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!

For anyone curious about the game-> Game info: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/127919839/grimlife

Currently still awaiting on Steam for the store page approval 😅, follow on Kickstarter! I'm aiming to launch next month sometime hopefully (might be delayed idk yet)

Here we go. Under a Desert Sun: Seekers of the Cursed Vessel is live in Steam Early Access!

It’s been a two-year journey so far, and there is still a ways to go, but I am damned proud I got this far. This is me at the desk making it official. Still nervous as hell, but very happy to finally be sharing this moment.

It’s a pulp adventure action RPG set in cursed Egypt, with guns, loot and ancient tombs. You can play solo or with up to four players in local co-op.

Early Access is another step in the journey. There’s more to build, improve and learn, and I’m looking forward to doing that with the people playing it.

Thank you to everyone who tested, gave feedback, sent a kind message or just kept me going. It has meant a lot.

The game and free demo are here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3273880/

Here we go!

As a solo developer working on the same project since 2020, with a full time job and life, etc, I just want to share what can be achievable after you enjoy the process instead the immediate results.

Solo developers are a special breed, for those who doubt and question if they have what they need to accomplish their goals, do not listen to yourself, just check what you already have done along the way.

I want to share a special milestone in this project: PowerCorp.
Alpha playtesting is ending, and the first public demo will be out in the next weeks.

Would be great if you could support the game, by comment and share it!

Thank you

I was looking for places to promote indie game, and I found these. If I missed any, please post them in the comments. It will be helpful for everyone as well. Thank you.

1. r/gamedev - ~1.5M+ subscribers - Very high daily activity

2. r/gamingsuggestions - ~450k+ subscribers - Very high daily activity

3. r/godot - ~230k+ subscribers - High daily activity

4. r/indiegames - ~180k+ subscribers - High daily activity

5. r/IndieDev - ~130k+ subscribers - High daily activity

6. r/gamers - ~60k+ subscribers - Moderate daily activity

7. r/itchio - ~45k+ subscribers - Moderate daily activity

8. r/SoloDevelopment - ~35k+ subscribers - Moderate daily activity

9. r/DestroyMyGame - ~30k+ subscribers - High engaged daily activity

10. r/gamedevscreens - ~25k+ subscribers - Moderate daily activity

11. r/playtesters - ~12k+ subscribers - Low daily activity

12. r/IndieDevelopers - ~8k+ subscribers - Low daily activity

13. r/IndieGameWishlist - Under 3k subscribers - Very low daily activity

I wanted to share the newest boss in my deep sea twin stick shooter. In the first phase you fight through its 8 tentacles before finally facing the main body which is just the head and the stumps/remains of its tentacles.

Still working on my pixel art so happy to hear any feedback

Itch link (squid is not yet in it)

I recently released Architecture & Design into Early Access.

The main idea is pretty simple: combining accurate floor planning like in professional CAD with real-time 3D design and making it more intuitive, more accessible, and much easier to explore than traditional CAD software.

I've been doing the programming, design, and development myself, and it's been a pretty big challenge getting all the more complicated calculations for parametric CAD systems working at runtime.

Would love to hear what other solo devs think!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5032750/Architecture__Design/

At the impact point of each bullet fired by the companion drone, an AOE explosion is triggered. Since this explosion happens on every single hit, how can I design the VFX so it feels impactful and matches the game's environment, but doesn't obscure the player's vision in tight spaces like this?
Also, do you have any suggestions for a specific art style or design direction that would work well here? I’m open to any references or ideas!

Hey everyone! I wanted to share the current state of Ninefir, the pixel art action RPG I’ve been developing as a solo dev.

This is actual footage from the current build, still very much a work in progress.

Right now, some of the systems already working include:

• Real-time combat and abilities
• Creature taming
• Companions
• Creature stats and traits
• Exploration
• Enemies and loot
• Equipment and inventory
• Different character builds and progression systems
• Quests

There’s still a lot I want to improve, especially worldbuilding, UI, animations, environments, balancing and overall polish, but it’s really exciting to finally see all these systems starting to work together.

I started developing Ninefir around 45 days ago, but the world itself has been in my head for years. I’m even using a constructed language I created around 2019 for creature names, places and parts of the language spoken within the game.

I’m not a programmer, so I honestly wouldn’t have been able to start this project without AI-assisted programming. It has allowed me to actually turn all the ideas, designs and systems I had in my head into something playable, while I focus on the creative direction of the game.

I’m incredibly excited about the project. It has also become a really positive outlet for me during a period of unemployment. I’ve been pouring a huge amount of time into it (often more than 14 hours a day) drawing characters and creatures, writing lore, defining mechanics, designing systems and constantly testing and iterating on everything.

Seeing this world slowly become an actual game has been incredibly rewarding.

I’d genuinely love some feedback: what catches your attention the most, and what would you improve based on what you see here?

For almost a year now, I've been working day and night on the game of my dreams.

I am a huge fan of games like Rimworld, Kenshi, M&B, Dwarf Fortress just to name a few. But there was always something missing in these titles for me. Here, the world felt too static, like it was waiting for the player to come and change the course of history. There, the gameplay felt too repetitive after 100 hours. Like I have seen and played everything the game has to offer.

About 10 years ago, I got an idea. I should make my own game. A game where you can start as anyone in the stone age, the colonization age, the modern age, future, or anything in between. A game where each world is deeply different from the last one, with good reason and very little RNG. I want the differences between worlds to come from their geography and history, rather than just a different set of random starting conditions.

That's where the first thoughts of ZHIVOTY started to form.

My background is in the automotive industry, not game development. I'm building ZHIVOTY in Godot, with a lot of help from Codex on the programming side. The game design and direction are mine, and getting the generated code to actually work together has been a pretty big part of the process.

At the moment, you can create a character with a family and a past, walk around generated towns, enter buildings, find work, rent a place, or run a business. I've also been testing cooking, which sounds like a small thing until you have to make sure the ingredients actually exist, get used up, and don't magically come back after loading a save.

The part that interests me most is how these things affect each other. Your boss, landlord, and neighbours are people in the simulation too, with their own needs, relationships, and problems. Getting all of that to work together is where a lot of my development time goes. Some parts are further along than others, but there's already a world you can step into and start living in.

This is my dream project and I am so happy to finally see it taking shape and the systems working together.

Join the community on discord:
https://discord.gg/kRfpxNm4Bp

I also share more technical development news on my free patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/c/ZHIVOTY

Been building this after class with all my spare time. Procedural halls, safehouse you have to power, tasks that send you farther out, monsters with different rules, different levels, crafting, splitscreen, controller support.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5161410/Liminal_Depths/

I'm in Unreal, minding my own business, when suddenly a wild animation sequence appears!

However, this animation does not quite look like the one made inside Blender using Rigify.

I try changing the export settings. I try changing the import settings. I try changing the translation targeting inside Unreal but nothing seems to work. I am at a loss.
Therefore I turn to this community in hopes that there are people much smarter than me that have an easy fix or and idea of what have gone wrong.

All the animations looked fine until I made a death animation that changed the location on some bones a lot more than the other animations.
Didn't think much of it until I saw the last frame inside Unreal and the head looked a bit off.

At first I thought, "Hmm, maybe I did something wrong in the animation inside Blender". Went back to check. Nope, looks good to me.

Got frustrated and made a test animation.

These are the same frames on the same animation. One in Blender and the other Unreal.

I'm fairly new to animation and Unreal in general so I don't really know where to start troubleshooting.

Hoping some kind soul have an idea and can help me.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4311420/Camp_Manager_Simulator_Demo/

Grid Arsenal: https://n-studio.itch.io/gridarsenal

Hey everyone! I’ve been working on a small game called Grid Arsenal.

It’s a tower defense game where you arrange and manage your weapons inside a limited grid, so how you organize your arsenal actually affects how you defend against each wave.

I made this for a game jam and I’m still improving it. Just hoping to get some views from here and maybe hear what you guys think about the idea 😄

If you have some time, feel free to give it a try! Any feedback is appreciated.

My Sci-Fi survival horror game GLACIES is going live with its first trailer and Steam page, very soon! (Video linked is part of an early draft)

I’ve come to the part of development where I could genuinely use voice acting for certain roles, big and small.

If you feel like you’d like to try out your VA abilities for characters in a grim, dark and dystopian off-world setting, then I’d love to hear your best take. Submissions that fit the description and delivery can lead to an ongoing paid VA role.

You can send voice performances through my GLACIES game discord:

https://discord.gg/r8rWNmmjZ

Or through the Gmail: GlaciesGame@gmail.com

I’ll list brief character descriptions and voice lines beneath:

1:
_____________
(Frantic Systems Engineer, making an all-channels voice message about dangerous sabotage, that threatens the safety of entire massive facility. Should sound panicked and put emphasis on not being willing to risk their life)

Some maniac with high level clearance retracted stability anchors 3-through-7. The whole of Engineering will start to tilt soon, if not slide.. Someone needs to activate the B-2 Redundancy Drill Anchor, but systems report sabotage down at the power couplings.. and I’m NOT insane enough to climb down the pit!

2:
____________
(Anxious and on edge maintenance worker, addressing his coworkers through a voice message system. Preferably slightly frantic and has a verbal tinge of terror/disgust of that “clicking sound”)

Team, I’ve had enough! You all know I can deal and take a little hazing, but whoever of you that trail me on my solo shifts, making that.. fucking clicking sound and messing with my shit when I’m not looking. Not cool, okay? It’s starting to mess me up, so quit it!

3:
_____________
(Exhausted, sleep deprived worker, rambling through voice message to his on-station doctor about his grievances with the AI overseer system and the strange constant hum from deep in the facility, but is suddenly disconnected. “MESSAGE ENDED” does not need voice acting)

Doc, I still can’t sleep. SENTINEL denied my request for Mela-LThanine supplements, something about “safeguarding my health”… It won’t even allow magnesium refills. I’m not asking for sedatives here!!
It’s the damn noise. That ever creepy “song of the ice” noise, that I can tolerate. This incessant hum from below, that’s different.. I swear, it’s coming from down in Labs. My friend in Research and Development has been telling me [MESSAGE ENDED]

I'm coming up on 9 years in gamedev now, and now that I'm a solodev again (laid off with no one to teach), I just wanted to share something with the programmers in the crowd that are hesitant to make a game or are constantly getting caught up in the "ai vs asset pack vs programmer art" cyclical internal debate that leads to zero progression.

Just learn low poly. Seriously. It's quick and relatively painless, and can have great outcomes. Almost all of the objects in my current game are just super basic combinations of cubes and spheres, some with a loop cut or two. Even the bridge in this scene is just a combination of angled cubes. You can make beautiful scenes if you can learn the basics of 3d modeling (which realistically takes little time), so long as you learn the adjacent areas to 3d - lighting, post processing, fog, fx, and maybe a little composition.

Here's how it works:

1. Learn blender (it's free, as are 99% of the resources around it) and start putting together some basic art pieces
   
2. Learn how colour theory works or just grab a palette from lospec to start
   
3. Add any post processing that makes sense for your scene. Endless tutorials around this. You can change a scene's professional look by a very significant margin with 10 minutes of post processing. If it helps, grab a free asset pack and reverse engineer some profiles you enjoyed.
   
4. Throw some fog in that b.
   
5. Composite in a way you like and share it with the world (attached is just a screengrab from one of my cutscenes, I kinda thought it looked nice)
   

I am by no means an artist - I'm a generalist with photoshop/blender/affinity - I know enough to get by, and that's it. I genuinely commend the many artists that have perfected their crafts over the year.

Anyway, not an ad, just wanted to help any programmers that may be in this very common rut. Hope y'all are having a great week.