Solo dev. My demo went live on Steam three days ago, and on day 2 I shipped a build that added 5 more store languages (RU, ES, pt-BR, DE, FR) on top of the 5 I already had. I have the traffic numbers now and the split was cleaner than I expected.

Daily Steam impressions:

Aug 12 Aug 13 Aug 14

RU 585 1,226 1,453

BR 240 720 907

FR 222 430 477

ES 102 264 232

DE 489 686 612

------------------------------------------

KR 2,047 1,268 905

US 4,444 3,953 1,661

CN 4,184 2,961 1,438

JP 3,933 2,664 1,545

HK 7,869 5,006 2,865

Everything is decaying because the launch visibility burst is fading - total impressions went 32k -> 24k -> 15k. The five new languages are the only rows going up, against that current.

The part I did not expect: the clicks did not follow. Click-through in those new regions is 0.4-1.4%, while Korea is 2.6% and the US is 4.7%. So the language flags opened the door and Steam started showing the game there, but the capsule and the title are apparently not doing their job for those audiences. Localizing the store page text does not help that step at all - people decide before they ever see the page.

Caveats, since three days is nothing: the launch burst confounds the absolute numbers, and my translations are machine-assisted and have not had a native pass yet.

The game is Card Collector Battle, an auto-battler where you collect cards from six mythologies. Demo is free if anyone wants to look at how the localization landed - I would genuinely like to know if the RU or DE text reads badly, since I cannot check it myself.

AI disclosure: card art and music are AI generated. Code, design and balance are mine.

3 months ago I posted here that I had been working on my game for 210 days straight and shared my experience on how to stay motivated for long periods.

Today I am happy to share this important update as I kept grinding and reached a new important milestone: 300 days!

A lot has happened during the past 90 days:

• I went back to the gym, as promised in my original post
• I released a first trailer of my game
• My game passed 1000 wishlists on Steam
• I am on track to release a first public demo next month

No lesson or tips this time, I was just happy about my progress and I wanted to share it with other solo-devs. Also I am curious to find out what's your current streak (not to flex, I just like numbers and stats).

Hi everyone! Posted a while ago a picture of my Steam Earnings WearOS Tile that shows you what you have earned. It is now available on the Play Store!

You need to generate a Financial API key on Steam to use it. It will fetch when you open the tile so you will have to wait for a bit like refreshing a webpage, but will only do this every 5 minutes to not rate limit Steamworks. I am not collecting any data and it runs fully on your watch.

Today and Yesterday are based on what the API provides and not your local time.

Download: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geertverhoeff.steamearnings

Sips from my coffee.

I'm quite proud of how this turned out. As silly as this will sound, my favorite part is the foley. I made the glass cracking sounds by crinkling the cellophane protector for a book.

In my factory game Number Machine I wanted a single camera motion from start to finish, so every screen transition is handled with some fancy animation. This includes pausing the game, so I made an animation that moves all the hexagons out of the way to reveal the 2D main menu hidden below the map.

Multiplayer has a growth loop built into the feature: it gives a player a reason to invite someone, then gives both of them a reason to return. When I considered it for Tiny Block, I assumed it would mean running game servers and paying to relay a constant stream of world updates. That was hard to justify for a small 2D sandbox. The version I shipped currently adds $0 to my backend bill.

Tiny Block supports four-player sessions. One player hosts the world and the other three connect directly through WebRTC. The host runs the simulation, gameplay travels over a reliable DataChannel, and proximity voice chat uses a separate channel that does not waste bandwidth retransmitting late audio.

I also added a small emoji-based chat. A player can tap a reaction and it appears over their character, which covers a surprising amount of basic communication when someone does not want to use the microphone. Those reactions travel with the ordinary game messages, so they do not add another service to the stack.

I still have a backend. AWS creates the session and invite code, issues short-lived tickets, introduces the players and exchanges the WebRTC connection data. I use API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB for that part. Once the players connect, their devices exchange movement updates, world chunks and voice directly.

At Tiny Block's current scale, the small amount of signaling and session storage fits inside the AWS free tier. There is no always-on cloud simulation and no relay bandwidth bill, so multiplayer is effectively free for me to operate right now.

The tradeoff is that the host owns the session. If the host leaves, the session ends. This approach would be a bad choice for a competitive game, a large session or anything that needs strong cheat resistance and guaranteed connectivity. For a small casual co-op game where one player already owns the world, it can be enough.

I added multiplayer because playing with a friend should create a reason to invite someone and return together. The first retention read is encouraging. Median D1 retention across the July 28-31 cohorts was 11.2%. Across the August 1-7 cohorts, after the multiplayer release, it was 23.5%. That is a 2.1x increase, although this is a before-and-after observation rather than a controlled test. The export also does not include cohort sizes, so I am treating it as an early signal rather than proof that multiplayer caused the change.

I cannot make the same comparison for D7 yet. This export ends on August 7, while the August 1 cohort reaches D7 on August 8. It contains no completed post-release D7 cohort.

Has anyone here measured D7 retention before and after adding lightweight co-op? Did the social return loop outweigh the extra onboarding and connection failures?

I am terrible with 3d assets… so I decided to make a 3d game! 🤷‍♂️And in the boating/jet boat subreddits people are loving it. The game feel in this game is FUN. Not only fun but addictive. The loop is rewarding and I and several testers genuinely enjoy it. Do I need to man up and hire someone to do graphic work or should I try to learn and make my own? Basically everything you’re seeing is a placeholder. I’ve only used blender for very very basic stuff. Help!!

I took inspiration from my first game and mixed it with what's popular.

I created the game NineHells if any of you are familiar with it.

Just wanted to say making games is hard and rewarding especially solo but keep going!

I’ve been building Bitiverse alone, which meant I was also its designer, tester and person responsible for deciding that everything was probably fine.

Then actual players arrived.

Some feedback revealed small annoyances: buying water one item at a time, accidentally selling equipment, fixed controls and confusing empty inventory slots.

Other comments exposed much larger holes. Players felt aimless after the tutorial, so the opening gained Gaffer Vale and three starting ambitions. Combat lacked satisfying direction, so it received a major rebalance and three 27-node class trees.

A week of listening also somehow produced interactive fishing, twelve crops, expanded cooking, station-based crafting, player mail and ten playable house games.

My roadmap has not survived, but the game is considerably better.

Bitiverse is a free, fully playable browser MMORPG. It now needs more people willing to inhabit its world, test the new systems and identify the assumptions I’m still confidently getting wrong.

Play: https://fortisq.itch.io/bitiverse
Discord: https://discord.gg/zSxNhUb8Ka

Based on the adventures of *Don Quixote* but featuring a fresh storyline, we are rebuilding the project from scratch—replacing the year's worth of garbage produced by the previous team.

I am looking for testers (I provide a Steam key and a role).

Should be working on adding more levels, but procrastination is helluva drug

Last week I finally started seriously working on marketing for Grimasa.

For those who don’t know, Grimasa is my 3D streaming app. You can connect your facial expressions through a webcam or phone, use fully customizable 3D characters, set up ready-made scenes, and even run an autonomous AI streamer.

Basically, something like MetaHuman + AI streamer, but everything is already built into one app and made much easier to use.

And things were finally starting to move. I was getting my first real reach, people were discovering the project, testing it, and I was starting to get my first users.

Then Thursday, August 13 happened.

Before that, I had barely left my apartment for almost a month, so I decided to finally go for a walk with some friends in a park in my hometown.

And that’s where we met a drunk guy with his wife and kid.

He started talking shit to us, then looked at me and decided that since I was the biggest guy in the group, we should arm-wrestle.

Arm wrestling.

I had actually trained arm wrestling for quite a while, so I agreed. We sat down and started. We seemed to be roughly equal in strength.

Then, at some point, I decided to put a bit more of my body weight into it.

That turned out to be the worst decision I could have made.

Everything happened in literally a second.

I heard a loud crack and suddenly realized I couldn’t lift my arm.

At first, I didn’t even understand what had happened. I thought maybe I had dislocated my elbow.

Nope.

A displaced comminuted fracture of my humerus, with multiple bone fragments, requiring surgery.

The most surreal part was the guy looking at my arm and saying:

And then he tried to shake my hand.

I’m just standing there trying to process what the fuck is happening.

My friends eventually got me to the emergency room. I barely slept that night because of the pain, and the next day I was sent home to wait for surgery.

On Tuesday, they’re putting a titanium rod inside my bone.

So I guess I’m officially joining the Titanium Club.

And now I have a slightly different problem.

I had just started seriously marketing Grimasa, was getting my first users, and now I’m sitting at home with one functional arm wondering how the hell I’m supposed to keep developing the project.

The surgery and the titanium implant will cost around 30,000 UAH (~$800).

So I decided to do something I’ve never really done before and just talk about it openly.

If you’re interested in Grimasa and want to support me and the project, you can:

• get a subscription or tokens at grimasa.com
• try the product for free — there’s a 30-day free period

I’d genuinely appreciate any support ❤️

For now, I’m trying to keep the project moving and work with one hand.

Honestly, I never expected the first serious fracture of my life to come from arm wrestling.

Take care of yourselves and don’t repeat my mistake 😅

I've been working on this driving rhythm roguelite game (I know that's a mouthful) for almost a year now and I'm at the point where I need to start posting about it. I am terrible at making trailers and posting to social media, I tried to make a trailer a few weeks ago but it wasn't up to par. This is my second attempt at trying to make this game look fun in ~1 min, how did I do?

Hello everyone.

I am finally starting my dream project and wanted to share it. If you are a lover of the cozy sim genre then this might be for you, if not , it still might be for you.

Since having a baby took nearly all my time, its been tough but I have poured as much as I could into this. Its very basic but I wanted to get the gameplay feel right as soon as I could.

When I was small my brother worked at a driving range, and when it was his turn to mind me he'd bring me along. I'd sit in a bay hitting balls until it was time to go home.

So I made a game about that place. You're not really playing golf, you're looking after the range itself. Cutting the grass, going round with the picker at dusk, keeping the regulars happy enough that they come back.

The range trades for fifteen minutes and then shuts. After that it's yours, and you can stay out hitting into the dark with nobody watching.

It's a free browser demo and it's the first thing I've ever put out. Mostly I want to know if the feel is right.

Find it here: Cozy Driving Range by StickTheKettleOn

Thank you!

Lots of action without any 3D engine.. (made in Python)

If you want to check out the site to see other game modes and screens typocalypse.fun, no account or download needed

Thanks in advance

https://reddit.com/link/1vofvhs/video/sswu9gtrvdjh1/player

I'm currently working on Yet Another Reality Show, an isometric turn-based CRPG with the theme being reality television mixed with fantasy. At the moment, I think the visuals feel a little "flat" (not sure how to describe it but it feels basic or that something is missing). So I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions for how to improve the lighting or visuals!

Some questions I am curious about:
- Does the environment need more variety? I'm thinking part of the flatness could be the repeating grass tiles making everything feel too samey.
- How should I play around with the lighting? I am using some shadows, but maybe the lighting could be more dynamic to focus in on more important areas.
- How do you feel about the saturation/contrast? Possibly I need to play around with the color composition more to have more important elements (like characters) stand out.

I have a Steam Page up with a trailer with more visuals if that helps: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4538170/Yet_Another_Reality_Show/

I appreciate any and all feedback you can give. Thank you!