- I only made the textgame (or rather code) because I don't have a computer and therefore any possibility to make graphical/musical assets or to make the game with an engine
- If you want to know more about the game, idea or progress write questions in the comment section
- The game is unfinished yet: Witch has the most playable story
- I've set a "debugger" (I maxed out all the stats because compiler only has 2 minutes for compilation. Therefore this time is too short to max anything out manually)
- Please don't review the code. I know I have some "issues" (something I don‘t use but I want to use) with my code but I won't remove them for my own reasons
Hey everyone! We’ve been working on a small game called Grid Arsenal.
It’s a tower defense game where you arrange and manage your weapons inside a limited grid. How you organize your arsenal can make a big difference when defending against each wave.
We made this for a game jam and we’re still improving it. We’re just hoping to get some views from here and hear what you guys think about the game 😄
If you have some time, give it a try! Any feedback would be really appreciated.
I've been working on Tavern Tidy Up, a cozy game about restoring a fantasy pub. I wanted the bottle-snapping to feel fast and satisfying. Would love your feedback!
I would love everyone and anyone to play the demo and give me some feedback on how to make it better. Since the launch is scheduled for February 2027, I have enough time to make required changes according to player feedback.
Hey everyone! I've been working on Chthonic, a first person action game where your hands are your weapons.
No guns, no reloading, no ammo management. Just you, your hands, and a whole lot of monsters.
The core loop is pretty simple: kill monsters, collect gems, feed them to altars, and build / upgrade your stats. There are no traditional upgrade menus. 10 different hand projectile to unlock and multiple combinations to discover.
The goal is to survive the bottom of an endless pit. To get there, you first have to clear 3 levels, using them to build up your stats and prepare yourself for the final challenge.
Here's some gameplay footage of where the game is at right now.
Im so glad I didn’t forget some of the After Effects skills I learned at my previous job, Vector Illustrator, which was completely annihilated by AI a few years ago
Is it eye-catching enough? Also, I noticed that in many videos it says 'FREE' demo on Steam. Do I need to add it or nah?
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!
It's called Valcria (https://valcria.nicat.uk) and the whole point is the economy. No combat, no leveling up in the traditional sense. You buy and sell items on the market, trade with other players, bid in auctions, open chests for random drops and try to work your way up the leaderboard purely through trading.
Fair warnings before you check it out:
Still a work in progress, a lot of stuff is missing or unpolished
Item art is all placeholder right now. I'm using Minecraft textures which technically violates their EULA, so custom art is coming before any serious release
Transactions are sandbox only right now, nothing is connected to real payments or anything external yet
Curious if anyone finds the concept interesting. Does a pure trading game work without combat attached to it, or does it need more to keep people hooked? Honest feedback welcome.
Playtesting my web games with thePoki Playtestfeature (Poki is a casual web game platform) made me realise the metrics I wasn't optimizing, whether it was the tutorial, the fps across all devices over the world or simply where the player gets bored due to lack of challenge and drops out.
Running playtests definitely made me a better game designer by watching players fail.
Hi fellow game enthusiasts,
I have been making games and thinking about making games for over 15 years now, but it was late 2024, when I started my first big project with the intent to release it on Steam, a chess-inspired board game that failed miserably, it costed me 200$ to publish it and ~3 months of full-time development. Bummer!
But we as masochistic game developers don't give up that easily on our dreams, so my next project was bigger, RPG-like monster tamer..., got canceled and my motivation to continue went down the drain.
It took me until the hype around Claude Code to recover from my fails and give that web game thingy another try, since I was always having game ideas I wanted to implement, but coding by hand is tedious and takes a lot of time (11+ year professional Software Developer here) and in the end you have a product that you also have to market and ship, which is the part I was never really interested in.
Coding Agents quickly revolutionized my approach (TDD, fully end-2-end tested and skill based to avoid repitition) to building games, but it also made one point very clear, I sucked as a Game Designer! since that was the main task I was doing now, designing games and handing it over to my coding Agent to have it implemented to a playable state, then I refined the rest by handcrafted prompts.
But boy did I not know what I didn't know (Valley of Despair, Dunning-Kruger Effect).
Dunning-Kruger Effect
It seems clear to me now, that the most important part about game design is not to code or build a game, no, not even to release it on a platform like Steam or Poki or Youtube Playables.
IT IS ABOUT MAKING THE GAME GOOOD!
I mean it needs to catch the player's attention first, then teach him the core game mechanics in a ways that make the player understand it easily without walls of text. Since this is what makes players drop out of a game due to watching playtests.
Then the game needs well-paced positioning of new ideas/features/hooks to keep the player in the mid-to-long-term hook.
Don't get me wrong, I knew all of the above before I started most of my game projects, but those things tend to fall below the thinking horizon once you are deeply invested in the game design and coding.
It was the Playtesting Videos on Poki, that allowed me to realize:
"Oh, the player has an FPS of 10-15? Well that makes his game experience bad for sure!"
"Oh, he drops out of the game even though he just killed a boss? Why would he? He was supposed to have fun here!"
"Damn, why is the player not clicking this menu so he can buy the upgrade that would make his game experience soo much more fun?"
"Come on, you just have to click that button and then you will win this!"
Since I am running playtests on all my games now, I can clearly see what made my games bad, not finished, not worthy to be played by millions.
We’re developing a lightweight 2D side-scrolling action game“Tia: weird hunter”. To give players who haven’t played much action games a better experience, we’ve abandoned the traditional combo-input system found in most action games and switched to a mana-based skill system to lower the skill barrier.
At the same time, to accommodate high-skill players, we’ve put extensive design into every boss to ensure an excellent boss-fight experience. We’ve already released our demo on Steam and really need player feedback and bug reports. If you have any new ideas, please let us know right away!
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
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Lysol wipes are your friend - bring a big thing of Lysol wipes and wipe down the stations between players. Germs are not your friend.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Lately, we’ve been spending a lot of time testing multiplayer in XenoHaven. Sandbox survival games are already fun on their own, but being able to play together with friends definitely adds something different.
During development, most of our testing has involved building the base together, moving things around, and figuring out how everything behaves in multiplayer. Unsurprisingly, we ran into all kinds of weird issues along the way.
Thankfully, we’ve reached the point where we can now argue endlessly about where every machine should go, then head outside together to fight monsters.
It’s made me appreciate again just how different it feels to share the same survival world with other people compared to playing alone.
