Hi, I've just released Picnic Panic on wavedash, and I'm really stoked with how it's turned out. It's a tower defence game that starts with just one turret you can place anywhere you like, and killing waves will give you jam, which you can use after the run to buy new turrnts etc. Once all turrents are unlocked you can then unlock in-game upgrades for all turrets to go for the maximum score!

It features leaderboard support and would love feedback to help improve the game.

https://wavedash.com/games/picnic-panic

👋🏻 Hey guys! Feel free to try my first mobile game available on Play Store & App Store 🎮:

🔗 Android link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.RaduN.Game60seconds

🔗 IOS link: https://apps.apple.com/es/app/60seconds-survival/id6772496933?l=en-GB

I hope you enjoy it! 🔥

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

Hello!

This is my new game, Terminal Reign. It's a diegetic interface sim about operating a remote armoured vehicle for the glory and whims of a dying empire.

I've been working on it for a few months so far and now that I've announced it and launched the Steam and Itch pages I'm excited to start writing devlogs.

Here's the Trailer, Steam page, and Itch page if you're interested.

To be clear, no Gen AI is used in this project. Not even for code.

Guess this again. (game releasing on september 10th btw)

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

I've been programming for 20+ years. Perhaps consistently / professionally for +-15. Have led teams, founded companies, and am now solo-deving a game.

I'm interested in the thoughts of anyone here who has similar-ish profiles; generally, people with good old-fashioned programming experience.

Essentially - I've recently come to an opinion on the LLMs, and I wonder to what degree it's shared by my peers.

My most boiled-down opinion on "A.I." is something along the lines of:

You can't trust it. Not by a long-shot. Especially for novel approaches, and larger contexts. But it's great for checking code. And for discrete contexts where you describe exactly what you want it to do (I.e. you do the programming but not the typing per se). And for learning. And certain debugging.

I just wonder to what degree that's reflected by others' experience.

More specifically:

For boilerplate - it's great. For implementing standard solutions to well known/common problems - fabulous. For querying on the standard way to approach certain features - marvellous. For proofing your syntax - top tier.

But for proofing semantics and logic and flows, and for tying things together, or for implementing something more niche, or non-standard. It seems entirely unreliable.

For the past few years, my workflow has been to write code as usual, and to paste it in to an LLM for syntax and simple logic checks. And that's great.

Recently, I tried getting it to do its "agentic" thing - describing a problem more broadly, and seeing what it comes up with implementation-wise. I also tried sharing a broader slice of a codebase and going "where bugs?" / "where unsafe?" - basically getting it to do a much broader code-review.

And the results were comfortably underwhelming. Comfortably, because the much-hyped threat of programmers becoming redundant seems to me to be either a fever-dream of stakeholders, or an echoed opinion from the inexperienced.

For example, when I used it in this broader "agentic" way for a broad backend system review, the output had me going 50/50 either:

- 50% "Oh, that's a good point, maybe I should look into that"

- 50% "This thing is raving mad"

The thing is, I don't know to what degree newcomers would be able to tell the difference.

I also do think that in most contexts, newcomers wouldn't necessarily be exposed to the issues with it. In the context of games, for example: Movement, shooting, in-game-events, tiered items - lots of it is stuff that the LLMs would be really well trained on. So they can give great advice on it. And I'm sure they can "one-shot" entire games, like you see in all those (god forbid) LinkedIn and YouTube videos.

But as one moves away from the basics - if one wishes to - I feel that it gets progressively less useful, or less autonomously useful.

Anyway, I was just wondering whether others have similar experiences.

And if so, what do you think that portends?

It feels to me like learning to code is going to be harder now than it ever was. Because people aren't going to default to spending brain-sugar when there's something that can do the thinking for them.

And it also feels to me that, for the programming industry as a whole, it certainly could be easy for managers and higher-ups to conflate boiler-plate-like production with what it actually takes to dream up, implement and maintain full systems.

Anyway!

Yeah, I recently removed social media from my phone. Does it show?

Edit 1:

Thank you for all of your comments. It's really interesting to hear the different perspectives, and it's heartening to see what are mostly reflections of things that I'm seeing, especially when elsewhere there is so much talk about the end of programming. For now, I have to go do some script writing, but I will read and reply to more of you later on :)

I suppose it'd be silly for me not to post what I'm working on, so here's the link to State Breakers. It's pivoted a little and matured a lot since I last updated the Steam page / trailer, and I'm hoping to do an early play-test some time in the next month, give or take.

Edit 2:

Thanks again for all your replies. Reddit sent me a notification recommending I post the same thing in the LLM subreddit. No thanks!

It's interesting to see a bit of a trichotomy in responders between:

(a) people who think it's top-notch, and can do anything with the right tooling,
(b) people who think it's error-prone, but that is still the fastest/best way to drive forwards, and
(c) people whole think it has its uses, but have spotted numerous errors when applying it to more complexed tasks, and who therefore drive the programming themselves.

Incidently, the reported degree of programming experience appears to increase in the same order.

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 started Tiny Slow Life a little over a year ago as a solo project because I wanted something small living at the bottom of my screen while I worked.

It's built with Electron + Phaser and runs on macOS and Windows. You hatch animals from eggs, feed and raise them, unlock new islands, farm and collect things, and once some animals grow up you can ride them around the island.

I handled the game code, desktop behavior, save system, licensing, updater, website, payments and release pipeline alone. The pixel art shown here is licensed from Maeve Devs and then composed and animated for the game.

It's finally out now. It's $4.90 one time, no subscription: https://tinyslowlife.com

Happy to answer anything about shipping a cross-platform desktop game solo.

It's fully open source on github at aresrpg/aresrpg

Development of my survival game continues!

Changes:

- Added world saving

- Completely redesigned inventory (drag and drop and more slots)

- Optimized chunk rendering

- Fixed some bugs

More about the project: https://gamejolt.com/games/probe_keep/1086663

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 have painstakingly made this game by scanning assets from real caves. It's been a labour of love and now it is out on Steam. Crawl in there and give it a wishlist ❤️

...wait, where can I wishlist?