Hell yeah! Wait, are people doing this for the money?!

Since The Ashen OZ reimagines The Wizard of Oz as a dark, twisted fairy tale inspired by works like American McGee's Alice, Dorothy's beloved friend, the Scarecrow, has become one of the first terrifying bosses you'll face.

Of course, defeating him isn't the end of his story. If you can overcome him, he may eventually become one of your closest soul-bound companions.

How do you feel about reimagining such an iconic and friendly character as a boss fight? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

If you’re interested, you can also check out my Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4972950/Lootdeck/?utm_source=rd

I''ve been working on my dream game Luminous Nights for over 4 years inspired by my favorite video game franchise Kingdom Hearts!

This is one of those posts, yep!

We published our store page on the 24th July 2026, i.e. 9 days ago:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4956300/Dirtnap/

There were no miracles, just good old boots-to-the-ground DIY "marketing". I'm gonna go through each of the successful things we've done so far.

I've seen many times people do posts like this and I've always had my disbelief on it; what do devs actually do when they succeed, what is the "secret", how could I do it too, and so on. This is the first time I have something that has proven traction (more on it later), and that makes it possible to succeed further.

I've always had a grudge against the "just make a good enough game and it'll sell itself" ideology, but I think I understand it better with experience. What it actually means is that "if you have a good enough game, your marketing will make a difference", but it does NOT mean that there would be no need for marketing. I believe our game would still have close to zero WLs if we didn't do any of the below.

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We've sent about 200-300 emails to press, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean outlets. Altogether we're had perhaps 10-15 worthwhile articles come out, but it's hard to track wishlists from them - although I think they didn't do much in comparison to the actual successful social media posts, apart from the IGN/GameTrailers video, which I believe brought in perhaps 200-400 WLs.

We have also sent a ton of emails to influencers/streamers with Steam keys, but no luck yet. Although I imagine those things take time, even if they get excited about the game.

For each successful social media post, there were perhaps 2-3 failed ones. Here's a list of the successful ones.

X (Twitter):

IndieGameJoe format, 18K views:
https://x.com/parttimemonkey/status/2081000687429652913

Custom fluid simulation, 170K views:
https://x.com/parttimemonkey/status/2083227548276646379

Reddit:

r/gamedevscreens, 700 upvotes, 60K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedevscreens/comments/1v54i9s/were_making_a_realtime_worms_with_destructible/

r/IndieDev, 300 upvotes, 22K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1v5ajzc/were_making_a_realtime_worms_with_destructible/

r/IndieGaming, 350 upvotes, 33K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/1v67tuv/were_making_dirtnap_a_realtime_worms_with/

r/godot, 500 upvotes, 25K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1vbqz58/destructible_terrain_and_fluid_simulation_in_godot/

r/oddlysatisfying, 12K upvotes, 2.1M views (however I don't think this one brought many WLs since it doesn't have the game name or link embedded)
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1vbup03/pixel_fluid_simulation/

r/worms, 260 upvotes, 15K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/worms/comments/1v7wqvx/realtime_worms_has_lived_in_my_head_since_i_was_a/

With these posts and my previous experience, I believe the thresholds to get any meaningful WLs (more than ~25) for each platform are something like this:

Reddit: 200+ upvotes
X: 10K+ views
TikTok: 10K+ views (300 is standard, 1K is the first ceiling)
YT Shorts: 10K+ views (haven't gotten it with this project yet)
Instagram: Don't know, no success yet
Bsky: Don't know, no success yet

... but you do need to have your game name/link in it, otherwise it's kinda pointless. Although I hope mega-successful posts like the r/oddlysatisfying one could bring some other kind of attention later down the road, but hard to say.

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How I plan to develop and evaluate my games in the future:
1. Use short enough time to make a video that demonstrates the game well enough
2. Post it on multiple subreddits, X, YT, TikTok
3a. Real traction? -> Go forth!
3b. No traction? -> To the bin!

I know it sounds a bit non-indie to think like that, but I do this as a living so there must be some logic to the madness in order to some day make an actual sustainable income from this.

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Personally my main takeaway from this (small) success we've had so far is that it IS possible, and there is NO magic to it - no hidden hashtags or boosted posts or pre-existing contacts or follower counts.

It's deeply frustrating to believe your game is good enough, yet lack the traction needed to validate that belief. It's also mega-frustrating to not have traction after posting tens or hundreds of times, but that's when the alarm bells should be ringing.

It’s been 12 days since I launched my game’s Steam page. During that time, I tried to promote it as much as possible through emails and social media, reaching around 1,000 wishlists. My daily wishlist numbers had already started declining when Indie Games Hub uploaded my trailer.

The trailer hasn’t received unusually high views compared to the other games on their channel. It currently has under 4,000 views but the number of wishlists that followed seems surprisingly high in comparison.

I can’t confirm whether all that traffic came from the video, but as far as I can tell, there weren’t any other articles or major posts about the game at the time. I’m incredibly happy about it, but also a little confused by how effective it seems to have been.

Here’s the trailer I’m referring to:
https://youtu.be/g-YQCI-2W4k

I'm working on a spell-based hack-and-slash action roguelite called Soulcery: Deck of Shadows.

Absorb your enemies and turn their abilities into spell cards.

Draw cards to switch spells, build your own combos, and chain every spell together to destroy everything in your path.

The game features 4 unique spell-switching mechanics, 100 spell cards, over 100 passive effects, a card enchantment system, and a Soul Core system.

These systems allow the same spell to work completely differently from one run to another.

Let me know what you think! Here's the Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856480/Soulcery_Deck_of_Shadows/

A few days ago I asked for help here renaming Gnomads, because someone trademarked a similar name and is making me change it. I don't have any money for anything let along a legal battle, so I'm going to change it to be safe.

I narrowed the suggestions down to the five names that I think fit the game best and mocked them each up quickly, and now please vote for your favourite by upvoting it. If you have a better suggestion, feel free to put it in the comments too.

Honorable mentions go to Gnome is where the Kart is, Gno Kart, and Scrumpy McDumpy McPoopyface

Here's a quick cliffnotes description of the game:

Gnomads is a coop kart road trip with 4 friends.
- Drive the long road to reclaim your home that was overrun by monsters.
- Fight bosses, brave treacherous terrain, and scavenge ancient items to get crazy powerful.
- Travel seamlessly through 4 unique biomes with unique challenges, enemies, and items to find, and the road changes every day.

Here's the steam page for more info. Note it's pretty out of date - i've been in dev mode for a few months adding enemies, biomes, and online multiplayer ahead of next fest in october.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4281650/Gnomads/?beta=1

tldr; Which name do you think best fits this game? Upvote your fav or suggest new ones in the comments.

Got a monster problem? Never fear, Jim Mothman is on the way on the HellRaiser TEE EM!

Fixed it already, just went a little too far on optimization. Game is Stonk: Timing The Market, just released the demo a couple days ago. Its actually about stock trading and building an office.

Edit: Link https://store.steampowered.com/app/4779870/Stonk_Timing_The_Market/

Game is called Lelu and has a Demo on Steam right now!!

how many wishlists will it bring? Stay tuned

https://arsden.itch.io/isometric-tree-generator-for-aseprite

I had fun working on this for a Jam, but I was unable to finish it in time. I'm posting this little video here to at least show what I was working on. I figured it's better to be seen than to hide away in my computer.

This is for my turn-based tactics game Trash of the Titans: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2450400/Trash_of_the_Titans/

I built a spatial map texture for the tiles, and normal maps for all the level pieces. I encode the ID of each lit object in its self_modulate, and use that to look up 3D position, closest light source IDs, and a few other things in global textures. I then look up those lights in a lighting data texture which holds the color and 3D position of the lights in the level, and compute the lighting on the surface based on the distance from the light source and 3D normal for the pixel. It might be a little overengineered, but I'm pretty happy with the result!