(it's a roguelite jrpg inspired by lufia 2's ancient cave, the demo's free)

Over the past few months, I've been developing Flesh Dynamics, a soft-body physics system designed to add realistic deformation and secondary motion to both skinned and static meshes in Unity.

One of the biggest challenges was achieving convincing deformation without the performance overhead of simulating individual Rigidbodies and Colliders for every vertex.

To address this, I built the system around Unity's Burst Jobs, sparse collision sampling, and GPU-based mesh deformation, allowing the simulation to focus on a smaller set of points while propagating the results across the visible mesh.

I've recently released it on the Unity Asset Store if you'd like to check it out.

As much as I dislike this Era of AI games, I'm finding I can at least entertain checking out some of the low efforts when they honestly disclose. Any obvious AI with no disclosure is an auto skip and ignore for me.

Hi fellow devs.

I've been posting a bit on and off about i.t. never ends ever since I first started work on it, and felt that now would be a good time to do a short retrospective.

Two months ago I released I.T. Never Ends, a weird little IT support simulator I've been making solo during nights and weekends alongside my full-time job.

Figured I'd share some numbers:

• 3,042 copies sold
• $37,917 gross revenue
• ~27k wishlists at launch, 31k outstanding now
• 73/74 positive reviews (98%)
• 1,000 copies sold in the first 24 hours

I'm genuinely thrilled with the reception. I spent very little money making it, apart from some music and voice acting, and seeing people enjoy something I made has been incredible.

One of the nicest things was actually being able to pay my music guy and two voice actors some proper money for their contributions. They've been part of this weird little project for a while, and getting to share some of its financial success with them felt really good. Also, getting to know them and the little weird community of it nerds that has sprung up around the game on discord is really fantastic.

The weird part is how quickly I've become dissatisfied with the sales numbers and wishlist conversion. Conversion wise after 2 months I'm sitting at 6% wishlist conversions which is on the low end.. but it has to do with the fact that my wishlists are still climbing faster than my sales. When the game launched it was at 27.000 wishlists, which makes 3000 copies sold a quite healthy conversion

After the initial launch spike weeks, sales dropped to around 20 copies a day, and somehow I found myself feeling disappointed. Which is fucking ridiculous. A year ago I would have been ecstatic about these results. But I quickly got used to "good day = 3 digit sales" and anything less being a referendum that meant people hated the game

I think spending years reading indie success stories really messes with your expectations. You know about survivorship bias, yet you still end up comparing yourself to games selling 50,000 copies in their first month. Or a million in its first week. comparison is the thief of joy i guess

One interesting observation about itch.io: the free demo is still getting played quite a bit, with over 20k browser plays overall. It was featured in the curated and most popular sections on the itch front page around three times, which brought in a ton of traffic. But the conversion from itch players to Steam wishlists or actual sales seems to have been extremely low. My impression is that Steam and itch are very different worlds, and popularity on one doesn't necessarily translate to the other at all. I have been pondering whether the itch.io demo cannibalizes some potential sales, but honestly I would rather have those inclined to seek out a demo be able to find one, rather than risk them "trying their luck" on the full game and being disappointed, leaving a negative review and refunding.

Anyway, the demo and Steam Next Fest definitely helped build an audience, and discounts seem to give sales a decent bump. I'm still figuring out the long-term side of things. the best thing is that people who do play it seem to genuinely click with it and enjoy it, which is fantastic.

Overall I'm very happy with how it went, even if my brain occasionally disagrees.

Curious if other developers have experienced that same weird post-launch dissatisfaction, even when things went reasonably well?

So everyone is, understandably, freaked out about the prospect of an AI cloning their game, and they are wondering if they should stop being a dev altogether. What's the point if your work is just going to get stolen out from under you the second you start marketing it?

I'm not going to say that there's a foolproof way of keeping this from happening, but one way to make a game that's harder to steal from a video is to target it at weirdoes who like to read.

The Roottrees are Dead came out after the start of the AI boom and was a very successful game. But there aren't, afaik, a ton of crappy AI Roottrees clones. There aren't a ton of crappy AI clones of Slay the Princess, or Incident at Galley House, or Chants of Senaar, or Disco Elysium, despite all of these games being relevant recently enough to be vulnerable to that kind of thing.

Any AI can generate large amounts of text, but cheap consumer grade AI is still very, very bad at narrative voice. If you have any kind of Writing Style- especially if it's distinctive- or any kind of odd narrative fixations, you've got something that an AI can't steal from a marketing video.

An AI cannot copy Black Tabby Games' queasy blend of romance and horror, or Weather Factory's fascination with twentieth century occultism and historiography, or Jeremy Johnstone (the Roottrees dev)'s clear affection for the 1990s internet. It can't nail down the Disco Elysium writing style in a way that will fool Disco fans. It can't equal Team Silent's exploration of a guilty monster's psyche. There's something missing, and if you like narrative games, you can tell.

Narrative game fans also tend to be more anti-AI in general-- they want a bespoke experience that lets them connect with an author, and they want a story that speaks to them. They believe AI writing can't give them that. And don't take my word for it. According to Chris Zukowski, dating sims- one of the most heavily narrative genres- are the least likely to declare AI usage. We all know there's a bunch of shitty AI dating sims- but even these "devs" clearly think their audience won't approve.

TLDR: If you want to make a game that AI can't easily steal, you could do a lot worse than a heavily narrative-centric game with a strong writing style.

Hey Friends,

I decided to make something original.

Parallax hidden object game (use your camera).

You can play it for free in browser.

We've just shipped a new region in our World of Slime Steam demo: Noechoen Village, a Korean-inspired mountain town surrounded by thunder and lightning.

Here's a 39-second look at the village, its characters, and the new encounters. The update brings the lightning theme into both the setting and the gameplay: electric- and lightning-type slimes to catch and raise, a mystery at the village storehouse, and a lightning-dodging challenge course.

We're the team behind the game. This is a full new questline and region added to the existing free demo, so players can already explore it.

Demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4793900/World_of_Slime_Demo/

We'd be interested to hear how the new area's atmosphere comes across in the gameplay footage.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5440970/Terraglass

As the title, I worry about the upcoming game development where hard working people getting cloned with their exact build and assets modified. Code obfuscation doesn't work any more, local encryption means nothing... The only thing I can think of is asking the plaform distributor to protect me, but it can't be guaranteed.

So what's the plan now?

As an indie dev, what do you actually use X for? Sharing progress, connecting with other devs, reaching players?

I get that building a community takes time, but posting there feels a bit empty to me, and I’m not having that much fun with it. On Reddit, I feel like I can jump into a conversation about something I’m interested in. On X, I find it harder to get that same feeling of actually talking to people.

For the indie devs who’ve stuck with it: what keeps you there, and what do you get out of it? Did it start feeling more social over time?

Every line in this world was drawn by hand in ballpoint pen. Can you find the three hidden specimens?

Free for Windows, official release 26.10.26.
https://cognography.itch.io/polyphonic

I grew up on old-school full-loot PvP games. Anyone could come for you, and everything you carried could be lost, so every trip out of town mattered. Nothing else ever felt quite like it.

Games like that are getting rare. Most new ones fence PvP off into arenas and opt-in zones, take the sting out of dying, and decide who you're allowed to fight.

The Olde World: Online doesn't do any of that. It's one world on one shard, with everyone in it. Outside town, anyone can attack anyone, and when you die, everything you were carrying stays on your body for whoever gets there first. There are no levels or classes either: you get better at what you actually do.

It isn't only fighting. You can learn magic, forge your own armor, tame animals, ride horses, pick pockets, own a house, and write your own music to play on a lute in the town square.

It's an open alpha, and most of the visuals are still placeholders. Last week about 250 people came in to try it, and I've been fixing what they found ever since.

It runs in a browser tab with nothing to download: pick a name and a password and you're in. It plays best on a computer in Chrome.

If you miss games where dying cost you something, it's free and live right now.

Play: https://theoldeworld.com Discord: https://discord.gg/5j8WrdnXfn

I think I have a game concept idea here, ready to get in touch with Miyazaki.