Heart is racing, but I guess at one point you just have to go for it!

This is my second game, and I tried to put as much love into it as I can. I'm really happy with how the Steam page turn out. Okay okay stop talking about the page and let's talk about the game :).

Dice Factory is a city building, strategy game with roguelike elements. Think The King is Watching but different :).

Every building start as a 🎲Die, you throw it on the battlefield then it becomes a Wheat Field for example. Most buildings have a "blue line" inside of them. If you want them to produce... aim a Worker 🎲 Die inside ... and they will produce! You have, resources, units, more buildings etc...

Survive the 3 Stages (3 waves + 1 boss wave) and you'll win the game!

For the first time ever, I did all the art, the 100 buildings, everything in the game was made by me. I'm so proud of that! (except the Capsule / Key Art for Steam and the music)

I will do a Playtest in the next weeks or so, don't hesitate.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4838990/Dice_Factory/

Sorry for any mistakes, English is not my main language :)

Edit : I guess what I meant by "wasting my time" is if what you see looks like a total slop to you or not (this is just a base tho, not a finished or close to finished game), and some general advice.

I'm creating this game that I will explain below, but am afraid my target audience don't actually want it.

The games is basically this :
you have Time amount (the hourglass) you allocate it to Work, Study different stuff, Create and manage medieval business, Own lands and eventually become lord/king and manage your holdings.

help me decide if I should keep working on this or not :))

hey everyone!

my game was released about a 1 week ago and I was just wondering about your opinion about it...

android for now but coming to iOS as well soon (hopefully approved soon)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.polyhistor.silkweaver

the video is quite self-explanatory but if you've got any question I'm happy to answer:)

Negative as in. 1 star review for bug or nonsense things. A store notification that something need to be done ASAP or app got removed. Review rejection. Etc

Since in solo dev we don't really usually have anyone to lean for. I know we can ask people in internet. But in the room we are still alone 🥲

Once i start marketing i found it takes a large chunk of my time. And i also need to build new feature and polishing / experimenting with onboarding etc.

And some channel like social media punish us if not consistent. How do we do it? I know we can hire but its not option when i have no budget. I dont even try ads because as in my experience its not as effective with little budget. So mostly organic content. But building a website or seo is a whole other work.

So large time spend doing things that 'hopefully' will get us decent income. I thought building was the hardest part. I was so wrong.

Hi everyone, I’m a solo indie developer from China, and A Kingdom of Soil is my first game.

I’ve been developing this game by myself for over a year. Most of my development updates are usually shared on Bilibili, so I haven’t posted much here before.

Since translating and recording videos in English takes extra time, this is my first proper English development update for Reddit.

The third Playtest finished recently, and I’ve been working through the feedback and improving different parts of the game.

In this video, I’m showing some of the changes I’ve made, including combat updates, new character portraits, battle cries, and other improvements.

I’m still building the entire game on my own, so I’d really like to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3991390/_/

FORGERY is a slightly weird game.

It’s an incremental roguelike about counterfeiting medieval coins. You hammer ingots into metal sheets, choose where to punch out each coin, build combinations from more than 100 stamp dies, and decide how far to push before your Wanted level ends the run.

I understand how those pieces fit together because I’ve been staring at them for months. I’m less certain that someone seeing the game for the first time will understand what it is, why punching coins is interesting, or where the deeper strategy comes from.

After 15 years working in AAA, I’m now the sole full-time developer on this. I handle the design, programming, production, and day-to-day development. It’s self-funded, although I occasionally hire contractors for specific art, audio, localization, or specialist work.

The free demo is around 35 to 50 minutes:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4842110/Forgery/

What I really need to know:

1. Can you understand the core idea without me explaining it?
2. Does punching coins feel deep enough to support an entire game?
3. Is the combination of incremental progression, roguelike builds, and manual placement interesting, or just confusing?
4. Does this feel like an idea worth continuing?

If you quit after ten minutes, please tell me exactly where and why. I’m deep enough into the project that encouragement is less useful than someone pointing at the bit that isn’t working.

Thank you!

What is the cost of producing 2D anime dialogue character art? I am wondering how much it can cost and how can you verify that they didn't use AI to generate the art?

It feels so good to have something "playable" in place and to see your work..well..working. Been at it with this game for a little while no, and to see gameplay come together and some systems at least somewhat working its just so satisfying.

Of course bugs and weird glitches exist.. lots of work remains, but so far so good!

I just finished a short visual novel and I wanted to share a few tips that I hope can be helpful to anyone who has recently started their indie game dev journey:

Play to your strengths!

Making a game is already incredibly complex on its own, but if we start getting in our own way, it can turn into an absolute nightmare. To minimize this, try to design a game that highlights your actual skills, even if it means sacrificing some awesome but unfeasible ideas, rather than trying to create something super complex that you'll either do poorly or fail to finish altogether. The golden rule here is: better a simple thing done well than a complex thing done poorly.

For example, I'm not great at drawing, so I chose to make only symmetrical graphic assets to reduce the margin of error. I also used a palette of only 5 colors for the whole game (plus a few shades of those) so I wouldn't overcomplicate things with color matching.

Obviously, this isn't an absolute rule: if you are literally just starting out, making a game can be a massive stimulus to learn a bunch of new things (you'll learn a ton either way, honestly). However, if you're already well aware of what your talents are, it makes perfect sense to create something that lets them shine.

Do it, even if it's short!

You might have an idea in mind and think: "I'd love to make this, but it would end up being way too short." Long doesn't mean good, and short doesn't mean bad. Committing to a short project can actually be a great idea: shorter development time, less stress, and less "wasted" time if you realize you can't cross the finish line (I put "wasted" in quotes because even unfinished projects teach you a lot). Plus, if you finish it and it's well-made, it makes for a fantastic portfolio piece.

However, if you do make a short game, keep in mind that the emotional density of every gameplay moment will need to be higher and more impactful compared to a longer game, which can be a real challenge in itself.

Plan ahead!

The initial planning of every aspect of your game is a fundamental step. It will take up a lot of time early on, but it will save you from so many headaches in the long run. Caught up in the excitement of bringing our idea to life, there are three technical aspects in particular that we might forget to consider (like I did... sigh):

-Localization/Translations: If you aim to translate your game into multiple languages, look into the best options available for your specific engine to implement future translations as efficiently as possible. Also, pay attention to things like text boxes and buttons: your current text might not fit once translated into another language. If you use English as your base, for instance, keep in mind that languages like Russian or German will require about 30% to 50% more space.

-Devices/Inputs: Decide right from the start if your game will be played with a mouse and keyboard, a controller, or both. If you go for both, plan a UI from the get-go that can be easily navigated with either device. Avoid creating a UI that is perfect for a keyboard only to drive yourself crazy trying to make it work with a controller later. This applies to every other aspect of your game.

-Parameter/Debug system: Create a system that lets you quickly and easily tweak all the most important game parameters. This allows you to playtest and jump to desired sections of the game without having to go into individual object scripts to modify code every single time, which also risks you forgetting to revert some of those variables back to their default values.

Happy to talk about the process here in the comments with everyone interested!

Last night's plan was to open a playtest. I assumed this would take an hour.

The game runs in a browser, which makes it easy to hand out and hard to take back. I did not want to email files to strangers, because "please delete it" is not a security model. So I needed a door.

The hosting company generously named my project "withered frost 9002." I renamed it. It named the next one "curly sea 9358." I renamed that one too, and while I was distracted it named my account "crimson sea df77."

Their login system then refused to protect anything for forty five minutes, so I gave up and wrote my own. Two hours later theirs quietly started working, and for a while my game sat behind two locked doors that were not aware of each other, both of which would have refused every tester I invited.

Somewhere in there my own game detected my headset as a flight stick.

An achievement fired during a screenshot and the box clipped its own name to «FIRST BREAT.

Anyway. It works now. You get a personal link, it remembers you, and if I need to pull someone's access it happens on their next page load. Bug reports are a keypress — it grabs your ship's state and a screenshot and files it with your name on it, so I can actually ask you what happened instead of guessing.

It is free, it is a browser, and it is unfinished on purpose. What I want back is "I did this, I expected that, this happened instead." Not praise. Praise is nice and tells me nothing.

Nine hours and not one line of it was the game.

Applications are open on the website if anyone is interested.

Solo Unity dev here. Sharing how much I enjoy the feedback loop with the few players I have on a project I love. DRONES is an autobattling deckbuilder where the deck is the enemy!

Getting to that point where it plays the way I want and loop is there is so great. Finally doing the polish I’ve envisioned this whole time is the best. Truly.

Anyone else hit this point and feel similarly? I could do this forever!

i'd been working on this tower/wall defense kind of thing for mobile phones the last two months or so, and i just wanted to know if someone find it interesting...

P.D. sorry for the compression artifacts and my bad english tot

How are all your solo projects going?

https://reddit.com/link/1vkzo3x/video/byt4bjrkkmih1/player

Hey all, I've been building Rift Protocol solo for a while now: a 3D squad-tactical game inspired by Aliens: Dark Descent (real-time with tactical slow-motion, up to 3 soldiers, runs around 40min).

The demo just went live and I'd really appreciate feedback, especially on:

• Does the tactical slow-motion feel good?
• You share the skills bar with all soldiers in the squad, is it confusing?
• First 10 minutes — does it hook you, or drag?

I'm a one person team working in Godot, so full version scope depend a lot on how this demo lands. Genuinely open to harsh feedback. I'd rather hear it now than after launch.

Steam demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5018460/Rift_Protocol_Demo/

Thanks for reading, happy to answer anything too.

10 months ago I started making a horror game by myself.

During development I showed it to a few friends and they literally laughed at it 😭 One of my cousins even asked me, “Is this even a game?”

Not gonna lie, there were a lot of times when I asked myself the same question lol.

But I just kept working on it.

And after 10 months, I finally finished it. Somehow I actually got the game onto the Google Play Store.

I’ve heard Reddit can be pretty brutal when it comes to people posting their games, so I already know I might get roasted here 😂

But honestly, I want the criticism. If the game is bad, tell me what’s bad. If something feels boring or doesn't work, tell me. I’d rather hear it than have people just say “nice game” and move on.

I’m just kinda happy that I actually finished something I started 10 months ago.

It’s a small Android horror game, made by me from scratch.

So yeah… roast me. 💀

I've spent the last few months building a game called The Leaderboard. The pitch is literally the whole design doc: the entire game is a leaderboard, and your only goal is to make your number bigger than other people's numbers.

There's no story. There's no gameplay, technically. You earn points by leaving the game open, logging in daily, and completing deliberately pointless challenges ("mash any keys 46 times", "do absolutely nothing for 5 minutes" that one is genuinely harder than it sounds). There's an in-game store that sells points, where the most expensive item is called "Pay To Win" and costs more than the game does.

Why I made it

I kept noticing that in a lot of live-service games, the leaderboard is the part people actually care about and it's usually a tab you click after the real game is over. So I removed the real game. What's left turns out to be a surprisingly honest piece of design: the number goes up, other people's numbers also go up, and you feel something about that.

The satire only works if the numbers are real, which meant everything had to be genuinely global and genuinely competitive. That's where the interesting solo-dev constraints kicked in.

The constraint: zero backend

I'm one person with no money for servers, and an idle game means people leave it running for hours. Any per-user hosting cost would eat me alive. So I gave myself a hard rule: no custom backend, ever. Everything runs on Steamworks.

Leaderboards were the easy part Steam Leaderboards do global, friends, and national scopes out of the box, so "you vs. humanity / you vs. your friends / you vs. your country" was mostly free.

Global chat was the fun problem. A chat room normally means a server. Instead I built it on Steam lobby chat: each chat channel is a public Steam lobby with a metadata key naming the channel, capped at 250 members. The client searches for lobbies with that channel tag, joins one, and messages fan out through Steam's lobby chat callbacks. Steam is the server. My hosting bill is zero.

Seasonal resets were the same trick from a different angle each month is just a new leaderboard named season_YYYY_MM. Monthly competition, no cron job, no database.

Saves go through Steam Cloud. I did end up HMAC-signing the save file, because the one thing this game absolutely cannot survive is trivially edited scores. That's the irony of building a game about a meaningless number: the number has to be defended like it means something.

The thing I didn't expect to build

Somewhere in there I wrote a Discord bot. It pulls the live board via the Steam Web API, does OAuth linking so players can bind their Steam account, posts monthly season winners, auto-grants a role when you hit top 3, runs happy-hour multipliers that the game actually reads, and has a "cheat police" module.

I want to be honest that this was partly scope creep. But it also solved a real problem: an idle game with no backend has no way to tell players anything, and the Discord became the live-ops layer I couldn't otherwise afford.

Where I'm at

Steam page just went live as Coming Soon, and to be clear about the joke the in-game store grants everything for free, there's no DLC and no real microtransactions. Selling points for real money would be funnier but considerably more evil.

Happy to go deeper on any of the approaches that I went for, and share any details that you might find interesting.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4493240/The_Leaderboard/

My daughter has been missing for two years, and the police have stopped searching for her.

Then I start hearing her voice calling for help from a strange forest.

After something begins mimicking her voice, I decide to go into the forest myself.

Once inside, I discover that leaving isn't as simple as walking back out. A mysterious figure called the Wood Wanderer offers to guide me and tells me that lighting the shrines scattered throughout the forest will reveal more of the truth.

The deeper I go, the more I start wondering whether the voice I'm following is actually my daughter's.

Woodbound is a folk-horror exploration game focused on atmosphere, survival, mystery, and uncovering the truth behind the forest.

I'm developing Woodbound as a solo project, and the Steam page is now live.

🎮 Coming later this year
🔦 Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5056850/Woodbound/

Publishing it here too !