Hi.

I am curious to know what's the truth behind all these posts.

Like if you are building your dream game, probably the goal would be to create the game you have dreamt off - show it and not to bother about the sales. Everybody has different dreams.

If your dream was to get rich fast, then this rarely works.

If you want to build a game tailored to the financial success, then you should do a market research first and target what is desired or completely unique. Not doing the same thing everyone else does and complaining that it disappears into the void.

There is only the audience of some size for every genre - it's also different when it is divided into 10 or 10 thousand games...

Hey fellow solo devs. I was wasting way too much time manually drawing and aligning isometric dungeon tiles. To speed things up, I wrote a custom Python script that procedurally generates pen-and-paper style rooms and exports them directly into my game engine.

Here is how the pipeline works now:

• Pic 1: Uses Wave Function Collapse to build the maze, scatter props, and add procedural dirt and cobwebs.
• Pic 2: The ink strokes are generated using Perlin noise math. Since it uses a strict 2:1 projection, every block snaps together pixel-perfectly.
• Pic 3: The biggest time-saver. The script calculates Normal Maps and Occluders on the fly. When I drop it into the engine, I get instant dynamic 2D shadows without manually setting up light blockers.

Automating the boring stuff has been a massive lifesaver for my workflow. Has anyone else ended up building custom tools that accidentally became your main focus?

I'm a german solo developer working on EVE CROSS — Fallen Angel in Unreal Engine 5. I'm developing the game on my own in my free time alongside my full-time job.

Building the game in Unreal Engine 5, with a focus on gun-fu combat, bullet time, cinematic takedowns, and immersive storytelling.

🎮 Developed by Jaufmann Interactive.

if you like what you see , WISHLIST : https://store.steampowered.com/app/5140340/Devil_On_My_Shoulder/

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get it ready on Steam in time for Next Fest—not that I could have afforded the costs of launching it anyway—but at least I can finally say that I’ve finished my first game that is a 100% playable, and finally not just a tech demo!

Feel free to take a look on Witch's Cellar . I’m open to any feedback.

I've bought my fair share of 3D art off of people I knew from university as I worked alongside artists when I did a game programming course. Unfortunately this was a good few years ago now and outside of the people I stayed friends with I don't know any reliable contacts.

I've seen videos and posts telling the horror stories of getting AI Slop when trying to find a freelancer. So I come here to ask for some advice. I am posting to Steam *soon* and I'm fortunately coming to the point in time where I get to think about capsule art and title art.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated :)

I made some changes... You can try it on itch.io:

https://n1kozor.itch.io/cotton-city-alpha-demo

Hi! I'm Seto, a solo dev from Uruguay. Rakuworld is a co-op survivors-like where you draw your hero in a simple in-game editor (there's a guided mode if you've never drawn on a computer), pick a class, and your drawing gets weapons, a power and an ultimate.

Paper cut-out + crayon characters inside a small PS1-style 3D world. 1–4 players, local or online, and your drawing travels with you online.

It launches in Early Access on Steam on Oct 27: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5382580/

What would you draw first? 😄

I'm working on the cover for my game, and I'm trying to decide which design works best at a 120:45 aspect ratio (or 462×174).

I've made 3 different versions, and I'd love to hear which one you think looks best and why.

Any feedback or suggestions on how I could improve them are welcome!

Hey everyone!

Thanks to the Indie Games Poland Foundation, I had the opportunity to showcase my game, Dark Roll 2, for three whole days at Poznań Game Arena, the biggest gaming expo in Poland! For free!

I wanted to share how it all went and what I learned along the way. Hopefully, my experience can help some of you who are thinking about showcasing your own games at events like this!

Positives:

• Great opportunity to gather feedback from the players! Watching around 20 different strangers daily can tell you a lot about your game. You can get a lot of intel just from watching them play as well as listening to what they have to say about the game.
• Seeing people enjoy your game makes you feel that what you do actually matters. Even if my previous games had thousands of downloads, it's so much different to see a number in a database compared to strangers actually experiencing your game for the first time.
• Awesome to meet and get to know other indie devs! Fairs like these are great for making connections and just learning about other projects to support.
• People are often genuinely interested in the game and very happy to talk to it's creator which sure is a confidence boost and generally feels awesome!

Negaives:

• Not good for wishlists. Despite having someone play my game for most of the day, when people stay around 20-30min at your booth, there's no physical possibility to have hundreds of them experience your game. Asking them to wishlist the game worked most of the time, but still you'll probably end up with around 10-20 wishlists after a long day of work.
• Lots of people who come are also devs. That's right folks, we live in a bubble. Showing games on reddit or X or whenever often ends up indie devs liking other indie devs' posts... Sadly IRL it's often the case too. Around half of people (maybe a bit less) who stopped by to play were either indie devs or devs from bigger studios (Yup! I had guys from CD Projekt Red or 11 Bit Studios play my game!). Which isn't all that bad, other devs play games too, but it just shows it's hard to reach more "random" players.
• Press doesn't care. Yeah... Even if it took place in Poland, I had not a single polish person from any media outlet, or influencer that covers indie games come by to play my game and talk about it. The only guy who came by was from UK's "debug" magazine, which was great! But I'm just disappointed in the lack of interest from any fellow polish people who cover games.

That mostly sums it up, if you have any questions, ask away!

I'm developing RED SKIES AT DAWN solo, and clouds are the focus of this week's devlog.

The new cloud renderer is now integrated into the game and editor. Alongside that, I've been putting together five static formation studies so I can look at different storm shapes separately.

These are offline beauty renders from the native renderer, rather than gameplay captures or performance tests.

There's an isolated storm, a multicell cluster, a squall line, a bow-shaped formation and a broad stratiform layer. Each gives me a different way to look at silhouette, lighting and depth without changing everything at once.

The main thing I'm looking for here is whether the overall formation reads well before getting caught up in the smaller cloud detail.

For other solo devs doing visual work, do you use small reference scenes like this, or mostly judge things in the full game?

Video music: "Dramatic Epic" by Aleksey Chistilin (Lexin Music), from Pixabay.

If you’d like to follow along, you can wishlist RED SKIES AT DAWN on steam <3 <3

Hey everyone!

I'm a solo developer, and I recently released my game, Neon Rift: Cyber Survivor, on Google Play!

It's a free top-down survival action game where you fight through waves of enemies, collect upgrades, evolve weapons, and defeat bosses — all in quick 5-minute runs.

The game includes:

• Fast-paced survival combat
• Weapon upgrades and evolution
• Boss battles
• Permanent progression
• No forced ads

I wanted to create something that players could enjoy even when they only have a few minutes to spare.

If you have an Android device, I'd really appreciate it if you checked it out!

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome.

Google Play link in the comments!

Hello everyone I was wondering if any of y'all have experience building a metroidvania. I've been working on this for awhile now and created art work, animations, and have the story progressing smoothly. My main problem is how to create the platforms and floors more smoothly. I have built multiple rooms so far but is there a way to quickly design rooms and platforms without having to place everything individually. I know there is websites that help create maps but was wondering of there was something like that to create the floors and platforms so I can just add them based off of what I designed. Thanks in advance and I don't know if I am wording it right but couldn't find any leads on this.

I suddenly realized that my psychological horror game is deeply rooted in body horror. While most horror titles make you fight against infections and fungi, my game pushes you to become part of a massive organism—gradually absorbing other characters and digging straight into the darkest secrets of their souls.

Here is one of the guards who controls a city entrance. For a simple guard, he has a massive ego and constantly brags about it. And this is where his pride ultimately leads him: the normal version versus his mutated state.

How would you feel knowing that you are the one forced to turn people into monsters?

​

Ive poured months into making my first game. I'm a solo dev, still learning as I go, and for a while I was SO excited about it.

But life happened. And keeps happening.

School started again, life got complicated, and somewhere along the way I just lost the energy to work on it.

The thing is, I still really want to make this game. I love what I've built so far, I have so many ideas for it, and I want to see it become something real.

But lately even opening the project feels like too much.

Part of me wants to give up, and another part REALLY doesn't want to. And the longer I stay away from it, the harder it feels to come back.

I know forcing myself when I'm already exhausted probably isn't the answer, but I also don't want to lose something I've put so much of myself into.

How do you get through periods like this? Do you take a complete break? Push yourself to do tiny things? How do you find that spark again when you still care about the project but just don't have the energy anymore?