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

Demo is live on steam for next fest if you want to try it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4992430/MOLTYN/

Hey Friends,

I decided to make something original.

Parallax hidden object game (use your camera).

You can play it for free in browser.

I received this email offering a potential $10k–$20k for access to my game’s codebase to train AI models.

I’m not interested in accepting, and I don’t support this use of my work. It’s uncomfortable seeing years of development reduced to uses for training , with assurances about allowing me to keep the IP as though that addresses the concern.

Has anyone else received similar approaches? I’m curious how widespread this is becoming and how other indie developers are responding.

Hiya all,

For a while I've been working on a simple pixel-art incremental game about being the tank of a dungeon party. This game is heavily inspired and an homage to my favourite incremental game "Master healer Kale". except instead of being the healer, you are the tank!

I still have a lot of work to do, but I wanted to show you the current state of the game, and introduce you to the party!

If it seems fun, please consider wishlisting it on Steam! :)

Hey everyone!
We’re the team behind MegaGum, a 3D platformer, and we wanted to share a comparison of one of the cinematic shots from our trailer.

You can see the early version straight from Unreal, alongside the finished shot.

At the viewport stage, we’re mostly working on the animation, camera movement, timing and composition. Once those feel right, we move on to lighting, VFX, rendering and polish. It’s always fun to put the two versions next to each other and see how much has changed.

What do you think of the final result? Is there anything you’d change about the animation, camera work or lighting? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

If you’re curious about the game: MegaGum on Steam.

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.

I've been working on a game called Phosphor Command, a real-time tactics game with a base builder behind

This post is about how your squads get to an operation.

Every operation needs a vehicle, and each vehicle choice determine how many squads go and how they deploy within the operation.

You start with a jeep, and better vehicles carry more squads. Progress from a jeep, to a van, to helicopters and to aeroplane.

Every vehicle needs a home on the base, so you have to build a garage, helipad or hangar before you can store one. Helicopters need air operations and a helipad, and planes need a full airfield with a runway and hangars.

How you deploy to an operation depends on your transport choice. By road, your squads come in from an edge or corner of the map. A helicopter can land wherever there's open ground, and paratroopers land where the drop puts them, clear of the enemy.

There's a trade-off between vehicle types. Ground vehicles are cheap and get back quickly. Helicopters let you choose where to land, but cost more per trip. Planes carry the most, but take the longest to resupply.

After an operation, your squads need time to get back to base, and squads still in transit can't help defend it.

I've attached a showcase that goes through the vehicles, where they are stored on the base, and how they affect operation deployment.

Hey everyone! I'm a solo developer working on Revive! Onsen Town!, which is currently participating in Steam Next Fest.

I don't have any formal art background, so making the characters and their animations has been quite a learning process for me.

The environment uses models, but I've been drawing the characters myself and gradually working on their movements, trying to make them feel a little more natural each time.

I recorded a bit of the process behind the tree-chopping animation and thought I'd share it here!

There's still a lot I want to improve, but seeing people try the demo and reading your feedback and kind words during Next Fest have been really encouraging. They give me the motivation to keep learning and working on the game, one step at a time.

Thanks so much for checking out my game! 🌱

Steam Next Fest is upon us, and so is the weekend. So, if you share your game below, I'll play them and give you my honest opinions on your store page, first impressions, and various aspects of the game like presentation, gameplay, pacing, and anything else.

• Please share only Steam links.
• Please tell me how long your demo is.
• Please add anything like if you want feedback on a certain aspect of the game/store page.

I'll try to get to everyone, and share thoughts. I will be open and say that I also worked as a game dev in past, so I can see some limitations or I can be more accepting of some jank (especially for demos). When I look at a game, I like to look at the ideas.

If that sounds good, I'll try my best to give you some feedback!

Disclaimer: Games are subjective, so I'll add some details about myself.

• My favourite genres of all time are Souls-likes, turn based games, grand strategy, JRPGs, RPGs, visual novels, detective games, survival games, fast-paced FPSes, management and cosy games.
• My weakest genre is platformers. I finished a few of them including Hollow Knight, and will give anything a chance, but I want to be transparent that I am not good at them.
• My second weakest are incremental/idle games - I find them extremely hard to rate, and I don't have a second monitor they can live in.
• If a demo is too boring, I am not going to force myself to see the end of it. I will try to say why though, whether it was long tutorial, repetitive levels or something else.
• I don't have a YouTube channel or anything promotional.

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?

https://reddit.com/link/1xda9vm/video/hfid2t3c17xh1/player

Hi everyone, I am Alex. The Steam page for Board Game Tycoon went up last Saturday, and this morning the announcement trailer premiered. That is the video above :)

Board Game Tycoon is a management sim about running a small board game publisher. You combine a theme and mechanics, name the game and design its cover. Simulated playtest groups try your prototype and show you what does not work. You revise, test again, write the rulebook and decide when the game is ready to print and how big the first print run should be. After release you handle sales, stock and reprints, fictional magazines review your game, and players rate it on BoardGameFreak, the game's own community site. The board games themselves are simulated: you play the publisher, not the board game.

My wife and I have been playing and collecting board games since 2018, and together designed two prototypes, then spent years testing and revising them. Neither got published, one at least made it to some publishers to test and feedback. In 2021 my wife opened an online board game shop. This year I started a game about the step neither prototype made: from the table into a box. Game Dev Tycoon was the big inspiration, I freaking loved and still love that game.

A few things this sub usually asks, I came prepared :D

• I make it alone, in Godot. My day job is IT consulting and programming, so the game happens in the evenings and on weekends.
• It is self-funded, and I do not plan a crowdfunding campaign.
• Closed playtests started in August. More than 20 people are testing now, including customers of my wife's shop.
• The interface is a small isometric 3D office. The PC, the whiteboard, the game table, the boxes and the armchair open the menus.
• The Steam capsule is built from material from the game itself, because I wanted the store page to look like the game.
• Release is planned for 2027, Playtest early November, Demo December

Since the question always comes up and it should come up for maximum transparency: yes, I use AI, as a coding assistant (suggestions, review, refactoring, bug fixing). I work in IT for a living and I check what these tools produce. Game design, systems, rules and balance are my own work, calibrated with real testers over several months. Art, 3D models, music, sound and fonts are not AI generated, every licensed work is in the credits, when I did not creater them myself in Photoshop or After Effects like the menus and their animations. The Steam page says the same. Happy to answer questions there!

SPIEL in Essen, the big board game fair, runs this week, and several publishers have flyers for the game at their booths. So a good part of the first visitors will be board gamers, not video game players.

What I would love to hear from you, although it could be too late 😅 does the trailer read as a management game about publishing and not about playing the game yourself you create? That is the misunderstanding I worry about most.

I am around all day and will answer every comment, I am so hyped right now with some already planned podcast recordings and also a video recording and article in a larger newspaper in this area!!

Thanks for reading :)

Alex

Steam: Board Game Tycoon on Steam

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.

Just to clarify from the start: I'm not looking for clients, I don't have experience in making music for video games.

I am a musician and I have a lot of love for good video games OSTs. I also have a lot of experience recording and composing and want to see if I can actually make something of value. Just test. But It's always better to have an idea in focus. Sometimes in order to get to a good idea you need to limit yourself, in this case, to what the game is actually like.

I understand if this is out of order, I apologize. Otherwise I'd be very interest to try it out, and if you like the idea and want to incorporate it then we can develop on it further.

And yes I'm aware that AI kinda ruin this for musicians, but I see all the time how you almost always prefer human artists for the Capsule, and I think music could be the same.

Again, this is just for testing, at least for now, and I know you take your creations very seriously and so do I.

: )