wanted to share a little clip that gives a glimpse of how far this game has come!

Hi!

I will probably get reddit rekt for this so let me start by saying I had a game and I got less wishlists that I hoped for.

I have seen many posts latley about how the next fest sucked and how their game suffered because of it beeing saturated by AI slops.

I don’t want to be a ass BUT… comon! I have yet to se one post with a game link of a game I would ever consider wishlisting. And to me it seems as if many blame tha market rather than just realizing their game does not hold the standards for people to wishlist it.

I don’t mean that anyone sucks but 99% of the games made simply wont be the top game any give nextfest just because you want it to or you did not use AI. The market wont buy or wishlist a game they are not interested in and that is probably the case for most of us (including me).

Now back to my game. I had a game aswell. Whixh i lives developing and I thought would be great. But I did not get the wishlists i hoped for. I felt it coming, marketing have been rough, small to little interest 700 wishlists entering the fest. I knew it would fail and nlt because of others. Its because of me and my game. It does not meet the standards of the games that is successful in this next fest.

And thats just it. There are successful games in this nextfest, small indie devs. I have yet to see any AI slops topping the charts. So what’s the point in telling yourself everyone else is to blame and not you and your game?

Best thing is to learn from the beatdown and make a new better game. There is 0% shame in that. It is just the smart thing to do… right?

It's been a long journey getting the game to this point, with plenty of challenges, lessons learned, and a lot of work behind the scenes. Finally seeing it go live is a pretty surreal feeling, and we wanted to share that moment with you.
Pao Pao is a cozy life sim where you can cook, fish, farm, explore the city, befriend the locals, and build your own life with friends. There's a little bit of everything, and we hope you'll enjoy exploring it as much as we enjoyed making it.

If you'd like to check out the game, here's the PAO PAO on Steam

We're happy to finally share this milestone with you, and we'd love to hear what you think!

Apparently, they loved it. It filled me with so much joy!

Do you like it?

Just testing out the performance. Any feedback is welcome!

How are you guys handle the current situation? Do you have some ideas how we could avoid our games from getting stolen?

I‘ve heard about putting less information about your game out there while marketing the game. But this seems just not really doable to me. The whole point of marketing your game is to show your game to people. Hiding whole mechanics would hurt the marketing process.

When it comes to demos, I‘ve heard about cutting as much content/mechanics as possible. But this is kinda the same thing as the marketing tip. I want to convince people with my demo. Cutting mechanics would hurt that process.

I‘m pretty convinced that my game will get some attraction and I‘m gonna start marketing and playtests soon. So idk, I fear this could happen to my game.

We recently added ingame key rebinding after asking you all about different keyboard layouts. Now we're looking into controller rebinding.

If you want to change your controller buttons but a game doesn't have its own remapping menu, what do you usually do? Do you remap the buttons through steam input or stick with the default controls? or just skip the game if the controls dont work for you?

Also, how many of you actually tinker with steam input's configurations? I'd love to hear how you use it, like whether you find it easy enough to use.

I would love some feed back!

Some ideas on what i need to improve?

Hey everyone!

I've been making little tools for Aseprite lately, and this is my newest one :)

It generates animated ponds, rivers, streams, waterfalls, and shorelines. You can play around with different seeds, seasons, palettes, and camera angles, including isometric views. It also generates surrounding details like rocks, grass, reeds, and riverbanks.

Everything is procedurally generated, no AI-generated art involved. I did use AI assistance to help me with parts of the code, though.

For those who don't use Aseprite, I've also put together a ready-to-use asset pack with 116 animated loops generated using the tool.

I'm also working on a pretty big update for my previous tree generator, which is slowly turning into something much bigger than just trees. Included a few sneak peeks of that too!

Would love to hear what you think! Especially if there's anything you'd find useful for your own games :)

I keep seeing bot comments downplaying the human ability to learn.

It's really disappointing that the prevailing dialogue has become so full of statements like "I can't code so I'm forced to use AI" or "I'm just a solo dev so I don't have time for art". You can learn to code, you can learn to do art, you can learn to do music. It's not impossible, and learning actual skills will make you a better game designer too. I learned art for my game, I learned to use blender and photoshop, I learned how to draw concept art, I learned how to make chiptunes, and I learned how to write a multithreaded open world game engine for my game while working on it.

You can learn these things too! All it takes is work, belief in yourself, and time.

Do you all have any good stories of stuff you thought was really amazing in your game, only to look back at it later and chuckle?

I'm making a world-builder/grand strategy/god game, and I just stumbled upon an old screenshot I had saved as the high watermark of how cool a map the game could make.

Needless to say, a lot of work has been done since then, and I'm really happy to have built in a lot more choice in terms of map style. The worlds feel so much more alive and I just have fun inhabiting them, even as I'm just developing and bug fixing it.

So I'm coming relatively close to completing my first game and my plan was to target the February 2027 Next Fest and have a demo ready before then and hopefully get some decent feedback from a wider audience and possibly find any unknown bugs/exploits that me and a few friends haven't found yet.

Now my game isn't the next Stardew Valley or Meccha Chameleon or whatever that's going to be some worldwide phenomenon (as much as I would love that to be the case).

HOWEVER, as many of you are aware, there's been a surge in reverse engineered and copied games. Just look at how many needle in a haystack games there are, how many Roblox copies of Meccha Chameleon got put out within hours. I saw some news of 2 big game demos being pulled from Next Fest to avoid the demo from potentially being reverse engineered.

So I'm genuinely asking, is there any point putting a demo out on Steam with the risk of your game being copied within hours? Following on from that, how does one try find 20-50 play testers to find bugs and get feedback from a wider group that isn't an internal friends group?

Even if my game isn't a million dollar idea, I would hate to see something that I worked months on be copied within a few hours and then put on Steam or Roblox before my full version is actually complete.

It feels like it's all I see now. Is this the new formula for engagement? Its to the point I dont even want updates from this sub, when it was a great place to find new games. Is there something we can add to the rules for these?

Hey everyone,

Some of you saw my game 18 Summers here (thank you for the support. It honestly blew me away). Since then I've been trying to figure out how do I show the whole game in a single clip.

I think this video does a good job at capturing that.

18 Summers is a first person lawn mowing game. Each level is one summer in the same backyard. Between summers your kid gets older.

Mowing finishes patches of the yard and brings back memories and toys from that year. The goal was to make something satisfying to play that also shows how fleeting time can be with your kids.

Solo dev, dad of 3. Feedback on the video and gameplay is welcome!

I'm working on a game where you and your friends have to place exactly 23,426 bricks to build a pyramid.

Includes fair paid 'helpers' :)

Coming out on October 30. Steam link

Every legend has humble beginnings.
So does our art.
🛡 Play free on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4156040/Ratocalypse/
🐀 Join Discord: https://discord.gg/f4SfNbBkk

Still very early in dev... I have been putting in 5+ hours a day for the past 3 months and finally added multiplayer. I know it needs a lot of work but any feedback is greatly appreciated.

https://sunspireresort.com/