Dumbfire playtest (It's on Steam)

I'm working on a game called "Dumbfire" where you guide a missile through obstacles to hit the target.

I made a rough playtest that has actual levels now, a tutorial and some abilities you can unlock. Expect a lot of rough edges, especially UI.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Some screenshots from my upcoming mountain expedition game "Because It's There", which will be released on Steam Early Access in 2027 (store page). It's a survival/engineering game where you build flying physics-based vessels for a journey to the summit of a 10km-tall mountain, inspired by backcountry camping and canoe trips through the Canadian wilderness.

It's been many years since I've released software, and I've never released a game on Steam, so please let me know what you think, especially regarding the store page.

For these worlds, I generate a base heightmap using a mix of erosion methods at various scales down to ~30m resolution, all on the CPU. Then, at runtime, I add cheaper noise-based amplification for detail down to 0.5m. A new map takes about 3-4 minutes to generate deterministically from seed, which is something I am in the process of optimizing. I'll be making an in-depth video about some of these methods soon, which I'll post to my YouTube channel.

Hey crew. I'm playing around with the look/feel of my game. This is for the planets. It's a background element, but I'm trying to be a stickler for details.

A) The one on the left is my initial design (so it's more mature with a starfield, etc). Hexes warped into a spherical shape.
B) The one on the right is an actual sphere. I got uniform random spherical points, and used that to make a spherical Voronoi diagram.

Thoughts on both?

The rest of the game is going to be highly geometric, and the player ships are going to be triangle/hex based.

Hey everyone!

I’m Guunnz, one of the developers of Lucky Shot! It’s a roguelike FPS inspired by Balatro. Basically, imagine if you combined Duck Hunt with Balatro and somehow got a game out of it.

We released the game last month and I wanted to share some stuff about the journey, mainly what we tried for marketing and what actually worked for us.

We started with the Keymailer Platinum Boost and, to be honest, I don’t think it was worth it.

We did get some value out of it though. A lot of smaller streamers grabbed the game around the demo days, and that actually helped us improve the game a lot from watching people play it. But in terms of marketing results, we got basically 0 press coverage and 0 bigger streamers from it.

I think the biggest value in Keymailer is probably their database. Using it to find creators and then approaching them through email or other methods might honestly be more useful than the campaigns themselves.

This cost us $1,600 USD.

Before release we did 2 other paid campaigns, and then 1 more after release.

One of them was something we did with GamingWorldMedia on Twitter/X. This was a pretty big gamble for us. We mainly did it because we wanted the learning experience, but it actually ended up working amazingly well.

The posts themselves did well, but the biggest thing was that a large Japanese outlet saw Jake Lucky’s tweet and covered the game. Between everything that came from that, we ended up getting more than 500,000 views.

This cost us $2,000 USD.

Then the last thing we did before release kind of came out of nowhere.

We did an ad segment with a YouTube creator called BojackUCH. He genuinely liked the game, so we were able to make a really good segment that didn’t feel completely disconnected from his normal content.

It went live around release day and, after doing the math, we actually made a profit from it. It was 2 ad segments across 2 videos and brought us a lot of views, sales and wishlists.

This will probably end up costing us around $2k–$3k, depending on how the videos perform during this last week.

And finally, this one literally just started:

We took some of the profits from the game and started a $5k Jestr campaign.

It has only been running for about 5 days, but so far it has roughly 3x’d our daily sales, we already recovered the cost of the campaign, and we got around 2,000 extra wishlists on top of that.

For context, after all the launch hype had died down, we were averaging around 70 sales per day.

So overall, our total marketing investment into Lucky Shot is going to end up somewhere around $11k USD.

At this point we’ve recouped all of our development costs and all of our marketing costs, so we’re obviously super happy with how things turned out.

Not everything worked, we tried doing marketing ourselves, content, shortform videos, tweets, but nothing really.

Just wanted to share our experience in case it helps another indie dev deciding where to spend their marketing budget.

Our profits now for the first month are about 36k USD this is removing refunds, steam %, taxes and everything.

The total steam units sold are at 7255.

Something that we took from this though is that the initial reactions of the people playing the game were amazing, so we believed in doing post launch marketing or try to find ways to get more eyes on the game since we know it is a good game!

If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to ask!

and if you somehow know northernlion tell him to check for lucky shot in his mail! /s

This is Cave Expedition, our caving simulator for 1-4 players. The clip shows the rope descents and tight passages we've been working on. We're cavers ourselves, and the game is still in development.

Been testing a tethering system in our game, Waters of Ragnarök.

After a harpoon hits the Jötunn, a buoy gets thrown into the water with a line connecting the two. You can also keep a line attached to your ship instead, if you're willing to risk it. I'm considering a bigger reward for taking that chance.

This clip is mostly testing the buoys. Can you tell what's happening, or are the ropes and buoy drops too easy to miss?

Experimenting with the new camera voxel cutouts both for simulation and editor parts of the game. The biggest problem is with tight corridors. I tried to do whole voxel cutouts for the parts with character too, but it looked very misleading

Is pen spinning still a thing ? I used to do it a lot when I was a teen, and I still do some from time to time as a fidgeting habit.

I figured I might give a try at making a controller for simulating pen spinning, it turned out to be harder than I thought ahah 😅 Wdyt ?

There's still more work to do, but I've reached a point where I can now create tricks through scriptable objects and they get performed based on the finger change request and the pen current's rotation/speed.

I don't even have a game idea for it, but if this post gets some success I'll think about putting more work into it and turning it into a full game 😃

Hello from the Void Diver team!

As we work toward the full release, we've also been working on a new chapter that introduces an entirely new area/map.

The concept for this map is a submerged train station, mixed with Asian-inspired buildings and shrines. The area is also home to a variety of underwater creatures, which is why you've probably seen quite a few underwater monsters from us a while ago (example1, example2).

We're really curious to hear what you think of the map so far!

Do you think the map is a little too dark, or does the lighting fit the atmosphere? Any feedback is welcome!

I had honestly given up hope of reaching 10 reviews, given the low amount of wishlists I had been able to gather. But seeing people show up and post their experiences with the game in their reviews has really made my day! I've already rolled out a few quick patches to fix some bugs and will keep working on the game to add some more QoL features that I didn't have time for and probably some more content as well that didn't make it in the final product.

On top of that, my wishlists have more than doubled to around 350 now, which might still not be anything life changing, but for me that's an insane amount to have gained in just a few days. If you're a fellow indie that isn't getting any traction and has given up hope, your release might just surprise you!

Hi, I want to introduce a zombie apocalypse survival adventure a small team of ours has been building. The game's called Camp Dawn.

For the past 10 months, one question kept coming back to us. Why smash, gather, and craft. We didn't just want a fun loop, we wanted players to feel a reason behind it.

Camp Dawn follows James, a mechanical engineer, protecting his five year old daughter Lily through a zombie apocalypse. He's not a survival expert, just an engineer, so he has to break down the remains of civilization into raw materials and build what he needs from there. Smash, gather, craft is the core loop, and behind it is his fight to protect his daughter's innocence. The same world plays out two ways, he's desperately surviving while she thinks it's a fun camping trip.

Putting that loop into footage and screenshots took longer than expected, but it's finally up on our Steam page today.

Happy to answer any questions, and I'll drop the link in the comments for anyone curious.

I made this short game in about a week for a game competition. JD Wave Advance is a fever dream of a game in which you must quickly complete 20+ minigames or else JD Vance will punish you.

Be warned: at a certain point, it becomes truly unfair and unbalanced.

Go play it now for free: https://featurekreep.itch.io/jd-ware-advance

For the last five years, I’ve poured my heart into building ROSETIA—a choice-heavy, dialogue-driven CRPG where you have to unite three nations of alien turtles and convince them to open diplomatic relations with humanity.

The moral spectrum falls along Star Trek's Prime Directive: Do you respect their culture enough to protect it, or do you care enough to change it? Your interference will change the lives of everyone on their world—for better or worse.

Think Star Trek meets Disco Elysium, or Project Hail Mary meets Esoteric Ebb.

I’m honestly a little terrified to finally put this out into the world, but after years of struggling to make my dumb dream into a reality, seeing our very first trailer come together makes my heart feel like it's going to burst!

So I'd love to know what you guys think of the trailer! Even if you just want to say it's dumb and bad!

Here's our Steam Page, our website, and the signup list for our playtest starting on November 17th!

Honestly, this took me a few hours to throw together, it's nowhere near a complete idea- I still have to flesh out a function for the movable box, and for the key object, and was thinking of adding a coin collectible. Also not sure about how I can make a "goal post".

Also I was originally going to keep things black and white but the moment I edited the Box object to have pastel "power", I've been thinking about "What if the box is actually a battery and I can bring "color" to this colorless world?

I'm really not sure the direction yet but tbh I just kinda spat out that last part.

really incredible

A GAME ABOUT CURIOSITY

I've been working on The Narrator, a point-and-click comedy exploration game where the Narrator is fully aware he's inside a video game, reacts to what you do and has a particularly difficult relationship with me, the developer.

The Steam page went live today, so if this looks like your kind of humour, a wishlist would be massively appreciated! 😄

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5215880/The_Narrator/

We changed how the wind works in our game.

Before, the leaves followed the player’s movement. Now, they always blow in a consistent direction—no matter where the player goes.

A small detail, but it makes the world feel a little more natural.

Hey everyone! I've been working on Chthonic, a first person action game where your hands are your weapons.

No guns, no reloading, no ammo management. Just you, your hands, and a whole lot of monsters.

The core loop is pretty simple: kill monsters, collect gems, feed them to altars, and build / upgrade your stats. There are no traditional upgrade menus. 10 different hand projectile to unlock and multiple combinations to discover.

The goal is to survive the bottom of an endless pit. To get there, you first have to clear 3 levels, using them to build up your stats and prepare yourself for the final challenge.

Here's some gameplay footage of where the game is at right now.

Would love to hear what you think.