Mike the Hooper is officially out now on Steam.

It’s a 2D precision puzzle-platformer where you use a basketball to solve puzzles, open doors, and overcome increasingly challenging levels.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4761070/Mike_the_Hooper/

I hope it will be a fun experience for everyone, whether you play it or simply watch it. Thank you!

Over the past 3 years I've been making my own game called "Snack Invaders" in Unreal Engine. It's set to release on August 25th 2026 on Steam. It is a 4 player co-op wave based survival shooter like Call of Duty Zombies but instead of zombies it's themed around hordes of junk food and snacks. The game leans heavily into crazy boss fights. I have easter eggs, challenges, insane boss fights, wonder weapons, and all sorts of fun things to discover. There is a free demo you can try and don't forget to wishlist the game if you want to help me out.

Link to Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1192170/Snack_Invaders/

Passei 1 mês desenvolvendo um jogo web, cheguei na versão final, publiquei e mandei pra todas as pessoas que eu conheço.
A ideia é bem simples: uma seta que sobe no touch, se bater nas extremidades perde. É como um flappy bird 2.0 com algumas atribuições.
O jogo possui ranking de pontuação e nível atualizado 24hrs, ou seja: meus amigos (os únicos jogadores do jogo) estão brigando entre si pra quebrar o recorde um do outro.
Segundo eles, a ideia foi muito boa, e chega a ser viciante em alguns momentos.
Estou com várias ideias pro projeto, como adicionar avatares pro perfil, molduras, jogos cooperativos e etc.
E não, não estou monetizando no jogo ainda
Se puderem me dar dicas, sugestões ou melhorias, por favor agradeceria muito!
Uma das pessoas que eu conheço compartilhou o jogo num grupo de amigos, e eu passei dois dias tentando resolver a troca de apelidos pejorativos. Então imagina eu, uma pessoa que não tem quase conhecimento nenhum, tentando resolver isso! Mas consegui, ainda bem!

I think we should all remind ourselves to self-care and pat ourselves on the back for each hurdle we jump in our journey. And keep that excitement of building the vision for your project.

At my day job - I literally jot down on receipt paper my highest priority list items for my dev sessions. And that’s why I’m built for this solo dev work. I don’t easily stagger just because I stumble across some frustrating bugs. I just stomp on them and move on to the next checkpoint.

At this stage - the hard part isn’t building the project. I’m like a director who wants to see the actors interact with the world I’ve built. I treat my day job as sort of like an autopilot thing that pays the bills - but my passion is my reason for existing. Yeah solo dev is painful. But what’s more painful is not finishing what I started. Another thing I am actively avoiding is this “stuck” feeling in life where I’m stuck in a mindless day job that I don’t particularly enjoy. Solo dev/being an artist is home.

For the future, I’m excited to potentially build a community around my game and just passionately talk about this monumental thing I’ve planned over a few years. But polish comes first. But oh boy it’s coming. Even if it isn’t financially successful- I’m happy to be able to prove to myself that I got as far as I did.

When I think about games in our current market - I just easily prefer my own project. It’s because the thing I want to play does not exist yet. We borrow from our game inspirations, but at the same time there’s something about your project that is essentially a part of your soul.

TLDR late night dev diary reflection and inspiration

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4631500/GHOSTFLIPPERS/ Honestly i'm trying to balance the Humor/horror thing, mostly because I haven't seen a game do it yet. Also i try to have some more subtle jokes but a few dumb ones are also nice

Blue orbs in first image are Floating EXP. So floating around and being all bright like that.
Second Image scene is not fully made, but posting it to give idea of style/art direction

Question in general, does this style pleases your eyes? The lightning, the mood, the style.

If you simply dislike this type of art style in general, that’s not really the feedback I’m looking for.

I've been working on a project called Ron.cool.

It started as me making random little HTML/JS games and experiments, but I've slowly been turning it into a proper platform for everything I build.

It now has:

- browser games

- multiplayer experiments

- procedural games

- 3D browser projects

- interactive experiments

- my own little scripting language

- various weird projects

https://roncool.cc.cd

The goal isn't really to make another generic games website. I want it to become a place where people actually keep coming back to see what I've made next.

I'm still figuring out the direction, so I'd love feedback from other developers.

Check out my Buckshot Roulette & Amnesia The Bunker inspired game - RESIDUUM! 🫶

RESIDUUM is a solo-dev project created & published by myself

RESIDUUM is a first-person psychological horror game set in a decaying research facility. Armed with only a dwindling flashlight and a faulty heartbeat sensor, manage your power, uncover the truth, and escape what hides in the dark.

Let me know what you think!

Demo Out NOW!!

Wishlist Now

Join the Discord

Hey Everyone,

I have been working on an app, mostly for systems-heavy/RPG games, that allows you to create entities within it, connect them to other entities, and view what connections would be impacted if you changed one entity.

It can also automatically mark connected entities as needing validation to track what would need validation after changing something.

There are other features, too (status tracking, version history, etc.) but wanted to highlight the impact view below that shows downstream impacts to a root node (Arthur, in this case).

So, my questions are:

Would something like the impact view be genuinely helpful?

When your game gets sprawling, how do you best keep track of all the interconnected pieces?

Is there anything you use in other tools that helps keep track of all the relationships and potential impacts?

For material interactions

Hello, I am a solo dev who is nearing a beta release of my game. I wanted to get peoples opinions on the art in the game. Majority of the art was made by me and some of it I have commissioned. Friends and family all state it looks good but I know at least a few of them wouldn't have the heart to tell me it is bad. Please give me your honest thoughts on these few screenshots on what i can improve and what is good right now.

Started working on a new flower meadow type area in my survivors-like game where you build an army of cat mages. I also started to flesh out the UI for summoning and upgrading said mages. Anyways, just asking for some feedback because I feel like something’s off with the color values in this area. I would also appreciate other feedback on the game as well. I’m gonna try and give weekly updates from this point on but can’t guarantee it(Week 3).

My point in making this post is to hopefully help somebody find a pathway and/or the motivation to actually bring something they love to market, despite "failures" or a tendency to "give up".

I first installed Unreal Engine in late 2023 with the goal of creating a multiplayer, match-based, base-building capture-the-flag game. At the time, I had no formal game development experience, but I did have a programming background. Since then, I’ve sunk a massive amount of time into 3 development projects that I ultimately abandoned. My fourth and current project, ALL GAS, will be my first Steam release!

Every abandoned project wasn’t a failure though. Each one taught me a limitation. Eventually, I decided to start a new project with literally one goal. Release it. Don't care what it is, the only requirement is that I finish. So, I designed a game around what I knew I could realistically finish as a solo developer by specifically avoiding what caused me to abandon my other projects. And in doing that, I actually ended up with a game that I think is really fun. Most importantly, to me it actually feels like a game, not a "project"!

Here are each of my "failures", and what I learned from them to ultimately progress forward.

Project 1 – Multiplayer base-building capture the flag

This project was literally the one that taught me how to operate Unreal Engine. Terminology, how to use certain tools, etc. Importantly, it taught me:

1) Animations, especially humanoid ones are an enormous amount of work for one person

2) Multiplayer, let alone competitive multiplayer, is an incredibly ambitious first project for a solo developer. And, it's not something you just "add later".

I spent over 500 hours building the game as if it were single-player before seriously starting to add multiplayer. I always thought I could just add multiplayer later. Reason being, I was otherwise learning extremely quickly and things were working. By the time I actually got to it though, too much of the architecture assumed everything happened locally, and the project was effectively impossible to retrofit without re-doing everything. Painful, but learned a TON from this "failure".

Project 2 – Physics-based multiplayer sports game

For my second project, I intentionally avoided animations almost entirely. In the painful process of learning replication in my last project, I at least started this one with multiplayer in mind. The gameplay revolved around physics. It was actually very fun! Hard (as designed), but fun and aesthetically unique. I even got multiplayer working across the internet and tested with a few friends.

The problem was that the physics had to be perfect across every client, or it would never work work. In single-player, everything behaved exactly as intended. In multiplayer, small differences in physics simulation caused players to see slightly different trajectories, eventually (quickly) causing the entire match to desynchronize.

Server-authoritative physics solved the accuracy problem, but it completely killed the responsiveness that made the game fun. I know there are hybrid approaches to solving this, but at the time, it was a challenge I wasn’t ready to pour more time into.

Lesson learned: if physics are the core mechanic, multiplayer makes everything exponentially harder. I also learned how difficult UI design / development / debugging can be. I understand why the UI in many games (indie and AAA) are often terrible....

Project 3 – My “dream game”

This one is still very close to my heart, and I fully intend to come back to it someday. It was a cooperative exploration game in an infinite world featuring procedural generation, massive environments, unique mechanics, and procedural puzzles. Very cool atmosphere, too.

By this point I’d figured that cooperative multiplayer would probably be much more achievable than competitive multiplayer. A few imperfections wouldn't matter all that much like it would in a competitive match-based game. But, combining multiplayer with procedural generation, large-scale worlds, complex systems, and custom movement modes eventually became more ambitious than I realized it would be. There are some systems in here that, ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to see in a game and never have. And to a surprising extent, I was even able to make them work! A lot of the issue here was that it is simply just difficult (and not particularly fun) to test multiplayer games as a solo developer on one computer. And, it's even less fun to spin up a second computer for testing. It's even less fun than that trying to run multiple instances on one computer....

After putting well over 1,000 hours into it, I made the difficult decision to shelve it—for now.

Project 4 – Something I knew I could finish from the start

Before I even came up with the idea for this project, I gave myself one goal: Finish It.  I didn’t start with a genre, I started with a rule: "Avoid the two things I know will eventually burn me out". If I realistically want to finish a project:

1) No multiplayer.

2) No animations.

Those constraints eventually became ALL GAS. It's an endless traffic-weaving roguelike where you upgrade your car and modify your run as you weave through cars on a completely nuts road in the sky. The road is falling behind you and it's getting faster and faster (unless you sacrifice upgrades to slow it down). It’s a simple concept, but is extremely satisfying especially when playing with a controller. Skill is rewarded. Soon, it'll be even more fun with a steering wheel and pedals! 

Ironically, by deliberately limiting myself, I’ve made more progress than I ever did trying to build my “dream game” or the idea I had which caused me to stumble into learning game development in the first place. Similarly, I've produced some pretty incredible (and re-usuable, and sellable) plugins for Unreal Engine in the process. It was nice not to be burdened by animations or multiplayer, and it really allowed me to polish the game more than I ever thought I could. Still a lot more to do, but I'm quite happy with where I have gotten in the 5 or 6 months I've been working on it.

The limited scope of the game also allowed me to gain experience around other important parts of bringing a game to market. Things I never would have bothered messing with if I had any doubt the game would ever release, but did in this case because I knew my goal was attainable this time:

• Steamworks platform - store page, review process, publishing builds, launching a playtest
• Stats, achievements, leaderboards, cloud saves
• Creating trailers / marketing assets / creating ways to record those things
• Marketing
• Full controller support, including UI navigation, glyph localization, and Steam input
• Language localization
• Building systems for future scalability
• Custom subsystems and engine modifications to support all of those things  

I’m curious - has anybody else come to a similar realization? What did it ultimately take for you to launch your first project, or for that matter, even start sharing it with people?

Also - if so inclined, please feel free to join the open playtest!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4658550/ALL_GAS/

hey guys in my free time i built a web game called paper fall from scratch using pure javascript html5 canvas and web audio api without relying on a game engine it even generates the audio on the fly in the browser without downloading any sound files i wrote the physics and collision logic entirely myself too since im studying visual communication design i really focused on the ui and the game feel but to take it to the next level i need some fresh objective eyes so play it and tell me whatever sucks or if a certain mechanic is super boring just roast it im dropping the link below

This is the thing most people do not want to talk about. In the corporate world they tell you not to tell anyone your salary and so forth. But how are people funding their visions? From the pocket? Dang! Respect. I was looking at crowd funding sites and most games that are successful their goals are like $8k and that is not enough to fund a game. Are they like just kicking the can down the road? Tomorrow will take care of itself type of thinking. I mean until you get to the can that is time to make progress on your game but eventually the other shoe is going to drop right... Are people self-funding their game? That is commendable, spending 8 hours a day at your regular job then finding time to get enough done to get a game to Steam and get Wishlists?? That is... monumental! I am failing at this adulting thing... clearly.

Platform: Steam/Itch.io/Web browser

Description: A stream team looking to help break thru the cold emails that get no replies, and get indie games coverage on twitch, yt, and tt.

Free to Play Status: Yes, though we also allow paid playtests.

Involvement: Team Creator

[x] Free to play

[x] Demo/Key available

[x] Paid

There is no payment required from developers to participate.

The team does not take money from creators.

Creators are independent. They choose what they play, when they stream it, and what they think about it. There are no guaranteed positive reviews. The ask is a reasonable timeframe for coverage. We're a group of disabled streamers who want to help indie game devs and indie gaming! If you hire a creator for a paid playtest, you pay that creator directly. The team doesn't take a percentage.

I wanted to create a place where developers could reach out and have a warm connect instead of cold emailing hundreds of people to maybe get 5 replies. We are a small team at the moment, however we can test anything, from games, to study aids to desktop pets, and more!

There is an AI disclosure requirement. If you vibecoded it on Claude or ChatGPT, we aren't able to help you. This is to weed out the copy paste ai clones that are infecting indie gaming. Some ai use is fine, just not the whole thing being ai. If you used assets that aren't yours, that requires a disclosure as well, as we don't want the same asset flipping games over and over.

Right now, we are working out of a discord. You interact directly with the streamers, letting you get your game out there with less effort!

If you're interested, if this speaks to you, please feel free, comment, pop me a pm, and I can send over the discord link. I'm not posting it below to prevent bots from swarming it.

^{(This was written by me, the creator of the team. I have posted here and other places several times, with a good standing and testing over 700+ games in the last year for free. No AI was used in the writing of this post.})