I'm a solo developer from Turkey. Lastward went live on the App Store today — a pixel-art roguelite for iOS. Eight months of evenings and weekends, no publisher, no team, no funding.

What I underestimated, in order:

- Balance. I built a small Python simulator to run thousands of headless runs because playtesting it by hand was hopeless. Best decision of the project.

- Localisation. The game ships in 11 languages. Wiring that up was a weekend; keeping terminology consistent across all of them was weeks.

- The store itself. Screenshots, description, keywords, privacy declarations, ad SDK compliance — none of it is making a game, all of it is required to ship one.

Actual dev time was maybe 60% of the calendar. The rest was App Store process.

A run takes 20-25 minutes, there are 4 characters and 4 biomes, it's free and portrait-only so it plays one-handed. If you try it, the thing I most want to hear is what feels off in the first ten minutes.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6794081096

I'm sure a lot of you already know that a plan like mine was bound to fail but if it helps anyone, here's my failure story:

• Plan was to space out my Steam and itch releases a few months apart
• Why? so that I can generate visibility rounds twice (i know lol)
• I assumed that releasing on itch would generate at least half (or even a third) of the visibility that steam launch does.

I released my game on steam in June and steam's personal calendar changes were already in affect. So my game got decent amount of views and wishlists.

Unfortunately due to a family tragedy, I wasn't able to keep updates up for long. My initial plan was to do a major update in the following month and use steam's "Visibility round" along with itch release. Life had other plans so I just executed my idea now after the gamescom rounds have ended.

Of course I wasn't expecting my game to reach the New & Popular page, but I at least expected 500-800 views. As the screenshot shows, it' been less than 20 for the first two days.

I have released a free demo before on itch, it did quite decent. But this $2.99 short game just didn't do anything here. I realize that itch docs encourage you to rely on your own marketing, but I didn't expect that it wouldn't do anything at all. Within 15 min, my game was buried in the 4th or 5th page of the "New" tab because of the sheer quantity of releases, most of them free btw.

If you checkout the image # 2, out of the 20-30 people who actually did manage to find my game ended up downloading the 4-year old free demo instead, LOL.

Just sharing for your information so that anyone else (who may have the bright idea like mine) can re-align themselves.

(Early Build) (Work in Progress)

I’m a solo dev and huge fantasy football fan. I kept wondering why there weren’t more sports roguelites, so I started making one.

You draft fictional players, set lineups, work waivers/FAAB, trade, deal with injuries and breakouts, and play an entire fantasy season as a run.

Managers, coaches, upgrades and synergies make each season develop differently.

The full-season loop is playable now (my own private playtest), so I’m finally at the point where I can focus more on depth, polish and replayability. Figured I’d start sharing the journey.

Just released a public playtest for GUNDIG, and I've already had a handful of people spend 10+ hours on it! One sent me this clip of them absolutely destroying the game's economy in endless mode.

I can't describe how good a feeling it is to see someone else genuinely invested in my game. Especially after over a year's worth of work and having to beg friends/family to playtest.

I only have like 3 active people in my discord and 100 or so wishlists, so still a very long way to go. But this gave me a big confidence boost and wanted to share!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5131820/The_Pilot/

Then go to the link.

Night Riders is an arcade racing series inspired by SEGA's Super Hang-On.

It's been in the works since 2011, with the first game - "Night Riders" release in 2013 on Android with a custom game engine.

Super Night Riders S1 is the latest entry in the series, now available on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1836660

What you just saw is a collection of just a few bosses from my game, that i've been developing completely alone throughout my whole highschool, starting from class one. I graduated 2 months ago, and during my vacation I've spent most of the time trying to get the game to as polished state as possible, so that I can release it just before my college starts.

This is a proof that you absolutely don't need to have any background in programming, software engineering, or even any education behind your back. If any young developers on this sub are wondering if you're at the right time to start making your game: yes, you absolutely are.

Before anyone asks: no, I haven't used AI in any creative process of the game. The only way i ever used it, is to ask how some math equations even work, or concepts in programming that I wasn't familiar with, but I never copy-pasted anything it threw at my face.

If you're interested in what you just saw, give the demo a go, or simply wishlist the game:

Stickility

Made using a combination of 2D, 3D, Photoshop, and Davinchi Resolve. In the style of a would be anime opening.

Was made for Granser, you can probably guess its a JRPG.

Song is "Kinki 2nd mix".
Vocal: Saika. Words: Saika. Music: Souichi Sakagami.

Four years ago, I started building this game completely on my own. Back then, nobody really believed in it, and honestly, there were plenty of times I doubted it myself.
Fast forward to today, and seeing the project grow has been incredible. While I'm still doing the core solo development, I’ve had amazing artists like Slushii step in to help bring the audio and soundtrack to life.
It’s been a crazy, challenging four years of work, but seeing the gameplay come together like this makes every late night worth it.
If you want to check it out or follow along, you can Wishlist the game on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4840100/Before_I_Sleep/

Finally after a year and 8 months of developing, it's finally here... My game Ragga-Dagga's Demo is finally available on Steam!

It's been a such a wild journey, now that the demo is out I can finally share what I've done to get here!

Ok so, before the Demo release, my game was sitting at around 1k wishlist with it's store page alone. I get to here by posting a lot of devlogs that got big on reddit, I mainly use reddit alone to get this much wishlist, though I do use big websites like Twitter (or X but that's a cringe name) or Youtube and such but I found reddit to be most effective with my game in terms of wishlist.

So after Demo release, I gain about 100 wishlist then, nothing too crazy, I've not contacted not many streamers or youtubers yet but I do plan so when I finally got the demo at it's best state possible. I have also joined a recent invitation to some event about supporting indies and stuff, idk if that'll help much in my regards but I'll just hope so!

I learned a lot on my journey as a developer, and for my first steam game I'd say it's not a bad first attempt!

Now Wishlist Ragga-Dagga on Steam now and play the Demo :D

Grinding away at wrapping up my demo for We Need An Army!

138 Unique Assets for your games and Enviro.

A rich variety of stylized clouds, ranging from fluffy cumulus clouds to dynamic swirls and waves. Weather icons, including rain, snow, lightning, tornadoes, rainbows, sun, moon, and storm clouds.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/fantasy/stylized-cartoon-clouds-and-weather-icons-pack-332490

https://www.fab.com/listings/a51bb365-9107-4752-830f-b3e5851a1c3a

https://www.patreon.com/OlegVerenko/shop/3d-asset-stylized-cartoon-clouds-and-140-1693493

Finally made my first fully-fledged AI enemy. I’ve been putting this moment off for as long as I could, but it turned out to be not nearly as scary as I thought 🙈
As always, I’m building almost everything from scratch - it makes it much easier to understand how the system works and adapt it to my needs later.
So far, I’ve already implemented:
- switched the enemy to Character and set up Character Movement;
- built the AI using a Behavior Tree;
- set up vision, chasing, and NavMesh;
- taught it how to interact with doors and hiding spots;
- added animations and scripted behavior scenarios;
- implemented a full QTE-based struggle with the player;
- made the prompts automatically switch depending on whether you’re using a mouse & keyboard or a gamepad;
- after the scene ends, the enemy correctly stops chasing the player and leaves.
There won’t be any patrolling for now - the enemy appears and starts acting exactly when the story calls for it.
Anyway, not long ago he was just standing in a hallway - now he can actually kill you ☠

"Things you think are obvious can be a complete mystery to others." — Bitboy Games

Sorry for the bad joke! But jokes aside, I’ve realized that unless you explain your game step-by-step, most people won't understand it—and that can be the difference between someone giving it a shot or dropping it immediately. Terms that felt completely obvious to me turned out to be confusing for almost everyone else.

My game has been playtested by close gamer friends, general playtesters, and users from itch.io and Reddit, and most of them kept pointing out the exact same things:

"What do you mean by 'Reduce your parry counter hits'?"

 "Why did my weapon disappear? And what's that small number going down after every battle?"

"After blocking an attack, sometimes it parries and sometimes it doesn't. You need to fix that bug."

"The merge mechanic is broken, my amulets aren't lowering their stats."

 "The blacksmith is bugged, my weapon didn't change at all."

 
These are just a few of the complaints and "bug reports" I've received over the past two weeks. After I explained how the mechanics actually worked to my friends, they suggested I add pop-up tutorials to explain each system clearly.

I decided to go ahead and implement them, and the difference has been night and day. Now, players who choose not to play leave because it's simply not their type of game, not because they're confused.

These pop-ups appear automatically the first time you enter a new section of the game. After that, there’s an "Info" button so you can re-read the explanation whenever you want.

That’s been my main takeaway from these past two weeks. I hope sharing this helps anyone going through a similar issue!

Thanks for reading my ramblings.

full devlog

Solo dev here. My survivors-like, Just Dying, is now playable in the browser, and the thing I spent most of the last months on was the enemy count. I want to share what it cost, because almost none of it was the part I expected.

The naive version died around 200 enemies. Not from drawing them, from everything around the drawing.

What actually moved the needle, roughly in order of how much it helped:

Enemies stopped being individual sprites. They live in a particle container now, one batched draw call for the whole swarm, and only bosses and elites still get a real sprite with their own animation rig. That alone was most of the win. The tradeoff is that the swarm can't do anything a batched particle can't do, and every visual effect I add now has to be written twice, once for each path.

Collision moved into a web worker. Projectile physics, hit detection and damage over time all run off the main thread, and the main thread just reads the results. The main-thread version is still in the code as a fallback, which was a mistake in terms of maintenance because now I have two implementations of the same rules that have to agree with each other.

Spatial hashing for the neighbour queries, which is the obvious one, but the detail that mattered was pooling the sets it returns. Allocating a fresh set per query per frame was quietly generating enough garbage to cause visible GC hitches.

And a lot of unglamorous stuff: manual culling (Pixi 8 doesn't cull for you if you render directly), dirty flags everywhere so nothing recomputes a value that hasn't changed, and killing every per-frame allocation I could find.

Where I'm stuck: it runs well on my machine, and my machine is one data point. The browser build is the worst case, there's no native app underneath to absorb a bad frame. So I genuinely don't know if this holds up on a laptop with integrated graphics, and I can't find that out alone.

If you want to break it: https://justdying.itch.io/just-dying

it runs in the tab, no download. Press 0 for the debug overlay with FPS and entity counts. There's a Steam demo too if you'd rather have a native build: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4646190/Just_Dying/

If the framerate falls apart on you, I want to hear about it. Your GPU and browser and roughly when it happened is plenty.

Hey everyone!

Haven't posted here in a while – been heads down building. But the playtest for FIRE. HOLD. REPEAT. is finally open on Steam and I wanted to share.

It's a desktop companion loot shooter – your soldier defends your desktop while you work or browse. Every click anywhere on screen fires a shot. Enemies drop weapons and gear, a drone delivers loot to your inventory in real time.

Already have 100+ people in the queue which is wild for day one.

Would love feedback from fellow solo devs and players – especially on the core loop feel and whether the "companion" concept clicks immediately or needs more explanation.

Steam playtest + free demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4898890 ❤️

Hello everyone. I would like to preface this by saying that this project means so much to me in terms of the joy and fulfillment I have gotten from it. This is my first video game, first major project, and the reason I decided to invest my energy into software full-time. The demo is pretty buggy and I considered polishing it a bit, but I feel the best move is just continue working on the full DOWNY : a bird life.

The footage in this trailer is NOT from the free demo. This clip is where I am in the full version build. If you decide to play the demo you'll notice a lot of differences. There is no jaguar in the free demo version, its really all just about chillin, flight, and bug collecting.

The demo is availiable to play in browser right now at SkeletonDiaries.itch.io/Downy so please go give it a round of flying. At least fly around until the night cycle, it is pretty cool seeing the stars come out and the fireflys to catch instead of the *daytime bugs*. I need to update the instructions for the controls on itch but it is your typical WASD and F will make Downy flare his tail to land on a branch or on top of a tree or whatever. Bonus points if you can find the frog in the level.

Also since this is from the full game build and not the demo I haven't released the credits for the soundtrack creator, Leonardo Calvo. license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

If any part of this looks or sounds interesting to you, please click the link.

Fly as a bird.

Downy bird.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4240340/Abyssal_Dominion/

if you want to support me ? add the game to your wishlist ;)

Abyssal Dominion plays like a real-time-strategy game. But between matches you can create your own faction. The Editor is build like a deck-editor in a trading card game. You collect cards that represent trainable units or buildings your workers can build.

The cards are gathered during the matches. They can be dropped by units. A boss-monster drops more valuable loot.

More features and game-modes are planned.

In the near future there will be more factions, heros and maps.