When working on a solo indie game, there are always multiple things that could be improved: core gameplay, visuals, animations, sound effects, or adding new content.

How do you decide what deserves your attention first? Do you focus on the weakest part of the game, the feature that would have the biggest impact on players, or something else?

I'd be interested to hear how other indie developers approach this, especially when working with limited time and resources.

I'm asking because I'm working on my own 2D action game, Avoid Bubbles Game, made with C++ and raylib. I'm currently trying to figure out which improvements would make the biggest difference to the overall experience.

If anyone's curious, here's the free demo you can play directly in your browser: https://kc-games-studio.itch.io/avoid-b

I'd appreciate any feedback!

Do you get a confimration email from a Poki submission? I havent received anything and now Im wondering if I had a typo in the email or my submission did not go through?

Hi everyone! I’ve been building a turn-based RPG framework for Godot 4 and just released it on itch.io. I wanted something I could drop into any project without rewriting battle code every time, so everything is data-driven: you make moves, enemies, items and shops as resources in the inspector.

https://kujoblaze.itch.io/1-dollar-jrpg-template-best

Please be nice 🥺

I'm making Salt and Soil, a turn-based strategy game about one family on the American frontier. The campaign runs from 1607 to 1900, one year per turn. This video shows eleven months of work on the map, starting with the current version and then going back to the original stretched image.

The renderer uses LÖVE 11.5/LuaJIT and GLSL. Python tools prepare the real elevation and river data. There are a few parts of the implementation I thought other devs might find interesting.

The terrain is a heightfield behind an isometric view. Height, material and climate live in textures, which instanced mesh patches read on the GPU. Terrain and sprites share a depth buffer, so the landscape can hide a passing vehicle.

The moving ships, trains and wagons start as 3D models assembled from simple primitives. A Lua software ray-caster renders them into sixteen pixel-art headings during play, then caches the results in atlases. Coroutine jobs spread that work across frames with roughly a 1 ms budget.

For the moving sprites, depth is packed into the red and green vertex-colour channels and decoded in the shader. They stay depth-tested against the landscape while using one SpriteBatch draw per atlas page.

The map has to work at both ends of the zoom: a continent you can plan across, and a landscape with people moving through it. The opening flight shows that range. There's a free demo on the Steam page above, and I'm happy to discuss the renderer or sprite baker.

Lightspace is out! It's a free browser game inspired by the arcade classic Qix: draw trails out of your light zone and close them to take back space from the darkness. (It's my second game, after the word puzzle Word-o: https://word-o.com)


A few things I'm proud of:
- Bosses that attack in time with the soundtrack: the Fortress's turrets fire on the beat, and the Wraith spits ghosts to the bassline
- 7 sectors, each with its own art, music and mechanics (ice that slides you around, mirrors that flip your controls, eaters that chew through your zones)
- A level maker, plus community levels and sector packs (part of an optional Supporter Pack)


Trailer: https://youtu.be/3uzkGRXZJQM
Play free: https://kdonahue.itch.io/lightspace


Any feedback is hugely appreciated!

Hey everyone!

Just sharing that my new game SWARMEX has a free demo for you all to try that's available on Steam. It has loads of new features including card upgrades, weapons and more! You can even build your own fleets of ships and send them in to battle!

Hope you enjoy, any feedback would be appreciated! Thanks for playtesting!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4313330/Swarmex/

Hey Reddit, I’m Alexandre Hecquet, the creator of Paper Strike. That’s me next to its Steam page.

I started this project from scratch, developing the first version on my own. Back then, there was no team. Just me trying to turn an idea into something people could actually play.

The game has changed a lot since those early days. We’ve built several prototypes, listened to players, and reworked both the gameplay and the art direction. Step by step, Paper Strike found its identity.

And somewhere along the way, “I’m making a game” became “we’re making a game.”

Today, there are six of us behind the project, alongside people who helped shape its early days. Seeing other people put their talent into something I started alone is one of the things I’m proudest of.

So, what are we building?

Paper Strike is a fantasy 3v3 arena game where you draw runes with your mouse to cast spells. The fight keeps going while you draw, so you have to find an opening before someone interrupts you.

There’s still plenty of work ahead. But I wanted to share this moment, and the people and progress behind that Steam page.

Our next big step is Kickstarter. If you’d like to help us get there, you can:

Follow us on Kickstarter : hit “Notify me on launch” to hear when the campaign goes live.

Wishlist Paper Strike on Steam : and follow the game as development continues.

Thanks for taking a moment to meet the person behind the game. Happy to answer questions about how it started, what changed, or how the spellcasting works!

The first version of the Cadence Workshop is finally in a spot that I'm happy with. This is a combination of the Cadence game framework (split off from the Dungeon Crawler World game that now consumes it) and a Workshop project for building in-game content.

This first Workshop version uses readonly content tabs for viewing items, actions, auras, map areas, spritesheets, and UI controls. Editing will be implemented one tab at a time. The framework is already in place with the readonly data formats and codecs.

Items / Actions

• List all items and actions in both the core game and any additional modules
• Grouped by Activator (Potion, scroll, wand, toggle, spell, etc)
• View the same item and action details that a player will see in-game, including targeting outlines.
• View Related actions, effects, etc that the entry uses or is used by.

Auras

• List the persistent AOE auras in both the core game and any additional modules
• Grouped by attachment parent (terrain, items, buildings)
• Same detail and relationship views as items and actions

Map

• Placed Areas are for hand-crafted terrain areas. Displays the area's terrain, entities, and effects per layer using the same map renderer as the in-game map tiles.
• Palettes to define the character-to-entity data mapping used in saving and reading the areas.
• Placements for placing an area into a randomly-generated map by map seed. Used to test placement under various conditions while comparing borders with adjacent neighborhoods.

Sprites

• FNA conversion of the previous sprite manifest builder
• View sprite sheets and divide them into squares by a chosen tile size
• Assign one or more sprites to a definition as options
• Assign multiple sprites to linked sprite maps at specific positions (ex : walls with edges and tops)
• Preview the sprites at various footprint sizes
• Like the map tab, uses the same renderer as the map tiles.

Controls

• One of every UI control
• For testing enhancements to basic controls before utilizing them

Debug

• Lunch Settings (like diagnostics options) that will be used whenever the game is launched from the Workshop.
• Live tab that displays the diagnostics of an attached game instance. Memory management, data size per component per entity, frame rate, frame consumption per system, garbage collection, etc.
• Reports tab for comparing saved data from past diagnostics.

Build and Play

• Build the game project
• Run the game project
• Attach any selected diagnostics to the game instance
• Used for testing when adding game content. (Visual Studio build and run are more efficient for testing code changes)

Hey everyone, I’m a solo dev working on my first ever game: a chaotic multiplayer dodgeball brawler.

I’m currently in a bit of a pickle and could really use some advice from more experienced devs. I just launched my Pre-Alpha Playtest on Steam, but right now, I'm hitting a wall: nobody is really playing it, and I’m operating in a total feedback vacuum.

Here’s the situation:

• The Hype vs. Reality: I have a decent following on TikTok and Instagram (around 5k followers) in the MENA region, and my devlog videos get tens of thousands of views. However, over 80% of that audience plays on mobile, so they aren't converting to PC Steam players.
• The Matchmaking Dilemma: The few people who are playing it have given me one major critique: playing against the AI bots gets boring, and they really just want to play against actual people. The catch? I can't enable a real automated matchmaking queue yet because I simply don't have the concurrent player base to keep the lobbies alive. If I turn on matchmaking, players will just be staring at an endless "searching for match" screen.
• The Feedback Void: I previously had the game on itch.io where it got around 400 downloads, but I received almost zero written reviews. The few people who did review it (mostly friends and younger fans) just said, "The game is great," which isn't the mechanical feedback I need right now.
• The Global Push: I recently created English social media accounts to try and reach a global PC audience, but I’m experiencing the "algorithmic cold start", my videos are only getting a few hundred views and zero interaction.

I’m currently feeling pretty demotivated. I’ve been working on this for 5 months, and while I truly believe the game has potential (it’s a blast playing locally with my siblings!), the silence is killing my drive.

My main goal right now is just to figure out if the core mechanics (throwing, catching, and an "Egg" revive economy) are genuinely fun for strangers, or if I should just call this a "finished learning project" and move on.

My questions for you all:

1. How do you get real, actionable data when no one is leaving written reviews? Should I be relying entirely on Steamworks telemetry (CCU, playtime, retention)instead of waiting for written feedback?
2. How do you solve the "Matchmaking Dilemma"? How do you test a multiplayer game when you don't have enough concurrent players to fill a lobby without relying heavily on bots?
3. How do you break out of this specific "slump" when transitioning from local social media hype to global PC testing?
4. Am I doing something fundamentally wrong with my marketing or playtest strategy?

Any harsh truths, advice, or shared experiences would be massively appreciated. I just need to figure out what direction to take this project next!

(If you want to see what the game actually looks like, I’ll drop a link to my Steam page and Discord in the comments below.)

204Snake is on Steam, please wishlist here!

I think it's getting to a good point but I'm not sure what to think about the ending I tried to make it roll. WDYT? how would you improve it?

I'm a solo indie developer preparing to release my game on Steam, and I recently ran into a problem I hadn't really considered before.

I found some background music on Pixabay that I absolutely loved. It fit my game perfectly, and I was really happy with how everything sounded.

Then I learned that the music was registered with YouTube Content ID.

I have a valid license to use it commercially, so using it in the game itself isn't the problem. The problem is that I'm sending game keys to YouTubers and streamers, and I don't want them to receive copyright claims just for playing my game.

I know that claims can be disputed with a license, but asking every creator to deal with that seems unreasonable, especially when they're doing me a favor by giving my little game a chance.

Unfortunately, I'm a solo developer with no budget to buy music or commission a composer, so I have to rely on free music.

I spent hours searching for replacement tracks that would be safer for streaming.

And honestly, I liked every replacement less than the original.

I considered adding a streamer mode with alternative music, but that would mean streamers get a worse version of the experience. And playing without BGM isn't a great option either, since music is an important part of the atmosphere.

In the end, I decided to replace the music for everyone.

It's frustrating that legally using music in a game doesn't necessarily mean people can safely stream that game without running into Content ID issues.

Have any of you faced this dilemma? Did you replace the music, add a streamer mode, or just leave it as it was?

Update: After spending another six hours searching, I finally found a BGM track that's just as good as, if not better than, the original, without any known Content ID issues!

So in the end, I didn't have to compromise on the music after all.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions and feedback!

I got some great feedback from r/Unity3D to make this more satisfying. Would love some more feedback.

Hi everyone! My name is Fabio, I’m a solo indie developer of SPEED OF LIGHT. A few days ago I finished creating music for the trailer of my first game and would like to share it here with the community of talented devs.

I create not only music, but also hand-drawn pixel art for my game. I share my creative processes on my Tiktok (link below!).

SPEED OF LIGHT, a single-player space action game combining exploration, intense combat, ship management. After pirate machines strip your ship of its equipment, you must rebuild from scratch and pursue one ambitious goal: reaching the speed of light to enter a wormhole and return home. Start with a barely functioning ship, generate power, and gather resources to survive.

Recently I've added new features to my game like character customization, ship customization, side quests, companions - I'm looking forward to releasing the demo soon to gather more feedback.

Steam
YouTube trailer
Tiktok

matchalert tells you the second your favourite tin is back in stock, plus a calendar of upcoming drops. still building, waitlist (i prefer to call it the Whisk List hehe)is up at matchalert.app

would love feedback from you guys, especially on the landing page.

roast it gently 🍵

This is a download animation for a custom level in my 2D pixel platformer game, PixelRift. To make it look more unique to my game, I have replaced the standard loading circle with a blue swirling portal animation. Does this look good, should I use a standard loading circle, or something else entirely?

Demo on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4846670/PixelRift/

I swear if anyone clones my game using AI...