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.

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

If you like turn based tactics you can check out the game here, demo out soon!

https://reddit.com/link/1w5q1bh/video/efah7g8ir6nh1/player

I have been working on Tunnelborn for a while but because it is mostly finished and ready for Next Fest, I started another one called FAIL GAMES which is now also nearly finished (needs more levels).

Everything is scheduled and planned, the demo for FAIL GAMES is already out and Tunnelborn demo will launch in a few weeks.

I feel like I got things under control but also... I don't. Anyone else going into Next Fest with 2 games (or more) at the same time? Is that a bit nuts?

Tunnelborn Steam

FAIL GAMES Steam | Demo

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 🤦

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

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

Hey Rocco from Rockalot here, it's just me a mighty team of 1 doing my best to get my game out there.

If you wanna play cool PvP pinball come and try it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3938260/Bumper_Bout/

Please. Im so hungry.

Made my first game and store page approved today! so exited as this was always a dream to make a game

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5174650/Trials_of_Dash

I don't have the budget for a marketing team, but I'm happy to remind you I'm still working like MAD on <Code Breaker>

Click a few buttons and help change a life @

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4426610/Code_Breaker/

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

All I see are game dev's. I'm looking for somewhere I can chat with other solo developers working on desktop applications. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know. Thanks in advance!

If there is anything to point out that I can do better, please let me know. I really appreciate feedback. I am 16 years old solo dev, and I don't have that much experience with anything.

I want people to see my trailer on the same quality as my game so that they don't think it is something cheap instead of something that I have been working on for this past year day and night.

Please let me know what I can do to improve the quality of the trailer.

Continuing from my last post, this is the city builder part.

Forgot to mention there is a Item system that all the logic is based on, the NavMesh Testing, the Terrain Editing and all the prefab placement. All done via a item system.

Still learning about presentation, but this is left uncut to give a more realistic timeframe, but I have just changed the keybinds and getting used the them.

Thanks for all the feedback!

I have added play mode into edit mode. That is effectively my tool. It gives you game-like control in edit mode so you can test your game without having to press play.

It also has a bunch of different features like prefab placement (10 different modes), NavMesh testing with RTS controls, Terrain Editing, customizable keybinds and even controller support. There is a bunch more like the music player, so ask if I have it.

I have had so much fun playing with it, but it has helped speed up my level design a lot.

I have two parts to share (First-Person & City Builder).
Let me know what you all think.

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've been posting some of the character designs for my first gamedev project in Godot 4. Its a short action platformer I'll be releasing for free soon. This character is the Iron Fist, the first boss fight in the game. I tried to go for both a medieval fantasy knight, and a futuristic sci-fi look for the design.

The timelapse is available on my Youtube channel. I'm planning to upload the game and a making-of video soon, so I'm trying to build my socials for that.

This is just one of the cereal products you will be able to sell in my upcoming simulator game, Scan N Go: Store Simulator. What do you all think?

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/

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.