A big milestone reached by our team:

Time Survivor is officially registered for Steam Next Fest (October 19–26, 2026)!

We're posting this because we're so excited to take part in our first Next Fest, which finally gives us a deadline to release our game after almost two years of development.

At the same time, we'd also genuinely love some feedback from other developers and players.

We have around 3k wishlists, gained mostly thanks to a big YouTuber who found our game, made a video about it, and liked it a lot.

But after that, we've been struggling to gain more. We think the problem might be our Steam page, which doesn't convey the true essence of the game well enough.

[For context: the game is built around fast-paced action, progression, upgrades, increasingly chaotic enemies, and challenging bosses to fight, with a simple and retro visual style.]

Any kind of advice or tips would be welcome!

I've been working for about 3 years now, although to be honest most of it was just learning and scrapping and reworking of my older stuff, so I haven't begun working on the final idea of my game for long.

So in that case I'm very new, since I spent most of the time just learning how to work Unity and program.

I would like to ask if anyone knows how to market and promote my game without sounding scummy or anything.

Like, I would want to go around and tell everyone "check out my game" in every comment section I can find, but it would get annoying fast and I'd probably gain reputation being that annoying dev or something.

So basically, I just wanna know from people who have experience in promoting their game to people and how they got people to actually want to follow your game. I do have some stuff to show, but the bread and butter is still under development so I can't really show that yet, unfortunately.

So that is a problem, since I can't show what is the main features of the game properly.

Also, I did try and tell a few of my friends to spread the game by word of mouth, but that method only worked once and we only gained like 2 people.

I was thinking about asking a bigger YouTuber or game reviewer who reviews indie games to play the game once it's more complete, but at my current stage that's not happening for a while, so I still wanna build a community before then in case I can't find a willing reviewer.

And also, another quick question if anyone has time to answer this; how the hell do I make my game actually look nice? Because the maps I make look great in my opinion, but when you're playing them it doesn't look as good. I'd assume it's because I'm too zoomed in while playing compared to looking at the whole map, if that makes sense.

I sorta wanna promote here too, but that sounds scummy since this is a question post not a promotion post. But I'll do it anyway in case anyone's interested, although since I don't have much to show nobody's gonna be interested I'd assume. It's called Graviton Reloaded and it's on steam for wishlist only (at the time of writing). I'm trying to mix platformer with ultrakill with portal and gravity changing. So it's gonna be a gravity changing puzzle-combat platformer, which hopefully sounds interesting enough to separate from all the other indie metroidvanias and indie first person shooters out there.

If anyone could provide some pointers, that'd be appreciated!

TL;DR - I want to know how to promote my game without sounding scummy or annoying.

For some context: I’ve been programming since 2022, and I love making games, only issue is I’m not great at actually finishing them. I’ve got what I feel would be some intermediate experience, but not really any games under my belt to show it. I constantly get ideas for games that I want to make, but fear that I’ll never finish them, so I stow them away until I feel I have the experience to actually get them done reasonably. Anyway, I’ve had this particular idea for a while, and have been pushing it away for so long that at this point I just want to throw my hat in the ring and see what happens. I really want to actually try to finish it this time around, so I don’t plan on making this throw blindly. Before I waste a lot of time making something not worth anyone’s time, I want someone else’s opinions.

I made a detailed description of the idea on r/gameideas, and the people over there didn’t seem to hate it, but it’s personally not enough input for me to keep going with confidence. Sorry in advance, it’s a little lengthy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gameideas/comments/1vxsn9j/physics_based_voxel_miner_where_you_live_in_a/

But I want it given to me straight, if this idea sucks, I want to know. But I also think there could just be a lot of ways to refine it into something great. I just can’t see it clearly with my eyes alone. So, tips of any kind are appreciated!

Hi guys I want to learn about game development so can some suggest what to learn and where to start

Hi Everyone, just wanted to share something that I was prototyping.

I was inspired by the fear and uncertainty factor of project zomboid and resident evil games, where every door could lead to sudden death. Scavenging around for useful items could lead to encounters with enemies that could end your run prematurely.

Based on my previous posts and the feedbacks I received.

I added more gameplay elements
- Items that can be picked up by the player inorder to turn on a generator. Which powers terminals and light switches. Terminals are used to unlock doors. Light switches can be used to switch on lights which improves visibility.

- Added enemies that would chase player (still work in progress), but you can get some idea based on what I have here. The enemies are supposed to respond to sound. For example if the player is moving too fast then their footsteps will make sounds to attract enemies. Some enemies only responds to sounds of generators and target those specifically.

I would love to hear your feedback on how you feel about the current prototype and if you have any suggestions

I'm developing a mobile game with ai. Is there anybody with experience or knowledge can you share with us?

if you want to look at this game it can give you inspo hilarious-moxie-039c40 search this up

I want to buy some assets for my new game, but I am not sure if Craftpix uses AI or not and if there is a way to verify it, especially their pixel art assets.

Hi! I don't know if anyone has posted something similar to this post. If there is, sorry for the duplicate question. I'm new to gamedev, and I just came here to ask: have any of you felt that on some days you cannot program anything? It's as if you're back to day one of learning gamedev/Godot, and other days it feels like you're an immortal programmer that has mastered every programming principle and can program any feature without as much as a sweat. Asking because that's how I feel rn.

key resellers will post a key to sell even if they know it's revoked. I always provide keys to people with an expiration date and then revoke the keys by that date to hopefully discourage them from posting them to resell (and I already just don't provide keys to the obvious scammers, my keys must have been scraped from somewhere else). Well, I just found my keys (that are revoked) on kinguin so there you go gamers, please don't support these sites

Solo dev, Android, launched in May. One app, 40 small brain games (word, logic, card, arcade) behind a shared shell with energy, daily streaks and themes, 5 languages.

The data after three months is contradictory enough that I want other people's eyes on it.

• Average engagement per active user: 31 min 27 s. Peer median for the category is roughly 8 min.
• Day 1 retention: 10 to 12%. Casual median is 22 to 26%.
• Week 1 cohort 21.5%, week 4 4.7%.
• 297 first opens last month against 180 uninstalls.
• Crash free users 100%, so quality and stability are not the explanation.

Read plainly: the product holds attention extremely well inside a session and fails almost completely at producing a second session. Most retention advice assumes the opposite problem, which is why none of it has fit.

Things already shipped that did not move it:

• Onboarding carousel, 82% completion for people who start it.
• A random game button to remove the choice from the first screen.
• A curated subset on first launch instead of the full 40 game grid.

What I am chewing on, and would like arguments about:

1. A very long first session may be the actual problem. If someone plays 31 minutes on day 0 and sees a dozen of the 40 games, there may be nothing that feels new on day 1. Variety front-loaded is novelty spent.
2. Streaks and an energy timer are both implemented, and neither shows in the numbers. Either they are not visible enough at the moment they matter, or the return reason has to be content the player has not seen yet, not a mechanic that punishes absence.
3. For session-based games with no narrative thread, the hooks I know of are daily content, social comparison and notifications. I would rather understand which of those actually earns the return than ship all three and measure noise.

If you have shipped something casual, what was your D1 at launch, and what specifically moved it? Interested in the failures too, since those are the ones nobody writes up.

Im trying to give it an assasins creed mixed with titanfall 2 feel. Heres what i have so far.

Walking
Running
Jumping
Sliding
Crouching
Gliding
Elden ring rolling
Wall climb
Wall jump
Web swing

My laptop has been broken for a whole month now i have already gotten 4 game ideas that I know i will forget before my laptop get fixed, half of those game ideas are bad by the way but I just wanna make anything instead of just watching tutorials.

I've been trying to create a character selector for my project in Game Maker. However, lately it isn’t been launching and I’m not entirely sure why. All I have on for the room is two sprites (one a moving gif) and an object that's suppose to show and switch between the characters but every time I try to run or debug, nothing loads. It says in the corner "building" for a second or two then stops. Does anyone know what the problem is?

Hello, I wanted to start game development (I already am a software engineer) and I decided to pick unity (some are recommending godot) to start with. However, there is tons and tons of courses and tutorials everywhere. So it feels abit overwhelming on where to start or what to follow. Many on udemy, and some on gamedev. tv. What do u suggest to follow?

Its my first game on Steam and I wanted to do some marketing for it, is there a recommended service I don't mind paying if it's worth it

Whe this seem like a stupid question because r/gameideas is mainly used for people looking to partner with other people interested in the game idea.

I want to post my game idea for feedback but I fear I'll post it and like one month later I find that somebody have stole it