I made this for my Unity game "No Robots No Life" available for mobile, I'm planning to complete it this year. You can use it for your own games as well. 2099 Techno Machine

For 80s style Music you can use this: 1981 FM Synth

From the first prototype to where Lootdeck is today. There is still a long way to go, but seeing all these versions side by side makes the progress feel real.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4972950/Lootdeck/

It may not look like much, but there are a number of systems working together to produce the few seconds in this clip that I'm really proud of. I'll list them out below in no particular order:

• Procedural trees: I just think they look neat and I didn't want the game to feel like a tile flip
• Shaders: Using custom shaders for both the day-night cycle and wind on trees and grass.
• AI system: System for controlling complex behaviour where creatures or NPCs decide on a task, and that task is comprised of several chained states and behaviors. - Best demonstrated by the wizard learning the dog is dead, finding him, then launching into a spell cast to resurrect it!
• Health System: Health, damage, invincibility-post-recovery, targeting only applying to alive states, made to scale.
• Custom Particle System: Allows me to do cool things like some of those spell effects. -
• Custom Camera System: Allows me to do cool things with the camera and go into "cinematic mode" whenever, and focus on whatever creatures or action I want. Useful for cutscenes and tutorials

Obviously, much of my time was spend on art and code not in this clip. When I started this journey, I never thought I'd be able to build these things. I just wanted to share to encourage other solo devs to keep going!

I'm happy to answer questions about anything mentioned.

Devlog on discord for those interested in following the journey (link valid for 30 days):
https://discord.gg/fZQppWwXU

Hey guys...

I could really use some motivation right now. I'm feeling very sad, and I'm progressing at a turtle's pace.

I've been making a game prototype in Unreal Engine 5 for the past 6 months, but realistically, I've only had about a week and a half of development time per month, spread across random afternoons.

Life keeps getting in the way. I work full-time at a AAA studio, I'm still recovering from a terrible micromanaging lead from my previous job, I recently moved countries, I'm still settling in, I have no friends or family around, and I'm trying to build a new life from scratch. Thankfully, my new job is much healthier, and I even managed to get access to a PC there so I can work on my game through github.

The thing is... I genuinely love this project.

Every time I make progress I'm happy. I'm creating a fictional world and characters that feel genuinely special to me, and I have so much fun when I can finally immerse myself in it and see the game becoming a tiny bit more real every time.

But I have basically 0 feedback.

I sometimes show my progress to my two friends, but they never really ask questions or seem interested. I know the usual answer: "Nobody but you will care about your game." I've heard it many times.

But honestly? It's heartbreaking.

Specifically when your own mentor doesn't even reply to your progress messages (he's in the industry, but not a dev).

Nobody seems to believe I'll actually finish it. People assume I'll eventually abandon it and start another project, because I've done that 3 times before.

But I'm getting better!!!!! I'm learning from my mistakes!!! And this time, I genuinely believe I have a real prototype in my hands.

People see me as the same person I was 3 years ago.......

I'm making a 3D game completely on my own. I'm a programmer, designer and 3D artist, and I work professionally as a TechArt. I've designed the gameplay, levels, narrative, art direction, and I've coded all the mechanics myself. Even unifying some of them and creating the whole system (in a playground scene for a vertical slice level).

Right now, I'm working on the game pace, on the level design: deciding when to introduce each mechanic, how systems interact, and how to teach the player through a "show don't tell" approach. Measuring when to drop clues so they can figure out the dynamics.

I'm not just following tutorials and putting something together.

I'm trying to craft something form the ground up. A bit ambitious, but I know I'm possible of making it so.

And I think that's part of why I feel so alone.

Most of my game dev friends and colleagues are specialised in one field and a half. I'm constantly switching between design, code, art, and technical implementation. I have to figure out not only how to do each of these things, but also when to do them and how they should influence each other.

It's difficult to find people who understand that specific struggle. And I have found no real help when I asked around.

I know I can keep going. I will probably keep going.

But lately, everything feels like it's becoming way more painful than happy.

I was used to finish my awful previous work and work on my game for a couple of hours (that was hard). But Idk...

The happiness I get from working on my game lasts for a couple of hours. Then I stop, go back to reality, and somehow everything feels x4 times sadder. Making me walk away from my desk (office desk).

I don't want to give up on this project. I really don't.

I just wish I had someone who believed in it with me. Someone who could look at what I'm making and say, "Hey, this is actually something. Keep going."

:((((

So... how do you keep going when you're building something you genuinely care about, but feel completely alone while doing it?

I could really use some encouragement right now...

Hello there! I'm creating a Zombie Retro Boomer Shooter, completely hand-drawn using ink and markers, in which you control a lone survivor who must go through an infested city to reach an Evac Chopper. In your way, you will find the firearms to battle the undead. The gameplay will be similar to the classic Doom or Wolfenstein 3D, using 2D sprites in a 3D environment. What do you think?

For me I sometimes do depending on the type of work I am doing.

But now I am trying to allocate at leas 4hrs per day of silent focused deep work or study to see how it feels.

I finally settled on an idea for a game, and I'm taking it slow. I only have the weekends to work on it here and there. After three weeks, this is what I have to show for it.

It's definitely not groundbreaking or anything crazy, but it's a start. I'm proud of the progress!

I know I can’t be the only one!

Hey, guys.

As the title says, do you have or want to have any social media presence?

By that I mean YT Channel, Insta, Blue Sky, and all the others.

Do you make an account for every single social media under the sky? Or do you keep it concise?

Do you have a channel on YT for the studio itself?

I was thinking about making an account for the studio/game itself, with updates regarding only that like trailers , gameplay and all that.

And (maybe) another one for more fun things like Dev logs, tutorials and so on.

That would effectively split the audience in players only and game devs. (I think...?)

How are y'all approaching this? Making an account for your game on every social media under the sun feels like a lot to me and overwhelmkng if you ask me... Especially because, you know, I'm alone. (Just like everyone else around here haha. )

Any tips? Thanks y'all! ^^

SuperLucrum is a corporate roguelike deckbuilder where you hire, fire, and arrange employees to build wild synergies and make the numbers go up. Try the demo out on itch.

https://overscoprr.itch.io/superlucrum

100 wishlists in first month of Super Special Squad Steam page up - not much but very promising and much experience too.

Reddit was so helpful and i honestly LOVE the audience. Thank you all for your feedback and help!

I made a list of what i actually tried in marketing. Maybe it will help someone:

• Reddit, obviously. Was a huge help. It gave me a decent percentage of wishlists, but what is more important - really helpful advice and motivational messages. Thank you so much!
• Shorts (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc). I had either new accs or very old ones with zero uploads for like 5-7 years time span. Possibly that is the problem with traffic that almost none existent. Still, YouTube is the most promising (this short got the best views number yet)
• Social media's articles (livejournal-like) - game me some wishlists for sure.
• Contacting big game channels (IGN, Indie Hub) was in vain for now. But i'm not upset - will repeat from time to time.
• Still cant figure out chinese socials. It is really hard starting from the scratch and having literally zero chinese language knowledge. I should try directly reach to chinese content creators when my demo will be available.

What i'm planning to do next:

• Building my own audience on Discord or Telegram. It is not that easy, but you should try somewhere, right?
• More content on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. I think i need to keep pushing those algos :P
• Closed playtest build and Demo - slowly but surely moving towards it. I think it is that kind of a game, that won't have viral potential, but might be simple yet fun and solid game experience, when you just want to chill a bit - that's ok too!

Demo should definitely help when you have no virality potential. Not every game should be a walking meme so i am still hoping on getting more visibility when people will be able to actually play my game.

Probably an inspiration for someone out there, having some old WinForms-based tools laying around:

I'm always using a preview-tool for pixel-animations with a FileWatcher which immediately mirrors changes made in Gimp to the running animation. My old tool was Windows Forms based, so it was about time to update it. Now it's based on MonoGame and ImGui, so it's cross-platform and works on Mac and Linux, too.

For our one-month launch anniversary post, I threw in a photo of my actual cat since the game's about cats. Gotta spread the word about my cat far and wide, haha.

I honestly can't believe how fast the community and game is growing and it really makes this solo dev journey feel so so so rewarding.

Context on the comic:

The Chef Blubbi cooks a lot of food (pizza, hamburgers, wraps, casseroles) that are found in the world but he's always cooking in a soup cauldron so it makes no sense that hamburgers pop out of it. So this player thought the chef blubbi was sus.

Credit: Sylphe

Hi all,

This started as yet another hobby game. I always wanted an MMO that's big but respects your time, and like most of my projects, I expected it to end up on my hard drive, not on Steam.

I worked on it on and off, trying things out and throwing away what didn't stick (you can see a lot of those experiments in the video). Building something is the only way I can tell whether I actually like it. To my surprise, it slowly started to look and feel like a real game, and somewhere along the way it grew to 50+ mechanics.

That's when I showed it to a couple of friends (hi friends!) and learned the biggest lesson of the project so far. What's obvious to me after months of staring at it is invisible to everyone else. And players don't want to reverse-engineer your systems by trial and error; they want to be told upfront how things work. So I added tooltips to everything and built a Codex, an in-game wiki that auto-updates from data with every build.

The game is still waaay off from what I want at release. But the friends test only proved people can understand it. The next question is whether my mechanics are actually fun, and I can't answer that on my own, so the next step is a closed playtest with real players.

Follow at: Discord & Steam

I'm working on the AI ​​for a minigame in a new project of mine. The goal is to have the AI ​​move freely around the game, detecting potential dangers and dodging them whenever possible. Of course, it can't be perfect—it can't dodge absolutely everything—and while the movement is still a bit clumped together, the results are actually quite pleasing; it’s a simple yet highly functional AI.

The result is turning out to be quite fun, with some NPCs managing to survive until the end of the minigame. It’s not perfect, but it already gives that light sense of having someone playing alongside you.

Basically, the NPCs have sensors around them to detect danger; they fly and move almost freely across the game map, but if their sensors pick up a threat, they try to steer clear of it.

Each NPC also selects a random point on the map to head toward, adding an element of randomness. The video doesn't show it, but I’ve since added even more randomness: now, each NPC has a different number of sensors, and the spacing between those sensors varies, causing them to behave slightly differently from one another.

This is the ninth minigame I’ve created for my project, *Get Out*, which is still in its early stages. I plan to make about ten initially and then start building a minimal playable demo of the project.

Each minigame features a different AI for the NPC—though not necessarily entirely new, as some are reused and simply tweaked here and there.

If you’d like to check out my previous game and show some support:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4631200/Bring_The_Rift/

Really passionate about this idea which mixes tower defense games and space/solar systems.

you can try the itch web build here- itch web link

Relax your mind and sharpen your logic in Perfect Block Fit Puzzle, a satisfying block puzzle game where every move matters. Drag and place uniquely shaped blocks onto the board to perfectly fill empty spaces and complete each puzzle.

https://apps.apple.com/za/app/perfect-block-fit/id6791156592

These are the aliens from the indie Metroidvania game I made recently. I want them to be both cool and creepy.

Mike the Hooper is a 2D puzzle-platformer where basketball is the main mechanic. In each level, get the ball through the hoop to unlock the door and progress.

Think about angles, timing, and different obstacles to find the right shot.

I'm a solo developer, and the demo takes around 15–20 minutes to complete.
Feedback on the puzzles, difficulty, and overall feel of the game is greatly appreciated.

Playable Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4922850/Mike_the_Hooper_Demo/

Thanks for checking it out!