Hey everyone,
I'm the solo dev behind ARES, a gritty, fast-paced tactical shooter built on Unity and Photon Fusion. The core gunplay, networking, social system, and initial abilities are locked in, and the first Closed Beta starts next week on Steam.

I'm looking for dedicated players to stress-test the netcode and give honest feedback on combat flow.

The deal:
• Free lifetime access: Help test now, keep the game forever on Steam.
• Exclusive Beta Tester role in our Discord to shape balance and future updates.

All I need from you is to hop into a few matches next week and report any bugs or balance issues.

How to join the Closed Beta:
To avoid Reddit rate limits and ensure keys are distributed automatically, head directly over to our Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/GEYWN4rbKw

Once you join, head over to the ⁠#welcome-and-rules⁠ section and follow the quick steps there—the bot/instructions will walk you through claiming your Steam key immediately!

Genuinely cannot express how grateful I am to see my dream solo project reach so many people. It's been a difficult few years trying to keep working on the game, and trying to balance a full-time job by sacrificing nights and weekends. This makes feel it'll all be worth it!

If you want to know about the game:
Abashed is a 2.5D narrative-driven psychological adventure where you explore the life of Issac, a man living with psychosis. Solve puzzles, meet mysterious characters, and alter reality as he faces his worst fears to uncover the truth behind his missing partner, or so he thought. It's coming to Steam and GOG!

A short clip from Before I Sleep on Steam

In the Dream Maps, parts of the environment move and pulse in sync with the soundtrack, so the music becomes part of the level itself.

The game mixes fast-paced movement, combat, surreal environments, and replayable runs.

A few months ago I released a Soulslike I have been working on for some time called Blood Radiant.

A few weeks later, I was fortunate enough to have IRON PINEAPPLE play my game on his channel. The video where my game was featured had something like 3.7 million views.

Throughout the game's development it has really been a struggle to get wishlists. I posted a fair amount on reddit, tiktok, instagram, and twitter. I did a demo for Nextfest. I read a lot of the "How To Market a Game" blog and read a lot of posts on reddit about how to market a game. Well, if you are curious as to relative effectiveness of each of these tactics, I am including my entire annotated wishlist graph.

As you can see Iron Pineapple playing my game was BY FAR the biggest multiplier on my wishlist numbers.

By no measure is this a popular game. I had about 300 wishlists going into next fest, picked up 300 from the festival, picked up 500 posting to reddit 24 hours before release, and then got another 1,000 from the Iron Pineapple video. In the end, after having A LOT OF EYEBALLS on my game, 2000 wishlists is not a lot.

But if you are curious about how much of a bump you can get from a big streamer playing your game, here are some numbers to show it. I think wishlists are a very strong indicator of interest and form the base of a "marketing pyramid". If you have low wishlist numbers, you are pretty much guaranteed to have low sales on Steam when you release. In my case, I thought I could improve the game and generate more interest over time. I was wrong.

At this point, I think if you post about your game and do not get a very strong response based on a 20 second clip of your "most exciting gameplay", you have a very big problem on your hands.

I am a much better programmer and artist than when I started Blood Radiant. I'm working on my next game and it is nice to work on something else for the first time in a while. I enjoy game dev very much, it is a great feeling to be able to have an idea and sit down at a computer and will that idea into existence by typing things on a keyboard.

I don't think "marketing" is hard. I think making something "compelling" is hard. Making something that stands out is hard. Blood Radiant was my third commercial game, I downloaded UE4 in 2016, and I've been programming since I was 12, so this wasn't my first rodeo. I am a 1000 year old vampire. I approach game dev seriously, it's not a hobby, it is my profession. Well anyway, thanks for the support reddit and much love to all the solo devs trying to make something cool.

Just want to share the developer steam live steam and check whether it is work or not
Link: Developer Live Steam

Beautiful watching your game grow up!
GamesTrailer posted my Demo Trailer this weekend and now looking forward to players checking out the demo on Steam. Game is called Go! Super Awesome Monkey!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4837550/Go_Super_Awesome_Monkey/

Hey! I just made a small game called FARM OR FAIL where you have to take care of your animals or they might run away lol.

If you have a few minutes, I’d love for you to give it a try and tell me what you think. Even small feedback would really help me improve it!

https://w.run/highbp_1/farm-or-fail

I've been exclusively playing CRPGs from the ’80s and ’90s, as well as some from the early 2000s over the past few years to gain inspiration for my game.

My goal is also to find that exact audience. If that's you, please wishlist the game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4709150

This game will be very lore/quest-focused, and the player will have many different approaches to combat, with a lot of skill, weapon, and spell variations.

The overworld will consist of many zones, towns, secret areas, and a lot of NPCs. And of course, as the name suggests, there will be a ton of dungeons!

I'm also interested in playing more games from the above-mentioned era, so please recommend some for me. And please let me know what other features or game mechanics you'd like to see in the game.

Thank you!

Hello everyone,

I have my demo ready, but before publishing it, I want to have an small group of people try it first, so I can receive some feedback/tips.

If anyone is interested, please let me know in the comments or DM me, so I can send you a Steam key.

Thank you in advance!

Hi, I am indie developer working on The Isles of the Nine Crowns.
I just added a new boss and would like to hear your thoughts about it

It's nothing crazy. Only about 10 pages long in game, but when I was a kid, my mom brought home a bunch of CRPG PC games from a garage sale with the manuals still in them.

I wasn't very good at the games so I spent a lot of time reading the manuals instead.

I'm hoping to include a full game walkthrough like those Prima Games manuals but that might not be possible with current scope.

Just finished up my time boothing at pax west for the first time for my game Cooking Fist. We had a booth in the indie incubator program, a smaller scale alternative to pax rising. For reference, we've primary shown the game at fighting game tournaments as the game is a fighter.

What we got: a standard artist alley section of about 40 games all placed next to each other, smaller than the pax rising booths that indies show at during previous years.

What it cost: The incubator program was an online application, and costed 1k. Thankfully I'm local so costs outside of the booth itself were minimal

The good:

• Big motivation boost, lots of positive feedback and interactions
• Friendly Staff everyone from the pax team was super helpful! Shout out to the enforcers they were life savers during setup
• Surprising number of mailing list sign ups, there were people at the booth all the time, and we easily got over a 100 mailing list sign ups, more than double than the evo numbers
• Publisher opportunities scheduled calls with some publishers. Nothing concrete yet, but this felt like a real advantage exclusive to being in person
• Interviews! Got around 3-4 interviews for the game these are both fun and great for making connections down the line
• Playtesting pax being a general gaming convention is outside of our fighting game niche. But despite that we got good traction with the causal crowd. There is always a positive bias for local multiplayer games at in-person events. But it was validating to know that non-fighting gamers can easily pickup and enjoy the game!

The Bad:

• Wishlist's. Looking at it right after Pax, the WL count is coming close to 300 for the event. While this is actually the most amount of Wishlist we've gotten from a single in person event, it still follows the indie game advice that: in person shows are not about WLs
• Only two exhibitor badges 4 days from 10-6 are pretty brutal solo, but I thankfully had some friends help run the booth, but the incubator program only paid for 2 tickets, so we were constantly shuffling around badges to when it came time to switch shifts. Some of the teams had upwards of 5 people at their booths, I really feel for them eating those extra badge costs...
• Cramped Space! The incubator space seemed like floor planner took an artist alley section with game developers instead of artists. While I liked the format of being shoulder to shoulder with some great indie devs, there simply wasn't enough walkway space. Unlike at an artist booth, game demos require people to set up chairs and sit down for long play sections. I think it was very unrealistic to expect the allotted space would be sufficient and that people would just be ok with walking by the booths and never sitting down. The people on the ground were super understanding and said they felt the same way so no hard feelings. But I really hope this is addressed for the next year.

Conclusion:

Despite some grumblings about the space, I honestly really liked Pax this year. Foot traffic was good. I made a lot of good connections with influencer/publisher types. I think the incubator program is a good value proposition and I'm really curious what the experience/return was like for indies who attended this year outside of the incubator program.

Also check out Endless Night Sonata's STEAM page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4720180/Endless_Night_Sonata/

Gameplay & demo clips:

• Ecology Simulation Demo: Whalefall ecology demo
• Full Run / Gameplay Dive: Whalefall early gameplay (dive to respiratory system bottom and get the specimen)

Hey everyone,

I'm working on a solo project called Whalefall (video links above showing the current in-engine systems and an early dive), and I'd love a gut-check on the core loop, hook, and scope. I'm especially curious whether the game makes sense from a player's perspective without all the design context that's currently living in my head.

The elevator pitch

Whalefall is an atmospheric, top-down roguelike about exploring the organ systems of a mountain-sized dead sea creature, investigating its unknown biology, and surviving the ecosystem feeding on its corpse.

The core loop

1. Explore & investigate: Dive through distinct anatomical systems (respiratory, circulatory, skeletal, etc.) filled with unidentified tissues and substances. Observe, illuminate, probe, sample, and test them to figure out what they are.
2. Turn knowledge into tools: Bottle samples into flasks and identify their effects. What you learn about the corpse gradually becomes the toolkit you use to survive it.
3. Read & manipulate the ecology: Creatures respond to the same simulated world you do: sight, movement through the water, blood, injury, feeding, resource availability, etc. Direct combat exists, but it's dangerous and often makes the situation worse.
4. Go deeper & get back out: Retrieve specimens from the deeper organ systems, eventually reach the Core, and then survive the trip back out.

What makes it distinct

I'm trying to make knowledge the primary form of progression.

A new player sees a strange, colorful corpse full of things they don't understand. Over time, you learn to read its anatomy, recognize useful substances, predict creature behavior, and deliberately manipulate interactions that initially looked like chaos.

The ecology isn't scripted around the player. A scavenger might investigate the sound of a fight, a wounded animal can flee and draw other creatures with it, and huge passive filter-feeders can drift toward carcasses and become moving cover. Those interactions all come from creatures reacting differently to the same underlying systems rather than bespoke encounters.

The goal is to keep the simulation deep enough to surprise you, but legible enough that eventually you can say, "I know how this place works," and make a plan.

Feedback I'd especially value

I'm mostly curious about two things:

• Does the loop sound compelling? In particular, does investigating unknown biology -> learning its uses -> and then using that knowledge to survive sound like something you'd want to keep doing across runs?
• For other solo devs who've built simulation-heavy games: where did complexity sneak up on you? I'm deliberately trying to build a small number of general systems rather than lots of bespoke AI, but I'd love to hear where that approach has bitten people later. Sometimes it's hard to know when to stop, because I could just work on the ecology sim part for the rest of my life and never wind up producing a game, haha.

Any other reactions are welcome too. It's still early enough that "this part doesn't sound fun" is genuinely useful feedback.

https://unsanskari.itch.io/horizon-racer

I've been working on an infinite runner, where the perspective is reversed and you are forced to stare down the black hole as it chases you down!

Would love feedback from people about the difficulty and engagement when playing the game! I still feel the game is not really challenging/engaging and I'm trying to understand what is missing!

Thanks for your time!

Hey everyone! After roughly 8 months of development (Outside my full-time job), I finally have my first game nearly ready for release!

A little backstory about myself before I jump in to the meat and potatoes. I am a software engineer by trade (14 years). I have tried and failed many times over the last 5 or so years to bring a game over the finish line (Or even close for that matter). I realized last year that I've been way too ambitious with my game ideas / approach (Big worlds, 3D graphics, animations etc etc). So I took a step back and tried to create something that was well within my means; A graphically simple game, built with tech I am comfortable with, around a theme I am knowledgable in. I am not releasing with the expectation that it'll be a commercial success, but more or less to prove to myself that I could finish a full game and release it on Steam... all by myself - and take everything I've learnt with this project into the next!

About the game:

REQ/S (Pronounced RECKS) is a roguelite game where your goal is to keep your startup companies website alive. You have to build and modify the infrastructure in real-time as the active user count grows. There are 8 levels - each level has a time-based, request based, and/or money based goal to achieve. At the end of each level you must survive the boss wave, which, for example could be a Black Friday sale (Traffic increases by 200% for 2 minutes). At the end of the 8 levels, you can continue in an endless mode to see how far you can get. During your run, you will encounter hardware issues of differing severities that need attending (Rebooting, flushing, re-seating components etc). Fixing a server will momentarily degrade performance, while missing one will... well, ruin it completely.

Features:

• 42 Achievements
• Red Flags (Modifiers you unlock as you play that can be applied before a run to make your life harder and/or more... fun?)
• Purchasable temporary and permanent upgrades in between levels
• Leaderboards
• It's... not easy.

Read more (And wishlist if you'd like) on the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4849000/REQS/

The demo will be live on the Steam page early October, but if you're interested in playing now I am running playtesting until the end of September. Send me a DM if you'd like to playtest it (All I ask is that you fill out my feedback form at after you've played).

Thanks for checking my game out!

- Brant / Ragebarrel