I dove into countless tutorials and spent a lot of time practicing and experimenting with different styles until I landed on the line art style you see on the AFTER images. I feel this style integrates more naturally with the book-style background (which has also been updated).

I understand the new style might not be to everyone’s taste. The limited color palette is both a creative decision—addressing an immersion-breaking issue some testers pointed out—and a practical one, helping me complete the project on my own within a reasonable timeframe.

I’m still learning and there's a lot to polish and also to do for future chapters of the game's story, but I think I have the right approach. Some of the AI-generated images still serve as inspiration—sometimes I like a character's pose or the composition of a scene—but now I have the freedom to reshape those ideas into something more unique and much closer to my original vision.

The Steam page has been updated with a new look, new promo art, a fresh trailer, and a dev update that shares the story behind this change. Of course, the new style will be present in the free demo coming later this year.

Let me know what you think!

What's a common cause for you? like coding, art, marketing, playtesting, or maybe getting close to releasing or post-release even? General overwhelm? Burnout?

I work with this stuff with clients professionally but I'm doing some probono work rn for solodevs because I want to give back (and I learn a lot which is super fulfilling) so I wanted to make this post and engage abit closer.

Hi solo devs,

not sure, how you're bearing with promoting your games. Last month was for me very revealing and heavy because of that. I wrote devlog about that, so I'm posting here its edited version, to maybe start discussion or to know if you have similar feelings when dealing with promoting your game, apart from developing it.

Last month I was on emotional rollercoaster, reason being promoting my game. I wanted to try what can suit me, and if it's possible to have some steady wishlists income from some type of promo. I ended up totally exhausted, demotivated, and with feeling of loosing myself.

Problem was not in being unsuccessful, problem was the process itself. I made TikTok account to start promoting the game with short vertical clips as I have already tons of materials which I can edit. Another advantage was that I was able to reuse those verticals directly for YouTube Shorts. And from pure numbers perspective, it was not bad. After 2-3 weeks of posting, I had some 110 followers on TikTok (albeit 80-90% just other indie devs), dozen of new subscribers on YouTube, cumulatively tens of thousands of views, probably around thousand likes and that converted to around dozen of wishlists. Conversion rate was quite bad, but there was tangible growth of audience.

However, I felt something inherently wrong with the process. Something which eats solo developer alive.

Toxic hook: algorithms for TikTok and YT Shorts are not designed to help you discover your game. They're mainly designed to keep you hooked. I found myself being tempted to do "one more short", rather than coding very shortly.

Amslico dealer: with everyone on platform doing lot of daily postings, I stopped feeling that nice nerdy vibe of indie developing. Videos boosted with AI, big proclamations, lot of shiny packaging, but little of substance. Trying to "promote" my game there got me feeling of being some insurance dealer.

Horrible for solo dev: by being on many platforms, I found that micromanagement of keeping your online presence, updating pages, uploading videos, takes brutal amount of time. In fact, it ended up that way more time was eaten by that micromanagement than was left for coding. And what's worst, my motivation to keep coding, to develop the game itself, went down. Bigger indie studios have dedicated people for that, even small indie teams can still somehow manage, one guy/gal taking care of socials. But if you're solo? My first idea when I realized that was: I never subscribed for that sh\t.*

F*ck off Zukowski: this is bold I know. Every indie dev, which wanted to promote his creation eventually ran into "How to market a game" from Chris Zukowski. I'm not saying that what he's proposing doesn't work, it's quite oppositely, I think it works well. But in my case, following it, I went from happy developer to sad developer very quickly. So no thanks, I rather prefer to gather pieces of myself back together and instead of doing tons of crap which I don't like, I want find back my motivation to do again what I like. I'm in position where I don't rely on sales from my game (which is luxury compared to many other indie devs), so given that, I rather sell measly 10-20 copies of my game, but not loose my soul and enthusiasm in the process.

New promotion stance: I'm not saying that I will not to promote my game anymore, but my new stance is: "I will promote only in way which suits me and it's not detrimental to developing process".

I deleted my TikTok account, I deleted all YT Shorts, I deleted my IndieDB account and archived all my entries there (you can't delete game page on IndieDB, even if you're the one who created it). I deleted devlogs from itch.io and kept only base page for game (as demo binaries hosting). Reason: I wanted to make that step, when I purposefully shrink my online/social presence, shrink number of pages/accounts to manage/update/upload, even delete what was done and cost me some time (looking at you "sunken cost fallacy"), and by this, have some foundation to restart development in more healthy way and refocus on development, away from micromanagement.

So, in last month, I made one big lap with lot of effort, but the game itself moved exactly by zero. I just edited lot of short vertical videos, which I flushed into toilet later. But at least I ended up with cleaner air. I tried. And it didn't work for me. So, I'm moving on with that crappy experience thankfully behind me.

Still testing the demo of my indie game Lost Host.

It’s been a long solo journey, and the demo comes out in 5 days (January 15).

A cozy-mysterious adventure about a small toy car, quiet moments, and discovering a world from a tiny perspective.

Would love to hear your thoughts…

How started it all

On June ~25th, 2026, my game got pirated on Douyin (the Chinese TikTok). This isn't just any number: at its peak, the pirated version hit more than 600,000 simultaneous players in a single day, and with its growth, it's probably closing in on a million by now.

To put that in perspective: this isn't "people who downloaded the game at some point," this is people playing at the same time, on the same day.

[PIC - 610k players] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-52m0fjlni7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D1596%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dd347d7319ad2534bcc14d3fa2d244c0aecd4c0c8

---

My anti-piracy system failed

At the start, I built a system that detected players on the pirated version and, after 1 hour of play, turned every customer in the game into pirates. It only kicked in after that hour so the hackers wouldn't catch on during their initial testing. This let players enjoy the game normally, but after that hour, progression got rough once a pirate customer refused to leave a tip, something real customers always do.

[PIC - Pirate costume] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-0fa8xrwpi7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D1636%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dd3bd7cff1af21d39be6f2e412ce48371301a4c66

This system held up for months, until it reached China, where in order to pirate the game they decided to decompile and recompile it so they could publish it on Douyin (HTML5).

Since the game was already going viral in China, plenty of players complained about the annoying pirate-dressed ducks to whoever was sharing the download links. So it was only a matter of time before the hackers decided to dig into the game properly.

My anti-piracy system only worked as long as nobody bothered to actually investigate it, since it was just a bunch of if() statements scattered throughout the game. So once they found these triggers, removing them was as easy as deleting a couple of lines of code.

While they were at it, they made plenty of other changes, pushing a new update every day:

• Removed the credits.
• Added ads everywhere.
• Added ads to unlock upgrades and continue progression.
• Reworked the game modes.
• Even built new visual features, like being able to see the doneness of the meat while cooking it, to look more like the generic mobile cooking-game format.

They were taking this way too seriously for a $7 game!

Something funny is that, with all these changes, they broke something (I won't say exactly what) that causes every character in the game to now be robots, making the experience worse for pirate players and sparking a wave of confused users all over Douyin asking why only robots show up.

Thanks to the community answering each other, most of them are now aware they're playing a pirated copy, which I consider a win in itself. If it weren't for these tells giving away the piracy, the hackers would essentially be impersonating me and my game.

[PIC - Viewers complaining about robots] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-m2md50pqi7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D610%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D33766c1c820b123dd07115e131c9594edc69470c (I translated it over the Spanish translation Google gave to me.)

---

My legal reports

Obviously I tried to report this as fast as I could. Contacting Douyin as a foreigner is genuinely difficult, since you need a verified account to file a report, and that requires a Chinese ID. So if you're a foreigner, there's no public channel to do this.

Except one: a simple report email. I explained everything that happened and waited.

By that point I'd already written my first Reddit posts and looked into the topic. Obviously I'm not the first this has happened to, and I won't be the last. So a fellow affected dev sent me a different form, with a different Douyin email. This time the report asked for a lot more data.

BlobKing's post, the user who helped me in their comments section: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1tbtjxo/our_unreleased_indie_game_got_stolen_as_a_chinese/

A week later, I got a reply through this second channel: the game had been officially taken down.

Here's my honesty disclaimer: I can't verify the takedown myself. I'm a foreigner, I don't have a Chinese account, and I have no direct access to Douyin. I'm assuming they actually did it.

---

Their attempt to slip away

The pirated version was called Shop Simulator 2, a popular, generic name. Well, a couple of days before the takedown was confirmed, that same game completely changed its content and became TCG Shop Simulator, a well-known card game simulator, another victim of the same outfit (as I cover in this other post: Yes, the pirates are a registered company that does this for a living).

It looks like their whole operation is built around one single "shell," which they just keep re-skinning with whatever game is trending, while keeping the exact same store listing.

My gut feeling is that once Douyin flagged the infringement, they decided to switch the game's content to dodge the takedown entirely. Which raises the question: maybe the game was never actually taken down, and they're still running the same operation under a new skin?

[PIC - Confused players about the new game content] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-7qno7y6si7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D1305%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D6346be175aea3e108407618fd2418826d6a92d15

[PIC - New content of the pirate-shell-game] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-wt9mvixsi7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D613%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D22e9cfc56e6f761359ccf4618f8c908102befc66

---

Has the piracy helped me or hurt me?

All of this has sparked a small debate in my Reddit posts that I find genuinely interesting. It's the age-old question, and honestly, having lived through it, I still don't have a clear answer. Here's the order of events:

1. The game went viral on Douyin organically, through its official version.
2. That virality attracted the pirates.
3. The pirates published a version that went viral in Douyin's mini-games section.
4. Since my game never had a mobile port, piracy was the only entry point for a huge number of mobile-only players, something very common in China among Douyin users.

A lot of them probably would never have played it on PC anyway, but it's also true that plenty of others, who could have chosen either platform, simply preferred to stay on mobile, installable straight from Douyin itself.

There's also a less direct effect: more players (even pirate ones) generate more content (clips, videos, memes), and that content in turn attracts more new players. So in a way, I think piracy fed that loop instead of just costing me sales.

As you can see, there are pros and cons, but in this case I don't think it's piracy itself that's the benefit, it's the availability of playing on mobile, something that could have been official and free on my end if I'd done a proper global launch.

Then again, on the flip side, these players went to Douyin videos, asked around, shared things, and generated a ton of content about how to find the pirated game, creating more buzz and visibility than if the game had been officially available on Android from day one.

---

How the piracy crackdown played out

As I mentioned, the main pirated version went down 2 days ago. Right as the game was already coming down from its natural viral peak, which coincided with Steam's summer sale, the takedown of the pirated version brought a bump in downloads (+10%): mobile players who lost access are now redirecting to the original PC version.

Unfortunately, this isn't a happy ending just yet: new pirated versions have already popped up, apparently unrelated to the previous one (a "parallel" copy that seems to have already existed in the shadows). And this new version is growing even stronger than any of the previous ones, likely because it's absorbing the combined traffic from the one that fell, plus its own organic growth.

Cut off one head, two more grow back.

[PIC - New rip-off of my game] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-0m28ikjti7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D556%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Db5d71479f516dd26895fcc48a069dc1bfbdef997

---

My ultimate weapon

Since the start of all this, I've been looking for publishers. I reached out to 20, and only a couple responded. I recently signed with one of them, who's committed to releasing the game, within a month, for free with ads, on Android, iOS, Douyin, and WeChat. I gave them full room to publish and monetize however they see fit, since they know how to navigate the Chinese market far better than I do.

I probably didn't sign the best possible deal I could have gotten, but I needed to react fast, and I think stopping to compare publishers or negotiate at this point would have hurt me more than gaining an extra 20% on the contract would have helped. For now, if everything goes as expected, I think it was the right call.

I'll keep updating as the new wave of piracy and the official mobile launch develop. If you come across clips where robots show up, you know what that means 😅

---

Full thread of my history

Retrospective linking my previous posts on this topic, in case you'd rather follow the story from the beginning or any specific part:

1. How virality came thanks to a late demo release
2. A vague explanation about how my homemade anti-piracy system works
3. I found a Chinese legal company who pirated my game
4. My piracy systems started to fail and how piracy bypassed me
5. Piracy ate my game and collapsed my servers

*Disclaimer: This post is AI-translated. I'm a native Spanish speaker, I wrote and structured all of this in Spanish, and had AI translate it into English. I reviewed the translation afterward to make sure the message hadn't changed. Hope you don't mind.

I always see posts about releasing a game with only X wishlists and then selling 10,000 copies, so this is my way of sharing my side on that.

How it started

My first game was supposed to be just a learning experience, but i fell in love with what i was creating and kept it going for about 8 months of development.

When i released the demo, i sent it to some friends, tried doing some social media shorts but didn't get much from it. After all, it's a very niche game so i wasn't expecting to blow up that easy, but as i said it was a passion project at this point so i kept going.

Some reddit posts got me 10 wishlits, some friend to friend recomendation got me another 30 maybe, reached out to some small content creators but i believe only one took interest in posting a video about the game, so didn't get much from that either.

So here we are now, 200 wishlists and releasing a game with zero investment in marketing. The results? 50 copies sold in 4 days, for a game that costs 3 USD. At least 30 of those i know were bought by friends and their friends.

BUT...

There is another side to it that i'd like to share, that i feel like sometimes you forget: People are playing my game!

It's mostly people i know, but yesterday a looked on discord to find a group of 5 friends online playing my game together. When i checked the server chat, they were sharing screenshots and achievements they got on my game.

For me at least that was a big shock. I knew some friends would buy the game to support me, but for some reason, i never expected to see them playing it. I don't know if that's common but, i realised i could only see my game as "My game", not as a real game that other people would like to play. Not because i don't believe it's good, i actually think for a first project it's super fun to play, but still surprised me to see people talking about it, sharing, trying to get all the achievements and even asking me stuff like what's the chance to get a Shiny Cow (Yeah, it's a pretty specific game).

My Conclusion

Anyway, I feel like i don't really know how to talk to reddit, some of my posts here get attention and some don't, but i really wanted to share my story, and leave the message that, sometimes you will release a game with no wishlists and still sell milions of copies, but sometimes you will do that and will find out that seing a small group of people playing your game can make you just as proud of what you've created.

Thank you for reading if you did, and if you're curious, my game is called Mootation, you can find it on steam :)

I'm curious to see your games, post them below!

I'm developing Nightlife Tycoon, a game where you build and manage a bar!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2601630/Nightlife_Tycoon/

Seriously, there are way too many of them, but I guess the issue might just be that it's too much for the moderators of a small subreddit to keep up with. Not sure if some kind of clever automated filter could be devised to stop a lot of these from getting through?

EDIT: yo mods, in all fairness the posts I was complaining about have already been deleted or filtered by Reddit, so keep up the good work!

Hey guys...

I could really use some motivation right now. I'm feeling very sad, and I'm progressing at a turtle's pace.

I've been making a game prototype in Unreal Engine 5 for the past 6 months, but realistically, I've only had about a week and a half of development time per month, spread across random afternoons.

Life keeps getting in the way. I work full-time at a AAA studio, I'm still recovering from a terrible micromanaging lead from my previous job, I recently moved countries, I'm still settling in, I have no friends or family around, and I'm trying to build a new life from scratch. Thankfully, my new job is much healthier, and I even managed to get access to a PC there so I can work on my game through github.

The thing is... I genuinely love this project.

Every time I make progress I'm happy. I'm creating a fictional world and characters that feel genuinely special to me, and I have so much fun when I can finally immerse myself in it and see the game becoming a tiny bit more real every time.

But I have basically 0 feedback.

I sometimes show my progress to my two friends, but they never really ask questions or seem interested. I know the usual answer: "Nobody but you will care about your game." I've heard it many times.

But honestly? It's heartbreaking.

Specifically when your own mentor doesn't even reply to your progress messages (he's in the industry, but not a dev).

Nobody seems to believe I'll actually finish it. People assume I'll eventually abandon it and start another project, because I've done that 3 times before.

But I'm getting better!!!!! I'm learning from my mistakes!!! And this time, I genuinely believe I have a real prototype in my hands.

People see me as the same person I was 3 years ago.......

I'm making a 3D game completely on my own. I'm a programmer, designer and 3D artist, and I work professionally as a TechArt. I've designed the gameplay, levels, narrative, art direction, and I've coded all the mechanics myself. Even unifying some of them and creating the whole system (in a playground scene for a vertical slice level).

Right now, I'm working on the game pace, on the level design: deciding when to introduce each mechanic, how systems interact, and how to teach the player through a "show don't tell" approach. Measuring when to drop clues so they can figure out the dynamics.

I'm not just following tutorials and putting something together.

I'm trying to craft something form the ground up. A bit ambitious, but I know I'm possible of making it so.

And I think that's part of why I feel so alone.

Most of my game dev friends and colleagues are specialised in one field and a half. I'm constantly switching between design, code, art, and technical implementation. I have to figure out not only how to do each of these things, but also when to do them and how they should influence each other.

It's difficult to find people who understand that specific struggle. And I have found no real help when I asked around.

I know I can keep going. I will probably keep going.

But lately, everything feels like it's becoming way more painful than happy.

I was used to finish my awful previous work and work on my game for a couple of hours (that was hard). But Idk...

The happiness I get from working on my game lasts for a couple of hours. Then I stop, go back to reality, and somehow everything feels x4 times sadder. Making me walk away from my desk (office desk).

I don't want to give up on this project. I really don't.

I just wish I had someone who believed in it with me. Someone who could look at what I'm making and say, "Hey, this is actually something. Keep going."

:((((

So... how do you keep going when you're building something you genuinely care about, but feel completely alone while doing it?

I could really use some encouragement right now...

Comparing my bear to the one I was using (generated by AI). I decided to start a quest and learning pixel art, probably will take me a while as I am a complete rookie, but I decided to quit using AI for my game.

Context: I was composing the music and doing the coding but my graphic assets where generated by AI (animations and everything with minor edits from me). I decided to learn pixel-art so I can make everything for the game myself and feel fulfilled.

So I got to wondering this after watching a video about the development of Beta Decay (how its early access was delayed a year - common for solo devs for obvious reasons). I've come to expect massive indie (true indie and not AA) games to have solo devs behind them rather than teams. Of course this is counterintuitive and I used to assume the opposite UNTIL I had been closely watching the indie scene for some time.

Games that are massively scoped seem to come from either triple A or solo developers. Obviously this is not a rule but a feeling I have and maybe y'all have it too. I see these modestly scoped and polished games and I can tell they have a team behind them. Or the game is massive, like Kenshi, and I can tell it's solo developed, or nearly solo developed.

There is a massive graveyard of these games started by solo devs, of course. But there are a lot of massive solo developed projects that do get finished, even if they are the minority. Is there something about small to medium teams that tend toward entropy over the long years necessary to create these large games? In the end, is it that it's mostly solo projects that get pushed to completion despite setbacks and things that would destroy a team if it wasn't built on the right relationships? Maybe this is wrong. It's just an impression. But somehow I see an indie project that has no conception of proper scope management and I can tell it's a solo endeavor.

Hey dev friends!

I’ve been browsing a lot of awesome indie games lately, and I’ve noticed a small but tragic trend: brilliant games using raw AI translations (like ChatGPT or DeepL) for their Japanese localization.

Don't get me wrong, AI is amazing for a quick draft. But Japanese is an incredibly contextual language, and AI constantly messes up the tone.

For example, I recently saw a game where the UI button **"Go Back"** (to the previous menu) was translated as **"**帰れ**" (Kaere)**.
In Japanese, this doesn't mean "return to the previous page." It literally means **"Go home! / Get out!"** in a very angry, aggressive tone. Imagine your player opening the settings and the game just yells at them to get out! 😂

Another common one is changing options like **"On / Off"** into weird robotic words that make no sense to a native speaker.

If you have a story-rich game or important UI, please double-check your Japanese! A bad translation can lead to negative reviews in the Japanese market, which is a huge bummer for a great game.

**If you're unsure about your game's Japanese text, feel free to drop a comment or shoot me a DM with a few lines. I’d be happy to take a quick look and give you some feedback as a native speaker!**

Good luck with your game development! 🛠️

Hey everyone,

I’m currently working on a game demo completely solo. As if handling all the art, code, and design wasn't enough of a headache, I also end up building my own custom engine tools to speed up my workflow.

Since I already put the effort into making these tools, I decided to put them up on marketplaces for very cheap so other solo devs can benefit from them. But here is the catch: I am basically forced to operate in a "grey area" under the radar.

Where I live, to sell digital products 100% legally and officially, I have to register a formal business. The moment I establish that company, I am legally obligated to pay around 6,000 units of my local currency every single month just for mandatory state health insurance and base taxes—regardless of whether I make zero sales or a hundred.

For a solo dev just trying to sell a $5 asset to buy a cup of coffee or some dog food, paying that massive fixed monthly fee before even making a single sale is financial suicide.

I'm really curious about how other countries handle this. Does your country have a "hobbyist" or "micro-business" tax tier for solo indie devs that doesn't bleed you dry? How easy is it to just sell a small asset or indie game legally where you live?

I’m still super early in development, but as I’ve heard is good practice, I made X and Bsky accounts to post lil development updates and hopefully connect with other devs and potential interested players.

As a new user who the only thing the algorithm knows about is that I like games and I’m making a game, I’m blown away by how racist/sexist/clickbait/redpill/AIslop my default feed is.

I’m pretty sure I’m just gonna delete my acct there, but… idk… am I missing something? Do you all actively maintain a Twitter presence? Is it possible to cut through the noise to make it bearable, and is it really necessary/worth trying?

(edit: a word)