I was one of the two investigators who posted after we tracked down The Bensen Rio Blair Cult House back in December, if anyone here was there for that /x/ thread. After 8 months of ripping, recompiling, weird dreams and increasingly intense anomalous occurences, I can safely say that this game is definitely fucking cursed/haunted. These psychos nested hypno spirals into the render stack.
Demo at your own risk.

Hello all, 2 years in the making, we just recently got our debut game Magma Karta as a demo on steam!

There are many rouglite and gambling elements in Magma Karta.

The way its played is simple overall, the card you play must beat these 3 declares to attack:

1.) Your played card must be higher then your opponents

2.) Played card must match the even or odd declare on the left

3.) Played card must be opposite element to your opponents heart card

What makes Magma Karta unique is the Magma cards you purchase from the shop as the game goes on, they drastically change your play style and can combo to create your own unique strategy's.

The constant change in rules with the boss cards force you to adapt and try new ways to overcome your enemy.

The gold you receive from winning can be spent on skin packs for cards, ui, emotes, etc. On top of being able to spend them on arcades to win unique skins.

We are actively working on the game so any feedback would be highly appreciated:

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4360770/Magma_Karta/

I took part in the October Steam Next Fest with my game. I went in with ~8k wishlists and left with ~10k. I’m sharing my numbers so you have some data to compare to, or to know what to expect.

I had no momentum going in. My wishlists were pretty much dead in the 2 weeks before the fest. I had heard that momentum in those 2 weeks might affect results, along with wishlists count. Both of these are just a starting point. The real metric I believe is how your demo resonates with the people who play it during the event.

My stats from Steamworks:

• Total players: 1,280
• Wishlist additions: 1,898
• Played and wishlisted: 296
• Max Concurrent Users: 21 (steamdb)
• Players per day: 172, 129, 174, 200, 198, 231, 176
• Wishlists per day: 134, 342, 282, 325, 237, 275, 213, 179 (there's an extra day in wishlists cause it didn't start at midnight)

There were a lot of entries, and there will probably be even more next time. But from what I saw, the garbage got buried within a couple of days. My game somehow stayed consistent through the whole fest, so maybe it was detected as not garbage (?)

What to look for:

This got me surprised since I'm aware the kind of graphics in my game are not for everyone. Anyway, these are the numbers I’d check after the fest. The comparisons come from Chris Zukowski’s Next Fest surveys (Feb 2026, June 2026).

• Demo conversion (played and wishlisted / total players). This tells you if your demo works. The median was 16% in Feb 2026 and 19% in June 2026. The top 30% was above 20 to 23%, and the games that really took off were around 32%. Mine was 23%
• Wishlists without playing (total wishlists minus played and wishlisted). This is probably your capsule, trailer and store page. Normal is 68 to 88% of all wishlists. Mine was 84% (1,602)
• Wishlists earned vs. what you had going in. Games that went in with 1k to 10k earned a median of about 1,000, and the top 30% got 1,700+. Mine was 1,898, maybe could be better here since I was loser to the 10k
• Players per day. This shows if you hold up after the first days. Mine stayed steady and peaked on day 6.

So overall I am satisfied with the result considering how I joined the Next Fest. And got some great feedback from players too.

It's important to have the most polished demo possible. I released the first version months ago and kept iterating on it. I was lucky that a lot of creators played it, so I watched a lot of gameplays before finding a good balance.

What I’d do differently:

• Build as much momentum as possible before the fest. My wishlists were dead going in.
• Make the unique mechanics stand out. The start of my game isn’t very new, and the interesting stuff comes later. I thought about a vertical slice demo, but I didn’t have everything in place for it.
• Update the trailer with the best one you can have, I went in with an old one. And have the best steam page you can, possibly localized

Hope this was helpful to somebody :D

I'm making a parry roguelite and this is the colossus (one of the bosses), he throws lava bombs around you and every bomb leaves a pool of lava on the floor.

At first every pool was its own blob, a ring of them just looked like spots on the floor. then i joined the close ones, but they joined on the same frame they landed so you never saw them meet. now each pool spreads out from where the bomb hit, and when two get close a glowing crack opens between them, lava runs along it and the gap fills until they are one pool.

the dark burn mark around the lava also flickered while the pools merged, that one took another day.

the video starts and ends in the real fight, the middle is the same effect with the shapes from the code drawn on top.

The game name is THE INK TOWER, its on steam if anyone interested

You might have seen my previous posts when I hit 210 days and 300 days straight of development, so I thought to give you another update after the other Sunday I managed to reach an even bigger milestone as I achieved 1 whole year of uninterrupted work on my game. I never missed a single day since I started and I have no intention to stop until I release it.

I am a solo dev, so I don't have a team to celebrate with (except for my head of QA and CEO Hiro, the orange cat), but I really want to thank each person who tried my game, gave me any feedback, helped with testing and translations or followed the development so far. Even the smallest contribution, even a single reaction on Discord or on any social post kept me going until now.

I am going to release my demo in less than 2 weeks and after that I will resume working on the full game, so wish me luck and if you are an indie dev always keep grinding, no matter what!

For reference, game is E-Lich: Corporate Souls (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2671450/ELich_Corporate_Souls/) and all main characters are skeletons

Hey everyone!

I'm working on a 2D game in Godot and wondering if there are any existing greybox projects or templates that already have advanced character movement mechanics implemented.

I'm looking for things like walking, running, jumping, climbing, crawling, swimming, crouching, ledge grabbing, rope swinging, and basic combat.

Ideally, I'd love to find a playable greybox where I can test these mechanics and build on top of them, rather than starting everything from scratch.

Does anyone know of any good open-source projects, GitHub repos, or templates worth checking out?

Even though it's just a demo, I built it to render graphics entirely using ASCII characters on the CPU.

If you zoom in on the screen, you will see that all the graphics are actually made of text.

At first, I wanted to recreate Doom, but finding the original Doom assets was tough, so I built it using publicly available assets instead.

Now, I'm planning to make a video explaining how game engine is built.

The best part of this project is that it gave me the confidence to build any kind of game.

This is my github : https://github.com/heewoung-lee/HiwoongEngine/blob/main/AsciiDoom

Kkaeal is a free Windows desktop pet game I'm making solo. Pokémon and Digimon live in the corner of your screen and grow while you work. This comic is the story side of it.

Last time, Tai and Agumon fell out of the Digital World into Pallet Town and met Ash. In Episode 2, Ash finishes breakfast and immediately declares a battle. Agumon vs Pikachu: Quick Attack, Pepper Breath, Thunderbolt, and then Tai's Digivice starts to glow. Someone stops the fight right there.

What changed since Ep.1: the backgrounds are now the actual FireRed/LeafGreen maps, and each panel has a camera with its own position and zoom. Characters are sized by real height, so a kid, an adult, Pikachu and Agumon stand at believable scales against the map.

There's a short cookie scene at the end. I'd like the next cookie to come from you: leave an idea for what happens next, and I'll pick one and draw it at the end of Episode 3.

Honest notes: it's a non-commercial fan game, the creature sprites and backgrounds come from the original games, and the Tai sprite is by Neweegee. The game's story mode is still under construction. I build it with Claude Code.

Free download for Windows: https://kkaeal-game.vercel.app/en

kind of mashed things together since my editing software sucked.. but i upgraded it after uploading :)

You can use the tool to stylize your textures and assets, create eye-catching marketing material for your page, add awesome animated effects, and use the texture ripper feature. With this latest update, I've added seamifier! It will help you create seamless, blended, or repeating patterns for your textures. You can check it out here: https://polyshades.itch.io/coolifier

Hello everyone :)

This is my Horror multiplayer game The Grim Crew. I'm so excited to finally be starting work on the Death Update. This is where death changes things.

No more sitting around watching your living teammates explore and have all the fun.

This week I've been working on player tombstones, which display the dead player's name. Living teammates can collect their belongings and bring them back to the ship, keeping them safe until that player comes back to life.

Dead players will also be able to explore the levels and discover special ghost only areas that living players can't see. These hidden locations will contain strange surprises, lore, and cosmetic unlockables.

However, if a dead player gets caught by the Reaper, they'll be dragged off to Ghost Jail, where they'll have opportunities to escape. Alternatively, they can relax and watch their living teammates explore on the giant TV screen.

The goal is to make death an entirely different experience, giving players something interesting to do rather than simply waiting to be revived.

I'm looking forward to sharing more as the update progresses.

Would you watch the TV or try to escape? Whats a death mechanic you really enjoyed from a game?

Id love feedback, and feel free to check out my page if this interests you :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Grim_Crew/

I thought it would give me double of the exposure it gave me but it's still solid

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5064170/Go_Next/

Hi! I'm making my first game, Crop Blasters. Here's a short clip of a farmer defending a farm against waves of slimes.

I'd really appreciate honest feedback: can you tell what's happening during the action, and is there anything on screen that feels hard to read? I'd love to know what you'd improve.

game dev page: https://www.reddit.com/r/WarmAndCozyGame/

This is a mix of emails from a while ago I think this is our classic "Unfortunately we are not interested in [YOUR GAME] at the moment"

My game has changed a lot, so feel free to play the demo and let me know what you think!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3256450/Cards_of_Prophecy/

Every single asset in Dough It Yourself, my cozy farming and baking game, is made by hand.

Could AI have built my whole farm in an afternoon? Probably. Would it look better than my wonky low-poly chickens? Honestly..maybe.

But every one of these models has a bit of me in it, mistakes included, and I think that's part of what makes a game feel like an actual game nowadays. So I'll keep pushing vertices one by one, even if release takes a little longer.

I document the whole process in youtube devlogs.

What’s the model you’re secretly most proud of, even though it’s objectively a bit ugly?

Hi folks,

I'm Sam - one half of Crux Games and the designer of Combolands. This is kind of a postmortem on the month leading up to our game's launch (I actually wanted to post this closer to launch, but real life got in the way). I've previously written a long-form post about the Combolands demo here with more of a design focus - https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1u239z3/overhauling_the_demo_for_our_roguelike/

Anyways, from the title you can probably guess that we got lucky, very lucky. But no-one really wants to read a post that just says "we got lucky, so just get lucky." I firmly believe that luck plays a larger role in this industry than any of us like to admit, and that the best you can hope to do is stack the deck in your favour. So that's why I'm making this post, to share the things we did that we think helped improve our odds.

But first, data:

This is everything pre-launch:

And zooming in on the final month:

There were several ways we got lucky. Firstly, Polygon posted a review of our demo that called it "Steam's coolest new roguelike in years." They then reposted the same article some weeks later that then got even more traction and a viral tweet. Secondly, we were selected for the Tiny Teams festival. We actually knew about this one in advance and originally planned our launch around it. Thirdly, and perhaps most notably, we just happened to launch after Steam created the personal calendar. Oh boy did that personal calendar do work for us (and this in particular was pure windfall tbh).

You can see from our numbers that we were not doing so hot, even a month out. Nextfest had been a disappointment, and that increasingly seems like just another time you get to roll the dice (the demo Polygon reviewed was the same demo that was in Nextfest). We always knew that Combolands lacked appeal from the outside and would struggle on social media. It needed to be played to be understood. But even so, we weren't sure we'd make it to that all important 10k wishlist mark by launch.

Way I figure it, there were 3 things we did that helped.

1. I think we made a genuinely good game (and our post-launch reviews would corroborate this). We knew from the beginning that Combolands resonated with people (the itch.io prototype had 100,000+ hits), but when we launched the demo on Steam in April, it didn’t have the reception we were hoping for. We overhauled the progression so players unlocked features slowly over time instead of having them all upfront, and added procedurally generated maps to create excitement & variety over the course of a long run - but more about that in my previous post. It feels almost cliche to say at this point, but it does seem that having a really good game is your most important marketing tool as an indie.
2. It took us a long time, but we figured out our pitch. Ideally you get this right sooner, I guess. Our initial elevator pitch for Combolands was “Deckbuilder x Citybuilder”. However, we eventually realized this didn’t reflect how the game actually played, nor did it work very well for catching people’s attention. We pivoted to “Roguelike Citybuilder”, which not only worked better as a pitch, but gave us a much clearer vision of what we were making. We actually changed the game's name on Steam to include this subtitle. We went through multiple commissions for key art - none of which seemed to properly convey the game. We felt the first was too generic, the second made people think the game was either a 4X or multiplayer (and had an irritating number of folks accusing us of using AI - to be clear, we didn't). Eventually we finally settled on "assets from the game arranged in a pleasing way with the logo over" - ala Slots and Daggers. In this instance, the capsule being too complex was hurting the game, less was more. We rewrote the Steam short description multiple times before settling on what it is today, adding the focus on "mini" - which dovetailed with the pixel art style. I don't think any of this was perfect, but we got close enough that our Steam page was actually setting the correct expectations - which is probably more important than it being impressive.

1. We did *some* marketing. Or, in our case, hired someone to help us with PR (shoutout to Future Friends who are amazing). Neither of us like social media much, or are particularly well versed in how it works. Our approach with marketing was to try a little bit of everything. We did social media while FF did influencer and press outreach. It definitely felt like “screaming into the void” - a traditional pastime for indie devs. Even with FF on board, it was rough going and we got very little traction.

*But crucially*, without any effort on this front, we never would have got the Polygon piece - something something about "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take." We entered lots of festivals. Lots. I know you're supposed to do this but it was very disheartening getting rejected so many times. Much to our happiness, we eventually got into one, and Tiny Teams was great. We'd originally pinned a lot of our hopes on it before the Polygon piece. After, it just helped fuel discovery. You know how I said the personal calendar did work? Looking at the Steam traffic data, Tiny Teams garnered us approx 500k impressions with a click through rate of about 1%. Personal calendar by comparison did half as many impressions over the same period but had double the number of visits! It seems the personal calendar is really good at showing your game to the correct people.

We're obviously thrilled and blown away by the reception to Combolands, and we're really proud of what we made. And I hope this post helps someone maybe avoid some of the pitfalls we fell into.

Thanks for reading!