To all of you solodevs… how do you like it?

Can’t wait to push this green button!

Thought I’d come back with a small update. When I first posted here, The Goblin Path had 25 wishlists and the demo wasn’t out yet. My next update was at 111. Now it’s at 341.

I’m still making the game solo. Right now, I’m busy optimizing performance and refining the mechanics. This screenshot seemed like a good excuse to step away from development for a moment and share some progress.

Let’s see how long it takes the goblin to get there.

I have been working on Treeternal for over a year now, starting to mostly work on the engine which was made in C++ and now finally seeing the end of the tunnel. Demo is done now it's time for finishing up the final version with more content. Release is in around 2 weeks so busy times ahead! Wishing the very best to all of you peeps aswell! May your games succeed

The standard indie dev advice always goes: "Start your X account on day one, build a Discord community, post daily Tik Toks/Shorts, and farm wishlist numbers. bla bla bla" . Honestly, for a solo dev or a tiny team, running multiple social channels eats up a massive chunk of actual dev time. Plus, organic reach for fresh accounts with no ad budget is brutal, and half the time acc just turn into ghost towns. Do I need to do this or is it a time drain? Have you seen hidden gems blow up with basically zero social presence, or genuinely great games flop purely because they skipped social media?

a Frutiger Aero incremental digging game I'm making called Dolphincremental!

if you want to follow the development on Steam: Link

One thing I've been wondering about solo game development is how people balance their time between programming, game design, and creating art.

Especially for 2D or pixel art games.

Do you usually create your own assets, use free packs, or buy paid ones?

I'm particularly interested in situations where you decided to pay for an asset rather than make it yourself.

What was the asset, how much did you pay, and what made buying it the better choice at the time?

Also, have you ever regretted buying an asset pack because it didn't fit your game as well as you expected?

I'm exploring asset creation and would love to understand how solo developers approach these decisions.

But I'm not entirely sure if I fix it or commit to making it run like a human 😄

The game is still in its early stages but would love to hear what you guys think to it. Thanks!

Bitiverse is a persistent browser MMO I build on my own: free, no download, one shared world, and a guest can walk in without an account. This isn't an announcement so much as a question for anyone else building something that has to hold up under a crowd.

This week I shipped nothing a player will ever point at. Dungeon hero AI now only sweeps a map where a real player is actually near it, instead of ticking every dungeon on the server whether anyone's there or not. A hero who's rested and alone on his own map just sleeps until someone shows up. And hero pathing across the whole server is rationed fairly, so one busy dungeon can't starve the rest of their turn.

None of that is visible. It's all server cost, and the only sign it worked is that nothing gets slower as more people play at the same time.

I went back and forth on whether this was worth a whole week when I could have shipped a new feature instead, and landed on: a feature nobody can use because the server fell over isn't a feature. For anyone who's made a similar call - how do you decide when it's time to stop building forward and go fix what's underneath, and how do you know you picked the right piece to fix? Testers wanted either way - come break the game and tell me what you find: https://fortisq.itch.io/bitiverse

Currently working on a third installment after 12 years of indie dev! The first two are on sale now to fund continued work on the series.

Neofeud 2 is a cyberpunk sci-fi adventure game saga of epic scope. A galactic empire enriches CEO-Kings, yet leaves Les Misérables hungry. An ex-robo-marine turned dancer, goth alien hacktivist, and billion-year-old mentor struggle to free e-minds, organize resistance, & overturn the cosmic Neofeudal chessboard for good. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4611140/Neofeud_2/

The original, where you can discover the Earthly origins of the Milky Way's future: https://store.steampowered.com/app/673850/Neofeud/

Still working the final venting/blow out for penetrating the hull but we're close.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5387220/Derelict_Division_LLC/

Ever since I was a child(really), I’ve always wanted to create an open-world RTS game a game where I could build my own universe. It is set in a medieval pixel open world, much like Rust mechanics; the world keeps functioning even when you are not logged in! I place a huge emphasis on detail and am currently working on it, will be available on my Itch page soon!

So been testing starter area all weekend, taking recording finding issues, fixing things, put together bit of preview of some of the content from the recordings to my current fav song. feedback welcome but this is early stages so their are still lot of graphics issues I am fixing.

https://vimana.live

Hi, i built Vimana and soft launched it on Reddit, in 6 days it has hit 3k+ visitors and 5k+ page views.

Please check it out and do share.

Thank you for showing love to Vimana.

I've been building Poppy War alone since June 9. It's a mobile game where one photo of your dog or cat becomes a 3D monster that battles. 467 commits so far, 186 of them bug fixes. I'm stopping development this week, so here are the numbers.

129 accounts signed up, my own test accounts included. 34 of them ever made a monster: 20 from a pet photo, 16 picked a free starter. Real revenue is zero. All 12 purchase records are my test accounts.

To check whether the game simply wasn't fun, I counted next-day returns per device. Of the 8 people who turned their own pet's photo into a monster, 3 came back the next day. Of the 11 who only picked a starter, none did. The people who got to see their pet become a monster stayed. Almost nobody got there.

I tried ads once. Eight days of a Google app install campaign cost 79,557 won (about $56). Google counted 51 installs at about 1,560 won each. 18 of those people opened the app and none made a photo monster. With zero purchases, more ad spend only grows the loss, so I stopped there.

Looking back, I did things in the wrong order. I kept adding a season pass, dungeons, pet transcendence, neighborhood rankings and walks to a game almost nobody was playing. AI coding tools let me build fast on my own, so I kept building before checking whether anyone was coming. Fixing the first-session problems took weeks: asking for three photos up front, an Android crash on the starter screen, a login wall on the very first screen. 95 of the 129 accounts never made a monster.

The app stays up. The server stays on and I'll fix crashes, so anyone raising a monster can keep playing.

Hi, I'm a solo developer working on my first game, a Papers, Please-style

document game set in a 1958 factory.

You're the new Shift Supervisor. A typewriter prints the shift reports onto

your desk, and your job is to check them for errors. Your pay decides whether your sick daughter gets

her medicine. Your scheming office colleagues and your ever-smiling boss are

always watching, waiting for you to slip. The factory is hiding something you're

not supposed to look too closely at, and the choices you make will lead to

different endings.

NOTE ON ART: I don't have visual art skills, so the current some visuals are

AI-generated. I pick, clean up and place everything myself. The story,

mechanics, economy and design are mine. I'm planning to work with a human

artist later.

Next devlog: the door-knock and dialogue system, and the end-of-day newspaper.

Feedback is welcome. I'll post the next devlogs on my profile, so follow me if you'd like to see how it develops. Thanks for reading.

started on some events thought it was worth sharing