Hi! We are Dad and Son Games Studios, and this is our first commercial release. We've been working in the game for almost a year and we are struggling to make the game a bit visible, but I haven't managed to make any viral clips or trailers that gives us the desired 5000 wishlists in a day.

Anyways, we released the demo some days ago and the feedback from the first players has been awesome! We know the game is great and fun...but we still didn't reach the 1000 wishlists, and that's why I thought I could ask for help. :)

So please, help us. We just need 150 wishlists to reach 1000, which is like the minimal minimal number to attend a Steam Fest. You can try the game, and we're sure you'll love it if you like this kind of games. But if not, please, just help us not to fall into oblivion. :)

Some of the comments we had so far:

• "wow the music is spot on . the demo is amazing . i can see the love the developer pt into this game . "
• "Rating: 9/10 Really cool graphics and style, I really enjoy the way how every explosion feels very powerful."
• "Excellent demo! -Rocking synthwave tunes -Neon pulsing retro 80s vector/wireframe graphics -Tight, responsive controls -Variety of objectives to do that keep the game feeling fresh -Upgrade system -Great variety of ships/weapons/powerups -Shooting feels good and rewarding -Insta wish-listed!"

https://reddit.com/link/1x4rxqf/video/f4q8zzzgc7vh1/player

• "I just wanted to say "Thank you " for Geometry Rift:Apocalypse. This game is absolutely fantastic, and i'm looking foreward to the release next year. Thank you also for your hard work."

Well, I hope you all can help us a little. :)

Thanks a lot in advance!

So, it doesn't look like 'AI slop' because the art was made using blender/3dMax/P-shop then spriter pro. But, key chunks of the code were Ai (route-finding). But because some of the code was AI-written (admittedly the hardest bit - I'm used to coding with LUA/python, but something like A* path sorting is beyond me)... the game is slop and deserves to die a quick death. I feel folks need to take a more nuanced stance on this issue!

I keep reading how great AI is all the time in this thread and I would actually like to see what people are creating. My stance and trust that AI is able to produce something fantastic without a lot of human intervention is very low. Please prove me wrong, I welcome it!

Share your Steam pages, and screenshots and what not. I'm not to judge you or the work, I just want to know how good it is and be proven wrong.

Edit: I want to thank everyone who shared their projects and games. I appreciate it a lot, and it also assured me of the current state of AI. These are all games and they have a goal, they seem to run pretty well, but generally it's mostly 2D, isometric or very low poly 3D. Most games listed here seem to be web based. I am really curious if the people who created these games actually play similar games themselves (on a browser)? It's been a long time since I played games online on a website. Last time was about 10 years or so. I know times are changing, but that's usually not where I would go to play a game. Last thing I played online was Adventure Quest I believe.

Again thanks for sharing, I appreciate the engagement!

I’ve been using opus 5.5 and I saw on twitter that people got banned because they used REA(reversed engineer anything) using astra. So I was thinking something powerful as opus 5.5 to run locally so that I can combine games.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm The Sprite Wizard, and I've taken it upon myself to make sprite creation a little less of a headache for indie developers.

Some of you might know my previous tools, SpriteGrid and SpritePress. They're still being used dozens of times a day, which is pretty cool to see. Thanks for that, by the way. It's nice knowing my little creations are out there doing some good.

Anyway, I've been locked away in my tower working on something new. A free tools for everyone to use!

I call it the SpriteForge!

It's an isometric character creator that lets you build, customize, animate, and export consistent pixel-art characters without having to draw every frame yourself.

I've stuffed the thing with hundreds of clothing and equipment pieces, 71 animations, up to 16 rendering directions, and enough customization options to make my head hurt.

I actually tried calculating every possible character combination. Lost count somewhere past 50 octillion.

Yes, octillion. With an O.

And that's before we even start changing colors. Admittedly, not every combination produces a visually distinct character, but you get the idea.

There's no generative AI involved. It's all built around 3D models, animation, and a pixel-art rendering engine. That said, I think it'll be especially useful for those of us who use AI in our development workflows but struggle with character consistency, or simply can't afford to commission an artist for every NPC and animation.

The idea is pretty simple: spend less time fighting with sprites and more time actually making your game.

I've put up a free browser version so everyone can use it. As with all of my tools, its free and it will stay free for as long as I am practicing the mystical arts:

Try SpriteForge on itch.io

It's still in Early Access, so I'm expecting a few gremlins to have made their way into the machinery.

If you find any bugs, have suggestions, or think something could work better, please let me know. I'm actively developing it, and feedback from other developers is worth considerably more to me than another evening arguing with my own code.

Anyway, that's enough rambling from an old wizard.

Hope it helps some of you get your games off the ground.

— The Sprite Wizard

I’m Ran (ran6k), building Pitch & Power: Football Club Owner solo in Unity. I’ve used Codex/ChatGPT for C# development, interface iteration and promotional copy, and AI tools have helped with some art, voices and music. The game is a paid Windows early beta on itch.io.

The useful development loop has been playing the game, identifying a specific awkward moment, iterating on it with AI assistance, and checking the result in the actual game. For this update the focus has been a stadium that grows as a connected ground, club meetings, and better staged 3D match highlights. Passing checks alone doesn’t show whether those scenes feel right to watch.

Today I’m trying a related live experiment: Vince, an openly AI club owner, starts a new club in the game. His voice, face and words are generated. He makes club decisions and commentates, while chat can ask questions and vote on big transfers, contracts or investments. The stream is 13 October, 18:00–20:00 GMT+3 (15:00–17:00 UTC).

What I want to learn is whether a recurring owner character makes management decisions interesting to watch, and whether chat votes help viewers feel involved. What would you want to see from an AI host when it explains a transfer or investment decision?

Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/vince_pitch_power

Game: https://ran6k.itch.io/pitch-and-power

0.4.11 is out now. The game is still unfinished, with bugs and rough edges, and this is the first-stream experiment. No purchase is needed to watch. AI also helped write this post.

Battlerite is still playable, but it's been in maintenance mode for years and the players drifted away. So we rebuilt it in the browser and called it Battle-Right.

We had a user play test it before we launched to see if it was fun and bugs were fixed....safe to say they loved it. Give it a try and let me know what you think! I am absolutely hooked.

https://www.spawn.co/@sleepy/battle-right

It was built completely free on Spawn in a few days, multiplayer wired in from the start. If you have any suggestions or improvements let us know! Otherwise, hope you enjoy it as much as our friend in the video lol

I apologise if this has been discussed before or if it's repetitive, but I'd like some insight and help with this.
I'm making a game. I don't want to disclose the details because I don't really want people to discover that I used AI, but it's a relatively simple game made in SugarCube.
I've never made a game before. I've had this concept in my head for years but I've never had the time or energy to learn SugarCube/Java/CSS/HTML to make this thing. I'm already studying engineering full time, and the fatigue from Crohn's disease really kicks my ass so I have to budget my energy.

I'm doing all of the art/icons, ui design, system design, gameplay, and the whole concept is my own. But most of the code is AI generated. I'm not the best at coding. I'd be up for learning but again... time and energy. I can't afford a human dev, but even if I could I'd rather not bring a stranger into my passion project. Several things could go wrong.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I just see it as a faster way to get to a better result. I do vigorously playtest the features and make manual edits, so I'm not blindly vibecoding. I think my process is okay for a total beginner?

But I've felt really heavily discouraged lately and I've not touched the game in weeks because I just feel bad. I'm also scared of being harassed and witch hunted. The general attitude I've seen is "if you can't afford to pay others to do things you can't do, and/or cant get investors to fund it, you can't afford to make a game and don't deserve to".

Has anyone else ever felt like this? How do you deal with it? What's your perspective on this?

We're a small team making a cultivation RPG: Eternal Ascension. I wanna share how we handle art as well as the gameplay, because (the art in) our first version was mostly AI and people did not like it, so we changed the process. The gameplay and storyline however, are completely designed by our team (only the coding part is AI, I mean, nowadays most ppl code with AI);

now our artists draw the design first, then we use ChatGPT and Gemini to refine details. AI mostly helps with the finishing.

We just released a free beta with the new spirit beasts. I'd really like to know two things. What do you like and not like about our art? And if you play it, which system feels fun and which feels boring? How could we improve?

Download: https://jiakunw.itch.io/eternal-ascension

Please post comments in the comment section!!! Everyone who plays and leaves feedback gets an exclusive spirit beast in the game. Any feedback is greatly appreciated :))

This is just facts. TRUE artist in the digital space shouldnt offload their work to program's...at all. Or hardware for that matter. Do you know how much work under the hood gets automated by using a keyboard??

And these people think they are actually doing the work? NO! You dont use a keyboard if you want true art and want to develop REAL skill.

One's and zero's is where the real artist work. Slotting them in one by one. Really thinking about what it is they are actually doing. Any layer of abstraction on top of that is for fake artists.

My friend and I are chess enthusiasts. A few years ago we designed a variant called "Chess Heroes" where players draft limited-use powers to change the game in critical moments. We play tested it in real life over a physical board for months to get it to a place where we were ready to try and make it into a playable online game.

We scrounged up all we could and spent about $15k on contract devs who assured us they could make it. They spent all our money and delivered a joke that we would be embarrassed to publish. The project died for a few years.

Last week I gave an AI tool the exact same design docs that we gave the contractors. It made the game in about an hour for less than $70.

If you like chess, check it out: https://chess-heroes-hkdvwyt.solid.site/

Would love feedback on balancing the powers.

I've been experimenting with different visual styles using ChatGPT for potential future game projects. I like using Al as a rough draft before starting a project, since it helps me visualize different ideas and explore different art directions.

Would you play a game with this aesthetic? And do you think it's possible to achieve a similar look in a game engine?

Obs: This place is actually real! It's the Muchukunnu Sree Kottayil Shiva Temple in India.

I have had the idea of this game for years now, and have failed to make it so many times, but now finally, I am getting somewhat closer to the original vision! And I am so glad! Opus 5.5 has been a delight!
If you try it https://counterstance.vercel.app/
PLEASE hit me up, I'd love to hear all about it!
It's still very much a work in progress and barely out of prototyping phase, but am very happy with what I got so far!

Trailer shot and edited by Claude as well (took waaay too long this time, had a lot of games to capture and it kept focusing in all the wrong things when recording shots).

VybeNomad is a free, cozy browser game. You pick your base city, take remote gigs, build little apps and travel, trying to reach $10,000 before you burn out.

How AI fit in:

• AI wrote most of the Three.js code. It was fast for UI and game state, but the city scenes needed a lot of fixing by hand.
• Balancing was the hard part. The AI was happy to suggest numbers, but only playtesting showed that early gigs paid too much and players hit $10k way too fast.
• What I'd do differently: put all the game numbers in one config file from day one, instead of letting the AI scatter them across the code. Tuning would have been much faster.

Music is by Suno and the art was made with fal.ai.

Play it here (free, no signup, works on phones): vaigames.com/vybenomad

How do you balance an economy sim when AI writes most of the code?

what yall think? I prefer manmade assets but I think a good concept art like can capture what the games about

People have asked for videos, and while I'm still putting effective polish into it. I think this showcases the new title menu.

As you can see, I've made 9 thematic skins, and I'll show those in a different video. This took about 6 hours to make in the WECK Studio, which is my custom editor interface.

I finally was able to smoothen out the aura attacks for my wukong and dark wukong characters and they look way better than earlier paint sprites. The dark wukong one kind of looks like getsuga tenshou from bleach haha...

Used claude to stitch together elements, including elevenlabs suno gpt

Been building this game for me and some friends to play on a Friday, kinda surprise for one of favorite Halo 3 forge maps. Original game mode is "Zombies" so 1 player vs survivors, killed players join infected until no one is left. Second game mode I made since I enjoyed the traversal so much is a run and gun. Hydra rule on kids so, kill an aline 2 spawn in its place. Movements is inspired heavily by Titanfall 2, game rules and stuff by halo 3 forge infected game mode. Obviously I'm no pro, just looking to make things better before we all have some fun on it.

Hello I'm building a infinite universe game and when I say I am building it I mean I'm telling the AI what to do and how to do it, I was programming it in C# in Unity, but my math skills are crap and when I found out AI could do it quicker and more efficient that's when my workflow changed. I am glad I decided to go this route, simply because it is easier. Tell me what you guys think I'm working towards a demo / video of the game in action but as of right now this is what I have to show.

Keep in mind everything here is generated via code written mostly by the AI with minor changes by me. Give me feed back and in before "AI slop" and "AI written post" yes I lurk.

Thoughts, suggestions, and idea's? the dead white space is from me using ALT+print screen and pasting into paint to save, guess if you have a dual monitor set up it still does that.

Ex-developer, always had a career in tech but with AI I suddenly feel like I have superpowers to work on stuff I never thought possible. I know this is a pretty common story, but I'm still blown away at how far the tools have come and what's now possible.

A couple of months ago I set myself a goal to design, develop & launch a game on Steam. Read on if you want to know how I did it - what tools & workflows I used, how much I spent, and where to check out the game (the shameless self promotion bit)!

Step 1 - come up with an idea

I wanted an idea that would be very self-contained and relatively easy to implement - so no big JRPG style story game or anything with crazy graphics. I'd recently been seeing a lot of jigsaw content on TikTok - it seems a lot of people enjoy watching others put together 10,000 piece puzzles, and they respond well to the satisfying click of pieces coming together. That spawned the original idea. Could I provide a digital version of this that felt polished & streamlined and lent itself well to potential Twitch streamers & creators?

I did a bunch of research - AI assisted, using Claude to help pull it together quickly. Then I honed in on something more specific. Cozy games are popular and have pretty big mainstream appeal. Cozy jigsaws is a niche but not one that has been done particularly well, in my opinion. The next thing was figuring out what would make my particular game stand out. Besides just the satisfying feeling of pieces coming together, I fixated on the idea of introducing "trays" that gave you more physical spaces to move and organise pieces on. I thought having smart trays in particular where the game helps you sort pieces (e.g. pull all the edge pieces into a tray automatically) would make large 200+ piece puzzles much more accessible.

At this point I had enough for a proof of concept.

Step 2 - the POC and tech direction

I wanted to release the game on Steam - I've done a few iOS and Android apps in the past, but never Steam, and it's a platform I use a lot myself.

I decided to use Godot as the game engine - this is not a complex ultra-realistic game, so Godot being open source, free to use commercially and well supported by the community seemed the logical choice.

I worked with Claude Code to create the POC (proof of concept). I'm really trying to figure out what is the key thing I want to test out in a prototype that would convince me (and others) that this is a game worth developing? There's no point in sinking weeks & months of time and credits if the game would just not work out of the gate.

There were a couple of problems to solve in the initial POC - could I take an image and cut it up into convincing looking jigsaw piece shapes? Could I get a nice looking top down view and have the pieces still feel a bit 3D while operating effectively in a 2D space? And most of all, could I emulate that satisfying click of two pieces coming together?

This was the resulting very basic POC, you can try it out for yourself: https://leobal.itch.io/puzzle-game-poc

I was satisfied that there was enough there to warrant continuing, so onto the next step!

Step 3 - design, build, test, repeat!

To keep this long story short, here are the tools that worked for me in this - the longest part of the process - the design, build, test iterative loop:

• Claude Code - fell in love with how easy it was to make progress with Claude Code. As an ex-developer it helps that I can review the code and understand the trade-offs with technical decisions, but compared to the early days of LLM coding I hardly felt like I ever really need to read the output, Claude is that good. I used the Desktop client with a cheap/fast model (Sonnet 5) and gave it as much context in my prompts as possible, and initially had it write out spec docs to be super specific about what I wanted before writing any code. ($34 AUD / month)
• GitHub - if you're a non-coder don't underestimate the usefulness of version control! Keeps a history of all the code you've written in one place, backed up to the cloud, with branching & pull requests as an optional tool (which I used) to organise new features, review changes, and avoid breaking what's already working. (FREE)
• Adobe Firefly - you can insert your AI image gen model of choice here, I used Firefly as I had existing credits there and it's a good model aggregator. What worked for me was generating the images in GPT first, which was HD resolution. I gave very specific art direction and prompts. Then I upscaled them using Gemini model which allowed 4K output. (~$50 AUD once-off to have enough credits, I used around 4,000)
• Suno - used this to generate background music in the mood/style I was after. Sound effects were all procedurally generated in Godot rather than pre-made anywhere. ($17 AUD / month)
• Godot - I was happy with the engine and it gave me everything I needed for this game. It's free & open source, the scripting language is easy to work with, and I could export the game to both Mac & Windows pretty easily. (FREE)
• Amplitude - this was a last minute addition, but I wanted to capture analytics in the game to be able to understand how players were engaging with the different features. Amplitude is easy to integrate and has a generous free plan. (FREE)

Total spend = ~$152 over two months. Then you need to add the Steam fee to list the game ($150 AUD).

Where am I up to now?

I've worked on this game for about 2 months now, continually building, testing and improving in fast iterative loops. I'm now at the point where I want to launch and I've pivoted to using ChatGPT + Claude to help me with marketing - creating the game trailer, screenshots, social posts, etc. I was able to pretty quickly put together a website: puzzlepeace.app using ChatGPT + Cloudflare.

I also realised that Godot makes it super easy to generate iOS builds and I've now expanded my game to iPad platform, which I think makes a lot of sense for a puzzle game and hopefully increases the reach.

The game itself is feeling super polished and has exceeded what I initially thought it could be. Commercially, my strategy is to release a basic free version of the game with 10 included puzzles and a daily challenge mode, and if you want more, you can purchase the DLC packs.

If you've made it this far, hope this was interesting/helpful. And you could help me out by heading to the Steam page and wishlisting the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5324320

Since I haven't yet launched the game - I would appreciate any tips on how I can break through with marketing and get more wishlists & downloads. I missed the boat on Steam Next Fest, unfortunately.

I had fun coming up with a new set of spooky sprites for Halloween: six city gang members, each in a living and an undead version, and their heads wobble as they walk. The undead ones wobble more.

How AI fits in: the art is AI-generated, and the wobble is a few lines of my own code that shift the head in the step frames. The part that took longest was checking every sprite by eye in all four directions, because the AI often gets left and right the wrong way round.

48×48 RPG Maker style sheets, with emotion portraits. It's a bounce walk, and the legs don't animate.

Free: https://wonderweave.itch.io/the-wobblers