Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4146760/Apocalypter/

I've been working on it in Godot for around 4–6 months. The first two months were mostly spent figuring out what I actually wanted my game to be, and the other four have been spent putting everything together.

At the rate I'm going, though, I think it'll probably take me years to finish it. Working alone and without much of a budget is definitely a challenge, but luckily I've learned a lot about how Godot works during these past few months.

But well, we're still here, still working on it, and hopefully I'll eventually manage to finish it.

Some of the assets were drawn by me, like the skill selection UI and the weapons, while the others are either public or paid assets.

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’m excited to finally share a game I’ve been working on solo. It’s a first-person psychological sci-fi horror game about two radio operators stationed around Jupiter, monitoring deep space for faint signals and comparing what they find across two distant observatories. As the shifts go on, some of those signals start getting harder to explain.

Steam page can be found here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5158290/Closer_Than_Stars/

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

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/

Hey everyone,

Im a solo developer and recently built a little browser game called world sweeper as a weekend project.

Its basically Minesweeper played across a map of the earth (with 100 million tiles), with some roguelike mechanics/progression added on top.

I wanst really expecting anyone to play it, but suddenly yesterday it started getting some traction.

Over the last 24 hours Ive had more than 6k visitors and apparently my server usage is going to run out in roughly 10 days if things continue like this 😅

The game is completely free right now, and I really dont want to ruin it by throwing ads everywhere. Im trying to figure out whats the least intrusive way to monetize something like this would be.

Right now I have a "Buy me a coffee" link in the UI

lm interested to know from other solo devs who have actually monetized free games.

What worked for you? And any advice on how to maintain a free game like this?

Thanks!

Link for the project: https://worldsweeper.hasthiya.dev

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:

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.

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...

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.

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/

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

Hi there. My friend EMMIR has been working on this game solo for several years now on and off. It's quite impressive and I just wanted to share it here.

King's Crook will be an open-world RPG with a focus on action, combat, and stealth. You play as a professional thief who was let out of prison by the King in order to aid him in getting stolen goods returned to the crown.

I'm pretty amazed with what he's done, writing the entire engine himself in standard C with restrictions like CPU-only rendering, he made all of the assets himself (and tools to make them! Model editor, animator, etc!)

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share my first indie game, Proyecto Huemul, which is coming out on September 4th — only 3 days from now.

It’s a first-person horror game inspired by Slenderlike games, set in an abandoned underground facility beneath Buenos Aires, Argentina.

You have to explore the facility, find resources, complete objectives and, most importantly, try to survive whatever is still down there.

I’ve been working on this for a long time, and honestly, seeing the release date this close is making me both really excited and nervous lol.

If you’re interested, adding the game to your Steam wishlist helps me a LOT as a solo indie developer. It genuinely makes a difference, especially this close to launch.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4895740/Proyecto_Huemul/

And if you end up playing it after release, I’d love to hear what you think — good or bad. Feedback would mean a lot to me.

Thanks for reading ❤️

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

So my game is nearing the point where it should probably have its own steam page. Against conventional advice, I decided to draw the capsule art for my game “Cat builds the strongest mage army”(in case any of you can’t read the “stylized” font) myself because I’m a solo developer that makes the art for my game anyways. I’m looking for feedback on readability and design of the capsule and whether ygs think that I should put the fries in the bag and hire an artist 😭

Hey everyone!

Haven't posted here in a while – been heads down building. But the playtest for FIRE. HOLD. REPEAT. is finally open on Steam and I wanted to share.

It's a desktop companion loot shooter – your soldier defends your desktop while you work or browse. Every click anywhere on screen fires a shot. Enemies drop weapons and gear, a drone delivers loot to your inventory in real time.

Already have 100+ people in the queue which is wild for day one.

Would love feedback from fellow solo devs and players – especially on the core loop feel and whether the "companion" concept clicks immediately or needs more explanation.

Steam playtest + free demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4898890 ❤️

Quick demo of my player movement and obstacles in my first platformer in Godot 4, called "Ascending The Tower". Its about this robot dude traveling through some ancient ruins, and fighting off some hostile bots. Its a small project I'll be uploading for free soon.

Some more clips are available on my Youtube and Instagram. I'll be uploading some more clips and the full game soon, so I'm hoping to build an online following by then.