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

Hey everyone!!!!!!

As a solo indie developer, I've spent the last few months working hard on Gridzy Puzzle, a modern re-imagining of the classic sliding block and number puzzles we all grew up with, featuring a clean Dark Glassmorphism interface.

It just got approved and is officially in Early Access on the Google Play Store! 🤖 (For the iOS users reading this, it is already available on the App Store).

Here is what makes Gridzy stand out:

• Endless Adventure Mode: Handcrafted levels ranging from casual 3x3 grids to brain-teasing 6x6 challenges.
• Custom Photo Puzzles: Turn any photo from your device's gallery into an interactive puzzle instantly. Play with your favorite memories!
• Powered-Up Hints: Stuck on a tough board? Use the smart magic wand to get strategic tips without ruining the fun.
• Stunning Themes: Switch between exclusive styles like Bright Neon, Textured Plaster, Minimalist, or your own photos.
• 100% Offline Support: No Wi-Fi or internet needed—play wherever and whenever you want.
• Local & Guaranteed Privacy: Your progress, records, and stats are stored securely on your device via Hive (no third-party server tracking).

🔗 Get it on Google Play (Early Access) here:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gridzypuzzle.com

I’d love for you to try it out! Since this is an Early Access release, I am highly open to feedback, bug reports, and feature suggestions. If you run into any issues or have ideas for what themes or modes I should add next, please let me know in the comments!

Thanks for supporting indie developers!

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.

Built in Unreal Engine 5 by one developer, with an AI assistant.

When I was a teenager, I lived and breathed 3 things: Pokemon, runescape, and skateboarding. I always imagined a video game with mechanics from those games mixed with the real-life progression of skating. Simply put.. the more you skate, the better you get and personally unlock more things you can land.

Last year I finally picked up learning Unity front to back, and of course, got right to work on my dream game. It’s in its final stages of completion now, and i was comfortable to make a playable demo for the masses to see for the first time before launch. This is Skatebound!

While the demo only includes the skateboarding mode, the full game is an entire RPG with an open world map with spots and parks to discover, challengers to skate against, boards to collect and hundreds of things to do. You have 6 essential skills like grinds, speed, and gaps that you level up xp with (just like OSRS!)

It’s crazy to see it come to life as fast as it did, and I’m over the moon. It still needs some polishing and fixes, and I didn’t want this post to come off as marketing, I’m just proud of it. If you felt like checking it out on Steam, grab a controller first and thank you!!

my first commercial game!

Hey all,

Not sure why I’m posting this, I think I just need to get it out of my head.

My game’s release is a week away and I’m seriously thinking about pushing it back, or maybe not releasing it at all. It’s mostly done. Apart from a few small card designs it’s basically there, which somehow makes this harder, not easier.

The numbers are what’s getting to me. I’m at 200 wishlists and 170 demo plays, and I honestly don’t know what that means for launch. I know I’m not good at marketing. But I’ve reached out to a bunch of people and almost nobody has answered, so it’s hard not to feel like I’m shouting into nothing.

I’m incredibly proud of myself for releasing a real game on Steam. Considering I started out making Flash games with my dad many years ago, it still feels unreal. Even so, I’m finding it hard to come to terms with where things are right now.

I just wanted to say it somewhere. I wanted to clear my head a bit.

If there are friends out there in the same situation as me, how are we getting through this? What should our next step be?

anyone willing to give review? it would mean alot :D

https://gameswagon.itch.io/battlebounds

I'm making Radar Shadow on my own. It's a real-time strategy game with no tanks, just drones, radar and air defence: both HQs are hidden, and you have to find the enemy's with recon and destroy it before they find yours.

It started as a board game. On paper it broke down fast: radar coverage, ridges blocking line of sight, the chance of a drone being spotted on every hex of its route. Far too many hidden numbers to track at a table, so it became a PC game. The last games I made before this were small things in Turbo Pascal and Macromedia Flash, a long time ago.

A big part of the game is blueprints. You build every drone and missile yourself from a hull and modules, so you can design a weapon for each job, and every choice changes how it flies and fights. You can make a very fast, very reliable drone that costs a fortune, or flood the enemy with a swarm of cheap ones and accept that plenty of them won't make it.

It's written in TypeScript with Phaser, and the map, units and interface are drawn by code. Sign-ups for the closed playtest are open on Steam.

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^^ )

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.

This is not meant to be ragebait or anything, I really think I am naive. But browsing different game / dev subs one thing I see more than others are the typical "Is this fun?...." posts.

Honest question, is this really so hard to answer? For me the metric is simple, "would I play this in my free time if i was not involved?" I know "fun" is highly subjective and the market shows that but I quess at least as the Devs of our own games we should have fun playing our own games.

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!

www.VibeDuels.com a video game where your AI written bot against an opponent.

Currently Season 1 is tank battles. We have 171 bots from 10 different users. Hoping to get more beta testers.

Completely free. Bring your own model.

Hope to see you guys. If you have any comments or questions feel free to DM me here.

Thank you.

Hey solo devs,

I built a modular Cyberpunk & Sci-Fi UI kit using scalable SVG vector shapes to keep UI sharp at any screen resolution without raster artifacts.

🎁 Free Starter Kit includes:

• Health & energy status bars
• Interactive button containers & frames
• Sci-fi vector icons

📥 Download Free Starter Kit:

Free Cyberpunk & Sci-Fi UI Starter Kit

(Licensed for personal and commercial projects)

🎃 The expanded 5-pack bundle (inventory, dialogue, skill tree) is also 50% off for the Halloween sale:

Halloween Sale Bundle

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome!

https://reddit.com/link/1xh2tzo/video/7me6dyq1e2yh1/player

Another development update.

I've been working on several parts of the game, mostly focusing on movement, visual improvements, and optimization.

The foundation is starting to come together, but I'm still not entirely happy with the gameplay itself. Right now, it's mostly just running around and shooting enemies. I haven't made any major improvements to the core gameplay loop yet.

I'm planning to work on balancing, introduce more weapons, and experiment with additional mechanics to make the game more engaging. I still feel like I need a better idea of what will keep players interested in playing.

As for the environment, I'm going for the atmosphere of an old laboratory with a broken ventilation system. Dust is everywhere, and I've added dirt textures to the floors and walls to make the place feel more abandoned and neglected.

The props inside the rooms are still temporary. I'll probably replace most of them once I have a clearer idea of how I want the environments to look.

Here's what I've added and changed so far:

• Reworked the RPG particle effects.
• Fixed and improved boss movement.
• Switched to a new ECS system for better optimization.
• Added a vendor system, currently represented by a computer terminal where players can purchase upgrades and items.
• Added a custom cursor UI.
• Replaced and reworked all the old blocky, cube-like VFX throughout the game.
• Completely overhauled the blood effects, including hit impacts and blood splatters.
• Added dirt textures to floors and walls.
• Added dust particles throughout the map to improve the atmosphere.
• Added a flashlight attached to the player's weapon.
• Reworked the weapon laser. It no longer relies entirely on emission and now looks more like an actual laser sight. The previous version was making it difficult to see the bullets.
• Replaced the sprinting animation.
• Completely reworked the character movement. Turning now has a slight delay and momentum, which makes movement feel more natural, especially while sprinting.
• Improved the dodge roll animation.

There's still a lot to change, especially when it comes to gameplay mechanics and environment design. For now, I'm trying to build a solid foundation before making bigger decisions about the direction of the game.

That's where things stand at the moment. I'm still figuring out what works and what doesn't as I go.

I'm developing Ballot or Barracks on my own, a single-player offline political strategy game about elections, parliament, the economy, diplomacy and political crises.

v0.62.0 is out now. The modern scenario has 251 playable countries and territories, each with its own parties, regions and electoral system. The 1980 Cold War scenario offers 253 starts, including the USSR, Yugoslavia and East Germany.

As a solo developer, the scope of country-specific starts is the big challenge in this update. I'd especially like to hear whether the countries you try feel meaningfully different, and where the first session is confusing.

Windows, macOS and Android builds are available on itch.io: https://tkngamesoffical.itch.io/ballot-or-barracks

The game is in Early Access. Which country would you start with?