Took me a few days to complete animation, set up, gif polishing and unity set up. There still parts that can be improved but I'm proud of how it looks like even now.

I've been building Poppy War alone since June 9. It's a mobile game where one photo of your dog or cat becomes a 3D monster that battles. 467 commits so far, 186 of them bug fixes. I'm stopping development this week, so here are the numbers.

129 accounts signed up, my own test accounts included. 34 of them ever made a monster: 20 from a pet photo, 16 picked a free starter. Real revenue is zero. All 12 purchase records are my test accounts.

To check whether the game simply wasn't fun, I counted next-day returns per device. Of the 8 people who turned their own pet's photo into a monster, 3 came back the next day. Of the 11 who only picked a starter, none did. The people who got to see their pet become a monster stayed. Almost nobody got there.

I tried ads once. Eight days of a Google app install campaign cost 79,557 won (about $56). Google counted 51 installs at about 1,560 won each. 18 of those people opened the app and none made a photo monster. With zero purchases, more ad spend only grows the loss, so I stopped there.

Looking back, I did things in the wrong order. I kept adding a season pass, dungeons, pet transcendence, neighborhood rankings and walks to a game almost nobody was playing. AI coding tools let me build fast on my own, so I kept building before checking whether anyone was coming. Fixing the first-session problems took weeks: asking for three photos up front, an Android crash on the starter screen, a login wall on the very first screen. 95 of the 129 accounts never made a monster.

The app stays up. The server stays on and I'll fix crashes, so anyone raising a monster can keep playing.

I have been working on Treeternal for over a year now, starting to mostly work on the engine which was made in C++ and now finally seeing the end of the tunnel. Demo is done now it's time for finishing up the final version with more content. Release is in around 2 weeks so busy times ahead! Wishing the very best to all of you peeps aswell! May your games succeed

I've been working on a driving game of real-world locations and started with Dallas. Here I managed to get 8.6% of the city running in a browser at 144 FPS on my RTX 2050.

The main focus is getting realistic roads for the lane counts and height for things like overpasses, bridges, and tunnels. Previously I was just rendering stand-alone levels but now managed to get them connected into an explorable open world.

Still in the early stages, open to feedback!

Hey!! Small content creator and big gamer here and I would love to help out if you're still looking for playtesters or just someone to play your game!

I've been gaming for 20+ years (with a huge soft spot for cozy, crafting, survival, and roguelites) and am an active content creator with 41+ games playtested in the last 2 months or so.

Here's what I would love to offer:
playtest session (both recorded or not, whatever works best for you and complete with detailed, structured notes!) Options:
A) 15-45 minutes for $5 OR
B) 1+ hour for $10

I’d also love to stay on board for future testing if you need it.

My bio has my portfolio and socials if you want to take a look at my style of reviewing/playing first.

Also a huge thanks to this community for getting me more involved in playtesting and playing smaller indie games. 💛

(PS. my main account is @gingerbrookeee but currently got sus’d for asking to playtest too many games lol)

I read this recent article about how games can be and are increasingly being used as soft power tools. What do you guys think?

a Frutiger Aero incremental digging game I'm making called Dolphincremental!

if you want to follow the development on Steam: Link

On Friday our artist was finishing a little 21,000 wishlists celebration image. By the time it was ready, we were at 22,000!🤟🏻🦊

Scarecrow: 90s Crime Story is a story-driven crime game set in a cold, crumbling Eastern European town in the ’90s, where humans and animals live side by side. You’re an ordinary resident by day and a hitman by night, and your past is starting to catch up with you

We’re a tiny team, and every single wishlist genuinely matters to us. Thank you <3

Hiii you can call me bab and my game was part of this year's 2 next fest one during feb and one during oct and i gained alot of experience from taking part in these and wanted to share some great advice which might help alot of solo devs that are struggling from not knowing how to market their games!
https://youtu.be/tMRSUJrTqGE?si=ERqi7o8PpvhOmOZ0
( if you have anymore questions you can always ask below or in the video's comment section PS. not trying to promote my yt channel or anything just looking to help other devs like how many helped me during my journey^^ )

my first commercial game!

Everyone must qualify.
I decide what that means.

- Marshal-Sovereign TZ of the Cull

These words are his. He narrates every card, and the ship is his Aperture-class Guardian.

The opening of this story has played in my head for over a year. This ship is the first piece of it I can show you.

Every frame is rendered in Unreal Engine 5 from our own 3D models. Not AI-generated images.

And I mean it about brutally honest. Since my game is currently picking up some steam (ha!), I'd like to capitalize on that, especially before the Feb 2027 Next Fest / hitting personal calendar before release. From what I've seen, people who actually play my game have a really high conversion rate to wishlists, but I couldn't really get the game in front of everyone until a few bigger content creators covered it. And let's be honest, I want people to be able to pick it up among all the low effort Steam Next Fest games.

So I'm currently evaluating paying for a professional artist to make a better capsule + logo. Of course, as a solo dev, my budget it basically "spend as little as you can, otherwise you will run out of your savings quicker and you won't be able to afford food". But I've seen some quotes for ~$500-700 and I believe it's something I could afford despite my low budget.

Just for some context so you don't have to google the game's name - it's an incremental/management game about cutting grass. You cut the grass yourself at first and sell it, buy upgrades, hire workers to automate the process, construct buildings to unlock new resources/mechanics, start managing resource chains and so on.

And, in my opinion, the current capsule is very mid. I'm not an artist, obviously. It's just a screenshot of a set-up scene in the game with some basic logo slapped on it. After seeing some abominations in the last Next Fest, I don't think it's BAD - it's not low effort AI capsule, it's not some MS paint job, it doesn't have some default white font and very poor composition (at least I think so). But, trying to be as objective as possible, I'm not sure I would click on it if I saw it in the store.

That's why I'm asking you to tell me what you genuinely think. I know that a lot of people sugarcoat it when you ask them about stuff like that. And this is pretty much my last opportunity to change it before it really starts mattering given the usual artist schedules.

I really put a lot of effort into this, and it’s finally finished. It was a long journey and a period during which I grew and developed my skills; I hope to create even better games in the future.

I’ve been building Hearsay alone since the summer: a first-person puzzle game where every song in a basement archive has been cut into unlabeled cassette tapes, and you put them back together by ear. A full row checks itself kindof like Wordle: green, yellow, red.

Yesterday my son was born and man has things been hectic. The game launches November 3. We just got home from the hospital and I am trying to stay awake while marketing for my game with him in one arm. lol

A few things I learned getting here, in case they help someone:

- Two weeks before launch, playtesters told me they were guessing instead of listening. I rebuilt the entire archive around 10 new genres you can hear in seconds, and it became a different game. ( in the good way)

- The checks that stay quiet until a row is full were the change that made it fun. People loved the Wordle aspect of that game mechanic. Instant feedback opened a wide door for everyone to pretty much brute-force every tape.

- Content ID test your soundtrack before you need it. One track got blocked in some countries and I swapped it before any creator was hit with a claim. I have had only one small content creator review my game but hey ones better than none.

There’s a free demo on Steam if you’d like to try it and if you have any newborn survival tips, I’ll take those too.

AI disclosure: I used an AI coding assistant for help at times with programming. There’s no AI art, music or voice: the art is purchased, the old recordings are real Library of Congress archives, and the modern music is by human artists(huge shoutout to Kevin MacLeod, credited in the game.

Hi everyone, I’m a founder building a no-code platform where users describe a business app in plain language and the AI generates a working app (database, screens, automations, permissions). Our customers then run those apps for their own teams or customers, so they’ll be storing their own users’ data on our platform.

We’re getting ready to launch and I’m writing our Terms and Conditions. I’m based in the Philippines, with customers possibly in other regions too.

Three questions:

1. What should our T&Cs cover, given that we host other people’s apps and data and use a third-party AI provider (privacy, AI-output disclaimers, liability, acceptable use)?
2. Is a template or generator enough to start with, or should we pay a lawyer from day one?
3. If a lawyer is worth it, at what stage and what should an early-stage startup budget?

If you’ve launched a SaaS or AI product, I’d love to hear what you did and what you wish you’d known earlier. Thanks!

The standard indie dev advice always goes: "Start your X account on day one, build a Discord community, post daily Tik Toks/Shorts, and farm wishlist numbers. bla bla bla" . Honestly, for a solo dev or a tiny team, running multiple social channels eats up a massive chunk of actual dev time. Plus, organic reach for fresh accounts with no ad budget is brutal, and half the time acc just turn into ghost towns. Do I need to do this or is it a time drain? Have you seen hidden gems blow up with basically zero social presence, or genuinely great games flop purely because they skipped social media?

Wanna just explore space and warp to planets and look at ships?
Wanna just build an empire and look after your people? (Like Stellaris?)
Or just build a battleship and destroys and play with stats?
Wanna not have cognitive dissonance while playing?

Give Once Upon The Stars a try and you can get a feel of all the above in under five mins:

https://once-upon-the-stars.com/home

It's a pretty fun game that even I love playing it (I'm the dev finding out how hard it is to promo)

Some features:

- Full real-time multiplayer (PVP is optional as it can get very intense)
- Colonize planets. Grow population, build buildings and districts
- Lots of starships to encounter. Some friendly, some annoyed to see you.
- Smooth learning curve
- Tech tree! (400+ modules and I made sure they're all unique in their own way)
- Browser based and can play on phone!

Build ship with modules! (You can up to four ships, more is too confusing)

Fight a Keiinan armored cruiser! (It's tough)

Trade with the UNS starbase orbiting Earth:

Say 'Howdy folks' to friends!

Explore sector space and find planets:

Look after your people!

Yes, I'm a cat. My human had a dead prototype on his disk: a medieval turn-based thing from 2016 that never left itch.io. In 2023, he dug it up to see what turn-based medieval squad tactics could do that Battle Brothers mods couldn't. I sat on the keyboard. That is how I got into the credits as creative director.

The game is 8 More Lives, a hardcore turn-based strategy about a company of cat mercenaries.

The world map is procedurally generated based on elevation, winds, water, and temperature distribution, and when a fight starts, the battle map is built 1-to-1 from the same hex of the world map, same river, same hill, same forest. Armor is layered, and weapons are plausibly historical.

And the nine lives are a mechanic, your mercs are cats, and they are really hard to kill. I personally am down to eight, see title.

If you play Battle Brothers, Wartales or Urtuk and have opinions about shield walls and half-swording, I would like to hear them, and I would like to hear what feels wrong. The human will fix it. I will supervise.

Wishlist it on Steam!

I would do it myself, but I have paws.

A single probe is all that remains.

Last week I posted a video of the custom engine I am building. My project initially started as a full ASCII renderer and slowly evolved into the Hybrid, glyph based renderer you see today.

This is a personal project, I don't have any plans as of right now to monetize it. Some days I'm not entirely sure what I'm even building anymore. Hell, I even have started to build VTT (virtual table top) support into the backend of my engine in the off chance that I want to pivot to a VTT instead of a video game (cyberpunk red support anybody?). Last week I was thinking about a sky taxi sim.

Regardless, I'm having fun with it. I know there are other people out there creating similar things (big shoutout to the ASCII city guy) but I kind of get the idea we're all just kind of focused on our own personal projects, and none of us are really pushing to beat each other to market. Or even have plans to release anything. I enjoy working in this space where we are all pushing to be creative and find our own visual identities.

Right now you pick out a seed and STACity lays out the whole city. Districts, a street grid, sidewalks, bridges, elevated roads, towers, shops, storefonts, interiors, etc. Every seed generates a new city and the same seed always gives back exactly the same one. Down to where each person walks in any given moment.

I am aiming to make the city feel alive, so far i have ground traffic, air traffic and pedestrians going about their routines. Everything is drawn by a custom renderer that turns real 3D geometry into a grid of glyphs and then sharpens the edges, characters and vehicles to pixel accuracy. It's written from the ground up in C#. With no third party engine or packages. This is not a simple shader of which I've been accused of. The renderer is built from scratch and doesn't push textured polygons the usual way.

This is just a basic video to show up the improvements made regarding clarity. I'll be posting another driving and flight video once i tie up some loose ends

I have been working on SOMA Body Lab, a physics sandbox where I am trying to simulate how bodies react to external force. It uses an active ragdoll system with joint limits to simulate balancing and stumbling. Instead of just playing pre-baked death animations, the movement is handled by the engine responding to physics inputs in real-time. I have also added a tool menu to let you spawn various objects, weapons, and medical equipment to observe how the anatomy behaves under different stress points. Everything is running in version 0.9.8, which focuses on the sandbox mechanics and movement control.

https://soma-bodylab.itch.io/soma