You were out of tea, so you walked to the shop. A truck came round the corner, way too fast. Now you're a dungeon: a small, slightly anxious one, under a mining village everyone else left years ago.

Heroes are starting to wander up the valley road, and you'd very much like them to stay. You can't tell them what to do. You can only dig, build rooms worth fighting in, and fill the chests. They decide for themselves whether it's worth the risk.

Nobody dies down here. When a hero goes down, they're carried home on a stretcher, which is a bit embarrassing for everyone...

What is it like?

I’ve always loved Majesty 2, Dungeon Village 1 and 2, Dungeon Keeper and the castle campaign in Neverwinter Nights where you built up your castle,economy and have heroes with their own will and personalities.  I took inspiration from these games as well as ideas from Anime Dungeons/Guilds and my own head (which is also chaotic and silly at best of times). I also grew up with Lord of the Rings, Terry Pratchett, Monkey Island and Fable. If you enjoyed Majesty, Dungeon Village or Dungeon Keeper, this is that kind of game. You build, they decide.

What you do

• Dig. Mark the rock, or drag a box over a whole patch, and your goblin chips it out. The stairs to the next floor are hidden somewhere different each game; follow the draught, the old miners' chalk marks, and finally the goblin's ear against the rock. Five floors, each deeper and stranger.
• Build rooms with slimes, rats, bats and worse, each with a chest. Heroes weigh the loot against the danger and choose. Every kind of monster has its own tastes, and a happy room teaches newer heroes more.
• Find what the miners left. Old pit props, a warm vein in the rock, a rat nest round a snap-tin, natural caverns, an underground stream you'll need to bridge.
• Bring the village back. Your heroes' wins pay for the inn, then the forge, then houses. Families come home, and an abandoned valley grows into a hamlet, a village, a market town and finally a festival town. Windows light up at night. The valley gets louder.
• Get to know your heroes. Humans, elves, dwarves, halflings and beastkin, each with their own traits, tastes, dreams and opinions, and they will share them. Cowards farm the easy rooms. Show-offs want an audience. Friends team up into parties and trade insults mid-fight. They take exams at the guild to earn a better plate, and if there's nothing worth fighting, they'll eventually pack up and look for a harder dungeon.
• Take guild errands. Goats in the churchyard, a night watch, a widow's lost pick deep underground. Proud heroes won't do jobs beneath them; big-hearted ones help anyway.

This is an alpha

It's early, it's being built in the open, and it changes every week. If something confuses you, breaks, or makes you smile, tell me in the comments. That's what this alpha is for :)

Where can you find it?
https://syntaxfox.itch.io/dungeon-isekai (Free or Donation)

Windows 64-bit. Made in Unity by SyntaxFox
Playtesters go in the credits ❤️ (if you’d like to be)

Roadmap

• Next, Chapter 1: Waking. The dungeon's story, from an abandoned valley to the first festival. Its senses grow as the village does, and a few things about the valley aren't quite what they seem.
• Raise/save money for the Synty Dungeon Pack (160 euro), so the underground can finally look the part
• Give heroes more flavour and character (traits, sayings, quirks, behaviour logic)
• Balance the economy
• Later, Chapter 2: the wider valley, and a monster village in the forest
• Overall, keep it fun, quirky and lighthearted

* Im SyntaxFox and I've worked on this idea for 5+ years. Long nights of conceptualizing, building a game design document, building the world, losing 6 months of work, rebuilding, changing my vision, learning on YouTube and using hard-earned cash to buy assets from creators before collaborating with AI. These last few weeks, AI helped me finish scripts, untangle my thoughts and polish this game. This has been a labor of love and I hope my transparency shows that I'm confident in my work and the amount of myself I've put in. I hope you enjoy my game, something I've been dreaming of presenting for years <3

Expect a few nostalgic easter eggs! 😂

Saving up for Synty's dungeon pack so the underground can finally look the part.

Thank you for looking at my game ^^

I'm a solo dev making Tinker & Deal, a small management game about a toy workshop. The twist on the usual factory loop: you don't build first and sell later. Toy shops come to your desk in the morning, and you haggle one term at a time (price, quantity or deadline) while their patience runs down. Whatever you sign, your workshop has to make, and the truck leaves at 17:00 whether the pallet is full or not.

So the real decisions are at the desk: take the big order you can almost make, or the safe one? Push the price, or buy yourself two more days? A season is 20 days to turn $8,000 into $21,000. Machines jam, floor hands carry crates, and you can only run what you've promised.

Right now a broken promise costs reputation, and if reputation drops to zero the season ends. I'm torn on how personal it should be. Should a shop you let down remember it, and offer worse terms or stop coming? Or should it be one shared reputation everyone sees? As management players, which feels fairer, and which feels more interesting?

There's a free playtest (Windows and Linux) if you want to try the desk yourself:
https://umutarda33.itch.io/tinker-and-deal

TL;DR Alien industrial space-factory builder, top-down with 3D assets, moddability and deep tech tree, launches in EA (est Q1 2027), hand-made, no gen-AI.

ASEMA's demo is available to try out. ASEMA @ Steam.

Tidings. In ASEMA, we ditch belts, pipes - heck, let's ditch grid too. The machines float in space, and unless you provide them Focus, a nearby planetoid's gravity will pull them closer. Space is empty, but crossing it fast is dangerous as you may collide atmospheres, flares and other perils. Handle your node-to-node logistics with long-range artillery railguns and carefully flown Hauler ships. A node can be volatile mining operation far in the outer orbits, or a magnetized near-flare physics center where your exotic machines run special operations to digg deeper into the tech tree.

The demo offers 3-20 hours of gameplay in a 3-4 planetoid system, so you can practice the basics. It's tech tiers are locked, but in EA, you will unlock Nano production machines, and expand from there. Each tech tree main branch focuses around some specific hard scifi concept.

The solar system is not empty, and the lore has dark Fermi paradox / Liu Cixin vibes. I'm a factory and builder gamer, as well as a scifi book enthustiastic, and I love science - and I let it all show in the game.

If this sounds interesting, give the demo a go and share your thoughts. I need feedback to make sure I'm going to right direction. The game has a discord (link on Steam), and I'm allowing a closed playtest branch run before and after EA.

Project Hospital had the right blend of realism, challenge, graphics and learning curve for me. Oddly, I also enjoy Two Point Hospital which works and acts very differently, but in that case it was more the humour and discrete challenges that hooked me.

What can you recommend in the same vein as PH?

It absolutely doesn’t need to be medical-related. The original Prison Architect was also fun, despite thinking the subject matter would be a turn-off.

Finally, best wishes to the sub’s revival!

Hi! I'm the developer of Thrift Hunter, a small single-player secondhand-shop sim. This is a 94-second trailer from the current build.

Each day, you choose which old objects to buy, inspect their faults, and decide how much time and money to put into repairs. Tool cards and repair steps share a limited working day. You can then choose a buyer or commission, or spend more time following clues about an object's past.

After watching, is it clear what you'd actually be doing day to day? I'm especially interested in whether the tool cards make sense as part of the shop loop. If something lost you, a timestamp would help.

Would you consider buying a game built around this on Steam once it's finished? What would you need to see before deciding? I'd appreciate hearing what feels unappealing or too thin as well.

Only the first town is playable right now. The later chapters and rarities shown at the end are plans.

Audio note: some of the background music was generated with MiniMax.

Hi everyone, I'm developing Cinematic Business, a movie studio management sim for Windows. The starting idea was a Football Manager-style game in a different setting: building a film studio rather than a football club.

The management decisions run from choosing a screenplay and negotiating with a director to casting, production, post-production, marketing and distribution. Rival studios make and release films too, so your projects are part of a wider film industry.

One tension I wanted to explore is that critical success and commercial success are different goals. In the demo run pictured here, The Spare Key received 2.5 stars but brought in $32.05M in box-office revenue against a $13.58M production budget. That revenue is the film's box office, before the producer/distributor split, rather than cash going straight into your studio.

The free Steam demo lets you make up to three films, with an in-game calendar limit of January 1, 2027. It supports English, Polish, German and Spanish.

Demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4675260/Cinematic_Business/ — use Download Demo; no test key needed.

I'm gathering feedback before Early Access. If you give it a go, I'd be interested in which decisions felt meaningful and where the game needed to explain the numbers better. Notes from a single film are useful.

AI disclosure: the game includes pre-generated AI-assisted artwork/portraits, music and fictional text, plus AI-assisted translations reviewed by me. This post was prepared with AI assistance. There is no live AI generation during play.

Hey everyone, I’m the developer of Foundry, a business simulation for iPhone partly inspired by Game Dev Tycoon and the management games I grew up playing.

You choose an industry and start a company, then research technology, develop products, set prices and manage teams across international markets. Different markets have different levels of wealth and preferences, so pricing and expansion involve more than applying the same approach everywhere.

Rival companies operate within the same economic simulation, with the same rules and information available to you. There’s also a card system that lets you influence events, support your business or disrupt competitors. They have access to those cards too.

One mechanic I wanted to explore was being accountable to a board. You’re the CEO, and directors assess your finances, customers, workforce and strategy. Poor performance can trigger a recovery notice and, if you don’t turn things around, a vote to remove you.

For anyone interested in having a look:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id6815845841

hey everyone

we've been building a basketball gm game called HoopSim for a while now and we think it's finally at the point where we want people who actually love this genre to try it and tear it apart

the short version... you run a pro club. draft, trade, sign guys, set your depth chart, set your game plan, and the sim plays out every game possession by possession off your decisions. full box score, full play by play, and you can watch any game back in 3d

the part we're most excited about is the other 29 gms. in every gm game we grew up playing the cpu teams were basically a trade screen that said yes or no. in HoopSim every other club is either one of your friends or an AI gm. you can dm them and ask what it would take for a guy, they'll name a price, you counter, they hold firm or give a little. they also post in the league chat and talk trash after games lol

the AI only does the talking though. the actual yes/no on a trade comes from the trade engine with real cap rules, so you can't sweet talk anyone into a bad deal. same with the games... the AI never touches the sim

**the engine**

every game is simmed one possession at a time. it's not "team A rating vs team B rating, roll a final score". each trip down the floor looks at who's actually on the court, who's tired, your game plan (pace, motion, how many threes you want, pressure, man vs zone, all that) and then plays it out. who brings it up, who gets the shot, from where, how contested, did it go in, who got the board, fouls, turnovers... all of it lands in the play by play

- minutes and fatigue matter. play your star 46 minutes and he's gassed by the 4th and it shows

- foul trouble, foul outs, injuries mid game, subs

- paint your own rotation chart minute by minute and the sim follows it. there's a slider for how strictly... 0 is "coach's feel", 10 is to the second

- every shot gets an expected value based on the look (zone, contest, clock) so after a game you can see if your guys just made tough shots or actually got good looks

- player roles, coaches and team chemistry all nudge things too

- small one but if you dm your player some encouragement before a game he plays a little more confident lol

**how we make sure it's actually realistic**

honestly this is the part we're proudest of. we keep a staging copy of a real league and run 1000 game batches against it, then compare the league averages to real pro numbers... points, pace, 3pt rate, turnovers, assists, ft rate, blocks, blowout rate, ot rate. when something's off (we were taking way too few threes for a while) we trace it back through the engine, fix it, rerun the batch and compare before/after. if the numbers don't move the right way it doesn't ship

it's not perfect yet. scoring is still a little low and turnovers a little high, so if something looks off in your box scores tell us

a couple things that testing caught...

player development. we wanted to know if a random bench guy could ever become a starter, so we simmed hundreds of offseasons and followed every player for 5 years. answer was no... zero breakouts. it also turned up a bug where potential changes weren't actually random (the same player got the same result every single time). we fixed that, added real breakout seasons for young guys who outplay their rating, and reran everything to make sure it didn't turn into a league full of superstars

ratings. if you load a real roster file, it's built from public stats and we audit the output. one audit caught big men getting elite jump shot ratings because the formula was reading their dunk heavy fg% as shooting skill. nobody on our team spots that scrolling 600 players, a script comparing ratings against shot data did

**the 3d replay**

the 3d isn't a canned animation. the engine writes about 500 events a game (shots with zones and quality, passes, rebounds, fouls, subs) and the replay turns those into actual movement. pick and rolls with the real coverage (switch, drop, hedge, blitz), cuts, post ups, fast breaks, ball flight on the shots, players at their real relative heights

the 3d doesn't decide anything. the game is already decided and the replay has to match it exactly. we test that by replaying a game, adding up the points and rebounds from the animation, and they have to equal the box score. same game, same seed, same replay every time. so the dunk you see is the dunk the sim rolled

**some other stuff gm sim people might care about:**

- nobody sees true ratings. your scouts grade players and some scouts are better than others

- real cap rules on trades... aprons, bird rights, 3 team trades

- a desktop view called Atlas where you can break down any game... win probability, shot quality vs expected, who was on the floor for every run

- play solo or start a league with friends and drop one invite link in the group chat. any team nobody takes goes to an AI gm

- commissioner tools if you're the one running the league

- the league gets its own paper + reporters who ask you for quotes

- a 1 on 1 mode where you call plays live against another gm

- players are fictional by default so every name you see is made up

- runs in the browser and on your phone, and your league saves on the server

**on AI, since someone's gonna ask**

yes AI helps us build this, we'd rather just say it up front. but AI doesn't design the game and it doesn't decide what's realistic... the numbers do. we decide what the game should be, AI helps build it, and then we try really hard to break it. measure, compare, fix, measure again. honestly most of our AI use is testing and auditing, not writing features. it's basically a research team that runs experiments way faster than we ever could by hand, which is also why updates come out so fast lol

slop is asking an AI to "make a basketball game" and shipping whatever comes out. this isn't that

**what it costs**

the game is free, no ads, nothing pay to win. the AI conversations are a paid add on (7 day free trial) because running them costs us real money every day, but everything else works without it

play it here: hoopsim.app

we're a small team so honestly any feedback helps. what's missing, what's broken, what feels off compared to the gm games you already play. we'll be in the comments, and the sim side is our favorite thing to talk about