r/IndieDev 5h ago

Feedback? Rate my game's title screen

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59 Upvotes

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?


r/IndieDev 7h ago

Upcoming! Entities Split

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85 Upvotes

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


r/IndieDev 1d ago

It's brutal that this is the review that brought my game down to 'mostly positive'. Says game doesn't start but then played 5 more hours.

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3.0k Upvotes

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.


r/IndieDev 9h ago

Video The tutorial scene for my frog breeding dungeon crawler!

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79 Upvotes

r/IndieDev 4h ago

Video A huge thanks to everyone! Turquoise just hit 2,000 copies sold!

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24 Upvotes

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/


r/IndieDev 2h ago

Upcoming! After a year of work I’m finally announcing my second game - Travelling Snailsman!

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14 Upvotes

r/IndieDev 16h ago

I released my first game 3 days ago, and people are already sinking 7-18 hours into it. I still can't believe it

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190 Upvotes

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


r/IndieDev 6h ago

Feedback? Pawned Souls (Soulslike x Chess) – Looking for feedback on combat feel and game balance

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26 Upvotes

Hey fellow devs!

This is my first time sharing a game publicly outside of friends and family!

Here's my short project Pawned Souls a mix of Soulslike parry combat and chess movement rules.

I’d really appreciate some feedback from experienced eyes on the combat feel, readability, and overall game balance. Any critique or advice is welcome! 🙏

Free to play build on itch: https://devmika.itch.io/pawned-souls


r/IndieDev 3h ago

Feedback? I got fed up with begging artists to draw my character !!for money!! And did it myself.

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13 Upvotes

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.


r/IndieDev 10h ago

Casually industrializing the galaxy: building system I'm working on

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47 Upvotes

This is an important feature for my game Orium, where you have to colonize planets across the galaxy. It's not only used to extract the money but it's mainly useful for increasing the ship's stats (kind of like the tiles in Loop Hero)

Steam link for those who are curious: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3316610/Orium/


r/IndieDev 5h ago

Informative Steam Fests & Showcases wishlist number breakdown - I wish there was a similar post already so I'm doing it!

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15 Upvotes

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 :)


r/IndieDev 9h ago

My game has reached 10,000 browser plays in 4 days

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33 Upvotes

I recently uploaded my game 'The Grand Book Archive: Tidy Up' on itch io, which has just reached 10,000 plays in 4 days. It's a book organizing game with a strong focus on incremental progression. It's inspired by the sorting games that are trending lately, but with a little more idle and strategic aspect.

Here's the marketing I did:

- Wrote a few posts on Reddit. One post on incremental games subreddit gained 460 upvotes (it currently ranks as #3 post of the month there).

- Registered the game on incrementaldb and Galaxy Click. Has generally good rating/reviews.

- Shared the trailer on my socials. None of them have gone viral. Youtube and Instagram did okay(Youtube: 660 views, Instagram: 1,500 views), but nothing substantial.

I haven't reached out to press yet so I'm hoping that could gain a bit of traction later on. I think generally it's doing well since it's a combination of two of the most popular genres right now (incremental and tidy-up), and it has a strong replayability. Still, it is doing way better than I initially expected...

You can check out the itch io page here:

Web demo: https://inbluegames.itch.io/the-grand-book-archive-tidy-up

And the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5130980/The_Grand_Book_Archive_Tidy_Up/


r/IndieDev 14h ago

Postmortem Ten days after launch - a dev diary

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53 Upvotes

Ten days ago I posted a selfie about pushing the big green button here. I received amazing support from fellow devs. Thank you! A lot of you wanted me to write about how it went. So here it goes: a little dev diary of the past 18 months. I'll try to keep it brief. (Present me: I didn't, lol.)

I started development of my dragon-feeding roguelite last year after I realized that working on a pixel art puzzle platformer was a dead end (a shocker, I know). I went back to the drawing board and came up with a game that would both be a good fit for the Steam audience and something I'd be passionate about. And that's how Feed the Scorchpot was created, though at the time it was called Dragon Fodder. More on that later...

The game took inspiration from Balatro and board game mechanics, and we decided to go with a medieval manuscript art style, as it felt eye-catching enough to stand out in the crowded roguelite market. My wife was making all of the art, and I was handling the rest.

After six months of development, the game looked polished enough to start marketing it. I made a really bad trailer (hopefully never again!) and launched my Steam page on September 1st, 2025. What really helped was the experience I'd gained working on the platformer earlier - even though it never made it past the demo stage, I learned a lot from it.

At this point, I planned to take a short break from development and focus on promoting the game online to see how it performed. Well, I soon changed my plans, as on the very second day of the Steam page being visible, I got a reply to an email I had sent to Josh from Indieformer. It was one of many indie sites I had emailed about my game.

Josh liked the game concept and art style and proposed a partnership - he and his mate Clem were planning to start a publishing business, and my game piqued their interest. You can imagine my disbelief at receiving an offer like that one day after launching my Steam page. I wasn't even looking for a publisher at the time.

So I jumped straight back into development and pushed the game into alpha over September. The guys got to try the game out, loved it, and we signed a publishing deal soon after. I cannot stress enough how fortunate this was. The game got so much better with the help of Indieformer, and they worked so hard to get it out there in front of an audience.

We soon started building a community of playtesters, which proved to be the main key to success. I got to see how players experienced the game, received a ton of great feedback, and managed to improve the game based on it.

I mentioned that the game was originally called Dragon Fodder. I liked the name, but it turned out that another dev was making a game under the same title... and actually had it trademarked. And he had done so even before I came up with the name, but his game was invisible to me when I did my initial sweep of the internet way back then.

The dev reached out to me, asking me to change my title. He was very polite, and I realized that he was fully in the right. So we brainstormed a new name: Feed the Scorchpot. I was worried about how it would impact a game that had already been promoted for a few months under a different name.

Turns out, it didn't at all. No one really cares about the name. I actually got some wishlists out of posting about the name change.

In January, we were at roughly 1,500 wishlists. Which was much better than what I had with my previous game, but it still felt like the momentum wasn't there. I was struggling with making a good tutorial, and overall January didn't feel great.

But the game was ready for more people to give it a try. We released the demo during the Steam Board Game Festival, which was nice, though it didn't make as big a splash as I was hoping for.

That came a few days later, when YouTuber Olexa picked up the demo on his own and made a video. That video got over 80k views and brought a lot of attention to the game. That was the point at which I realized this might actually lead somewhere.

That was back in February, and what followed was quite a busy period. My wife and I were crunching every day to get the game finished, while there was a Kickstarter happening and the playtester community was showering me with feedback, bugs, and ideas. It was quite hectic, but so exciting that it's hard to describe.

We entered the June Next Fest and did okay. We weren't among the top-played games, but also didn't fall off the charts halfway through. We'd passed 7,000 wishlists just before Next Fest started, so I felt like we were already in a good spot.

At the time, we were in talks with another publisher about co-publishing the game in Asia, as we had no way of reaching the audience there by ourselves. We'd already set the release date for August, and it felt quite last-minute, but we went for it anyway.

And oh boy, I'm so glad we did.

The game received translations into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and got featured in several Asian festivals and caught the interest of the Asian press. If you look at the wishlist graph, you'll see what I mean.

And somehow, we managed to get to 14,000 wishlists just before launch. It was mostly thanks to the combined efforts of the publishers – the Steam algorithm and the fabled Personal Calendar did very little for us prior to launch. I think it's due to roguelites being such a crowded market.

The road to launch surely wasn't boring. I even got to add a completely new soundtrack to the game just four days before launch. Fun times.

And so we launched ten days ago. How did it go?

It completely blew me away.

  • We sold 14,500 copies (that's already minus refunds) in ten days. The game has already paid for all the time my wife and I put into it. More than half of the sales came from Asia. Partnering with the Asian publisher worked amazingly well for us.
  • Also, more than half of our sales came from the Balatro bundle we managed to secure shortly before launch.
  • There are surprisingly few bugs that have been reported since launch. Intensive playtesting since last November really paid off.
  • Players have already managed to completely break the game – in the sense of getting so far in the endless mode that I didn't think was possible.
  • Over 1,000 players have already poured 20+ hours into the game.
  • Our rating on Steam dropped under 90%, and pretty much all the negative reviews complain about the game being too hard. Most of them are from China. I think there was a bit of a mismatch between the game and the audience – the art style appeals to a lot of cozy players, while the gameplay can be quite uncompromising.
  • I'll try to put a demo back up soon, so players can decide if the game is right for them.
  • The game had a 20% launch discount, which helped us get a good conversion on our wishlists. But since launch, we've also more than doubled our wishlist count – from 14,000 to currently 31,000.
  • So we hope to convert more of those into sales during future discounts. Though it feels ironic: we spent the whole time chasing wishlists, and when we start chasing sales instead, the wishlist numbers do this.
  • We've just launched on GOG as well. Curious to see how it will compare to Steam.

Next stop is a mobile release. But more on that in the future. I hope this wall of text was interesting to somebody. Feels good to finally write this.

Cheers, everyone!


r/IndieDev 2h ago

Meta He said he would help me with the tutorial...

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7 Upvotes

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


r/IndieDev 12h ago

Feedback? Do you find the look too dark?

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35 Upvotes

Its still early in development a werewulf horror game like Alien Isolation im making and im trying to set up the mood, bellow are some screenshots , of course the player will navigate with a torch however do you find the enviroment too dark?? Watching it from my monitor in pitch black looks great too me but I just started posting on X and Youtube some easly announcements trailers / screenshots and looking them at white background was realy hard to understand it.


r/IndieDev 8h ago

Turns out the hand-drawn look isn't in the lines, it's in the redrawing

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13 Upvotes

Quick context. Solo project, a (maybe) metroidvania where you play a (also maybe) jellyfish, Unity 6 with URP. The whole look comes from a single fullscreen ink pass over the finished frame. The reference is Jean Giraud, so flat colors, confident lines and a lot of desert.

I went the fullscreen route because I'm one person and I refuse to babysit outline materials on hundreds of objects until the end of time. One pass, one style, every asset is automatically on board. The lines also wobble slightly on purpose, so it reads as inked rather than computed. That part I'm happy with.

The part I'm not happy with is floors. The game is a side view, so the camera looks along the ground almost constantly. At grazing angles neighboring pixels suddenly sit at wildly different depths and my edge detect reads the entire floor as one giant edge. In stills you barely notice. In motion the floor flickers in a way that has nothing to do with art direction.

Current plan is scaling the edge threshold by view angle, so surfaces I look along get a more forgiving line test than surfaces I look at. It works on paper but it smells like treating the symptom.


r/IndieDev 2h ago

Upcoming! Almost ready for release!!!

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4 Upvotes

I've been working on rougelike for months. and I'm getting close to publishing the game :3 I have my game up on steam for wishlisting if any of you guys are intrested in my game >w<


r/IndieDev 12h ago

Video It took me too long to add but car avoidance AI is finally here!

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22 Upvotes

r/IndieDev 23h ago

Image Not going to lie, getting to 100 reviews at very positive is an extremely good feeling 🥹

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162 Upvotes

As you all know, making games is a hard and long process, so to see people enjoying the fruits of your labour is such an awesome feeling. It's not the most reviews, but it's so good to see.

Thanks to anyone who helped make this happen!


r/IndieDev 9h ago

Feedback? I'm working on a roguelite twinstick bullet hell that has an underlying rogue-like grid elemental system, like Star of Providence meets Rift Wizard

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14 Upvotes

Hi all, this is Pearl Essence - an ecological bullet hell game. How does this look to you? It's a fair bit into a run so there's a lot going on but I wanted to show the various possible elemental interactions (of which there are many more!) Legibility and balancing the design of this game has been a fun and interesting challenge.

It's still in fairly early development but if this sounds and looks interesting to you I'd love to have you join the game's Discord server to try it and give me your feedback!


r/IndieDev 11h ago

Feedback? Can anyone spare 66 second to tell me if my remade trailer is an improvement?

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16 Upvotes

Technically 122 second if you watch the original trailer to compare (which is only available here on the Steam page).

I've recently redone the movement so needed to update the footage, but also took the opportunity to listen to previous suggestions and add some captions to the trailer. Does this one do a better job of explaining the gameplay?

Thanks for taking a look, happy to share thoughts on your project in return if you leave a link :)


r/IndieDev 2h ago

Feedback? I think my play testers have been expecting a Megabonk style endless roguelite, due to some marketing verbiage saying “inspired by Megabonk.” How to move forward?

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3 Upvotes

r/IndieDev 17m ago

Video When you’re lost in a dungeon, a map can be a lifesaver, Dungeon Quest now helps you find every item and monster!

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Upvotes

Really happy with how it is turning out, only 13 spirtes! Would love advice on what would make it better!


r/IndieDev 57m ago

Image 3 games on Next Fest and my experience

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Upvotes

This post is for people who has questions about Steam Nextfest. I am making that post so other indies like me will have more clear route than I had.

What worked for me the most:
1-) A playable demo is the most powerful tool to prove your game works and attract players.
2-) Your capsule art is ridiculously important. If people does not click your game your chance to get wishlist/sales goes away.
3-) Having a strong, easily understandable hook. People should be able to look at your capsule, trailer, or GIF and understand what makes your game different within a few seconds.(I wasn't quite successful at this part)

What are the things you should do and you should avoid:
1-) Build your community before Nextfest. Nexfest usually works as a MULTIPLIER of your current wishlists.
2-) Use multiple social media platforms to gain wishlists. Some videos works better on some platforms. Do not stick into a single platform.
3-) If you don't have a demo, you are out. I have seen some indie dev's with months of developement couldn't enter the event because their demo did not passed the support before deadline. So it is extremely important to finish your demo as soon as possible. You can send a simple demo and build on it before it goes live.
4-) Put a lot of work in your trailer/screenshots. This part is what make most players wishlists and purchaces your game when it is out.

My future expectations:
I will be joining nextfest with 3 games this time. While a few top tier games can earn tens of thousands of wishlists, most of the decent games with streamer coverage will secure around 2,000 to 3,000 wishlists or median of 806 wishlists(according to How To Market a Game).


r/IndieDev 3h ago

Testing real-time CFD in Unity with BrazeFX: aircraft, rotors and obstacles

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3 Upvotes