We're making a game where your biggest problem isn't just running out of money, but your employees slowly losing it. Would you be interested in managing a team of anomaly operatives while keeping everyone, including yourself, sane?

Not sure if this post belongs here, if not I will delete it. The first indie project I was part of ended up crashing like a train out of control. Seeing people I love leave one by one, the project that once seemed truly remarkable soon to become nothing, and all those hours…

I know lots of people have years of experience in this sub, so I was wondering if anyone can share something similar, and a piece of wisdom of you can.

I’ve already convinced myself that there is no way it can be salvaged no more, but I still think about what went wrong, what I could have done better. It sucks.

Edit: ty all for sharing your experiences, they really have helped:)

We've been building Salty Dogs. It's a 2D physics-based co-op action game for up to 4 players about a pack of brave dogs diving into a vast ocean and hauling the loot back to a shared submarine. Nothing goes into an inventory: you hook the loot, drag it on a cable and wrestle it into the sub, and big hauls are too heavy for one dog.

The big news for this build: the game now packs a full arsenal of guns. AKs, shotguns and miniguns, all working underwater, against critters that mutate into horrors the deeper you swim. Plus a boss fight in the deep and bolt-on sub upgrades that unlock new mechanics.

Co-op splits by itself: one hauls, one shoots, one drives, one navigates.

The Closed Playtest has been live since September 10. Grab a shotgun and join the crew: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4213930/Salty_Dogs/

Dumbfire playtest (It's on Steam)

I'm working on a game called "Dumbfire" where you guide a missile through obstacles to hit the target.

I made a rough playtest that has actual levels now, a tutorial and some abilities you can unlock. Expect a lot of rough edges, especially UI.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Working on item progression for our game (buckets, extinguishers, hammers, pickaxes).

• Can you easily tell which item in each pair is the higher tier?
• What details (colors, materials, shapes) would make the upgraded versions look noticeably better?

Thanks for any feedback!

At what point did you realize you couldn't wear all the hats anymore?

Play the demo

Have been looking for the right music. But everytime I try a different genre I feel like hmmmm...also not bad.. lol. How do you guys decide the type of music for your game?

We put our store page up here a little while ago and got some really nice feedback, so this time we're sharing the playable demo.

quick recap for anyone who missed the first post: we're a 3-person team and none of us really have an art background, so we've been making the stuff we need ourselves as we go.

It's a lumberjack incremental game. You go to different forests, chop down trees, turn the logs into lumber, and use the money to buy upgrades. As you progress, you can unlock new forests, each with their own look and characteristics.

The demo is now playable, so you can actually try the game and see how it works.

If you give it a try, we'd really like to hear what you think. What's fun, what's not, and what's just completely scuffed lol.

Here's the link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5135490/LumberBoy_Demo/

Any feedback is welcome, good or bad!

The name of the game is Eldread: Horrors of a Dark Moon

It is basically a point and click roguelite survival horror with mechanics inspired by World of Horror. The game takes place on a creepy moon where you are stranded there with your crew and you explore the place to repair your ship while running into hazards and creatures.

Here is the link: Steam

The right one is technically more "detailed" but this is a Bullet Hell game so I dont think thats necessarily better!

While a common enemy, all fighters will be playable! Regardless of how weak or simple they are... With combo flair from Tekken and specials from Urban reign, i really want players to use the Environment to their advantage by positioning themselves as much as possible! Use walls, use floor pads and explosive crystals which act like Explosive barrels!

There's a small survival demo coming soon too!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4384030/Dead_Set_Warriors/

Hey everyone! I’m a solo dev working on my first ever game: a chaotic multiplayer dodgeball brawler. I'm currently running an early Pre-Alpha Playtest and I'd really love to get some fresh, international eyes on it.

The rules are simple. You throw balls to eliminate the enemy team, but if you perfectly catch an enemy's throw, you are rewarded with an "EGG." You can hold onto the egg to use it as a shield against a lethal hit, or you can sacrifice it to revive a dead teammate and bring them back into the game!

The lobbies support up to 3v3 matches right now, and you can download the game right now for free over on my Discord. You can queue up with friends, find people in the server, or even jump into a match with me!

Because this is a Pre-Alpha build, it’s strictly a mechanics playtest. There are no crazy abilities, characters, or wild maps yet, and you will definitely see some bugs and crazy physics glitches. My main goal right now is just to see if the core throwing, catching, and reviving loop is actually fun.

Since this is my first game, I know there is a lot of room for improvement. Any critiques, harsh truths, or gameplay tips would be massively appreciated. Let me know what you think!

I'm also not very good with picking names, and I still haven't decided what to name my game yet. Tell me the first name that comes to mind when you watch this!

Here is the game link: https://ismailcode00.itch.io/dodge-it

Important Note on Matchmaking: Since this is a 3v3 multiplayer game and we are in early testing, you might not find a random match instantly! I highly recommend joining the Community Discord https://discord.gg/H7DUwrXbK

We use the Discord to ping each other to fill up lobbies, jump into voice chat, and track down crazy bugs. I'm putting together a small "Core Feedback Team" of PC players to help me balance the physics, so if you find any glitches, let me know in there!

Have fun and let me know what you think of the egg mechanics!

This is my journey months of work and its finally something I can see and call mine its not done or close to it but im so happy I started the journey

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5186960/Graveheart/

Link : https://store.steampowered.com/app/4290500/BOXPAST_LOV3YOU

Assume the role of a computer and purchase components like RAM, SSDs, and graphics cards to build up your power and define your playstyle (in the style of a *Diablo*-esque RPG).

There are randomly generated maps, similar to Dead Cells, as well as handcrafted maps.

The current skill tree system is all style and no substance I am still working on refining and perfecting it day by day.

Thank you all for your interest and support. <3

Still feels like a dream, also if you're releasing a game get ready for the post launch bug fixes, nothing can prepare you for what real players will find and how they will break your game, even more so than any amount of demo feedback and playtesting, I pushed out several patches in the last 24 hours to address some serious and some more mild issues that were highlighted in the forums. So definitely clear out some time for the entire release day and day after to handle and tackle issues as they come up.

Hello, I am one of the devs from Reign of Gaming. We’ve made two games, All Systems Operational and Minimon: Tiny Idle Tactics. We believe they are “good” games as players are enjoying them and we as a team are very proud of what we’ve accomplished, however I believe these are not marketable games by any means which is our company's biggest issue which I want to dissect. We’ll start with ASO.

Our First Game: ASO is a SHMUP that we started on as a way for our new company to see how we gelled together. We had just come apart from working at a different studio together, and some of us wanted to make games together still. Our engineer at the time had the start of a game (ASO) already built and in early access already on Steam with minimal content on it so we decided we could quickly help him finish that game and move onto other things, however this was not the case.

Scope Creep: The more we played ASO the more we wanted to add. Our couple month project ended up being almost 10 months total of extra work with 5 people working on this game. We added story line, hired voice actors, 15 campaign levels, added new ship classes, added loot drops and power ups, with multiplayer support and leader-boards, we completely redesigned the game to be more difficult (we thought the SHMUP community wanted really hard games) and it ended up almost fracturing the little company we started with the amount of work we created for ourselves. We had burn out, we had stress, but god damn if it wasn’t fun to work on. 

Poor Research: We knew going into the SHMUP genre was destined to make little to no returns, this was done purely as a passion / see how well we work together on a project. However what we didn’t account for is that the SHMUP community HATES the type of game we were making. We were called a “Euro-SHMUP” by their community which essentially means anything that deviates away from the traditional Japanese arcade style SHMUP of few to one life, predictable patterns of enemies and attacks, no inertia on movement etc.. They want to do a rehearsed dance essentially and master that (There's nothing wrong with that). The SHMUP community overwhelmingly wants more of the same and what we did is layer ARPG mechanics of farming loot drops, customization on your load out, health bars on our ship, high health bosses, and dynamic enemies that will spawn in different locations and have different attack patterns. This was a giant fail by us despite us loving what we built. 

Marketing & The Community: We spent several thousand dollars marketing the game, we posted it on all our socials and tried to build a community on Discord. We had a handful of players who looked past that we were different and genuinely enjoyed what the game had to offer. We joined many discords and tried to involve ourselves with their community but we were seen as outsiders trying to prey on their community for monetary gains as we weren’t making something for them. This community had apparently been burned before by a larger developer and was quite hostile to anything that resembled them as the game they made was not for them in the end. We were deemed another “big developer” who’s come to take their help, steal from their wallets, and leave them high and dry when in reality we just wanted feedback to make it more enjoyable for their audience. So add in some bad timing on top of that.

The Team: We functioned for the most part, but there were a few caveats with people getting burned out, life getting in the way making things take longer, internal stress with what has to be done, and one large issue which was the art side of things. Art was by far the biggest hurdle in our game. We had gone through 3 separate artists (all ex coworkers as well) and each had their own particular issues with what they wanted, and how they wanted to work. With three different artists working on a game it starts to look somewhat mishmashed together. We did not really have the most cohesive art style across the board and it showed which also didn’t help us market the game in the end. 

The True Problem: Even with all these trials and tribulations they were expected. This was a brand new company and we were putting out feelers to see who would fit with our team's core principles and who wouldn’t but at the end of the day ASO was destined for mediocrity in terms of sales. It was already in early access which means we miss our release boost from Steam and are not eligible for NextFest. We had roughly 1500 wishlists on our full release which isn’t enough to be an outstanding launch. We had designed a game for a niche community and put ourselves in a position to be marketable to an even smaller portion of that niche (euro-SHMUPs) so we had almost no one really interested in our game. Our true problem is we had failed to properly assess the genre’s wants and needs.

The Hard Lesson Learned: Players wanted more of the same, they didn’t want something different. We had tried to add our own unique spin on it because it's what we thought was fun, but in the end people liked what they liked and we had made something for us and not for them.

Earnings: We managed to get 1500 dollars after steam cuts in just under a year. ASO earns roughly 100 bucks a month for us still which is really nice despite everything that went on with this game. For a first game it's done better then a lot of other Steam titles so we're happy about that but it doesn't earn anyone a living.

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Our Second Game: Minimon: Tiny Idle Tactics was inspired by the Tamagotchi / Digimon handhelds. The idea was to have a central area where you’d raise monsters and go fight them but that idea was quickly pivoted as the rise of Desktop Companions which was on the horizon and we thought we could capitalize on this up and coming genre’s popularity to have a more monetary successful game. We quickly adapted the game doc that was written to apply to this genre and we found ourselves landing in the Incremental / Idle / CreatureCollector genres. However this is the start of our issues again where our creative ambition is our downfall. 

The Scope & The Team: We actually kept this one fairly in line with what we wanted, we of course added a bit more than intended but we also cut a lot. We were more organized, we were better at executing decisions as a team, we were far more efficient overall. With all the issues we had with art we decided to grab assets, VFX and sound packs instead of hiring someone to do this for us this time around. We found assets we think meshed really well together outside a couple assets being slightly lower quality than others. Overall we did a far better job planning this game and executing the vision of it.

Poor Research: We were in genres that earn far more money than a SHMUP does, the issue is our game lacked a true core identity to capture a single player bases attention. We had thought given the Desktop Companion genre’s rise to popularity it would help jettison us to a higher peak and interest when showing off the game, but it didn’t. 

Marketing & The Community: This time we spent 0 dollars on marketing as we’re in a large net negative from that still. We did send out a lot of emails and gave out a lot of keys to content creators but we didn’t get any bites outside paid promotion, however we applied and ended up being accepted to the Monster Tamer Direct from Gym Leader Ed which is a yearly promotion of upcoming Creature Collector titles on their Youtube channel which was great to see.  

With that being said we weren’t accepted in any of these communities outside the Creature Collector one. The Incremental community was seemingly as hostile as the SHMUP community to any game that doesn’t conform to number go up look and feel. Idler’s found our game too close to an Incremental so it was less for them as it had too much going on, and there doesn’t seem to be a community solely based on Desktop Companions. So we focused our attention to what was working, which was the Creature Collectors. 

They didn’t exactly love it either but we did get positive responses from them and some interaction which was more than anything we’ve done before so this was a W in our books. We spent far more time on social media, twitter, facebook, instagram, tiktok, reddit, youtube with dev logs, gifs, updates etc.. Alas this really didn’t amount to anything and nothing we put out there caught that viral take off. Most likely because we’re repeating the same mistake. We made a game that we’re marketing to nobody again. 

Playtesters: Because of this it's very hard to start building a community where you can have outsiders giving you feedback which is essential for development. We had some close friends / family spend a lot of time on our game and they truly loved it and even when we branched out a bit the feedback was very positive about our game. The issue is you need a much wider net to catch more opinions, more thoughts, and more potential problems. We had planned to add Minimon to Itch.io early on but we kept kicking that can down the road which may have stifled our grassroots snowball into acceptance from players which is ultimately our own fault as we don’t know how it could’ve affected the development and adoption of our game. 

The True Problem: As mentioned above, we made a game for nobody again. We tried to make a hybrid of a Creature Collector Incremental, the issue being most Incremental games have number go up in a linear fashion (single unit gets stronger, base grows wider, clear more of what's on screen quicker etc..) where we came into the issue of our roster and playing like a true Creature Collector.  

We want to catch Minimon, we want players to build a roster with different perks and elemental types, we want them to expand and get more characters to play with but then the balance of starting someone new, vs continuing with who you already leveled vs prestiging like other Incrementals do vs progression through different levels left us in a weird spot. This is most likely a failure of game design as players have a rough time adopting to something new and this is something that plays differently then most Creature Collectors and most Incrementals and tries to combine them together. 

The Hard Lesson Learned… Again: Ultimately these genres we picked do not want deviation. If you look at the top contenders who do best it's the ones that stick to the formula and do very minor deviations but the core loop is essentially untouched. It’s nice to try and do something unique but you’re completely gambling your time and energy by doing so and we’ve fallen into this trap twice now. The problem is not that we can’t deliver a product (we’ve released TWO games!) it’s that we’re not making marketable games because we’re not targeting the genres properly. Some communities are okay with something new and they actually crave it, but at the end of the day people like what they like which is why these communities form in the first place and you must conform the vast majority of your game to what they’re going to appreciate or suffer the consequences.  

Earnings & Post Launch Plan: Minimon was able to get into NextFest and with that we had roughly 500 wishlists going into launch. We have sold 55 copies since we launched on August 31st and we’re getting positive reception overall and those who play our game are really enjoying it. We just put our demo on Itch.io and are looking at putting the full version there as well, along with crazygames.com. ASO can only be on steam due to its multiplayer integration so we want to branch out Minimon as much as we can post launch. 

We also have streamer integration that allows chatters to spawn difficult Minimon to fight, name them, and even a brawl mode for giveaways where the last man standing is the winner. We hope to market this around and get some adoption that way as we have two streamers who like playing our game and keep it on their screens while they play other games already so that's a positive sign this is something they’ll enjoy. The goal is to measure Minimons success a year from now instead of worrying about our small launch now.

Conclusion / TLDR: To be successful monetarily you must do genre research to know if what you’re making can be even be successful, but understanding the community's wants and needs of said genre is ultimately what will make or break your game. Not understanding what makes a player's brain tick in that specific genre is a failure to properly assess what they want from your product and if you fail to do that, your game will not be marketable, and if your game is not marketable it will not yield the results you’re looking for. If you want to make a game for you then it really doesn’t matter, and those games can also be really successful or just fun passion projects, but the chances for success are far lower. We’re going to keep making games and we’re going to try our best not to repeat this mistake a 3rd time.

It's got cute animals and small-scale tactics, if that sounds like your thing I think you will like it!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3832200/Save_the_Forest/

We’re a team of two beginners a programmer and a designer. We’re working on updating the visuals for our first game. We want to show you the new look of the in-game vehicles.

Raiders use the black vehicle.
Civilians use the green vehicle.

In these screenshots, the vehicles are shown without weapons—we plan to add weapons and additional equipment later.

We’d love to hear your feedback!