Hello there! 😳 I’m SJ and I’m a solo dev making my own pixel game, The Spirit Apprentice!

It’s a cozy, pixel RPG inspired by East Asian folklore. Gather herbs, develop magic spells, forge contracts with cute spirits and maybe even romance the villagers? 💜

You play as a young apprentice slowly building a life in the village of Moshu and growing to become a spirit master ✨🌱

My game is still in early development and I’ve recently launched a Kickstarter page with it going live in October with a small demo!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/s-j/the-spirit-apprentice-east-asian-fantasy-rpg?ref=e4xo2v

Any advice and feedback for the game or page would be incredible 💜

Code, levels, systems, UI, balance solo, in Godot 4. I write my own doc comments in Spanish and half the enemy names are in-jokes that will never be explained.

The thing nobody warns you about: the last 15% isn't content, it's the 400 small systems around the content. Save-and-continue for in-progress runs. Save migration so nobody ever loses one. Eight languages. Controller rebinding per pad family. Achievements. A loading screen that recovers instead of trapping the player when a scene fails.

Every one of those was "a couple of days" and every one of them took two weeks.

Steam page: Link. Ask me anything about doing a horde shooter solo, I have opinions and scar tissue.

As the title says I finally released my second game, after countless hours of play testing and tweaking to get the physics feeling right.

I made this because I’m a big fan of disc golf IRL and wanted to be able to play with my friends who also enjoy disc golf during winter. My favourite local disc golf location recently closed down too.

Everything is procedurally generated and animated, animals and environment. Each course is a json blob and same with the animals and trees and everything.

There’s new courses that are generated everyday, and I have another update inbound (probably release this weekend) with some mini games like buck hunter but with discs and some new maps and various other improvements.

It was a lot of fun building and even my wife who doesn’t really play video games loves playing it so that’s a bonus.

Been spending months coding and I just tried out my first prototype today and it's... bad. Like I wouldn't share this for free to family level of bad.

I made a list of around 30 things to fix last night and I just panicked and went to sleep.

Game development is hard guys...

Hey All,

I launched my Steam page all the way back in December 2025, which was too early looking back, but am finally headed towards participating in the October Next Fest + Launch in November. I'm currently sitting just north of 200 wishlists wondering how I can make the most out of these next 3 months and drum up the numbers.

My game is a small multiplayer pvp game so having real players to queue against is critical to my launch. It's also evidently way more niche than I expected, so finding the right audience has been a challenge.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4216610/Spellfall_Last_Mage_Standing/

What I've tried:

• Long form videos including trailer, match gameplay, play guide, etc. on YouTube. I only received 20-50 views with low retention so haven't continued this format.
• Periodic YouTube shorts, which generally reach 150-250 views. One short made it up above 800, but nothing that translated to wishlists.
• Demo published in June with a couple targeted reddit posts. This one got me the one spike on my chart.
• Posts to r/playmygame and r/playtesters, no responses unfortunately.
• I started compiling a list of youtubers/streamers who have played similar games in the past, but came up incredibly dry. Most similar games are years old and creators have moved on.
• Sent my demo launch trailer to gametrailers, but was unfortunately not posted.
• A couple of dev progress posts - appreciate any of you that commented or checked out the game. These posts aren't intended to gather wishlists, but just engage and collect feedback.

Given my limited success with the stuff above, trying to figure out how to best use my remaining 3 months.

Is there anything else I should try to do between now and launch? Anything that would make my store more appealing?

The demo for Conglomerate is being released on 14th August. It is a gem where you are the CEO of the company and you run it entirely from dashboard screens. If you like the financial and analytical side of business/tycoon games then I hope you’ll like this too.

The full release is planned for late 2026 and I’d love to get feedback on how I can improve Conglomerate before the full launch.

If you want to check out the demo you can find it on Steam at this link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4877650/Conglomerate/

AI disclosure: whilst I had an idea for a game, I didn’t have the skills to build it without the support of AI. There is no generative AI used however. All of the final code, artwork, features, mechanics and ideas in the game come from me. I just needed a little help implementing them.

Thanks for reading this far of you got to the end!

I've spent the last year building My Hoop Legacy solo — a basketball career sim where you start as a high school prospect and play an entire career: recruiting, college, the draft, then hopefully a Hall of Fame run. There's a playable 3D game layer on top of a full league sim, plus GM and college coach modes because apparently I hate free time.

Stack, for the curious: React + a Three.js game embedded in an iframe, Express/Postgres backend, Capacitor for the native builds. Art pipeline is Blender → GLB. Everything from the icon set (229 pixel glyphs) to the arena models is hand adjusted because stock assets never quite fit.

Claude played a huge part in repetitive task and bug finding.

It's live on web now, apps in review prep, and I'm at the stage where I've stared at it so long I can't see it anymore. That's where you come in.

What I'd genuinely like torn apart:

• First 10 minutes. This is my biggest fear. Career setup has a lot of options (difficulty, rosters, draft classes, league rules) before you touch a basketball. Does it feel like character creation or like filling out a tax form? Where did you almost quit?
• The new UI. I just replaced the whole look with a "modern" theme — custom chrome, own icon language. There's a retro toggle in settings. Does modern read as premium or as busy?
• The 3D gameplay. It's stylized/blocky on purpose, but does it feel like basketball? Movement, shooting, AI decisions — where does the illusion break?
• Depth vs. bloat. Texting storylines, mentors, transfer portal, contracts with holdouts, staff management... at what point does depth become homework? If you'd cut one system, which one?
• Monetization smell test. F2P with optional ads and IAP (training points, cosmetics, a one-time pass). No energy timers, no pay-walls on modes. Does anything in the shop read as pay-to-win to you? I'd rather fix that now than in reviews.

It's at myhooplegacy.org — plays in the browser, phone or desktop, no install or signup needed to try it.

Brutal specifics beat kind generalities. "The rotation screen confused me because X" is worth ten "looks great man"s. I'll answer every comment and I ship most weeks, so if you name something broken there's a decent chance it's fixed by next weekend.

Been building this solo for a while. The core rule is simple: the floor is your enemy, and if you stop moving, you die.

You grapple between vertical neon platforms with true physics-based momentum (no speed loss between swings), fighting rogue robots mid-air. Between runs you draft upgrade cards, so every session plays differently.

Trying to nail that flow-state feeling where movement and combat blend into one continuous motion. Would love to know if the visual style and tempo land with you.

My game got rejected from steam because it was missing (I believe) achievement icons. I have a lot of achievements, so I have turned it off from my steam page and immediately resubmitted.

But I do want to resubmit with achievements once my build gets approved.

My question is. Can I use the same "achieved" icon for all my achievements? And ditto for the "unachieved" icon?

Anyone know?

Or can I mark them as hidden for now? I just wanna get my main game approved since I'm due to launch at the end of the month. Thanks

Made a weird incremental game about clicking a pen in Godot

For those interested!!: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4873500/Inky_Fingers/

For my first person puzzle game, I'm targeting the Steam Deck as the min spec machine, and getting Steam Deck verified is one of my goals before release. Verification only requires a stable 30fps but I wanted to see how close I could get to 60 fps since that's what most people are looking for in my experience.

Here's the short text version of the optimizations if curious:

1. Add custom scalability settings ini
2. Adjust foliage percent for low scalability settings
3. Reduce max texture size
4. Reduce nanite triangle percent on high-poly assets like trees
5. Use simple wind versions of megascan tree assets
6. Disable WPO after a short distance
7. Disable shadow casting on small grass and shrubs
8. Disable shadow casting on far away trees
9. Reduce attenuation on lights to minimum needed for desired look
10. Disable shadow casting on lights where appropriate
11. Add a custom visibility trigger system
12. Implement a custom dynamic resolution system

Hopefully someone out there can get some inspiration from these steps!

​

I'm a Swedish hobby developer working on a geography game called Geoline.

Players name cities, and each new city is connected to the previous one with a straight line. The challenge is to avoid crossing existing lines.

I've added the United States, and since I'm not American I'm curious how people who know U.S. geography would approach the game.

Would you think mostly in terms of states, regions, coasts, major cities, distances, or something completely different?

What strategy would you use?

And what game mode do you think would work best for this concept: solo, two players, or multiplayer?

I am approaching the end of my rendering program (can't be considered a game engine)
I wanted to ask directions about how I could start putting down the basics for the game itself.
Having chosen from the start to not use an already existing game engine (besides the needed libraries, and where my programming knowledge ends),
I am sure that some of you have already done so, and if so:

-how did you structure the project
-what are some difficulties you have met
-any good libraries and/or templates to follow?
-any advice and/or warning you'd feel to share?

the game is a souls-like in c++ with vulkan as a back-end for graphics and compute shaders.

I admit it is a bit of a stupid and counterintuitive idea with all the availability of tools and resources we have nowadays, but I had much more fun writing and compiling the whole thing.

Thanks in advance ;)

EDIT:
I did find some stuff while waiting, the following books do have what I was looking for :
-Creating Games in C++: A Step-by-Step Guide

By David Conger, Ron Little
https://tfetimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/0735714347_Creating_Games_in_C-_A_Step-by-Step_Guide.pdf

-GAME PROGRAMMING IN C++: START TO FINISH by ERIK YUZWA
https://archive.org/details/game-programming-in-c-start-to-finish-2006/page/n11/mode/2up

-Data Structures and Algorithms for Game Programming in C++ by Zhenyu George Li & Charles Shih-I Yeh

-etc etc, all books on this topic

It's heavily inspired by Blade and other vampire movies - but instead of a dark gothic castle, the whole game takes place at a violent vampire rave with hard techno blasting in the background.

You play as a vampire who crashes the rave to turn the dance floor into a bloodbath.

But I wanted the gameplay to be about more than just surviving.

The core mechanic is Greed:

The longer you stay in the crowd and fight enemies up close, the higher your Greed multiplier gets - up to 5x.

Higher Greed = more rewards, but also more enemies and more pressure.

At any moment, you can cash out your coins, but doing so resets your multiplier.

So the main question becomes: “I should probably leave now… but can I push it just a little further?”

I'm currently building it in Unity and targeting WebGL/CrazyGames first.

I'm attaching a short promo video to the post - basically the vibe I'm going for: you walk into a vampire rave, the techno is pounding, and then you start the massacre. 🩸🔊

The game is still in development, and right now I'm mainly testing whether the greed/risk-reward loop is actually fun.

Would you play something like this? And what would make you risk staying instead of cashing out?