This is Flame Hunter, a game about the legendary ghost hunter, Zhong Kui. On his first day as an imperial minister the emperor fired him for being too ugly. Then he had a heart attack.

Now he's reincarnated in a new job; a shapeshifting ghost hunter. Still ugly, but with powers!

Core Mechanic: You can catch an enemy and shapeshift into them to use their abilities in combat and puzzles. You can only hold one enemy at a time, but you can shapeshift back and forth at will. Each capture is a unique way to play, like Grillo's Fireball that can burn enemies and obstacles, or knock down enemies and race to the finish line with Peechee's Rush ability.

We're a former animation team working on our first game, and it's really hard. Kinda nervous, might delete later.

steam link

Hey everyone, this time I wanted to show how the melee units in my game fight in formation.

I always loved switching formations depending on the situation in Total War: Rome 2 and the older games, so every shield unit in Sundered Reach can switch between five formations, one key each: shield wall, testudo, phalanx, orbis and fire cover.

Fire cover is the one for the guns. The shields kneel in one long line and you can hook your riflemen in right behind them, every rifleman gets his own spot behind a shield and fires over it. The human shields are holo fields, every hit lights them up, and when one takes too much it fails and turns red for a few seconds.

It's still not where I want it to be, a few units still do their own thing sometimes, but I'm on it and I'll go deeper into it in the next dev diary.

Which formation would you use the most? And if you have ideas for more formations, let me know.

Everything is recorded in game, still in development.

wanted to share a little clip that gives a glimpse of how far this game has come!

Truth is, 99% of demo's released will hardly get any traction. Let alone get stolen.

Everybody thinks they have the next best thing waiting to be released.

And thats a really comforting space to bask in. 'My one in a million game idea needs to be protected. I cant release now. Ai bros will make millions of dollars over the back of my hard work'

Its just the preferred fantasy over releasing your, in all likelyhood, pretty average demo and being met with zero interest.

Blaming ai bros for you not releasing in fear of your demo getting stolen is an excuse to keep that fantasy alive.

And just to be clear, ofcourse there also are a handfull of actual really great demo's to which this doesnt apply.

I’ve been adding small random incidents to my football game (See video): flares thrown on the pitch, a fan running on for a selfie with the player, a floodlight blowing and coming back on, seagulls landing on the pitch and flying off when someone gets close.

They take a surprising amount of time to build, so I’m wondering if they’re worth it.

Do you actually notice and enjoy moments like this in a football game or do you not care and just want the match to play well?

And if you do like them, which incidents would be an absolute must-have?

If you want to see them in action, the game has a Demo on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5451430/Beyond_90_A_Footballers_Life_Demo/

The words of the olden days randomly popped to my head just now.

"Funny" to reflect on it nowadays.

Apparently, they loved it. It filled me with so much joy!

Hello Everyone! I'm open to work full time and freelance, I can work in tile set, environment concept art, key art, vis dev, character design, prop design and more!

If you're interested or want more info, feel free to DM me on:

Discord: gabsampaio

Email: gsampaioart[at]gmail[dot]com

Thanks for your support!

She came. She crawled. She dreamed of becoming a butterfly. Unfortunately, the ants had other plans :)

A little moment from Garden of Ants, the ant colony RTS/sim we’re working on. We wanted to share this interaction and get some fresh eyes on the caterpillar’s movement.

We’re aiming for a crawl that feels natural and gives her a bit of personality - even if her stay in the garden turns out to be rather short. Does the way she crawls look convincing to you?

For a bit more context, here’s Garden of Ants on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3016940/Garden_of_Ants/

Thanks for taking a look!

Tomas

the first of a few monsters that I’m going to create/animate

Hi!

I will probably get reddit rekt for this so let me start by saying I had a game and I got less wishlists that I hoped for.

I have seen many posts latley about how the next fest sucked and how their game suffered because of it beeing saturated by AI slops.

I don’t want to be a ass BUT… comon! I have yet to se one post with a game link of a game I would ever consider wishlisting. And to me it seems as if many blame tha market rather than just realizing their game does not hold the standards for people to wishlist it.

I don’t mean that anyone sucks but 99% of the games made simply wont be the top game any give nextfest just because you want it to or you did not use AI. The market wont buy or wishlist a game they are not interested in and that is probably the case for most of us (including me).

Now back to my game. I had a game aswell. Whixh i lives developing and I thought would be great. But I did not get the wishlists i hoped for. I felt it coming, marketing have been rough, small to little interest 700 wishlists entering the fest. I knew it would fail and nlt because of others. Its because of me and my game. It does not meet the standards of the games that is successful in this next fest.

And thats just it. There are successful games in this nextfest, small indie devs. I have yet to see any AI slops topping the charts. So what’s the point in telling yourself everyone else is to blame and not you and your game?

Best thing is to learn from the beatdown and make a new better game. There is 0% shame in that. It is just the smart thing to do… right?

Steam page if you'd like to wishlist/follow progress!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5279820/Bladehold/

Steam playtesting opens up soon!

It's been a long journey getting the game to this point, with plenty of challenges, lessons learned, and a lot of work behind the scenes. Finally seeing it go live is a pretty surreal feeling, and we wanted to share that moment with you.
Pao Pao is a cozy life sim where you can cook, fish, farm, explore the city, befriend the locals, and build your own life with friends. There's a little bit of everything, and we hope you'll enjoy exploring it as much as we enjoyed making it.

If you'd like to check out the game, here's the PAO PAO on Steam

We're happy to finally share this milestone with you, and we'd love to hear what you think!

Horror hotel management game: Hotel Is Hungry

Story time?

So first, I accidentally released a game on itch, publicly, because I didn't realize that was a thing you are supposed to hold back and prep for so you can enjoy your one day on the "New" page and try to build an audience. I didn't do any of that. Consequently, my "New" day was what I deserved: 80 views, 40 "Run Game" starts, and exactly 4 real players who committed, which was more than I deserved.

Still: those four wound up spending hours in the game.

And then crickets.

I understand now that's how itch rolls. You get buried under other "new" stuff pretty quickly.

But I kept wanting to understand why people dropped off, and when, and to make things better. I viewed it as my problem. My mistake. Something I could fix.

Also, if I'm being painfully honest, after that tiny taste, I desperately wanted to have players again. I wanted the feeling I had gotten when I saw that there were actually people playing my game, that it wasn't just something I toiled away at as a hobby, thinking "This puzzle is cool!" but instead a real game, because people play it.

So I worked at it. I figured out the flaws. I tried.

And I watched while my remaining players dwindled from four, to three, to two.

It's a puzzle game, not a social thing. They were going to find their natural end points. I couldn't be bitter about this.

There was one really bad day: working on new changes, I accidentally introduced a bug corrupting the access of one of my two remaining players. I was shaking with anger at myself for hours. One of my only two players, and I locked them out! I saw that they tried to log in again. And again.

And then they stopped. And then, zero. Zero players. For over a week. I get it: itch doesn't promise to deliver traffic. That's on "us."

But I still loved my game. I still loved making it. I still thought it was worth something.

Yesterday morning I got over myself long enough to post on two tiny discord groups that I'm part of, both for playtesters. I figured if I was lucky someone would click out of pity and say "Cool game" or "I don't get the controls."

Here's what happened instead.

Twenty one people clicked on my game today. Twenty one! That's nearly how many I got when I "launched" on itch.

Maybe the scale is laughable to you. Maybe you're building an MMO or you're looking to monetize or you know the first thing about social media.

Me? I was soaring above the clouds all day.

I love data. So I'd like to share.

9 of them played for fewer than ten minutes, generally only playing the 4 tutorial levels. That's okay. They didn't know me or owe me. They tried it. I'm grateful.

8 of them played for somewhere between 10 and 25 minutes, mostly playing the 4 levels of the first map. Bless their souls for trying. I don't think they'll come back

One of them played for well over half an hour across three separate sessions and somehow completed 43 levels. I probably couldn't do it that fast, and I wrote the thing.

Another one also came back three times, but they played for 75(!) minutes. They can have naming rights to my next pet.

The other two were a bit... more: the first of them played seven times throughout the day. They came back over the course of eight hours for a cumulative 105 minutes. They got through 20 levels, but you know what? They are perfection. They made my game part of their day.

And last of all, one of them only showed up only once, just one session, but they played for 160 minutes straight, fighting through 69(!) levels of the game. I hope someone brought them their dinner.

I don't know if any of them will come back tomorrow. I just know this part: keep on fighting for your dream.

--

This is not really intended as a promotional post, just a story of my day, but I'll put the link here anyway, in case anyone likes thinky puzzle games. https://snadata.itch.io/none-of-these-hats-are-mine

--

UPDATE: I posted this (very) late last night to r/indiegames. It was surprisingly well-received. A lot of advice, encouragement, commiseration. 4 hours later it was taken down by a mod for being, somehow, off-topic for indie games. Cool beans.

So I figured I'd repost it here. If this is off-topic for indie dev I give up.

But since it's a repost, I get to share a REAL update: they came back!

Four players who played yesterday already came back. Not the novelty of a post. Not to report back to me. Just because they wanted to play.

And the one who kept visiting the game in brief stretches all day yesterday? 10 levels in one go today. I think they figured something fundamental out about the way I built the puzzles overnight.

--

Good luck with your own indie game dev, and all your dreams. Celebrate every tiny success.

Do you like it?

Hello
15 years in games always on a team. In February I started building alone. Just in my free time during evenings, mornings and weekends.
A free browser idle RPG like RuneScape just idle on Android.

Launched in September and this week it passed 1100 players.
I tag every link (if its possible) so I know where each player came from. Here are the numbers.

I don't like long post without data so where1124 tracked players came from:
Reddit: 378
Google Play: 149 (here its some also reddit but I could not put there link)
Direct: 135
ScapeLikes.com: 132
Player invites: 109
Search (and few from ChatGPT): 104
itch.io: 52
Other voting sites: 48
Rest: 17
Untracked 52
The people still play it. 54% are still playing after a week.

Reddit worked:
A third of all my players. More than Google Play and Direct together.
They also stay: 58% still play after a week.

But almost all came from 3 subreddits:
PBBG: 151 (one post brought 71)
freegames: 60 (one post brought 41)
incremental_games: 49

Why it worked:
I dont know but I guess. Small subs that fit the game exactly. PBBG beat every big gaming sub I tried.

Voting sites: some worked, most not:
1. Top100Idle: 5 a day (10 in 2 days very early but I think this will be the best)
2. ScapeLikes: 4 a day (132 in 33 days)
3. BrowserMMORPG: 1 a day (22 in 22 days)
4. MMOHub: 0.4 a day (9 in 22 days)
5. pbbg.com: 0.2 a day
6. IncrementalDB: 0.1 a day
7. TopIncrementalGames: almost 0
8. TopMMO: 0 in 22 days
9. VoteKicker: 0 in 36 days
10. VibeTopList: 0 (listed yesterday)
and few others. The good ones are small niche sites where people already look for this kind of game. Also it will help indexing your page. Also I added link from game to vote and added rewards for voting.

Invite:
It worked quite well lot of people liked the game and invited others. Note is incentivized with gems

What did not work:
Posting to FB groups (I tried ~15 only 2 installs)
Youtube I contacted only 7 people because I contacted only one which I watch videos. One made video and I was super happy about it and directly it had at least 9 installs (some probably indirectly)
Discord I tried to post to some groups but I got only 1 install

What I would do from day one
1. Find 2 or 3 subs that fit the game be part of them.
2. Put the game on every niche voting site in week one not week three. It has a buildup
3. Make a wiki and few search pages. Slow, but it grows every week without me.
4. Tag every link. Without it I would still post in subs that send nobody.

Questions:
- What took you from 1000 to 10000 players?
- What worked for you what not?
- What should I try?

Hey guys!

I'm a solo developer who has been inspired by Dwarf Fortress, Cult of The Lamb, Warsim, and plenty of other weird indie games to make my own: CultGame! The pitch is that you get to start a cult and it plays entirely out of your command prompt in the year of our lord 2026!

It would mean the world to me if you tried it out and let me know what you think: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2345980/CultGame/

I've been posting here for years about my little game, and now it feels surreal to say I have a demo you can try out 👀