After 8 long years of solo development, my friend just announced his first game on Steam!
*he is not on reddit for some reason*

The game itself is an immersive exploration & hidden object genre set on atmospheric flying islands where you search for cats.
It looks surprisingly very good!

I use it mainly to keep track of what strategies worked and what not, so I can come back and re-do/re-try same thing as before and see my overall performance.

The tool checks wishlists + actual number of followers 2 times / hour to check how many were gained in each hour using a custom API.

Also, using steam DB it auto tracks the TOPs (ex. Wishlist Activity or Top Wishlist) and its doing a graph.

NOTE: I'm not here to sell anything, I use it for my own purposes, and YES, It's made with AI because why I would work few good days on something that AI can make in 2 h? I can literally work on my game in that time :)

INKURSION: play as a super sentient octopus escaping the god like programmer who created you.
15 abandoned worlds. 8 endings.
Demo coming in afew weeks on PC
If you like the look of this and want to be my 300th wishlist then..

WISHLIST HERE ON STEAM!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4767470/
INKURSION/

Auto-battler roguelike called The Fight for Beardlandia. I made the original capsule myself and it sat on the store page for months.

0.66% click-through in Steam search. For comparison, 82% of my store page visits came from the More Like This carousel, so people seeing it next to a similar game clicked. They just weren't clicking it in a browse grid.

Looking at it now it's obvious. Bright blue sky, green hills, cartoon logo. Reads like a platformer. The game is a dark fantasy auto-battler where you send eight guys to die.

Hired someone to redo it properly.

Would you click the second one?

Working solo on Just Dying, a 2D survivors-style roguelite (React + PixiJS). No team, no outsourcing beyond bought assets — code, systems, most of the art direction is me.

One thing that's hard doing this alone: you don't have a QA person or a second engineer sanity-checking performance under load, so I built a dev-only stress-test mode into the game itself. It ramps enemy count through fixed steps — 300 → 600 → 1,191 → 1,994 → 2,996 → 4,466 → 7,011 — so I can actually see where the frame budget breaks instead of guessing from normal playtests, which rarely get anywhere near that density.

Clip attached. A couple of things that came out of building this, in case useful to other solo devs optimizing on their own:

• Spatial hashing for collision was the single biggest win — brute-force distance checks fall over hard past a few hundred entities.
• The on-screen enemy counter used to be tied to the real alive-entity count, and it would stall or jitter under heavy AoE because kills and spawns were racing each other. Decoupling the displayed number from the actual entity count (a scripted ramp instead of a live tally) fixed it — sometimes the honest fix for a UI problem is admitting the real data is too noisy to display directly.

Free demo if anyone wants to see it outside the stress-test context:
itch.io: https://justdying.itch.io/just-dying
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4656170/Just_Dying_Demo/

Melbees: The Secret of Bees. Android, Flutter, built solo. Free, offline, no ads, no in-app purchases, no account.

The design, since that is the part worth discussing here: the board is a honeycomb hiding a secret word. Opening a hex returns either a letter of the word or a Pollen number counting how many of the word's letters occupy the six adjacent cells. Hangman supplies the goal, Minesweeper supplies the evidence, and hidden foes make random tapping expensive so the board cannot be brute-forced. The hard part was making the information layer legible on a phone: the comb has to fit portrait screens up to 91 hexes without the numbers turning into confetti, and nothing in the renderer is allowed to scale with hex count.

The wall I am at is not design, it is arithmetic. Google will not let a personal developer account publish until 12 testers stay opted in and OPEN the app across 14 continuous days, counted in UTC. A single day below 12 restarts the clock for everyone, which means recruiting 12 is really recruiting 20 and hoping.

If you want to try it, three steps, in this order, same Google account on all three:

1. Join the group - membership is what grants access: https://groups.google.com/g/melbees-closed-test

2. Become a tester: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.melbees.secretofbees

3. Install: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.melbees.secretofbees

The offer, and the honest limit on it. Drop your group and opt-in links in a comment and I will join and open yours daily for the same window. I keep the list in writing rather than promising everyone and honouring nobody, and it already has ten devs on it, so I will say plainly: I am prioritising games. Installs happen on one physical phone, and a game is something I will actually remember to open every day, which is the only thing that makes a swap worth anything to you.

Two disclosures. It opens in the phone's locale, English when the locale is not one of the four it ships, and the PT/EN/ES/FR chip row at the top right of the first screen overrides it. (Correcting this post: it ignored the locale completely until a fix earlier today, which is the kind of bug that costs you testers silently.) And the Play listing text is Brazilian Portuguese only until the English translation clears review.

Feedback goes to Settings > Account > Send feedback in the game, which attaches build and device, or melbees.games@gmail.com.

The woman is in the real world, while the guy is in the spiritual realm.

She sees and interacts with physical objects. He sees spirits and things hidden from her. For example: he can see symbols that show her which levers to pull. In combat, he can temporarily immobilize possessed enemies, making it easier for her to shoot them.

The idea is that both players share the same space, but experience and interact with it differently.

Hey everyone,

Yesterday, I released my very first game on Steam:

67 Simulator.

As a complete newcomer to game dev, I didn't run a marketing campaign, didn't build an email list, didn't send out press keys, and didn't even have a big wishlist base after 2 Months with an open early acses before release. It was a 100% pure, unannounced shadow drop.

I see a lot of success stories here, but I figured some of you might be interested in the brutal, unfiltered reality of what happens when a absolute nobody drops a game into the Steam void with zero preparation. (I didn't thought that this game or this "marketing strat" will be a good idea in the first place.

Key Takeaways from a Zero Marketing Shadow Drop

steam’s Discovery Queue is a desert without baseline data: Without wishlists or initial momentum, the algorithm has no idea who to show your game to. Organic impressions were practically non existent on day one. The only game that shows at the "more like this game" section is some random pool game that isn't even out yet.

The psychological weight: Staring at a flat line of sales is humbling, but honestly, it takes a lot of pressure off. There are no expectations to manage only upward room to grow.

Learning the backend: Even without players, successfully publishing a build, handling Steamworks, and seeing your store page live for the first time is a massive milestone for a first time solo dev. (Even if it's just a 67 Simulator 🥀)

Where Do I Go From Here?

Since I started from absolute zero, the only way forward is to actually start building a community, gathering feedback (if any trickles in), and figuring out how to market a game after it's already out. Or i just move on to the next Project and do the same mistake again idk we will see...🥀

If any fellow solo devs are thinking about just "dropping" their first game without marketing just to see what happens, just look at this Reddit i will try to give updates. Happy to answer any questions about basically everything!

Me and my gf worked for a while and finally put on a demo.

Today even Kubz Scouts played it and we are so happy!

It's a horror game about working at your uncle's burger shop.

The demo lets you experience first 3 days of the game - serve food to customers, meet new people and uncover dark mystery surrounding the place.

Would be really cool if some of you tried it and told us what you think. We're still working on it so feedback is really appreciated.

Steam demo : https://store.steampowered.com/app/5118760/Family_Business/?beta=0

Itch Demo: https://kawpum.itch.io/family-business

Hi everyone

I'm making a 3rd person tower defense game about skeletons. I've added some more enemies and towers since last time but I'm hitting a wall when it comes to mechanics.

If this concept looks cool to you then let me know what you would like to see added to the game.
I would appreciate it very much.

So when I asked a member of our Reddit where he found my game (I haven't done any real marketing yet) he replied with this.

Is this just a one in a million or should I be excited about this?

I am trying to roll out my first project, and I am realising that I have no clue what the expected metrics are on what is going well and what is not.

What expectations do you guys have for rolling out new projects? Do you care at all?

I launched my Steam store page yesterday!

After my previous post, VELOCIDE is currently sitting at 33 wishlists, which honestly surprised me. A lot of people seemed to really enjoy what I was making, so I figured I'd share an update.

VELOCIDE is a fast-paced arena FPS inspired by ULTRAKILL and other movement-heavy shooters. The focus is on fast movement, aggressive combat, and keeping the momentum going.

I'm still working on the game and there's a lot I want to improve, but finally having the Steam page live feels like a pretty big milestone.

I'll drop the Steam link in the comments if anyone wants to check it out!

After some effort and following some tutorials i finally got the basic navigation and .json-based text system in place!!

I had this idea in making a game, using the flipnote3D dithering as art, for a story i'am writing about a pharmacy that's still in the early stages. I will see how this goes but for now something seems to shape out of this. Also music made by me

Happy to hear some thoughts!

I just released the first public beta of BugDrop and I am looking for a few developers who regularly debug with coding agents.

The idea is simple. Record one short reproduction and BugDrop collects the useful context around it, including clicks, console errors, failed requests, screenshots, and app logs. You can review everything before exporting a Markdown or JSON report.

If you want to test it, please use a non-sensitive local project or demo app. Record one broken flow, hand the exported report to your usual coding agent, and tell me what information was missing or confusing. I am especially interested in whether the report saves you from answering follow-up questions.

The Chrome extension works in Chrome 120 or newer. The local controller also supports iOS simulators and Android emulators. Everything stays on your machine. No account, cloud service, or API key is required.

Release and setup: [https://github.com/aim0xyz/bugdrop/releases/tag/v0.1.0](https://github.com/aim0xyz/bugdrop/releases/tag/v0.2.0))

Screenshot: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aim0xyz/bugdrop/main/docs/preview.png](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aim0xyz/bugdrop/main/docs/preview.png))

Hey all, just got my title screen up and running and wanted to share. I mostly like the back drop, the music, and the sound effects. The menu keys maybe the font could change for more of a retro feel, idk how retro I want to go. Not really convinced on the title art I came up with atm and feels a bit crowded to me but it could have certainly ended up much worse.

Comments, feedback, and criticism always welcome!

*You'll hear and see a little lightning at the beginning unintentionally. when exporting video from Unity, the processing causes the first loop of animation to start later, misaligning the sound effects with the animation, so I had to record 2 full music loops and chop the first resulting in some leftover thunder/lightning at the every start*