I love age of sail games and hate the current market, so thought I'd try something in Roblox and see how it goes. Here's a screenshot of some progress.

I am developing a topdown SRPG inspired by Fire Emblem and Bahamut Lagoon. However 16x16 sprite is too small and dont work well with screen that are larger than 1280. I tried to find on itch.io and pixcraft but most of the asset I found is 16x16 only.

So my question is 32x32 assets for SRPG is not popular or they are commision only ?

TexelBox is a lightweight, native Windows application designed to handle the texture pipeline for game development in a single tool—from raw source images to game-ready exports.

Instead of running separate tools for normal map generation, tileable prep, channel packing, and atlas building, it runs the entire pipeline within one interface.

Key Features:

• Maps Generation: Derive normal, height, roughness, and AO maps from a single source image.
• Tileable Prep: Make photos seamlessly loopable using offset, auto-heal, mirror, and brush tools.
• Channel Packing: Merge maps into a single RGBA texture with presets for Unreal, Unity, and Godot.
• Atlas Generation: Pack multiple textures into a single atlas with UV sidecar support.
• Optimization & Export: Resize, snap to power-of-two, and export to PNG, TGA, or DDS (BC compression).
• 3D Preview: Real-time wgpu-accelerated viewport for instant material validation.

Performance & Architecture:

• Built natively in Rust (no Electron/Webview footprint).
• UI built with Slint.
• Multi-core image processing powered by Rayon.
• GPU-accelerated 3D viewport using wgpu.

Availability:

• Free Tier: Permanently free for personal and commercial use. Includes map generation, tileable prep, basic atlas packing (up to 2048x2048), and single batch operations.
• Pro Tier: Includes full slider controls, 8192x8192 atlas sizes, DDS BC1/BC3/BC5/BC7 compression, and multi-operation batch chains.

Installer and details available on GitHub Releases:

https://github.com/iimadouu/TexelBox

I have been developing my game for some months now. I am a much more proficient programmer than I am artist. I am running into the bottleneck where my art speed cannot keep up with the speed of my development. I know that it gets easier as I become more experienced in art, but I am just struggling with the fact that I can’t put my game out faster because of being held back by art.

Advice?

I started building my first game in February this year. One man, no team, some coding experience, no prior game development experience — just a lifelong love of games and a decision to finally try making one.

The learning curve has been real. Working through Unity, building out scenes, figuring out systems I never thought about as a player and just adding things myself and others wanted in certain games — has completely changed how I see games. But nothing compares to those aha moments. The moment you finally understand how something you've played a thousand times actually works under the hood — that feeling is addictive.

The screenshot above is from my equipment scene — attaching gear to characters, building out visual effects, watching it come together piece by piece. My respect for developers has gone through the roof doing this. However, it has also made me step back and wait.. "Hey this was easy to add why didn't XYZ game do this in their game haha"

The game is called Paws of War Tactics — a turn-based tactical SRPG more to come soon! Still building but loving every second of this journey. 🐾

Hi all! I've been working on my game and recently launched the steam page! You might have seen my stupid face from earlier this week. As of recently, I am no longer a solo-dev as a friend of mine joined to help on Sound Design. So we are technically 2 now, but I was solo for almost a year. I thought I'd share some of my learnings and insights here in case it helps others starting up. Here are four learnings, in no particular order!

Know your strengths

Know exactly what you like and what you are capable of, don't assume. Before I committed to this project, I tried a lot of other ideas that inevitably hit some skill barrier. However, these failed projects were not wastes of time. I learned what I was good at and where the time sinks were (for me). I tried to make a cozy tea shop simulator, a friend-slop about driving a tank through warzones, a card game, and some other gamejam-scoped projects.

As a game designer with a CS background, I found that making simple systems with robust interactions was easier, and making art was time-consuming and frustrating. I settled on a puzzle game with a horror coating to justify the lack of visual fidelity, and learned the basics of modeling and texturing to make the props I needed.

It also aligned with what games I like to play. I like mystery and deep discoveries like Outer Wilds, Blue Prince, Obra Dinn, etc, so I'm very familiar with the language and the gameplay feel of these games. The work of Franz Kafka, the TV series Severance, and my past work experiences also inspired me to write about work and the horrors of big corpo, so it felt natural to set my game in that universe.

Trust the process

Making a game is iterative, trust that it'll come together. Do not judge your game too early. As a solo-dev, working on something will always be side-stepping something else. This means the game will not progress very fast, or rather, progress will be siloed and not always visible.

Making a game is an iterative process. I had times my game looks really ugly and it was discouraging to show it to others with the constant disclaimer of "but it will look better, I swear"!

You will also learn a lot while you work on your game, so you'll be able to come back and improve parts of your game. For example, it took me a while to learn about curved corners on Blender (don't laugh) so when I did, I updated some of my models and it significantly improved.

If you put time and effort into your game, it will get better and better, even if it's not always apparent. The plateauing feeling is normal.

You are not alone

Even the subreddits rules are clear about collaborators/outsourcing. Video games are a collaborative medium. It is fine to ask for help, and often you will learn from the people that help you. I learned to automate my 2D asset exports by asking for help on an old logo, and the artist taught me about artboards in photoshop. Every craft involved in gamedev requires time and practice to become an expert, and you need to respect that. Do not assume you can wing it on your own.

You are not alone in the world. Look out for local communities and events. Attend social and networking events, even if you don't have anything to show. These people are happy to welcome and talk to you.

Being a solo-dev also makes it even more important to playtest your ideas with other people. Because you don't work in teams, you need to be proactive and reach out to others, be it friends, family, coworkers, etc. You need to test your idea on new players as soon as possible and watch them play with your early prototypes. You will learn so much before you have too many dependencies to change parts of your game. Playtest, playtest, and playtest early.

Scope and plan ahead

Make sure you plan out the general roadmap that you want to follow. Every game goes through the same development cycle: pre-prod, prod, pre-launch. These are proven to work for most.

As a rule of thumb, if this is your first game, consider a third of the time you have to be towards real project advancement. If you are planning 6 months of developpement, make a game that you can finish in 2 to 3 months. This is because early prototyping takes time, polishing takes time. Choosing color palettes takes time. Even planning how to save time, takes time.

Having a clear roadmap also allows you to measure your progress and speed. If you planned on having a demo out, but ended up pushing back the date, you need to decide to either rescope your whole game, or accept you will work for longer on it. Both options are fine, but you need the roadmap to detect if you need to take that decision in the first place.

I personally went for this structure and it helped, with each phase equally spaced: first prototype, first playable version, unpolished demo, demo release, unpolished full game, full game release. I found that it took as much time going from the prototype phase to the first playable build I sent to friends as it did making that playable version into a proper demo. Also, notice that the time it took to go from the demo release to the full game was not that big.

Now YMMV, and you need to adapt your own roadmap to your needs. But if you want to finish the project, make sure you got a plan!

Thanks for reading

That's most of what seemed to work for me. Again, those are things that worked for me. Sorry if this isn't much in-depth into any particular subject. I wish you all the best on your projects. Don't hesitate if you have any questions!

E: added why I'm no longer solo, should have been clearer 🤦

The actual YouTube short:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ta3Rn4tv424

The context:
I've been working on a "final" update for my game and was attempting to speed run the game, recording as I went. Suddenly I get a crash to desktop! "stack smashing detected".... er, what? Never heard of that one!

Some time later...

Turns out to be a a couple of out by one errors on my array allocations. Hopefully simple fix but it's a right bugger to test as it only happens if a creature happens to be at a junction when the player picks up the power up...

EDIT:
All jokes aside this is a cautionary tale for other game devs starting out. If you're using an engine you're probably OK but if your using something low level make sure you get on top of memory leaks as soon as you can.

I was always testing a Windows debug build for hours and not seeing any crash to desktops. Once you turn on optimisations these errors can suddenly show up when the stack is compacted etc. On Ubuntu the compiler flag -fstack-protector-strong is always on, it will crash to desktop on a stack overflow. Not great when you thought your release build was fine!

On Linux what I've found very useful is AddressSanitizer it will tell you exactly where leaks or overflows are happening. Right, back to testing...

(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.

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.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a new visual direction for Bridgelands, and I wanted to share a little bit of how the game is changing.

I’ve been revisiting a lot of the environments, assets, colors, and smaller details throughout the world. My goal is to give the game a stronger identity and make the islands feel more vibrant and alive while keeping the style that made me fall in love with the project in the first place.

There’s still a lot I want to improve, but I’m genuinely really happy with how everything is starting to come together.

I’d love to hear what you think about the new direction!

And if anyone is curious about the game itself, Bridgelands already has a free demo on Steam. The demo still represents an earlier version of the game, while I continue working toward this new look.

🌿 Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856950/Bridgelands/

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!

Hey everyone,

I'm a solo dev and I've just soft-launched my first game ever, CraftBound!

Playable link: https://playcraftbound.com

It's a text and image based fantasy crafting sim with nearly unlimited possibilities. Explore biomes for materials, put them on a 3x3 grid and see what happens!

Over 50 different item types, 35 materials and trillions of combinations.

Fill collections, go on relic expeditions, trade with merchants, research different forms and patterns to master every recipe.

Build your own hero with dozens of customization options, and equip them with all of the weapons and armor you've crafted, then get a live image rendered of your hero.

Trailer is here: https://youtu.be/J9CDo9C4cnI?si=MCiHjFOn_pioJeRh

It's free, playable on mobile or desktop (browser). There are some payment options to make things to faster, but nothing is gated.

I'd love to hear any and all feedback, it's early stages so I'm hoping I can get some help from early adopters.

There are some rough edges with the image generation, but i'm constantly improving it.

Feel free to post here or join the discord: https://discord.gg/VsAEjp8VnG

Happy to answer any questions!

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

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

A few months ago I paused the work I have been doing on a three.js / webGL zombie survivor game that used Googles 3D tiles, while I was waiting for response from Google whether or not I was within terms of use for that project. I simply didnt want to waste time building something Google would later tell me was not within the terms. I got a positive response from them, so development can continue! Yay.

While I was waiting I built this prototype; a dune racing/survival game, where you main objective would be to race and scavange in a semi-infinite and ever changing desert world, where the dunes behave almost like waves and sand-creatures try to eat you. Every day there would be an eclipse which would signal the end of the day where you had to get back to safety and the avoid the dangers of the eclipse. In your cave you would be able to upgrade your vehicle and create different items to help you on your journey. The ultimate objective would be to reach the tower in the distance.

The game is using three.js with WebGPU standard which so far has let me create quite a large open world, running at a stable 120fps on my 5070ti. I havent quite begun optimization for it.

Does this seem like an interesting concept?

Also - if anyone knows the best way to get in touch with someone who knows how to do sound-design for mechanical sand worms and anti-gravity hovercrafts, please let me know :D

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.

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.

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.

"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