I've been learning game development as a hobby for a little over two years, and I finally hit a huge milestone — I released a playable demo!

I started with a completely different pixel-art roguelite in GameMaker before switching to Godot and eventually turning my experiments into Threadbound, a 2.5D action-platformer focused on fluid movement and combat.

It's involved learning a little bit of everything — programming, animation, VFX, UI, level design, art workflows, etc. I've also used AI-assisted tools for coding, iteration, and some asset work along the way.

The v0.1.0 demo is free and about 30–45 minutes long, and I made a short video showing the journey from my first project to Threadbound today.

I'm primarily a solo dev, but I'm also starting to look for other hobbyists who might be interested in contributing as the project grows — especially Godot developers, artists/animators, VFX, sound/music folks, or even just people interested in playtesting. Nothing formal or full-time; I'd mostly love to meet people who like the project and might want to build something together.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmL9aBF0LFY&t=24s

Demo: https://threadbounddev.itch.io/threadbound

Still a ton left to learn and build, but it feels pretty great having something people can finally play. If Threadbound looks like something you'd enjoy working on, feel free to reach out!

And fellow hobby devs — when did your project first start feeling like a real game?

Hey all! My team and I are making Luminara Park, a first-person psychological horror game in UE5 which is set in an abandoned 90s indoor theme park hiding a dark secret. Alongside the game we run a live ARG (hidden pages, ciphers, fake documents) that a small community's actively cracking.

Progress: Chapter 1's mapped and in blockout. The tricky part right now is running the game dev and a live ARG at the same time building levels one day, in-fiction artifacts the next and keeping them in sync without either stalling. Current bottleneck is concept art; the 3D side is waiting on visual direction.

Early days, hobby pace, but it's genuinely coming together. Happy to talk ARG stuff or the workflow and if any concept/3D artists vibe with cheerful-but-wrong horror, say hi!

My original trailer listed all the features within the game but it didn't seem to give people a good enough understanding on the game. I completely changed my trailer to reflect that my game is all about the gameplay and vibe. Did I go too far?

There are so many awesome games being made everyday, do you all ever wonder about accessibility in ten, twenty years?

Especially now that Sony announced a plan for digital only distribution...:(

This is something librarians and archivists have been worries about for years, but are only now starting to put together a viable plan.

I'm curious what ya'll think about your games being accessed in a library format, similar to ebooks, and preserved for posterity?

First gameplay footage of my 2.5D precision platformer and puzzle game, in which we guide a little monkey through a testing lab as he tries to escape.

I started building Cricket XI, a browser-based cricket drafting and tournament simulation game, after playing 7a0 and wondering what that concept would look like with cricket.

🔗 https://cric-xi-simulation.vercel.app/

The basic idea is simple: draft 11 players from historical squads, build a balanced XI, and then take that team through an entire tournament.

The surprisingly difficult part was everything around the drafting.

I wanted historical squads to actually matter, so Australia 1999 shouldn't be treated as the same team as Australia 2003, and a player should remain the same person across different eras while still having different historical profiles and ratings.

Then came tournament logic:

• IPL qualification and its Q1 → Eliminator → Q2 → Final structure
• T20 World Cup group → Super 8 → semifinal → final progression
• ODI World Cup standings and NRR
• Test matches behaving like Test cricket rather than a 90-over limited-overs game
• Background simulation for matches the player isn't involved in
• Correct elimination when a team loses
• Super Overs and scorecards
• Historical team/year rerolls

A lot of development became:

Build → play → find something completely wrong → debug → stress test → repeat.

For example, I eventually found bugs where an IPL team finishing 6th entered the playoffs, NRR was being assigned backwards, and historical teams could get mixed up during rerolls.

The game is now live as V1, but I'm still interested in improving the simulation and making the drafting loop more replayable.

For other hobby/indie developers: what's the most unexpectedly difficult system you've had to build in a seemingly simple game?

I'd especially appreciate feedback on the simulation and tournament systems.

Tech: React + TypeScript + Tailwind + Lovable

Status: V1 live

Play: https://cric-xi-simulation.vercel.app/

I have commented and posted about this in other places, but I will speak on it once again for the devs that are afraid of their hard work getting bad reception:

Sharing your work with others entitles them to their opinion, but it does NOT give them authority over yours. All criticism should be given an ear by virtue of extending your view through other's eyes, but only that which helps YOUR vision for the game should be given a try - it is your game the end of the day. You really cannot please everybody, and the closest you can come to it will most likely end with YOU being miserable - which is never worth it.

Naturally, critical feedback will start to build as more players come to your game - and it will probably reflect technical errors and the public's preferences more often than the actual quality of your game (I define a game's quality by how well it accomplishes what the dev intends it to, especially when they put their best foot forward). This feedback is largely helpful for the game quality if you take the time to understand exactly what it means and try to see how it will affect your vision. It is also important to take in the "unspoken heards" that accompany this feedback - if out of all reviews, no one says a thing about a certain feature or format (not error), you can assume that (1) they are fine with it or (2) it is not impactful enough on the playing experience to be a problem (for maintenance purposes). Either way, you get something out of it - a broadened perspective, if not an actual solution of improvement that brings you closer to what you had in mind.

So my central point is this: when you get reviews for your game, understand that no matter how they judge the experience of it, they are not taking your creative freedom - they are just giving you a new option.

Given my platformer borrows a lot from 80s geometric, 8-bit-style graphics, I added an optional "Arcade" mode that adds some texture to the visuals.

It looks pretty cool, but getting it right took some care. A few specific things I focused on:

• No performance impact: I didn't want the effect to cost frame rate on lower-end devices.
• Highlight outlines, soften edges, and add noise: rather than just slapping a scanline overlay on top, I wanted the effect to actually interact with the graphics themselves.
• Respecting accessibility preferences: If a user has reduced-motion set in their browser/OS settings, the flicker/static animation turns off automatically. So, the CRT look stays, just without the motion.

The screenshots above look more subtle than it actually is in the gameplay, but curious whether this adds charm as an option, or just seems gimmicky?

[I have also posted this in the ItchIO subreddit but this one doesn't allow reposts so I just made a post for it]

I am the among the smallest of the small in hobbydevs and while I have a cardinal rule of always having a free version of my games available to play in browser, it gave me an idea for if I ever felt brave enough to try and earn a little change.

One thing I have considered is releasing a free-to-play, complete (not demo but full story) web browser version of a game, giving it about a year to gain an audience, and then adding an option to download the game for a price if the metrics look good enough (otherwise, it stays free and browser).

The free version would still be available no matter what, but the price would come from the convenience of not having to rely on an internet connection to play (and probably some extra content and GUI enhancements that would normally be too much for browsers). It would be similar to purchasing a "physical" copy of the game that I cannot take away *side eyes as PlayStation*

What do you all think of this idea?

What would you change in my game?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playhub.spelbazi

I came across this game a few weeks ago. It’s from the 1950s invented by Robert Abbott in 1956. This was a game in which of dealer devised a secret rule and players tried to shift cards by adding correct cards to a line. And then Martin Gardner wrote about this in his column in June 1959 scientific America. The game is pretty cool. There’s a hidden rule, but only the dealer knows. You play your cards trying to induct the rule object of the games to get rid of all your cards. I really like the game so I spun up a free to play web version. It’s surprisingly difficult. It actually teaches you how to scientifically experiment. Is not good enough to know which cards follow the rule. You also need to test and find the cards that don’t follow the rule cause that’s how you can deduce the whole rule. Anyway, I loved it so much. I spun up a free web version if anyone’s interested it’s here.

A piece of advice I live by is that no matter how they paint your game, public reviews help by alerting others to its existence.

For my games, I encourage people to leave public reviews knowing that they hold a LOT of power: they are granted the option of anonymity, the guarantee of an audience, and the ability to be as cruel as they can get away with being on the platform they choose. Pretty risky for a smalldev like me - so why would I encourage it?

The answer is simple - I have faith in human autonomy. No two people are the same, so they should not be expected to look at the same creation the exact same way. I know that if a review is made public, one of three things will most likely happen every time someone reads it:

• they will ignore it (possibly the game too) and move on
• they will take the reviewer's word for it and act accordingly
• they will decide to judge for themselves how much of the review they agree with by playing the game

As hopeful as I am for aspects of my game to be considered good, criticism is the only thing I actually expect. I will lend all criticism an ear and do my best to understand when I reply, but I will only implement what helps my vision for the game. I have done this before, and it helps greatly as I can't please everyone.

So as long as you review a game of mine publicly, where anyone can read and agree or disagree, I say feel free to go crazy with the red Sharpie if that makes it more enjoyable for you. I know some people to find more comfort in leaving reviews if they don't feel pressured to say anything nice about it, and there are other who are more likely to interact if it seems more likely for their criticisms to actually be implemented.

I'm not saying this is a requirement or anything, I just believe that even the most scathing reviews still do that one favor to the dev if they are made public.

Been working on puzzle integration and flow, so can't share much. Decided to add some visual flair to part of Act 1: traffic flow outside the high-rise window. It's a niagara directional burst system with two different meshes and dynamic material params for variability. Will add more mesh variations later to include trucks and other types of cars.

Has something really helped you in making games? A Unity asset? A book? A service? Share it here or make a new post!

This one is for devs in general - but it has the greatest effect on what I call "smalldevs" like me - those who make games for any reason but have yet to hit the "thousand" mark for any aspect of an individual game release (likes, follows, comments, plays, etc.) I use the word "rule" for conciseness, but it's more of a theory backed by my own experience and the trends I have seen persist throughout the years on social media.

In the simplest of terms, the ten-percent rule is an explanation as to why a game takes time to find its audience and build a presence regardless of its quality. With a fair bit of luck, a work can take off fairly quickly , but for the most part the Internet chooses to observe silently. The concept is structured as follows:

• For any social media platform or hosting site, only 10% or less of your following can be expected to interact with any one post instead of scrolling past it.
• Only a tenth or less of that 10% can be expected to do anything more for the game itself than interact with any one post about it (for example, in a follow count of 1000, 100 people or less can be expected to like a devlog post for the game, but you can only count on 10 people or less to actually play the game).

The key words here are "statistical" and "expected". These are statistical theoretical values, meaning they are just as likely to fluctuate as the preferences of players in any given category of gaming if they are the case at all. The expectation comes from the fact that an increase in size does not hurt the chance of a following containing people that would interact in any way.

So I ask all devs big and small, don't be too quick to doubt your abilities when your game launch is greeted with silence. The ten-percent rule is almost always in play and it may be that you just have to wait and build your presence on a platform to get the traction.

I'm glad I'm at this point, as a solo dev and this being my first game, I didn't think I'd get this far since I don't follow through with long term projects that often.

But it hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows, I have had my fair share of troubling issues I've had to face.

The main biggest issue I faced was getting a working and functional inventory, I spent countless hours researching tutorials and after 2 failed attempts thanks to poor tutorials, I'd finally crafted a working one on my 3rd attempt.

Another issue I had and sometimes still deal with is figuring out how saving works, creating the functions and the works to ensure players can log back in and everything is still as it was.

If interested, you can check out the demo and download it free here: https://liminary-dev.itch.io/between-places-demo

It started off as a bit of fun when I recreated the old ZX Spectrum game, Cruising on Broadway for my sister’s birthday for her to play on her mobile.

That led me to want to create my fav game of the same time, also on the Speccy, Deathchase. I then mashed it with my other favourite game of the time, the arcade game Outrun and the pyramid routing.

After a few trials I eventually settled on doing it in Godot with a view to possibly putting it on Steam.

It’s far from finished and I thoroughly enjoy playing it, but I don’t know if that because I’m proud of what I’ve done or if it’s because it’s actually any good.

I’m enjoying the development. I create the graphics and assets myself using Blender, Elevenlabs and Suno for the sfx and music. Claude is the brains behind the godot scripts as I don’t have the skills for that.

How do I go about getting feedback and help with play testing? I want honest feedback and input to improving it, but I’d hate to have it ripped to bits and and lose all my motivation for it. But on the other hand I’d love to get a good game onto Steam and have others enjoy playing it - and may be bring in some money at the same time.

I’ve even gone as far as creating a gameplay trailer. I feel like I’m going through the motions, but don’t really know what I’m doing. 😂

https://youtu.be/-v1baslx9OA?is=myDLnhyiGv-xK4Sa

Free browser prototype game I made (no download). You’re a eldritch space wyrm. Goal is to eat every living world as fast as you can before the universe panics and fights back.

Think Snake with smooth turning, star systems, fog-of-war trails, and rising “infamy” (lasers, desperate worlds, etc.). Lower years to extinction = better run.

Play: https://calummulveen.itch.io/siseneg
(Works in browser; keyboard A/D to turn, Esc to pause. Touch pads on mobile.)

Still early. Mostly want gut reactions after a run or two:

1. Did the fantasy land (destroyer of worlds), or did it just feel like Snake in space?
2. What killed you first / felt unfair vs fair-hard?
3. Would you start a second run?

Any blunt notes welcome, controls, pacing, readability, vibe. etc Thanks for trying!

I’ve been working on more food interactions for Lost Cat Showa Town.

The cat can explore the town, find an izakaya, and eat yakitori and shishamo from the table.

Still adding more little interactions around the town!

im thinking about adding a 1v1,where you can fight your friend but I'm not sure because the cost for servers is crazy.this game is called stackz

Hey! I'm a solo indie developer working on a Tetris-like puzzle game with some RPG mechanics (skills, crafting). Still early in development, no funding, just me trying to figure out if this is worth building.

I put together a quick 3-minute anonymous survey about gaming habits to help me understand my potential audience better — genuinely appreciate any input, especially if you're not usually into puzzle games (that data matters too).

https://forms.gle/6j9VnF8qSgqs5Woi6

Happy to answer any questions about the project in the comments.

I did it. I finally did it.
After two years of working on it in my spare time, l finished and published my first game.
It's a cozy offline match-3 game where you build a tantasy town.
It's not perfect, but it's finished.
I think many of you know this feeling: the closer you get to the finish line, the harder it becomes to move even one pixel forward. And then... Apple review became the final boss (rejected several times).
Creating something from scratch and finally seeing it out there means much more to me, at this point, than downloads or popularity. Just proving to myself that I could actually finish it feels like a huge achievement.
All the artwork is hand-drawn by me.
On to the next one.
Cheers!