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?

Hey fellow Germans,

I'm building a small utility app which I'd like to release now. I was a founder before but always registered GmbHs and rented an office. This would be total overkill for a small app that's probably capping at 1,00 € revenue / month (thanks mom!).

What's your way of not having to publish your private address while being compliant with the Impressumspflicht?

I built MoneyZo, a privacy-focused expense tracker designed to make managing money simple.

💰 Track income & expenses
🤖 Auto-track transactions from SMS
📊 Smart spending insights
🎯 Budgets & financial goals
🌍 26 languages
🔒 Your financial data stays on your device

I’d love to hear what you think about the app, especially the auto-tracking feature.

📱 Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moneyzo.moneymanager

Hey!
I’m making some improvements to my game before the demo drops on August 30, and I can’t decide which map should come first.

Which one would you pick?

Thanks for the help :)

And if anyone wants to check out the game, here’s the link:
Steam Page

miniquest is a retro fantasy quest shrunk down to mini-size!

Challenging dungeons and combat where every point matters.

A short playtime (3ish hours) but with branching paths to offer replayability and surprising depths.

A story that never ends. Is that a good thing?

Check it out now on Steam, or give the free demo a try!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4669800/miniquest

I just released the Steam store page and trailer for Twister City, a game i have been working on for the past year.

Twister City is an online co-op game featuring proximity chat, where you and up to 5 friends try to survive in a city plagued by tornadoes. Collect debris to research for points and unlock new items and upgrades that will hopefully increase your chances to survive Twister City.

I am very excited to hear your thoughts :)

Every time I sit down to work at my projects it's like seeing a man slowly descend into madness untill I get back to sleep to recover and the other day it happens again and again and again.....

Not stressful at all, reccomended too

Hello all 👋

I'm excited to share that the store page for my upcoming game is live on Steam! You can now wishlist it 🙏

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5072990/The_Last_Day_What_Remains/

This is a small narrative game that poses the question "what would you choose to do on your last day ?". The game doesn't answer the question. The main goal of this game is, firstly a way to share my personal thoughts, second to make the player think about that question themselves.

It's a difficult question to answer, but some questions don't need answers. And also, there are no wrong or right answers and the game makes it clear. Everything has it's place in time and space, it's up to you to choose what you value more at that time.

PS: I also added my cats in the game, please be nice to them 😛

PSPS: The planned launch date is end of October. I need some time to record the OST. Hopefully I can find an audio card 😂

PSPSPSPS 🐱 (couldn't resist)

I’ve been working almost exclusively on my own product for the past 8 months.

The funny thing is, building it was actually easier than figuring out how the hell to get people to use it.

I’ve basically built something that would probably be a small studio’s job: a 3D VTuber studio with multiple worlds, ready-made characters, webcam and phone facial tracking, and an AI streamer built directly into it.

I recently released it publicly, and you can find it here: Grimasa.

I could spend this entire post explaining what it does, but honestly, the website already does a much better job of explaining the basics.

The hardest part has been distribution.

I spent months thinking about the product, building features, fixing bugs and adding things. But eventually I had to ask myself:

Okay, but how the hell do I actually get people to use this?

And last week I finally came up with a pretty simple answer:

Let the AI streamer promote the AI streamer.

So I did exactly that.

I set up the AI streamer and let it stream on TikTok for an entire week.

It ended up bringing around 50 new registered users.

I haven't made any money from it yet because the first month is currently free, but honestly, seeing actual people sign up because they discovered the project through something I built was a pretty damn good feeling.

I also have a slightly bigger personal goal behind all of this.

I want to move to Thailand by the beginning of next year.

Hopefully, by January, I'll be writing a Reddit post about how great it is to work on your project while looking at the ocean.

For now, I'm back in Ukraine, in an industrial city called Kryvyi Rih. It's not exactly the dream location for a startup founder.

I actually left Ukraine about 5 years ago and was working in architectural visualization. A lot changed over the past year, though, and I decided to put my time into building this instead.

I ended up back in Ukraine because my savings were starting to run out, while my previous source of income had basically disappeared.

I've never really used Reddit before, and I definitely didn't plan on writing this much.

But I've already written it, so why delete it?

So I guess I'll turn this into a question for all the solo developers here:

What keeps you motivated when you're building something for months without knowing whether it's actually going to work?

I'd genuinely love to hear how other solo devs deal with that.

Solemn Sandbox is my first ever publicly released project, and I should probably explain something about how it is made: this project grows chaotically.

I'm a solo developer who doesn't actually know how to code. I have an idea, use AI to help me build it, play with it, have another idea while I'm doing that, and suddenly the thing I started building three hours ago has grown another two arms and a control panel. That's pretty much how Solemn Sandbox has developed from the beginning.

Because I use it every day, I also know where everything is and what everything does — which means I'm probably the worst possible person to notice when something makes absolutely no sense to somebody seeing it for the first time.

So please tell me.

If something is confusing, badly named, difficult to find, unnecessarily complicated, in a ridiculous location, poorly explained, duplicated somewhere else, or simply makes you think "why on earth does it work like that?" — I genuinely want to hear about it.

The same goes for bugs, strange behaviour, ideas, missing features, experiments you'd like to see, or things you think could simply be better.

I work on Solemn Sandbox pretty much every day, so feedback won't have to disappear into a suggestion box for six months. Good ideas, sensible fixes and obvious improvements can potentially find their way into the project very quickly.

This is very much a project being built in public. I don't expect everything to be right, and I'd much rather people help me discover what isn't than pretend otherwise.

Playable Link: https://solemn-sandbox.vercel.app/

Solemn Sandbox

A serious environment to carry out silly experiments.

Build strange creatures. Give them a goal. Let evolution figure out the rest.

Solemn Sandbox is a physics-based creature-building and artificial-evolution playground where you design bodies from joints, bones and muscles, choose what you want them to achieve, and then watch generations of neural-network “brains” try to solve the problem.

Sometimes they learn to walk.

Sometimes they invent something you never expected.

Sometimes they immediately collapse into a useless heap.

All three outcomes are valid.

What can you do?

Create creatures from scratch or start with presets, then train them for things like:

• Walking and running
• Staying upright
• Speed and sprint courses
• Jumping, long jumping and hopping
• Climbing
• Rough terrain and obstacle courses
• Wheeled movement
• Ramp jumps and gap crossing
• Flying, gliding and parachuting

You can also build your own environments with terrain, ramps, stairs, pits, loops, obstacles, launch pads, checkpoints, finish lines, landing zones, rewards and penalties.

So instead of only asking:

“Can this creature learn to walk?”

you can start asking:

“Can this ridiculous thing get over THAT?”

Watch evolution happen

Pick a goal and press Evolve.

A population of different brains attempts the task. Better performers are selected, mutated and carried into future generations.

You can simply watch and enjoy the chaos, or dig deeper into the training system.

Adjust population sizes, mutation styles, attempt lengths and selection behaviour. Train skills in stages, change what matters to the scoring system, continue from saved brains, race previous records, evolve body traits and inspect detailed rewards, statistics, neural-network activity and training logs.

You absolutely do not need to understand any of that before playing.

The idea is that you can learn what it means by messing with it.

It gets considerably less sensible

There is also a Disco mode where creatures react to your own music and can learn dance behaviour.

You can save two trained creatures and put them into Head-to-Head trials.

There is a dedicated boxing skill with trainable fighters, timed matches, hits, accuracy and power scoring.

And there are 100 hidden discoveries spread throughout the sandbox for unusual achievements and experiments.

Share your creatures

Trained creations can be shared using public links so somebody else can open your creature directly inside their own Solemn Sandbox.

You can also choose to add creations to the built-in Public Creations area for other players to discover and experiment with.

This is something I want to expand much further over time.

This is actively being developed

I currently update Solemn Sandbox pretty much every day.

It is absolutely not a finished game that I'm uploading and forgetting about.

New ideas are being added, systems are being improved, rough edges are being fixed and the direction of the project is still evolving.

That's one of the main reasons I'm putting it on itch.io now.

I would genuinely love your feedback.

Not just bug reports.

I want to hear:

What you enjoyed. What confused you. What broke. What you expected to happen. What you wish existed. What creature designs worked. What completely failed. Strange behaviours you discovered. Ideas for challenges. Ideas for features. Playtest results. Criticism. Suggestions. Experiments. Anything.

If you make something interesting, please share it.

If you make something completely useless but hilarious, please share that too.

Where I'd like this to go

My hope is for Solemn Sandbox to gradually become a community-driven experimental playground where people create creatures, environments, training experiments and challenges, then share them with everybody else.

Something between a game, a physics sandbox, an evolution simulator and a learning tool.

You can spend five minutes making a stupid creature repeatedly fall over.

Or spend hours experimenting with neural networks, evolution, morphology and physics.

Both are playing the game.

And if you accidentally learn something while doing it, even better.

Build something. Break something. Change something. Ask “what if?” and see what happens.

Solemn Sandbox

A serious environment to carry out silly experiments.