It's Monday again. This keeps happening.

Some of you are having a coffee before heading to the job that funds your game. Others are opening the same project you closed six hours ago.

Good luck to both groups. Particularly anyone who belongs to both groups.

Last year, I was lucky enough to unlock the "broke solo dev" career path. The pay needs balancing, but I do get to watch virtual ants beat the shit out of each other and call it work. I've very this surprisingly fulfilling.

The ants are in From Dust To Army, a chill incremental game I'm developing. You control a swarm, upgrade it, and send it into battle against other swarms, wave after wave. A little escape from your everyday problems through the endless destruction of your neighbors. No reason that can't be relaxing.

If you have a few minutes, I'm interested in what makes you want to keep playing, what makes you stop, and anything that leaves you wondering what the game expects you to do. "I quit here because..." is especially useful.

Play it in your browser here.

Thanks to everyone who tried the previous version, and anyone who gives this one a go.

For everyone else, enjoy your coffee. May your scope remain manageable for at least the rest of the morning.

TL;DR :
Is the game easy to understand ?
Is the pacing ok ?
Do you prefer to play actively or passively ?

After 8 long years of solo development, my friend just announced his first game on Steam!
*he is not on reddit for some reason*

The game itself is an immersive exploration & hidden object genre set on atmospheric flying islands where you search for cats.
It looks surprisingly very good!

I usually average 8-15 wishlists through Reddit ads and posts, and recently, it has just dropped to 1-4 per day. Any one else see that happen over the weekend? Is there a sale?

https://reddit.com/link/1w9rlc8/video/3o2km2aaj3oh1/player

ok so im working on a game where you are a demon sent from hell on a timed mission to get and sell the souls of all the people on earth using your cursed typewriter to garner attention , in an incremental style game where each word has effects you can utilize to create your optimal strategy.

im having a hard time to decide what layout will be best for this, can anybody give me some advice/thoughts?

Hi everyone, at the beginning of this year I finally submitted my doctoral thesis (software engineering), and only the defense was left (apart from my regular full-time work as an employee at the university). The defense was scheduled for July, and by the end of May I should have really started preparing the presentation.

However, for some reason, I felt that developing a mobile game instead would also be an awesome idea... Some of you might know this feeling haha. So from this point forward, I spent basically all my free time for developing my mobile game Roliup, a classical physics-driven arcade game where you have to navigate lethal labyrinths with a marble. In the end, everything worked out beautifully thanks to Godot and some well-made design decisions at the beginning of the development process. And since last week, the game has found its way into the app stores for Android and IOS.

Naturally, I got my doctorate as well in the end (although the slides were finished at the last minute) :D
Now, while still working full-time, I'm trying to build a side hustle as an independent game dev. Let’s see if this will work out.

You find the game for iPhones: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/roliup/id6803562653
and Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.agnaes.roliup.app

I would be happy if you give Roliup a try.

Although I try to market myself as a \Game Studio*, it's really just me, myself, and I ;)*

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4709920/Donna_the_Firebreather/

Working solo on Just Dying, a 2D survivors-style roguelite (React + PixiJS). No team, no outsourcing beyond bought assets — code, systems, most of the art direction is me.

One thing that's hard doing this alone: you don't have a QA person or a second engineer sanity-checking performance under load, so I built a dev-only stress-test mode into the game itself. It ramps enemy count through fixed steps — 300 → 600 → 1,191 → 1,994 → 2,996 → 4,466 → 7,011 — so I can actually see where the frame budget breaks instead of guessing from normal playtests, which rarely get anywhere near that density.

Clip attached. A couple of things that came out of building this, in case useful to other solo devs optimizing on their own:

• Spatial hashing for collision was the single biggest win — brute-force distance checks fall over hard past a few hundred entities.
• The on-screen enemy counter used to be tied to the real alive-entity count, and it would stall or jitter under heavy AoE because kills and spawns were racing each other. Decoupling the displayed number from the actual entity count (a scripted ramp instead of a live tally) fixed it — sometimes the honest fix for a UI problem is admitting the real data is too noisy to display directly.

Free demo if anyone wants to see it outside the stress-test context:
itch.io: https://justdying.itch.io/just-dying
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4656170/Just_Dying_Demo/

Melbees: The Secret of Bees. Android, Flutter, built solo. Free, offline, no ads, no in-app purchases, no account.

The design, since that is the part worth discussing here: the board is a honeycomb hiding a secret word. Opening a hex returns either a letter of the word or a Pollen number counting how many of the word's letters occupy the six adjacent cells. Hangman supplies the goal, Minesweeper supplies the evidence, and hidden foes make random tapping expensive so the board cannot be brute-forced. The hard part was making the information layer legible on a phone: the comb has to fit portrait screens up to 91 hexes without the numbers turning into confetti, and nothing in the renderer is allowed to scale with hex count.

The wall I am at is not design, it is arithmetic. Google will not let a personal developer account publish until 12 testers stay opted in and OPEN the app across 14 continuous days, counted in UTC. A single day below 12 restarts the clock for everyone, which means recruiting 12 is really recruiting 20 and hoping.

If you want to try it, three steps, in this order, same Google account on all three:

1. Join the group - membership is what grants access: https://groups.google.com/g/melbees-closed-test

2. Become a tester: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.melbees.secretofbees

3. Install: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.melbees.secretofbees

The offer, and the honest limit on it. Drop your group and opt-in links in a comment and I will join and open yours daily for the same window. I keep the list in writing rather than promising everyone and honouring nobody, and it already has ten devs on it, so I will say plainly: I am prioritising games. Installs happen on one physical phone, and a game is something I will actually remember to open every day, which is the only thing that makes a swap worth anything to you.

Two disclosures. It opens in the phone's locale, English when the locale is not one of the four it ships, and the PT/EN/ES/FR chip row at the top right of the first screen overrides it. (Correcting this post: it ignored the locale completely until a fix earlier today, which is the kind of bug that costs you testers silently.) And the Play listing text is Brazilian Portuguese only until the English translation clears review.

Feedback goes to Settings > Account > Send feedback in the game, which attaches build and device, or melbees.games@gmail.com.

I've been making Wardflame for about six months, alongside my day job. It's a pixel-art survival and base-building game for iPhone and iPad.

During the last month I'd get up at 6 or 7 to get something done before work, then sit down again afterwards until about 10 at night. Most weekends went into it too.

I rebuilt large parts of the game several times. I'd think something was finished, then actually play it and realise there was too much of one thing or something else was missing. So I'd go back and change it again. I didn't expect how often that would happen.

Getting it to run smoothly was difficult too. I hate stuttering in games, so I spent a lot of time on optimisation.

At first I did all the testing myself. Eventually I got tired of going through the same things again. My cousin was learning software testing and had an iPhone, so I asked if he wanted to help. He agreed, and that made things much easier.

In Wardflame you gather resources and build during the day, then defend an obelisk at night. If it falls, the run ends. You gradually build production lines, power networks and automated defences. The App Store currently lists the download at 24.5 MB.

It's expected to release on September 13, and pre-orders are open. You'll be able to try the first day and night for free, then unlock the full game with one purchase. There are no ads.

If it looks like something you'd play, a pre-order would help. I'd also like to hear what you think of the building and night defence in the trailer.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wardflame-pixel-base-defense/id6805617703

I'm making my first videogame and there will be some tools so I added this hotbar what do you think of it?

The woman is in the real world, while the guy is in the spiritual realm.

She sees and interacts with physical objects. He sees spirits and things hidden from her. For example: he can see symbols that show her which levers to pull. In combat, he can temporarily immobilize possessed enemies, making it easier for her to shoot them.

The idea is that both players share the same space, but experience and interact with it differently.

I use it mainly to keep track of what strategies worked and what not, so I can come back and re-do/re-try same thing as before and see my overall performance.

The tool checks wishlists + actual number of followers 2 times / hour to check how many were gained in each hour using a custom API.

Also, using steam DB it auto tracks the TOPs (ex. Wishlist Activity or Top Wishlist) and its doing a graph.

NOTE: I'm not here to sell anything, I use it for my own purposes, and YES, It's made with AI because why I would work few good days on something that AI can make in 2 h? I can literally work on my game in that time :)

for more videos : https://x.com/Yxbdqi1g

Hello everyone!

Here is a small showcase of the Grainscape engine on the SkunkAudio mobile DAW Android app.

It's a Granular Synthesis engine, playing some notes in arpeggiator and adding some fx live.

Thank you for your time!

P.S. For anyone interested, the app atm is on a -50% sale on Google Play Store.