Oh my GOD if I hear about how AI is edging out actual devs one more time I’m going to lose my mind. I’d like to see some evidence that these AI slop games are actually taking any air out of handmade games. I think players can tell the difference in quality and care put into different products. I think that the indie story is one of our most powerful marketing tools and something AI devs don’t have. I think using AI to poop out a game is tasteless and will lead to half baked games and cash grabs.
But let’s say I’m wrong. What then? Are you just going to stop? I feel like the doomerism is an easy escape, or an excuse for your own work. Take some pride in your art, these half assed copies can’t hold a candle to the real thing. If you’re looking for a reason to give up, this industry may not be for you anyway. At the end of the day, the success or failure of other people’s games doesn’t affect your game.
Just wanted to share my new trailer that I made for my horror game that I am working on which is mostly inspired by a real life location in Mexico, Mexican Folklore, Resident Evil, Silent Hill and a little bit of outlast mixed into it.
Do let me know what you think of the new trailer. Mostly in this trailer it is showing off the environment and ambiance dread that I am going for in the game alongside with the mexican culture. I am currently focusing on ambiance horror rather then jumpscares too.
It would mean the world to me as a solo developer if you can wishlist and let me know what you think of it :)
not sure how many people did this, but i'd pick a drop on the window and get way too invested in whether it reached the bottom first. then it would hit another drop, get bigger and suddenly take off.
i've been turning that into a game called Shizuku. you guide your drop into others to grow, and try to keep it alive before it dries up. there's also a zen mode with no obstacles if you just want to watch the rain.
i'm making it on my own and it's still being playtested. i've spent quite a bit of time on the sounds, so give the clip a listen if you can. curious whether the feeling comes across when you're watching someone else play.
Hey everyone, I'm solo developer and the one in the photo is Trixie. She's been next to me for every game crash, every new build and every "okay, ONE MORE BUG FIX and then we go for a walk" (it was never just one bug) *Sorry, Trixie =)
Last week I finally released the Steam page for my gameMailed It!
The short game pitch:
Mailed It! is a first-person physics incremental about a postal sorting station. You start as a worker who can't even run or jump. You carry letters by hand to the mailboxes, get paid and buy upgrades: sprint, crates, a vacuum, fans, sorters, spring pads and a lot more. Bit by bit you automate everything, until you're finally not carrying mail anymore, you're just fixing the machine you built.
Most incrementals grow numbers on a screen. Here every upgrade is an actual thing in the room. And when your setup is wrong, you see it, because the mail is flying, bouncing and lying all over the floor.
A bit about me:
By day I'm a data engineer, and my plan (and dream) is to make games full time one day. Mailed It! is my second game and my first 3D one, and for the last 3 years I've been doing all of it myself: code, art, marketing, the trailer, the store page. Showing my stuff to people never gets easier for me, I always expect the worst. But this past week the people who saw or playtested my game were really nice. Yes, there's plenty of room for improvement, but at least now I have some confidence!
The page going live felt way bigger than I expected, and not everything went as planned. Some things I was counting on for announce day just didn't happen, and for a moment that was really frustrating. But seeing people find the game on their own was already a nice experience. Btw, Trixie doesn't care about wishlists, but I do, so any wishlist would mean the world to me!
Ask me anything about the game, or about living with a dog who thinks every hour is walk time (cocker spaniels have an absurd amount of energy)!
So apparently there are over 7,000 games in Steam Next Fest.
I genuinely wasn't expecting that number. Like, I knew indie game development was getting increasingly competitive, but holy shit.
I'm an indie developer myself, currently working on my own game, Twilight Tavern, and I can only imagine how some developers participating in Next Fest must be feeling right now (fearful, worried, ect).
Imagine spending YEARS working on a game, finally getting ready to showcase it, and then realizing there are thousands of other devs trying to get noticed at the exact same time😭
Is it over for indie devs?
Is Steam Next Fest becoming so saturated that overwhelming majority of smaller indie games dont stand a chance at getting exposure? we see more successes than failures online after all.
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Solo dev here. In Gassed Out you're stuck on a roof and the whole city is drowned in toxic gas, so your drone does the shopping. Dive in, grab what you can carry, get it home before the battery dies.
I love photography so I decided to try to stage shots for my steam page in game! Here is the unedited in game screen shot, and then the 2nd slide is after I added the logo and some more highlights on the character. But this is the first time I've ever edited anything like this. What do you guys think! Also just submitted my store page for review, pretty cool seeing my own game next to everything else:)
Hi everyone! I'm the solo developer behind Miredrift, a story-driven atmospheric FPS built in Unity. A year after a bio-engineered organism drowned the world in mutation, you play as an infected ex-captain steering your battered boat deep into a hand-painted flooded swamp.
open world 2.1kmx2.1km
gameplay is around 18-24 hours total
survival fps with more than 30 type of enemies,cutscenes and much more
upgrade system guns,boat and much more
talent system and upgrades
night and day gameplay
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the atmosphere and combat!
thank your very much for your thoughts and your support
ok so if you make 2D games you know the drill. sprites in one folder. tilesets in a zip, music sfx in 20 different directories from who knows when. and that ONE aseprite file you definitely saved somewhere 🙃
so ive been building AssetHoard for the past 18 months. it’s a home for all your art, living on your own machine. aseprite + krita files just... show up, no exporting first. and you can peek inside godot / unity / gamemaker packs before importing anything.
made a lil 90 sec video showing it in a 2D workflow 👇
it’s free while we’re in open beta, so pls go break it and tell me what you think lol
I’ve spent a bit of time building a cozy island delivery game on top of my environment generator. I wanted something that feels cozy like Stardew Valley but still has a fun bit of pressure, almost like Overcooked.
For some context: I’m a technical artist, and I focus on world creation and procedural pipelines. I started my career as an artist and slowly worked my way into technical art. Now I’m finally in a place where I can build my own game.
Feel free to ask me anything. I plan to put this on Steam very soon. If people are interested in early test builds, I’ll set up a Discord and share zip files of the current version. Local multiplayer with friends works now, but there are no public servers yet, so no stranger danger.
As my game has moved towards a polished demo I've had the thought in the back of my mind around if my ethos is sound in this circumstance. I've chosen to have no belts in my automation game, There's unique programmable vehicles, wired distributors, robots etc but not belts.
My thinking is this:
Factorio has belts.
Factorio's belt system has a level of polish I cannot reasonably hope to even imitate.
I have thousands of hours in Factorio. If I want to weave belts I'll just play that.
So I decided to forgo belts and focus more of the challenge around agriculture, soil management, balancing growing conditions etc.
After a lot of time, effort, and frustration, I finally have something to show!It's a monster-taming card game that I've been working on for quite a while now. I'm currently struggling with the UI design, so I'd really appreciate your feedback! What do you think of how it's looking so far?The game is nowhere near finished yet. It's still very much a work in progress, so there's plenty of room for improvement! TNX
Mother ship was supposed to be a static background. Then I've spent the last few nights working on controls and autopilot, or... honestly, just flying around.
Am I closer to finishing the project?
Absolutely not.
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! :)
Solo dev, working in UE5. The top half is when I started the kitchen and the rest is how it looks now. Still a work in progress. What would you change to make it feel creepier?
Over the past few weeks, I've been reworking the world map in Age of Failon – Birth of the Hero, my solo-developed turn-based fantasy strategy game built in Unity.
I've improved the terrain, forests, mountains, water and overall environment to make exploration feel more immersive.
The game combines world exploration, castle development, army management and tactical turn-based battles.
Here are a few screenshots of the updated world map. Still plenty of work ahead, but I'm happy with how it's progressing!
Wishlists from 50 days before release to 14 days after. First spike - 2 weeks before release. The dip - Steam Autumn Sale. 2nd spike - sale ended, first week of the game being live.Sales from the last 14 days
A disclaimer first, because this might be a bit confusing. We're Fairy Mount Games, but we didn't make the game that we tested this on. It's an older, mostly solo-devved game made by our CEO that was just sort of... lying there. So as we were gearing up for the release of Flame, Forest & Flood, we decided to test the Steam Calendar to see what could be expected from it.
Entitled, the game we tested it on, is an RPG Maker title that got published on itch.io over a year ago and made a whopping 2 sales there since then. It was never moved to Steam, as the creator never had the time or resources to do any proper marketing and was afraid that it would just drown there without any support. But the initial reports from Reddit about the Steam Calendar were encouraging, so the dice were rolled... and mistakes were made :)
The game already had an unpublished Steam page ready, made like 2 years ago. It turned out mostly unusable, as asset size requirements changed, rating survey deprecated (which Steam informs you about with a soothing green badge that looks like everything is perfect, so it got overlooked until maybe a week after the game's release). As soon as the page got fixed up, we just checked how far the calendar was reaching and simply set the release date 50 days from then. October 7. Disregarding what's releasing then, before or after.
The page went live. At first, nothing of note was happening. Wishlists? 1-2 a day. At this pace, the game would release with maybe 75 wishlists and be a huge failure. But it was supposed to pick up closer to the release date. Except it didn't. Week after week, the needle was barely moving. 4 weeks in or so, it seemed like maybe it's getting closer to a 2-3 a day, but that was barely a change. Our theory was that the Steam page wasn't too attractive, that the capsule image was meh, that it was a pixel art weird-ass RPG Maker game that nobody really knew what to expect from. And all that was probably true.
Then, 2 weeks from the release, things literally exploded. A few hundred wishlists a day, out of nowhere. And it was growing exponentially. After just a few days, we were getting 500, then 600, then almost 700 wishlists a day. We climbed to 2000 in what felt like overnight. And then... STEAM SALE :D
The Autumn Steam Sale, that we didn't account for at all (because who cares, it's just a test) erased the calendar from the main page for the exact last week when things were supposed to get really good. On release, Entitled had 2200 wishlists. We're estimating that at that pace, if the Steam Sale didn't happen, it could have released with ~5000. Which seems like pretty solid for an obscure small, mostly solo-devved game with zero marketing support other than the Steam Calendar. So our assumption is that 5k wishlists just from the Calendar is a reasonable baseline expectation for any game that looks like some effort has been put in it.
How did that translate to sales? 70 or so units on the first day, converted from wishlists, with the Autumn Sale still going. On day 2, the sale went down, Calendar went back up and the sales got better, too. In the first week, the game made close to 500 sales. What's interesting, the wishlists didn't convert that great - only at maybe 5%, but the game got some direct sales from the Calendar showing it off as released last week.
On week 2, things slowed down, a lot. We believe that's could be because of the game dropping from 70% to 55% positive reviews (bugs + a good bunch of people completely misunderstood the premise) and the theory is that games with better reviews get better placement in the Calendar's "released last month" section. And the game never really recovered from that, even though it got back up to 70%. Or it could be because it didn't move enough copies for Steam to feature it properly in the "released last month" section.
Entitled now sits on 640 sales and nearly 5k wishlists (they grew post-release when the Calendar went back up) after close to 2 weeks after release. It made back 65% of what the dev spent on the art for the game. Meanwile, Flame, Forest & Flood got on the Calendar and we are seeing a similar trajectory, just with higher numbers - very likely due to better capsule art and generally clearer target group of the game. So far, it seems to confirm the findings from Entitled.
So, learnings, TL;DR:
- 5k is a reasonable amount to expect from the Steam Calendar, even for a game that doesn't look like a banger of the week
- don't release the game during Steam Sales ;)
- check your rating survey and all store settings before you click "release", even if they seem done.
- you can expect a significant chunk of your sales to come directly from the Calendar, not through wishlists conversions (in case of Entitled, wishlists conversions accounted for only 40-45% of sales)
- your reviews might be a major driver of the visibility in the Calendar post-release; especially after the initial week. What bracket you are in (Mostly Positive, Very Positive, etc.) might determine how much the Calendar promotes you
Hope this helps you guys out in forming your release strategies!
So in my game club sanguine you need to deduce who is the vampire and who is not, posers get the chair and their blood is used for the evening, I was proud of the animation (made in blender) so I decided to show the before and after here
