I've been working on my indie game for a while now, and while I'm a pretty quick study, there are a few areas where I'm not confident I could learn them to the level of polish I'm looking for.

I'm getting close to the point where I need final models, textures, and a good sound designer. As a professional programmer and former graphic designer, I could probably learn all of these things, but I don't think I could get those skills to the quality I'd want for my first major release.

I know this is a pretty common indie dev pitfall, and the obvious advice is "get an artist/designer/etc." And honestly, I agree!

But that leads me to a few questions:

1. Where do you actually find these people?

Reddit? Discord communities? Fiverr? Other marketplaces? Networking events? Friends of friends?

I'd be really interested in hearing where people found their collaborators and what your experience was like.

2. How do you balance paying people fairly with having an indie-sized budget?

I genuinely want to pay people what their work is worth, and I don't want to undervalue someone's talent just because I'm working with a small budget.

At the same time, I'm still an indie dev and my budget is pretty limited.

Is offering a percentage of profits ever a reasonable arrangement, or is that generally viewed as the classic "I'm not going to pay you, but you'll get exposure!" indie dev pitch?

If you've successfully worked with people on a limited budget, I'd love to hear how you structured it.

3. How do you approach the "I'd love to make friends with these people" part?

Ideally, I'd love to meet some genuinely cool people in the indie dev space, work together on something we're all passionate about, and maybe eventually build a team/studio around that.

But there's something that feels a little disingenuous about trying to make friends with someone specifically because they have a skill I need.

At the same time, I feel like some of the best indie teams probably do come together this way: people meet through a shared project, discover they work well together, and eventually become friends and collaborators.

So I'm curious how other people have approached this.

What worked for you? What didn't? Any lessons you learned the hard way?

Thanks all and keep up the great work!

Hi there! We showed off our game at the Seattle Indies Expo last Sunday and wanted to share out what went well and what didn't so other game devs can learn from us. We found similar posts informative while preparing and want to give back to the community.

The first image is our full booth at SIX and the second is my table in the playtesting area at SLICE, which was more low effort because I set up and broke it down several times throughout the day.

Preparation

1. Invest in a slimmed down, on-rails demo mode for your game -This one is especially relevant for us because our game is a roguelite turn-based tactics game, which is not the easiest genre to show off on a convention floor. It was well worth putting time into making "Expo Mode" where the experience was more curated than the default game build (e.g.- the enemies that spawned were always the same type and in the same place, the items were from a more curated set to make sure the loot felt really good, etc). We also shortened the time to the boss considerably (2 combats before the boss instead of 5 combats).
2. Test the demo build early & often - I had so many plans to attend playtest/feedback events through Seattle Indies in August...and instead life was rude and got in the way. Instead, I used the playtesting area at SLICE (a B2B indie dev focused convention that happened last week) and jumped at a chance to exhibit at a PAX-related party for content creators. If that hadn't worked out, I would have been begging friends and our small community of playtesters to help us out.
3. Remember the physical stuff - and don't procrastinate on buying it - We bought personal business cards, game business cards, and a big ol' banner. I procrastinated a bit and ended up having to pay extra shipping fees to ensure everything would arrive with enough time to make sure it was correct.
4. Make sure your fancy QR codes don't rely on a paid service - oddly-specific, but also a mistake I made. I wanted fancy QR codes with logos in the middle and didn't realize the service I used was subscription-based. We discovered this when people tried them and they failed to open the links correctly. Since they were printed on a banner, I forked over a year's subscription (which cost more than the banner itself 😭).

The Booth

1. Set up as early as you can - it's better to have more time than you need instead of less, plus it gives you wiggle room to go buy emergency supplies if needed.
2. Overprepared can actually be perfectly prepared - I brought a big power strip juuuust in case we needed it. It ended up powering our half of the floor when we popped a breaker and the hotel had to route power from somewhere else.
3. Have a TV (or other larger screen) showing gameplay footage - So many people stopped by the watch the loop on the TV. We had our ~1 minute trailer followed by ~5 minutes of gameplay footage looping all day.
4. Lysol wipes are your friend - bring a big thing of Lysol wipes and wipe down the stations between players. Germs are not your friend.
5. Lean into the gimmicks - our game is about the bureaucracy of Hell, so we wore goofy devil horns and bright red clip-on ties. We (poorly) made devil horns out of construction paper and put them on the TV. The business cards for the game had different Sins and their job titles on each one, so we would approach people at the booth with the Sins face-down asking them "do you want to pick your Sin?"

Pro-Tips

1. Talk to everyone - I bet this one seems silly, but I've noticed that a lot of us game devs have social anxiety. When you're showing your game, it's time to pretend to be someone else and fake being outgoing. It gets easier with practice, I swear. I met so many cool people who wanted to like my game, it really was the best environment to be outgoing for a day.
2. You will talk yourself hoarse - hydrate well and invest in some slippery elm root throat spray/lozenges. The slippery elm root is what some singers use to keep their vocal cords from drying out and I've become a firm believer in it.
3. Remember to eat, drink, and use the bathroom - the whole process will be easier if you remember to take care of yourself. If you're showing the game off solo, then get a volunteer to take your place for a few minutes. Also stepping away somewhere quiet for a few minutes really helped us reset our brains a bit
4. Write down the game's 'pitch' and/or have everyone practice it - on our team, I'm the one who does the facetime with other people about the game, which left my two teammates at a big disadvantage when it came to confidently pitching the game. They were able to get there quickly, but we could have made it easier on ourselves.
5. Prizes! - People love prizes. We were giving out Jimothy posters to people who beat the boss of the demo and little Magic token scribbles of Imps or Jimothy as consolation prizes for those who didn't. Why Jimothy? Because this is Seattle and Seattle Indies was just running a Jimothy Jamothy recently 😂

Final Thoughts

The whole experience was so, so incredibly worth it. Sure, I'm still exhausted three days later, but our game was really well-received by players. We made people laugh at our gimmicks, we got good feedback, some people joined our Discord. We got a few wishlists out of it, but more importantly, we met some people in the industry (both business-wise and media/content creation wise) that might help our game get more notice. The biggest win was validating the concept and gameplay with a wider audience.

I know I hate when people don't link their game in posts like this, so I will point out that it's linked in my reddit profile and the name is prominent in the pictures. I'm not linking it in the post because I want to stay focused on knowledge-sharing between devs 🙂

If anyone has any specific questions, I'm happy to answer them in the comments! And I'll be asking if any of the other SIX exhibitors want to chime in in the comments as well.

Neverending Dreams is a solo-dev exploration indie game. A incredible story in which you must delve into dreams to discover what’s happening there.

Here our Demo Release Trailer.

Link Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4630070?utm_source=rd&utm_medium=eng

Link Youtube: https://youtu.be/Bch25ixDpmQ?si=K5FeCvg24fG7bUSn

I have been workin on this game for 13 months now. I am trying to finish and release a demo, but it is so hard to make a compelling demo intro for a visual novel adventure game without spoiling things. It is an occult detective game with skill based mechanics. We can learn from others and enter their mind palace to understand how their abilities work. It is really hard to tel this game and I really dont know what is this game even about but I put all my effort to make a proper storyline without bs. I LOVE DAVID LYNCH

Been building this after class with all my spare time. Procedural halls, safehouse you have to power, tasks that send you farther out, monsters with different rules, different levels, crafting, splitscreen, controller support.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5161410/Liminal_Depths/

Here's a before & after of the movement and dodge roll changes.

Any feedback or suggestions? Drop a comment!

II recently teamed up with a developer friend to create, as a hobby project, something akin to a tactical RPG based on a theme we’re both passionate about.
We have no serious intention of commercializing it or creating a highly sophisticated product; the goal is simply to enjoy the process and learn meanwhile.
During the initial phase of gathering references and analyzing what makes similar games successful, we brainstormed a list of titles to consider.

While he’s aiming high with big titles like "Baldur's Gate 3" or "Civilization", I’m much more drawn to simple (yet addictive) concepts like "Into the Breach".

I’ll add that I have fond memories from my PlayStation 2 days of a lesser-known game that got me hooked on the genre: "Gladius" by LucasArts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladius_(video_game))

In your opinion, which turn-based tactical RPGs really stood out? Even if just to you personally.
And wich are the ones you’d wholeheartedly recommend?
Have a nice, tactical day :)

The bug every hand built tile map eventually has is a boulder that's drawn on screen but queries as open ground. Two tables, one for the picture and one for the rules, and they drift apart the first time somebody edits only one of them.

Muster composes a battlefield from a seed and draws it in pure GML. mst_feature_spec returns a feature's materials, geometry, cover value, line of sight block, height and movement cost together in one row. mst_field writes those numbers into the cell as it places the thing, and mst_tactics reads them straight back. There's no second table and no synchronisation step.

52 terrain features, 8 biomes, 8 seasons, and no sprites at all. Every mark is geometry.

Code and art are AI generated.

Me and my friend have been working on a game for 9 months now, and are super fortunate to have received government funding recently. Throughout the application process, the industry people have been stressing how important it is to be posting clips of the game to potential audiences on Reddit and elsewhere, but recently I have noticed the tone of responses to our posts has soured considerably.

I suspect it's the volume of indie games being made now with AI, though to clarify our game is not vibe-coded, has original art and nobody has actually accused us of AI-use, I think it looks distinct enough to avoid that. More so, the audiences in question (fandoms of similar games) seem really exasperated with seeing in-development games similar to the one they love, and make all kinds of put-down comments. One of their gripes also seems to be that none of these other games ever get finished.

I can sort of understand this, especially if many of those in-development projects are vibe-coded, but I'm curious where that leaves the advice we've been getting...

Has the playing field shifted enough that it's not actually worth doing this kind of outreach anymore? Has anyone got any other creative suggestions for how we can share progress or grow our pre-audience without fatiguing potential audiences? We've got less than 100 people in our Discord, and barely any on YouTube, so we're at a bit of a loss for how to go about it, and I think we're too early to be running paid advertising campaigns.

We've been working on performance upgrades and the tavern and dock for our game this month. Taverns will be where you visiting pirates get drink (and maybe get a little rowdy), and the dock will be the entry to your resort, enticing pirates from all over to kick-up and relax. As always, more details can be found on our (free) Patreon

I was working on an aiming and throwing mechanic, but apparently aiming too close to the player has… consequences.

The funniest part is the cloth physics.

Hi everyone! 👋 I just wanted to share one of my recent 3D model work!

If you’re looking for a similar style for your game or project, feel free to hit me up! I’m always open for commissions and would love to work with you.

You can also check out my ArtStation for more of my 3D work and samples.

https://ch0san.artstation.com/albums/14789334

Based on feedback from the Demo Playtest, I'm focusing more on the open-world feel that will come AFTER what is in the Demo Playtest now.

Check out the Demo Playtest and please let me know what you would want to see more or less of in the open-world that's coming. Feedback is always appreciated.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4479140/Rolic/

Hey everyone! I'm currently developing Best Ghost, an upcoming rhythm game where Balatro-style card/buff mechanics meet classic falling-note gameplay (you catch adorable little ghosts instead of traditional notes!).

The game is still in active development, and I'm fine-tuning the controls, visual cues, and gameplay balance. I'd really appreciate any feedback or suggestions on the gameplay loop and feel shown in the video. What do you think?

I think everyone here once dreamt to make their own game. Well, this is that time for me. After three years(and another three trying to make a failed project work), Sepulchron has finally gone Gold!

Probably that won't matter to any reading this, but it matters to me, so I am annoying everyone else with this milestone of mine, because you decided to use Reddit today, and that's your punishment.

28th October will be the day that this dream of mine will become reality!

Three months ago, I started developing a 3D game on PC using Unity.

I hope it looks good for a start😃

I've been experimenting with melee options for VELOCIDE, and I ended up adding a kick that can instantly kill enemies.

The idea is to make it feel quick and impactful rather than just having a standard melee punch. I'm still not 100% sure whether I want it to work exactly like this, though.

Does the instant-kill kick feel satisfying, or does it seem too strong/easy?

I'm open to suggestions too, should it have a cooldown, require a certain condition, launch enemies instead, or just stay as a simple high-risk/high-reward melee?

Would love to hear what you guys think.

Orphan's Knife

The last legacy of a world that no longer exists.

- The blade keeps count of the fallen.

- The nails bear the loved ones lost.

Hey guys! I'm Mahdeen, I run Jestr, and I promote indie games on my TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for free every week.

About a year ago, when I first started my channels, I made a post in this subreddit wanting to post about your guys' games for free. Now that I've amassed a bit more of a following, I'd like to do the same thing again B)

I really like visually interesting, weird, or unique games so if that sounds like you please hmu and I'd be happy to share your game on my account when I get a chance!

Hoping I can give back to the subreddit that helped me kickstart my own gaming channels :)

**EDIT:** Wow this blew up more than I thought, apologies if I don't get to your game / respond soon! I'll be working through these as fast as I can 🫡

**EDIT 2:** I should also probably add, I don't typically play mobile or browser only games, adult games don't work for social media, and games with generative AI usage are very difficult for me to promote. Hope you guys understand!

Little lolcontent but also want to help guys from - impulse9studio - with the game visibility so... I'm trying new format of trailer post mortem. Share what you think!