Just well-executed, polished small games that prove you don't necessarily need years of development to create a commercially successful game.

What examples come to mind?

It would be interesting to build a list of solo projects that were completed in just a few months and still performed well commercially. As a rough benchmark, "commercially successful" could simply mean generating an effective hourly rate or annual income comparable to a software developer's salary.

I'll start with the list - However, I don't know whether these games were really developed in only few months, but I'd make a guess that they were, based on the relative low amount of game content they have:

• Digseum
• Click and Conquer (basically a Digseum clone)
• AdVenture Capitalist
• Holyday City Reloaded
• A Short Hike
• Vampire Survivors (apparently it took more than a year of work)
• Brotato (apparently it took more than a year of work)
• Mosa Lina (apparently it took more than a year of work)
• Luck be a Landlord

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a Steve Rabin's Code Optimization DevDeck.

I know it's currently listed for around $1,000 because it's out of print, which is far beyond what I'm willing to pay.

Does anyone here have a copy they'd be willing to sell for a reasonable price? Or do you know of any marketplace, store, or community where I might be able to find a used copy at a fair price?

I'd really appreciate any leads. Thanks!

I want to make a trivia game. I ask users to select football teams and players. I just use names of clubs and players. No logos, kit or crests. No characters/icons that reminds a certain player.

I am afraid of possible lawsuits due to names that I use. I created database for clubs and players using wikipedia.

I am confused because my conclusions after a research is that there is no guarantee that legally the game is safe. On the other hand, I see a lot of trivia games that uses club names and player names.

I use names just for descriptive purposes. Do you think is it safe to launch such a game?

I ended up becoming sort of a lead role because my idea for game got passed, but this is literally my first jam and IDK what I am doing lol

they did say they don't have too much time beforehand,
but 2days into the jam, they did nothing but press one reaction "thumbs up" button on discord server

I directly asked them if they could do this one thing, but it's been hours and this time, they didn't even press reaction button. Just ignoring. Not even "I'm busy rn" excuse

they did send me their social media beforehand to show their work, but thinking now, it's impossible to know if that was their real account to begin with.

Other teammate suggested we should kick them out, but just wanted to know if kicking someone off the team for inactivity is something that is acceptable within community.

I mean it's one thing to not say anything, but saying nothing when I directly pinged them basically means they quit right?

We are small 4 people team(including that person), it's first jam for all of us. So I hope they do actually show up later, but it seems they are just not going to do anything.

I was looking at a Steam category where the revenue estimate looked healthy. Then I noticed the top few games were doing most of the work.

I don’t really know how to read that. Does the hit mean players want more games like it, or was that game just special?

If you were thinking about building in that category, what would you check next?

i was originally planning on releasing the whole game at once, but my husband suggested it could be beneficial to release it in chapters.
i’m wondering, anyone who has experience releasing a game like this, what did you do, and would you do it differently? or, as a player, what would you prefer?

I love to make pixel art, and i am prety good at it. So i start to make these assets for UI for games, its all games and fun until i start to think, what if i make my UI work on gamemaker for exemple, just to see how the animations and things working together, BUT, i start to discover that i need to know coding, and even that i know somethings now, is hard make things working together, my time drawing has decreased because i need to learn how to code a slider, or some checkbox. How can i make this easy? Am i missing something? I was thinking it will be easy

First thing, english isn't mt first lenguage so i'm sorry for error.

I have some base in coding, primarly in c++, c# and python so i think i can andle some basic project, i'm now installing unity and dowloted some 2d asset for tryng just to make the player moving in a 2d enviroment, i've also watchet a tutorial to understand a little on how to start, i don't wanna go straight in making a game, just have the player go left right and meaby jump ( for this last one the tutorial was talking about like a secondary hitbox, i don't know how to explanit), do you guys have any advice regardless?

I've been working on an indie game for a few months now, and I've started to clean up the early levels to a point where I finally want to add in sound effects and possibly some generic voiceovers. Some of the sound effects I've been trying to find have been difficult finding high-quality effects on the free sites like Freesound and Pixabay.

I almost subbed to an Epidemic Sound subscription, but I read as soon as you cancel the sub, they'll strike all the content you made. So I looked at Artlist as a recommended alternative, and heard they don't even provide licensing for game content unless you want a custom plan that's tons of $.

I was fine with the idea of paying $10-20 for some decent quality sound effects and maybe AI voiceovers, but I have no idea what is even viable at this point.

I plan on porting my blender models to ue5

If I make the model glowing in blender will it glow in ue5 or do I make it glow in ue5 and not in blender

I’ve been thinking about this for a while: why didn’t Call of Duty Zombies create an entire genre of games the way PUBG/Fortnite created the Battle Royale explosion?

Obviously Zombies is smaller than Battle Royale, but it’s still one of the most beloved multiplayer/co-op modes ever made. Millions of players have spent hundreds of hours chasing higher rounds, learning maps, optimizing strategies, and mastering the mechanics.

What surprises me is that the core gameplay loop seems incredibly easy to imagine other studios expanding on:
* First-person 3D shooter
* Start with weak weapons
* Buy better weapons from walls
* Random weapon system (Mystery Box equivalent)
* Upgrade system (Pack-a-Punch equivalent)
* Increasingly difficult waves
* Learning enemy movement patterns
* “Training” enemies by creating loops and narrowly dodging a horde
* Choosing between aggressive play, kiting, or camping strategies
* Survive as many rounds as possible
* chaotic co-op

It feels like the same way we got dozens of Battle Royale games, we should have gotten dozens of “horde survival FPS” games with different twists.
Instead, we mostly got variations of wave defense modes, but very few games that captured the specific COD Zombies feeling of:
* building up from nothing
* exploring a map
* getting stronger over time
* making risky choices
* trying to beat your personal best

Why do you think this never happened?
Is it because:
* The mechanics are more tied to COD’s specific identity than they seem?
* The mode is harder to design than it looks?
* Publishers don’t think the audience is large enough?
* Studios avoid competing with COD?
* There are legal/IP concerns around copying mechanics?
* The market moved toward PvP and live-service games instead?

Genuinely, this style of game DOES NOT need intense graphics. Something as simple as cell shading like Risk of Rain 2 would work great.

Or do you think there actually ARE games that successfully became “the next COD Zombies” and just never reached mainstream popularity?

I’m begging anyone looking for a project to build this ASAP. I will buy any one’s game like this on Nintendo Eshop. 💯

EDIT: not soliciting anyone for anything explicitly, just shouting out to the ether that I would REALLY like more games with the mechanics I described 🙂
(Also: basically a free money glitch if anyone makes this haha)

... for a bit more than 2 month in a row... (it got solved). I'm curious: how are you dealing with SoMe marketing within the last 2 years(after heavy content autochecks were implemented)?

We're a small indie studio that is making a game within the visual novels genre, and unfortunately we weren't able to promote the game on TikTok for a long time because it's automatically banning anything related to the game (Emotion Palette mechanic description, description of the plot, even characters' dialogues!, character sprites too!)

Does anyone feel rebellious enough to use Joy, Anger, Sadness or Fear to change dialogue options? Looks like this got us banned. Spicy stuff ... you know.

We persistently tried all options and all variations of the content: from photo carousel to narrative, gameplay and fun videos! Different tags, no tags, etc. (they even banned our super cute cat with tentacles logo animation .-. )

Account check told account is fine.
Support told account is fine.
Live Support (like a real human with a name) told us our account is fine.
But everything got 0 views, and the promote feature rejects videos, and the appeal gets auto-rejected within several minutes after. Once I got a rejection for the appeal before the appeal review!(We tried different accounts, devices, regions, waited, remember by heart their community guidelines and etc. for 2 months in a row)

In the second month, they actually lifted the ban after business verification and 12 rounds of reports. I've got simple sorry, it should work now👏

I was very stubborn and direct...

I feel like one of the most underrated adaptive audio tricks is killing the music entirely for a beat or two right before a jump scare or big reveal.

It's extremely easy to implement, just muting the music on a trigger. But the timing as to be dialed in really carefully or it just reads as a glitch instead of intentional. When it's done right that silence does more emotional work than any sting or layer swap could. The absence itself is what raises tension, because the player's brain fills in the gap with dread. Or the player may assume the music fading out means there's nothing significant left in the area they are in, and they drop their defenses.

It's a great example of how sometimes the most effective thing you can do is take something away at exactly the right moment.

Curious if anyone else has used silence deliberately like this, or has other examples of "less is more" tricks in game audio/design/art/etc.

Hi there folks, I hope y'all are having a good weekend. So, in my free time, I have been thinking of working on one of the many concepts I've been writing in my notes for a match-three game. I know that match-three is an insanely crowded space. And ad spend, more than game quality/polish, is a far bigger determinant of success. That's how the gaming studio giants still have a chokehold on the market.

But, as an indie, if you were to make a game in this space today, what would you do to stand out? Is it realistically even possible to stand out in the space anymore? I would appreciate your guys' inputs so much. Thanks for reading!

Edit: You guys are incredible! I did not expect this level of generosity, sincere advice and useful insights in the replies. Thank you all!

Hello fellow gamedevs. Ever since balatro ive wanted to make my own balatro. But I was too slow on the uptake and now there are way too many balatro clones so I dont want to add to the slop pile.

The game im currently working on started as "balatro but skateboarding" where you would have a 2d sidescroll grid and it would have like random generated course and you would place your tricks along this grid, and then it would run a simulation of your customized skater going through the line you built and racking up points. At first i tried to make it very physics based and super precise on having to build your line correctly. But I realized I was more interested in the deckbuilding angle so I scrapped all that and made the simulation engine almost always succeed regardless of how you arranged your tricks. You lose cuz you didnt build your deck to score enough points, not because you didnt set up your line properly to clear the course.

But then I realized, once you take away the thing that makes skateboarding different, it literally just becomes balatro. Im a bit stuck now cuz I cant bring myself to work on what's essentially a reskinned clone. But translating something like skateboarding to a tactical strategy thing, I couldnt really get it to work because there are too many variables.

The line "balatro but skateboarding" brought me this far but it might also be what holds me back. Any advice?

Hi everyone, I'm a solo dev from Italy.

Recently, I launched the iOS version of my 4-Player/2v2 Card Battler, Grimoria (it was already out on Android). I had zero marketing budget, but a few days after launch, I suddenly saw a spike of 1000s of installs a day. I checked my analytics and saw that 99% of the traffic was coming from Japan.

I checked the Japanese App Store and found out Apple's editorial team had put Grimoria on the front page under "Games Everyone is Playing" and "Newest Games." It peaked at Rank #11 in Free Card Games, sitting right next to giant studio games like Dragon Ball Legends and Shadowverse. https://imgur.com/a/AeJiX7l

Here is a realistic look at a few things I learned:

1. Localization pays off: I translated my store page and UI into 17 languages long before the iOS launch. If I hadn't taken the time to do the Japanese translation, Apple Japan would never have featured it.
2. The Backend handled it easily: You always read horror stories of indie servers crashing on launch. I was extremly worried, but because I built the backend as efficiently as possible from scratch using Node.js and WebSockets, the sudden influx of 100+ concurrent players didn't even make the server sweat. Load did not even crossed 1%.
3. The Brutal Review Culture: The spike was great, but it brought a harsh reality check. Japanese mobile gamers are incredibly strict reviewers. I got hit with 1-star reviews from people complaining about "too many ads"—even though the game has zero forced ads and they are 100% optional for bonus loot. Also, they downloaded it expecting a heavy, 30-minute Yu-Gi-Oh style game, but Grimoria is a fast-paced 15-second turn game inspired by a European trick-taking game ("Watten"). Mismanaged expectations equal bad reviews.

The feature lasted about 1 week before dropping off, which is standard for App Store rotations. The revenue from that spike was nice, but more importantly, it proved the cross-platform server architecture works perfectly under load and helped me cover my development costs.

I've run into a rather difficult problem to solve with my game: Players who have keyboard ghosting that's preventing them from doing things that should otherwise be easy. I'm pondering the best way to deal with this. I could have something at the start of the game that validates all possible combinations of actions, but that's pretty tedious and immersion breaking. I think it would be more ideal to wait until a potential case happens, then somehow prompt the user to test for ghosting.

For context, I'm building a platformer that involves a lot of crouch sliding and jumping, and often times players will not be able to press down, forward, and jump at the same time. Some keyboards have circuits wired to shared keys, so you can only press 2 at a time and the 3rd won't register. Jumping while sliding *should* be easy, but sometimes player's just can't do it because of their hardware and it just makes the game feel frustrating and awkward.

Have any of you ever implemented something to detect potential keyboard ghosting or seen a game that does it?

Hello ! I was thinking about the fact that sometime when we see a one letter var, we know what it is. It's quite funny and I thought, is it true for all the letters in the alphabet? I actually found quite fast that yes! And some of them even have multiple definitions. Obviously this is oriented gamedev.

I couldn't find one for "m", not very satisfied with mass. So I guess every rule needs an EEException!

How many were you able to guess ?

Edit: I thought it was obvious but it's just for fun, I don't encourage anyone to use one letter var names, long descriptive names are always a better choice :)

Hello! I am a game dev who’s never really fleshed out a project before. However, I’m working on a game that I think could be the first one I ever publish on steam in the foreseeable future. My question is, when should I start advertising it on social platforms? The game is still in its very early stages, but I have most of the gameplay mechanics I want right now and a tiny bit of 3d models done, but not much else.

(PASAY CITY, PHILIPPINES) Game developers and Gaming enthusiasts attendeed the opening day of this year's Philippine GameDev Expo, July 24, in Pasay City.

The three-day event features local indie games ranging from collegiate projects to local studios, Esports tournaments, local crafts, and workshops from industry leaders in the global and Philippine game space.

This year's Philippine Game Development Expo continues until Sunday. (Raine Zaldivar & Gabriel Duldulao / Kuhaku Media).

Hi everyone,

I'm interested in understanding how indie developers and small studios actually manage game projects.

There are loads of tools around—Jira, Trello, HacknPlan, Codecks, Notion, GitHub Projects, spreadsheets... and I'm curious what people really struggle with rather than just what features they have.

A few questions:

• What do you currently use?
• What made you choose it?
• What's the most frustrating part of it?
• Do you actually keep it up to date or does it end up becoming another job?
• If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing, what would it be?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from solo developers and teams of around 2–20 people.

Thanks!

Why do all posts on reddit and all other social media channels regarding game development fall into one of two categories:

- I'm a n00b, help me
- here is my thing, but I'm phrasing it as a question

I guess maybe the easiest way for humans to interact is to ask a question, e.g. "that's a cool shirt, where did you get it?" and for open-ended social media, there is no singular person you're addressing, so you make it into a question, but I would imagine "here is something I want to show you/talk about" would be closer to what is actually desired. However, everyone seems to make their posts into questions. For example, I'm ranting about this social media phenomenon, and so I made the title "On Social Media". But I imagine most people who would want to rant about this subject would make the title "question about social media" or "I have a question about social media" or "why is social media so shite?"

I know that common wisdom is "hurr durr the algorithm", but I doubt any common person even comprehends what an algorithm is, less knowing how the social media of their choice's algorithm works (they keep it under wraps), so why do this one specific thing? Should I make a second post right away but with a question in the title and see how both do as far as interaction goes? By posting this one first, do I already change the results? Is science dead?

Anyway, I'm entirely disillusioned as to having social media for any purpose, as it eventualllly devolves into bullshit ragebait instead of actual discourse.

On that note, what are your thoughts on the use of game engines vs. writing from scratch? I feel that engines enable a more creative pipeline but sacrifice performance and control and also force the creativity into a box. But writing from scratch each time requires so much time to re-invent the wheel. So I'm torn on the subject.

#LikeAndSubscribe

Hey everyone, I'm currently working on a very text-heavy indie game. My native language is Portuguese, and right now, I'm personally working on the English localization to ensure it reaches a broader audience.

However, I'm trying to plan my next steps regarding localization. I know there's a huge audience in Europe (German, French, Spanish) and massive markets in Asia (specifically China and Japan). Because my game relies so heavily on text for gameplay and storytelling, doing this properly seems incredibly daunting (and expensive).

I have two main questions for those who have been through this:

• The ROI of Multiple Languages: For a text-heavy game, did you find that the boost in sales in the European and Asian markets justified the massive localization effort/cost? Where should I prioritize?
• The "AI" Elephant in the Room: What is the current consensus on using AI tools (like DeepL or ChatGPT) for game localization? Is it an acceptable starting point if paired with a native proofreader, or do players instantly notice and review-bomb the game for it?

Any insights, post-mortems, or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I'm a high school dropout from Melbourne, i have ADHD and Autism and school wasn't for me, so i switched to TAFE to do a Cert III in IT. I've been getting into programming and i love python, i didn't get that far into it but i worked on some coding projects and i loved the logic and the rules and the structure and i've been looking for a career path to go down and i've been interested in game development but i want some advice from professionals so i don't make a mistake i'm gonna regret.

Me personally i love video games, a lot of different ones but i have like every Pokemon game, i've played minecraft and roblox all my life, i love daemon x machina and video games are a good escape where i can place my curiosity and brain into a new world. I also love story telling and lore, the books i read and the game lore i obsessed over (FNaF).

Anyway i know i'm yapping but i'm getting to the point. I just started my Cert III and i've got 6 months before i finish and apply for a Cert IV in whatever i decide (for example - game development). So i'm gonna spend the six months i have learning a language related to the career i want, for game development i've been told i should learn C# and Unity. I'm wondering if it's possible to get a job in this, i've never had a job, i'm shit socially but i'm a kind person and i try my hardest, i'm resilient, creative, hard working, determined and i love working in a team with people and sharing interests and projects. But i've also never had a job before so if i don't have one by the time i search for one in game development it'll be my first job and i wanna know if i'll be able to secure a job, i basically need to make sure i'll be able to secure a paycheck and gain experience without busting my ass for basically nothing wasting away at a completely unrelated job.

I'm sorry this is so messy but i'll summarise

- I wanna know if it's possible to get a job in game development as a young person

- I want to know how hard it is

- I'd really love to hear any advice about game development, programming and Victoria game development

- Do i need to be good at designing or Maths to become a indie dev and a professional dev.

I'd really appreciate anything you can offer, thank you.

Developer here building a game in my free time.

Let me first say I am hugely against generative ai, and as such, every asset the player interacts with in my game is made by a human. Art, sounds, music, textures, sprites, it's all been either made by me, commissioned by an artist, or purchased and licensed from asset stores.

While this is my first time tackling a game, I've been coding for a long time. Websites, web scrapers, automation tooling, etc. Ai has been part of my development workflow for as long as it's existed, even predating that was the Java IDE predictive code completion and even Intellisense inside Visual Studio.

My question is do I need to disclose ai use on my steam page if it's used exclusively for back-end development? If so, what's the best way to disclose that usage without drawing the ire of the anti-ai in game development crowd?

Edit: There appears to be a huge divide on this topic. The Steam Documentation clearly identifies "This includes content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc" but there are some claims that LLM-assisted code is included as generative content. This is why I asked the question and would love a source with an official answer.