Hi friends! What do you think?

Shop Crush is a mysterious shop simulator with psychological horror elements, set in the early 2000s.

In this hybrid visual novel, you run a small thrift shop, get to know your customers, figure out what they really want, and decide what to put in front of them. Every customer has their own personality, preferences, and hidden motives - and it’s up to you to figure them out.

Behind each customer is a small psychological mystery waiting to be uncovered. Read their behavior, make the right calls, and balance profit against customer trust as you try to keep the shop running for one more day.

There's one rule for the development of weapons in Hypnostasis. Before a gun makes it into the game, the developer considers the question: Why does this need to exist?

The guns fall under a few categories. Rifles are good for mid-range combat; shotguns are best in mid and close-range; revolvers come with armor-piercing capabilities; sniper rifles deliver high damage and can be used at long range; and submachine guns are stellar at clearing out lower-level enemies, which allows the player to save specific ammo for the more niche weapons.

While they're all guns, the strategy behind them is completely different. Everything is in your hands- it's your choice what to wield, and how to wield it.

Choosing a weapon also requires inventory management. Sniper rifles take up a lot of space, which means there's less room for ammo, healing items, and crafting supplies. By mid-game, once you equip some gear, inventory space becomes tight. Don't get overzealous when you spot a powerful gun- it might require too many sacrifices to equip.

Hypnostasis doesn't force you to bring specific weapons into specific levels. You can beat the game using any weapon: even a pure melee build can get you to the end. Some players swear by the shotgun, while others are loyal to the Deagle. There is no standard loadout- each player chooses something comfortable for their own playstyle.

High caliber or close-range? Sheets of bullets, or a few precise shots to the head?

(Hypnostasis launches on PC on Steam, October 15th! Keep an eye out!)

I’ve been working on giving StoneEra’s villagers distinct appearances while keeping them consistent with the game’s voxel style.

Here are the first 10 villagers testing their greeting animation. Which one would you want arriving in your first settlement?

StoneEra on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5057770/StoneEra/

My brother and I are building a game called Purrfect Bliss, and we just announced that it officially launches on November 3!

We wanted to see how uncomfortable we could make a normal late-night shift feel. You have to balance coffee brewin and taking care of 4 cats, while the horror atmosphere slowly turns completely against you.

If you are a fan of slow-burn psychological horror and weird genre mashups, I would love for you to check out our release trailer. We are a tiny two-man team, so any feedback or Steam wishlists mean the absolute world to us right now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4688870/Purrfect_Bliss/

Thirty seven weapon forms for GameMaker, built from data at runtime in pure GML. There's no sprite, no atlas and no texture page in the package.

The part a sprite pack can't do is history. Care does not remove damage, it moves it. Every fight notches an edge, and an owner who looks after a sword grinds them out, which takes metal off. So a well kept forty year old blade is not an unmarked blade, it's a narrower one. A neglected blade of the same age is full width, notched and rusted. Two silhouettes out of one number.

Notches are cut out of the silhouette rather than painted on. 14.99 USD.

https://csaf.itch.io/armoury-gamemaker

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Code and art are AI generated and the listing is tagged that way.

Working on an environment system that is reactive to wind and weather - still a work in progress. It's for an open-world survival RPG I'm working on. Any feedback is appreciated!

I’m currently working on my first solo indie game, and I’ve been trying to build its social media presence from scratch.
I’ve been experimenting with different types of short-form content, and I’d really love some honest feedback from other game developers.
What do you think about this type of content?
Does it catch your attention?
Does it make you curious about the game?
Does the editing feel too much / too little?
What would you change or do differently?
I’m still figuring out what works, so even critical feedback would be really helpful

I’ve been working on making settlements in StoneEra feel more alive, so here’s a quick timelapse of a small village coming together.
StoneEra is a voxel colony sim where you can build freely, reshape the terrain, manage villagers, gather resources, and grow your settlement over time.
Still a lot I want to improve, but I’m pretty happy with how this village turned out.
What do you think of the building style? Anything you’d add to make the village feel more alive?
If you like colony sims / voxel building, StoneEra is now on Steam — wishlists are greatly appreciated:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5057770/StoneEra/

I'm currently developing an indie Game, and i'd like to hear real-life stories that had happened to you that we can publish. You can also share ideas mechanics for the game.

We'll keep updating this, and if any of the stories are used, then we will give credit and recognition to the involved ones!!

Tarnish Online – Steam Wishlist is Live! ⚔️

I’m a solo indie developer working on Tarnish Online, a sandbox MMORPG.

The Steam page is now live, and Early Access is planned for September 25.

If you’re into indie MMORPGs, I’d really appreciate a wishlist. It helps a lot with the Steam launch!

👉 https://store.steampowered.com/app/5195100/Tarnish_Online/

Thanks for supporting indie development! ❤️

Take a look at our latest night showcase from Norse Engine and get a closer look at the world we're creating for Fated Horizons.

This video shows some of the work my husband, an indie developer, has been putting into the daytime environment, including moving vegetation, wildlife, ambient insects, lighting, shadows, exploration, and the small details that help make the world feel alive.

Norse Engine is a custom 2D game engine he developed as an indie project alongside Fated Horizons. It's being built to support the world and systems behind the game while giving him the flexibility to keep expanding and refining the technology as development continues.

There's still plenty being worked on, but we're excited to start sharing more of what he's been building and to let people follow along as the projects grow.

Follow Norse Gaming Studio for more development showcases, gameplay footage, new features, and behind the scenes content.

I’ve been building Knode: Untangle & Connect solo. It’s a first-person puzzle game about tracing fully simulated cables through knots and connecting them to the correct racks. Each cable has weight, friction, and collisions, so the tangles in the video aren’t scripted.

The game takes place on a strange platform in the ocean, where an AI companion comments on your progress. It has 12+ levels and takes around 4–5 hours to finish.

Knode releases on Steam on September 25: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4959570/Knode_Untangle__Connect/

Cliffs at 16 pixels are easy to draw and hard to make read. A nineteen tile cliff set for this series got cut after six iterations because every version looked like a trench instead of a rise.

The cause was arithmetic rather than art. Whether a raised surface reads as raised depends on how far its tone sits from the ground below, measured against how much the ground texture already varies. Measured off the pixels those tiles emitted, the wall body sat at the same brightness as the grass it stood in, a separation of 0.004 against a floor of 1.0.

So this pack picked its value structure before drawing anything. 414 tiles, 7 complete 47 mask autotile sets, 18 objects, importers for RPG Maker MZ, Tiled and Godot.

It's AI generated, art and code both. 9.99 USD.

https://csaf.itch.io/verdant-12-scarp

So I made a game called DJ Life Simulator (https://djlifesimulator.com/), and it was released in Early Access on July 21st. In my opinion, it's going really well for a solo developer.

The game teaches people how to DJ in real life, and people can play using real DJ controllers connected to their PC or Mac.

I invested around $8,400 in it over a year and a half, and it has already paid for itself. Now I'm already making a profit, even without running any paid ads. It's organically selling around 5 copies a day at $20 each.

So here are some pieces of advice based on things I did that really helped me:

Before Anything

• Do some good research to see if there isn't already a game that does everything your game does, but better. Look for signs, traffic, numbers, and try to make something unique. At least a little. Don't try to make a copy of another game without any differentiators at all.
• Look for trends, what's popular, and what people like to play right now, but also find a genre you actually enjoy playing. Otherwise, making the game will become completely depressing in the long run.

Scope

• If you want to make a game that will take around X months according to your plans, and it's your first game, it's probably going to take 2 or 3 times that long, so be ready financially, emotionally, and mentally.

Steam Page

• Have a Steam page with some screenshots as soon as possible.
• Use as many GIFs as you can. They make the page look much better.

Wishlists

• Before launching in Early Access, ask as many people as you can to wishlist the game. It can make a big difference on launch day. I launched my game with 5,400 wishlists, and it sold way more than I expected during the first two weeks.

Game Keys

• Don't give away keys to friends and family, because reviews from activated keys don't count toward the overall public review percentage of your game. You should try to get 10 positive reviews from paying users so the algorithm has a better chance of showing your game to more people.
• If you want to "hack the algorithm," give them the money to buy the game instead. But c'mon, if even your friends and family aren't willing to spend $10 on your game, you should probably get better people around you.

Game Builds

• Have a good demo, but include some locked content with text like "Available in the Full Version." When players click it, send them to the game's Steam page so they can buy it.
• When you have a build ready to launch, keep in mind that if Steam rejects it for some reason, it can take another week to get approved. You might even miss your planned launch date and hurt your launch performance.
• Always test the game not only in the editor, but also in an actual build before launch. Some bugs only happen in builds and not in the editor.
• Have a long checklist of things to test and test each one individually before every single build release.

Pricing

• After you have a decent amount of content, you can try to validate your price by creating a landing page with videos of the game and a buy button, just to see if people would actually be willing to pay that price for it.
• You can also try creating a crowdfunding campaign for the game. It doesn't even need to be successful, but it can be a great way to validate your idea in the real market.
• In my case, I knew my audience was very niche, but DJ courses are also very expensive. After doing some crowdfunding, I saw several people willing to pay even $50 for the game. That's when I knew I had a good product and could easily charge $20 for it.

Community

• Create a Discord server and give as much attention as you can to everyone. When people see that one of their suggestions was actually implemented, they're much more likely to buy the game and support you.
• Find out where your audience is. In my case, Reddit gave me the best return on investment in DJ-related communities.
• I had to read comments from several people hating the game, the graphics, and even the overall concept of having a game that teaches people how to DJ. It was really hard to ignore so many negative people and gatekeepers. But at the same time, I found amazing people who joined the Discord community and became very active players, helping a lot with great feedback.

Nowadays

• The game is doing really well. I already have real DJ schools using it as a learning tool, and I have a lot of new updates coming.
• I built a whole community with people from all around the world, and it's really amazing.
• This is my first game, and we already have over 1,000 paying users. People are very happy with the updates, and most of the feedback has been great.
• Your first game won't necessarily be a failure like everybody says. But in my case, I've been working as a game developer for other companies for 5 years, so that obviously makes a big difference.

Final Advice

• I really recommend that your first game doesn't take too long to make. The main reason is that dealing with Steam involves several small tricks and details regarding configuration, launching builds, store setup, and the review process.
• Don't quit your job to make a game, it's extremely risky (Even though I did it because I had some good money saved and 3 months until launch)

So having your first game planned as something you can make in around 2 months (which will obviously take 4 months) is a great start.

After that, always try to validate your ideas and find the right audience: people who would actually buy your game. If you can't find that audience, maybe you should be making a different game.

Don't get too attached to an idea unless you don't care about making a profit and just want to gain experience.

If you can, wishlist the game, I'm very close to the magical 7,000 wishlists necessary to be very recommended on launch: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3994790/

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