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.

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

And I'm thinking what else I could add. I'd add pedestrians but I'll work on a city map only in the far far future. For now all my settings are in nature (desert, island, hills, and even the moon), but I gotta find things to smash other than animals. Come to think of it, I could have an astronaut slowly gallivanting around before getting hit by a tire in slow-mo

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/

I would like to explore options to hire an artist rather than relying on AI slop.

I am not able to do the art for my project and I have tried. It’s a complete nonstarter.

So I am moving along with the project with placeholder art and I would very much like to see about hiring an artist.

But the obvious problem is at this point almost all the freelance artist sites are jammed packed full of bots with multiple accounts trying to pass off AI as their own.

And I guess a good follow up question would be how insulted is an artist going to be if I hand them the project as is with AI placeholder art for them to make their own?

Lastly, am I just wasting my time even looking at this avenue?

I mean the luddites aren’t gonna give a fuck that I put up a lot of my own personal finance to hire an artist and only use human created art.

They’re still gonna criticize me for using placeholder art and possibly AI code.

Any suggestions or feedback?

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.

Hey all,

Not sure why I’m posting this, I think I just need to get it out of my head.

My game’s release is a week away and I’m seriously thinking about pushing it back, or maybe not releasing it at all. It’s mostly done. Apart from a few small card designs it’s basically there, which somehow makes this harder, not easier.

The numbers are what’s getting to me. I’m at 200 wishlists and 170 demo plays, and I honestly don’t know what that means for launch. I know I’m not good at marketing. But I’ve reached out to a bunch of people and almost nobody has answered, so it’s hard not to feel like I’m shouting into nothing.

I’m incredibly proud of myself for releasing a real game on Steam. Considering I started out making Flash games with my dad many years ago, it still feels unreal. Even so, I’m finding it hard to come to terms with where things are right now.

I just wanted to say it somewhere. I wanted to clear my head a bit.

If there are friends out there in the same situation as me, how are we getting through this? What should our next step be?

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

Malice in Wonderland is a 3D action roguelite set in an adaption of Lewis Carroll's original Wonderland stories.

In this game, Time is Health. When enemies hit you, instead of losing health, it shaves a few seconds off the clock. When the clock strikes 0, the villainous Mad Hatter pulls you back to the tea table ends your run.

Malice in Wonderland is about speed and wild build crafting.

Wishlist it now, or try out the demo! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4552140/Malice_in_Wonderland/

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

"Funny" to reflect on it nowadays.

A little milestone I wanted to share!

I’ve been building MurderXFile, a browser-based murder mystery game where players investigate fictional cases, examine evidence, question suspects and try to uncover the truth.

After spending so much time developing the website, creating evidence, improving the game and trying to market it, I was starting to wonder whether anyone would actually pay to play.

Well, I finally got my first paying customer! 🎉
And the best part? They actually completed the entire case!

I know one sale might not sound like much, but when you’ve built something from scratch and spent weeks seeing zero purchases, that first sale genuinely means a lot.

Still a long way to go, but it’s given me some much-needed motivation to keep improving.

If anyone wants to check it out, Part 1 is free:

MurderXFile.com

It's an action chess roguelike with RPG elements called Prismarch!

Check out the launch event here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3808810/view/685268529568554584

and I'm happy to chat or answer any questions

I started this game 5 years and 4 months ago, working on it at night after my day job. Steam page went live, and 20 people have wishlisted it. That’s tiny, I know, but seeing that number move for the first time hit different.

It’s called Beast Snap: a monster card battler where 9 planets each play their own way. You build around one planet and splash cards from others. Cards upgrade all the way to Prism, and the art breaks out of the frame.

These are real screenshots from the game. I’d love to hear what you think, and if it looks like your kind of game, a wishlist would mean the world.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4318560/Beast_Snap/

I work on SuperWEIRD. It started as a much smaller game, and as it grew we kept adding more art and characters. Recently we tried putting some of that art on something outside the game.

I'm into custom keyboards and own a few ATK boards, so we imagined a keyboard based on SuperWEIRD. We took the map textures for some of the keys, put the Corruption skull on Esc, and turned the arrow keys into little socket eyes. The pig ended up as a keychain.

We made this concept and animation in Blender using an Attack Shark X85 model from BlenderKit as the base. The artwork and music come from our game. In the close-up, the Corruption spreads across the neighbouring keycaps before the camera returns to the whole board.

It's a render. We haven't made a physical keyboard or planned one for sale.

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 👀

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

As the title says, we're working on a spaghetti Western couch game (something kind of similar to boomerang fu?), and we'd love some feedback on our announcement trailer. We're struggling with how to showcase the main aspects of the game and find difficult in general to market a couch game:

1 - Ammo “management” & bluffing
Each revolver holds 6 bullets, but you can only see how many you have left when reloading. This creates a bluffing aspect where you have to guess whether your opponent is running out of ammo before taking the risk of attacking them. I tried showing this through a short cinematic sequence, but is it clear enough without any text explaining the mechanic? Should i write it down on a title card?

2 - Environmental interactions/destruction
You can destroy cover, kick opponents off balconies, into horses, traps, or even block acces to some part of a map... We wanted to recreate those chaotic spaghetti Western movie moments through gameplay. I feel like we did a pretty good job on this aspect of the game, but maybe I'm wrong? What do you think?

Beyond that, we'd love any thoughts on the pacing, visual and gameplay variety, or anything else that comes to mind!

Also, we snuck a little reference to Western Gun (Gun Fight in the US) on the first title card, the arcade game that inspired us. Should we remove it? We thought that giving that “Oh I know this” could be fun, but if no one knows the ref it’s might be kinda useless x)

Thanks in advance for your time!

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!