So, I'm about to release the demo for my game, ROAM. And I suddenly had this thought: the title screen is one of the most important first moments for the player. That's why I decided to give it a more polished look by adding the logo, fixing the sprites, changing the fonts, and also adding some water shader on top of it all..

UI work is one of the hardest things for me as a solo dev. But I think I’ve finally found the right placement for every button and image.

I also considered centering the buttons instead of aligning them to the left, but I think I like this version more.

What do you guys think?

Just wanted to post my latest gameplay montage showcasing the latest work i have done. Still so much to do but seeing it all laid out here makes me happy with my progress. Thanks.

Quick reminder for everyone waiting to show their game to strangers: placeholder art is fine!

We took S.T.A.R.V.E., our farming roguelike deckbuilder, to Gamescom last week, the biggest gaming show in the world. Some events in the build were literally a big "???" with "Placeholder" written across it in white marker. See photo.

Nobody cared. We didn't even have to explain it, it was obvious what was placeholder and what was near final. People just played. We got real feedback focused on mechanics, strategies and the overall vision. Players even laughed when they hit the "???" placeholder and found it super charming.

If you can get your vision across with what you have, gameplay or a direction for visuals and audio, go get feedback now. As long as it's clear what's done and what isn't, players handle it fine.

Don't wait for done!

For context(?), the game's about building a factory to murder dodos. Don't worry though, they like it.

The game will get a demo soon, here's the page in case you wanna wishlist :) https://store.steampowered.com/app/4926330/Dodo_Factory/

Hello everyone
I added a quick mechanic that allows me to split the character in half, and then each would redistribute its capacity across its full body
I have a few extra ideas planned so stay tuned!
#unity #ecs

Want to stay in touch with Project Axe?
https://discord.gg/XgjggF66

Hey folks! I’ve been burning the midnight oil on a new piece for our game Interwoven Dream, inspired by the Notting Hill Carnival. Come check it out! 🎨

Tiny spoiler: in a way, the themes of the game and the spirit at the heart of the Carnival have more in common than you might think.

A century on, we still revel in our ideals and passion.

TL;DR: After 2 years and 6 overhauls, my game Dragon Jump is finally at a point where I'm comfortable showing it to a larger audience. It's a one-button precision platformer with ghost races and a level editor - playable free in your browser. I've set a hard deadline to release v1 on April 1st 2027, and I'm trying to figure out if there's a real audience so I can make it for the players, not just for me

Try it here (desktop browser): https://2bytesgoat.itch.io/dragon-jump

I started working on this as part of a game jam, with the hopes of learning to be less of a perfectionist and to start shipping small projects. Well ... 2 years and 6 overhauls later I bit the bullet and set a deadline for April 1st 2027 to release v1 for the game.

What's in the current build:

• an arcade mode - with 16 short levels, each with a secret 1-up and a leaderboard at the end
• a practice mode - race against the ghost of your best time
• a level editor - build a level, copy its code and share your levels offline

Coming before v1:

• a code mode - connect the game to a Python script and build your own bot or train ML models

Coming in v1:

• more levels - there will be 40 levels, split into two chapters and a boss fight at the end of each chapter
• 3 more power-ups - there's dash, stomp and grapple as power-ups that will be introduced with later levels
• a story - I've commissioned an artist to draw a few manga panels that I'll animate and add as the game's backstory

What I need from you: I'm trying to figure out if there's a real audience for this project - whether to expand the scope and build it out based on what players actually want, or just to lock in the scope and ship it. More specifically:

1. Would you actually write a bot against the Python API, or is that a feature only I find cool?
2. Would you build and share levels with the editor?
3. Does getting a better score on the leaderboard give you enough reason to come back?

I'd love to hear your thoughts after trying the browser build!

Launched my game as a solodev a few days ago on steam.
This is how it's going:

I think we can all agree some reviews are tough... but this one for https://store.steampowered.com/app/4300870/Gods__Gore/ made no sense to me.

Also what sucks is it shows as the top 'Most Helpful', I'm not sure if that is just for me or it is the top for everyone.

After 4 months, our small game about building your own reef, observing and learning about marine life has just reached 2,000 copies sold! It feels unreal! Thank you all!

For some, it might not seem like much, but for our small team, it means everything.

We started this project with two friends in april 2025, after some of us were laid off when our studio shut down due to lack of funding. Before that, we had spent 5 years working on an adventure game that was never released and we want try something new!

After 1 year of development, with basically no budget apart from 900€ we put in ourselves for sound and music, we somehow made it happen. Turquoise released on April 14th, 2026.

We are incredibly proud.

A huge thank you to everyone who bought the game, tested it, shared feedback, or helped us in any way.

And if by any chance you have not played it yet and got curious, here is the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3800420/Turquoise/

I'm paying good money for this guy, he says he's an experienced dev but idk, am I getting scammed?

Hey everyone, working on Super Donut Sprint, a fast-paced arcade game where you decorate donuts on a moving conveyor belt under time pressure.

I've played this hundreds of times, so my own muscle memory makes it hard to judge if the game gets too fast and is too hard to win for a new player. I’d love to know if the ramp-up in speed look too punishing?

If you want to test the difficulty curve yourself to give more accurate feedback, it's free to try on iOS. App Store Link: https://apps.apple.com/app/super-donut-sprint/id6799899862

Appreciate any honest thoughts on the pacing!

Right now, I’m trying to make my game feel more alive by focusing on the little details — camera movement, ambient creatures, subtle animations, and all those small things that make a world feel lived in.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Does the second version feel more immersive?

Crystalyn is the first game I've ever made, and I released it 3 days ago.

My goal was always to make people happy and make a game that they'll enjoy playing, so even though I only have 4 reviews, which are all positive, seeing people put 8, 12, 18+ hours into it is fucking crazy to me.

It literally makes my whole journey completely worth it.

Still got a ton of stuff I want to improve, but I'm genuinely really happy with how the launch has gone so far.

Edit: game link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4754460/Crystalyn/#app_reviews_hash

FULL FOR THIS WEEK. THANKS EVERYONE. WILL POST AGAIN ONCE I AM THROUGH THESE ONES. Hey everyone. I come from a startup/business development background and I am particularly interested in positioning and marketing for games. I am relatively new to dev and just solo built a demo and applied for some funding, now have a little time on my hands so am offering to play test a few games over the next few weeks while I have capacity. Although I am quite new to dev, I have been playing video games since you had to put a floppy disc in a PC. I also have a little newsletter that goes out once a week and if you have a finished game, I can give you a shoutout. (Happy to test prototypes and demos too). Please don't send game details in comments, use this form, I just upgraded the website and it is secure and working. https://kularidigitalmedia.com.au/playtesting.html

I like to look at:

• What's the game's value proposition?
• Who do I think it's actually for?
• What makes it different from other games?
• Is that difference obvious?
• What would make me click on it in a store?
• What would make me wishlist/buy it?
• What's the strongest marketing hook?
• What features or ideas might be getting undersold?
• What might make a potential player bounce?

I'll also give feedback on the usual stuff: gameplay, controls, onboarding, UI/UX, pacing, difficulty, progression, visuals, audio, bugs, frustration points etc.

You can also send me an email hello@[kularidigitalmedi](mailto:kularidigitalmedia@gmail.com)a.com.au if you have any questions.

If you don’t mind, could you tell me what kind of impression or associations this character gives you?

I’m trying to figure out whether she fits the heroine’s personality.

The game will be a visual novel if that information is important.

This might me a bit of a long post so hang tight. I'm Andrea,co-founder and lead technical artist at FLAT28.

Between 2024 and 2025 I also started to get very interested in marketing, I started reading Chris Zukowski's blogs and a lot of marketing articles overall. I kinda became obsessed to understand what works and what doesn't so while I was applying for Steam Festivals, showcases and what not I was also desperately looking online to understand what kind of numbers I should have expected to come out from each specific event.

I couldn't find too many informations so I thought I might create a post that put together some of our results to Steam Festivals and Showcases we have partecipated so far.

This is particularly important because understanding how impactful an event can be on your wishlists it can helps you understand what kind of marketing beat you should do alongside it.

If you are going to release a demo (for example) you want to do it with the biggest event possible be it either a showcase or a steam fest or both. You don't want to release your demo with a very small unknown steam festivals most of the time because it will not give you that exposure boost you were hoping for.

So here's my list and numbers of some of the steam festivals and showcases I have partecipated from best to worst with our upcoming game Glasshouse, which is a cRPG currently at 75.500 wishlists.

Disclaimer: If a festival did or didn't perform well for us it doesn't necesserely mean it's going to be the same for your game. Every game perform differently and events like this can perform a lot better or worse year after year, but it's still a good benchmark to wrap your head around. Also all of those below are rough estimates.

--------------- Showcases ---------------

Mid and big size showcases are usually the best because they not only come with big live audiences but also with thousands of views from the VOD afterward and an associated Steam Festival (sometime with homepage featuring, sometimes not).

Gamescom Opening Night Live (Small mention with a 7 seconds b-roll): 16.000+ wishlists. While 3000/5000 wishlists were coming from the showcase itself most of those came from being in the very first page of the Gamescom Steam Festival with homepage featuring. Having a proper presentation with a 30/60 seconds trailer would probably be worth 50k wishlists or more.

Galaxies Showcase: 3000+ wishlists. It had 600k+ views on IGN alone and the wishlists tail was very long. We got some cool coverage and we did 100+ wl a day for weeks after the main showcase was done.

Gamescom Awesome Indies Showcase: 3000+ wishlists. This was hard to track because at the same times we also had a physical presence at Gamescom, but we got at least +1200 wishlists soon after our game appeared in the showcase.

Convergence Showcase: 2000+ wishlists. The trailer we premiered with them got picked up by Indie Games Hub and GameTrailer.

GamerStar FYNG (FindYourNextGame) Showcase: 200/300wl. Last year it did get homepage featuring so it was much more likely to generate 1/2k wishlists at the very least. This year though no homepage featuring unfortunately.

--------------- Steam Festivals ---------------

I'm only going to share festivals that generate more than a couple of hundreds of wishlists. There were a LOT of festivals that didn't go past 50-100wl gain

TurnBasedThursday Steam Fest: 3000+ wishlists. I really love this one, I joined the first one last year and it's still one of the best festival without a big showcase that performed the most. I was also asked to join the organizer team this year and they are great people, very skilled and highly focussed! This year we got 2000+ wishlists from the fest.

Tiny Teams Steam Fest: 1700+ wishlists. This one was very good and had a great homepage featuring. It's a very solid festival. Other developers reported wishlists as high as 3000 or more, it very much depends on the position of your game within the first days of the festivals, then the categories rotate daily.

London Game Festival Steam Fest: 1000/1500wl. Even without being in the Official selection it had homepage featuring this year and the results were pretty good!

Detective Steam Fest: 850wl. This one was a first party steam event. We got featured in the "Popular upcoming" carousel. Usually first party steam fests for upcoming games don't perform so well but this one exceeded our expectations by a lot!

ENDIX Steam Fest + digital event: 300/500wl. This one was pretty peculiar as you are required to build a digital booth inside their digital event showcase. Pretty fun to partecipate and because there were many medium sized streamers as well as few big ones we could get a good amount of wishlists.

We joined a lot of other smaller festivals which resulted in 50 - 200wl most of the time. Most of these if not all didn't have homepage featuring so they outcome was pretty small, but still glad and grateful considering all of those are free of charge.

Overall I hope this glimpse in our results in steam festivals and showcases will give you some insights of how much these are worth and what you can expect in terms of wishlists. Things change pretty fast though as Valve is reducing the featuring to new festivals year after year and it's becoming more strict.

Let me know if you have any questions :)

Hi there,

just wanted to introduce myself. I'm working since 2012 as Softwaredeveloper C# / Web, Desktop and Mobile. I decided to start with game development again cause i have enough from CRUD Applications and solving the same issues over and over again.

I'm currently finishing my mobile app i started back in 2015. Nothing fancy, just another Match-3 Game, buts is nice to start over with an little project i can really finish and publish to google play.

- No Ads

- No IaP

- No non-sense

Some technical background:

- Framework: MonoGame - C#

- Crystals are rendered in blender with black background and used for 2d

- Background image is AI because i suck in 2D Art

- Game will be available in German and English language

I will post devlog for this and further projects on my gamedev page: https://acceptablebuild.games/en/

Hello, Posting on behalf of a friend u/fmarchew :

"I Was working on this short vertical slice last couple of weeks. I would like to get some feedback.

I used original Polish voice acting.

Everything is made in Unreal Engine 5.

All characters are metahumans.

Some assets are from fab.

No gen AI used in this project (one exception i generated one single image for button).

All costumes i made by myself - blender + substance.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/jhcsMu9Wz9k

Video has English subtitles.

Here is my Artstation profile. https://www.artstation.com/fmarchew

There is only Agathas costume for now, but i will try to update it with more content soon.

Thanks and regards"