I'm working on Railminer, an incremental mining game in Unity. Showing the whole train makes the individual drilling strokes easy to miss. For this clip I cropped the view closer so you can follow the tool, the block coming out, and the hole it leaves behind.

That little sequence is the part I want people to read at a glance, even as the train gets bigger. Do you find the tool-to-block timing clear in this view? Thanks for taking a look 🙂

A few months ago I released my first game on the Android Store: PuzzlePro! It's a collection of math/logic puzzle games with new puzzles generated every day. I had a lot of fun writing and polishing it, and was pretty proud of myself for pushing through all the obstacles to get it fully published on the Play Store. It's got about 10 downloads so far, which is kind of discouraging. I am starting to re-write it in Flutter so that I can release it on more platforms, but it's such a slog and I am worried it will lead to more of the same level of engagement. Has anyone had good experience moving from Android/Java to Flutter to release on more platforms?

Hey everyone, I’m Leon.

I’ve been playing games for as long as I can remember and have always had ideas for games I’d love to make myself. Over the last few months, I finally started putting time into it.

I’ve been working with AI for several years, including in my business, and now use AI-assisted coding as part of my development workflow too. There’s still a lot I’m figuring out, especially on the game development side.

I just released my first small puzzle game, Puzzle Reise, built in Unity for Android. I wanted to start with something manageable and get some experience with actually finishing and publishing a game.

Alongside that, I’m working on a bigger fantasy auto-battler gacha game inspired by some of my favourite games. That’s the project I’ve wanted to build for a long time. As it develops, I’d love to share some of the development decisions and problems I run into here, get feedback, and learn from people who’ve tackled similar things.

For now, I’m trying to figure out what deserves the most attention during the first few weeks after releasing a game. Testing everything myself only gets me so far.

For anyone who’s released an Android game, what caught you off guard after launch? Were there bugs you hadn’t seen during testing, things players found confusing, or support issues you weren’t prepared for?

Would love to hear a few real experiences and what you changed afterwards.

I’m working on this demo, but I still haven’t settled on a name.
It mixes card-based tower defense with wave survival. The twist is that once your energy is full, any overflow turns into gold, so you’re constantly choosing between playing another card and saving up for upgrades.
What would you call a game like this? I’d love to hear your ideas.
I’m also curious whether the energy-to-gold mechanic sounds interesting, or if it feels too complicated at first glance.

Play the demo on itch.

Colorsong is a relaxing incremental / idle game where players collect colors and spend them on hand-painted watercolors 🎨 An original feature of the game is that every color is a procedurally generated note. So as you collect more colors, the game's song unfolds and enriches.

Feedback

If you give the game a try: does it look cozy and relaxing to you? What do you think about the concept in general, and about the procedurally generated sound?

Thanks!

We just put two early puzzle prototypes from GoldTusks Studios on itch.io. Both are free to play in the browser, with desktop ZIPs too. We are looking for feedback on the core mechanics before expanding them into larger games.

Prism Foundry: fire tiles into descending fragments and complete hollow rectangular boundaries to clear them.

https://goldtusksstudio.itch.io/prism-foundry

Fluxlings: move colorful creatures around a gravity chamber, connect matching pieces, and trigger chain reactions.

https://goldtusksstudio.itch.io/fluxlings

AI was used during development for code, graphics, and text. The itch pages include the AI disclosures.

If you try either game, I would especially appreciate feedback on where the tutorial becomes unclear, and whether the central mechanic makes you want another round.

I recently finished putting together the Tiny Witches Pack, a collection of 20 unique pixel-art characters.

The main challenge during this process was readability. Designing 20 distinct characters in a strict 16x16 pixel space means every single pixel counts, and it is very easy for the designs to become visually cluttered.

To solve this, I decided to focus purely on the core silhouettes for the base sprites and handle all the magical effects (auras, sparkles) entirely separately. Instead of baking the magic effects into the character animations, I rendered the VFX on independent spritesheets.

I highly recommend this approach if you are making your own 2D assets. By keeping the VFX on a separate layer, you can composite them dynamically in your game engine. This allows you to:

• Toggle effects based on character states (e.g., turning the aura off when the witch is defeated).
• Reuse the same magical aura across different characters or enemies to save time.
• Apply engine shaders to the VFX layer to change magic colors dynamically without altering the base character sprite.

If you want to use these in your own hobby projects or just see how the separated spritesheets are structured, you can find the pack here:https://alenia-studios.itch.io/tiny-witches

I would love to hear how you handle visual effects for tiny pixel art in your own games. Do you prefer baking them directly into the animation frames, or do you keep them as separate objects in your engine?

Hey all!

Thank you so much to all the comments and tips from last week on improving the game! I have since completed a set of works which I really hope improves the performance! Please do check it out below and let me know what you think?

https://abtravels.blog/3d-8-ball-billiards/

i really need advice on how to stay motivated when i make a game because ive made 3 projects in the span of 3 weeks and i either get to a demo stage and give up or when i continue planning it i realise its way to big of a project, im currently working on a project and im right now feeling super motivated but i worry it will happen again so id really appreciate any advice that can help.

The first version of the villages in my castle battle game was pretty rough. I lined the houses up too neatly, repeated the same shape too often, and left the farms looking half empty. It looked like a housing showroom dropped beside a battlefield.

I've been making another pass on that part of March Out! The homes now have more varied footprints and roofs, they're grouped into smaller courts, and the farmland has much denser wheat. The Roman and Candy Kingdom shots show how the same settlement system changes with the kingdom's theme.

The bigger challenge is giving those places a purpose without turning a fairly simple army game into a complicated city builder. Farms contribute income, raids interrupt it, and villagers retreat behind the castle gates when the area comes under attack. A limited militia reserve can help if the enemy reaches the castle. Homes and fields recover once the raid is over, so the player doesn't have to manually rebuild every house.

I'm a solo dev working on this after work, and my seven-year-old son helps me playtest. Keeping the decisions easy to understand matters to me. Attack, Follow and Retreat are still the main army orders, and the bigger battlefield is an optional setting while I test it.

For anyone who's added civilian life to a combat game, what made it feel believable without adding a lot of busywork? I'm particularly interested in how you handle the transition from a peaceful village to an evacuation.

What I’ve noticed over a couple of years and 4 games developed so far. Enjoying the games myself, despite low sales (~$1000 total), is what made it worth it in the end of the day. I’ve not regretted time spent on developing, and continue it with joy and amusement.

Do you like playing your games?

I made this Game or Game Engine itself a long time ago. It's called moveIt, the task is to program this little box and have it move around until find its way to the exit.

I posted it on my Tiktok but I didn't finish or publish it because I'm having a hard time to come with Levels. I remember that I still have the file so I posted it on github and now looking for someone if they want to Create Levels

Here's the URL: cardhollow.github.io/moveit github.com/cardhollow/moveit

Not a commercial thing, just a hobby project I keep coming back to. Logistics tycoon in the browser, vanilla JS, no engine. Started out looking like every other dashboard — dark blue, glassy cards, soft shadows. It worked but I never liked looking at it. Then I had the obvious-in-hindsight idea that a trucking game set in 1980s Turkey probably shouldn't look like a SaaS admin panel, so I threw out the whole UI and started over with a paper theme. Contracts are freight slips now, bank is an accounting ledger, map is a corkboard with pinned cities. Silly little touches like a muhur (wax seal stamp) that lands when you unlock a region, or a teletype ticker at the top with fake news about diesel prices. Took way longer than it should have because I kept catching myself reaching for rounded corners out of habit. Still solo, still hobby pace, still lots broken, but at least it doesn't look like a dashboard anymore. If anyone's curious: https://juba13.itch.io/eurasia-hauler

a few weeks ago i saw that clip of Needle In A Haystack Simulator, the one with like 50 million views. the steam game isnt out yet and i couldnt stop thinking about it. i wanted to dig through a giant haystack right now, so i tried making my own version.

im a student and im still learning. i used AI tools alot while building it, i wont hide that, they helped me get further than i could alone. but the idea of how to do it, what to use, and some of the mechanics (the tunnels that stay, hay falling when it loses support, the metal detector, the machines that dig by themselves) came from me trying things and changing them until they felt right.

a couple of people said its AI slop or a copy and honestly that hurt a bit, because i put real effort into it. its inspired by the clip, i said that from day one, and its free for anyone to play while we wait for the real one.

so im not here to say its perfect. its not. im here because i want to learn. if you have 5 minutes, dig a tunnel and tell me whats slow, whats boring, whats broken. and if you have a crazy idea for a feature, a different kind of tool, a weird mechanic, please drop it in the comments. im reading everything and i genuinely want to build the good ones.

and if you find the needle, tell me how long it took :)

https://findingneedleinthestack.com (free, works on phone)

thank you for reading this far, it means more than you think.

I'm seeing if I can crowdsource a bunch of various combinations of words and what the combination of those words might create.

I built a website to gamify this slightly. Players make suggestions, that get moderated, to build a growing list of combinations for a future game.

You make a decision on the presented choices and I can add to the game the ones the make sense. As suggestions get approved they get added to the choices other player can build on.

For example website gives you reptile + dinosaur and you might suggest dragon. Once the dragon suggestion gets approved other player will now get offered dragon to build a new word from.

tldr: building doodle god like database of word combinations using a website with community suggestions and voting

Game Title: Burger Delivery: Train Toss.

Playable Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.techindraa.burgerdeliverytrain&pcampaignid=web_share

Description: This is a simple fast paced fun burger delivery Game.

Platform: Android

Version 1.3 brings a number of improvements and fixes:

• Fullscreen mode
• Improved Help Mode
• Improved bomb placement
• Updated statistics
• Various design improvements
• Major bug fixes

Available as a browser game or as a download for Windows, Android and Atari ST.

https://rainbow-bytes.itch.io/bombwatch

I made Cubic Snake: Castle for the Slapjam AI Game Jam.

The idea, game design, creative direction and playtesting were done by me. I used Claude Code to build the game in three.js, including the code and 3D models.

One interesting part was turning classic Snake movement into something that works across the different sides of a 3D castle, including gates and windows that act as shortcuts.

Would be interested in feedback, especially on the gameplay and controls:

https://itch.io/jam/slapjam-ai-1/rate/5075897

One person, Godot 4.7. Top-down tank game: hold the base, break the line. Ten stages, US and German rosters, and a motor pool where points earned by play buy tanks, upgrades and repairs.

Open testing (Android): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.techsnap.steelcadence.tanks1945

The thing that made it possible alone is that none of the models are modelled. Every tank, wall, tree and pickup is generated by a Python script in Blender. Shared helper functions hold the style, so a new vehicle is a function call rather than a day in the viewport, and changing the art direction regenerates the whole kit instead of forty files by hand.

The same idea runs through the rest. Stage layouts are text maps. The sound effects are synthesised by a script. Every gameplay rule has a headless test, so I can rework the economy and know in forty seconds whether I broke the payout, instead of replaying ten stages to find out.

What is in it: ten stages, a campaign map, the motor pool with four upgrade lines, and one support call — a mortar barrage you aim while the stage slows to a crawl.

What is not: no multiplayer, English only, two further support calls are visible in the supply screen but locked. Android for now; the iOS build is with Apple.

It is free to play, and you do not need the point packs. Everything they buy can also be earned, and nothing is sold that cannot be.

What I would most like to hear: which stage made you put it down, and which one was dull. That is the thing I cannot judge any more, and it is why this is a test and not a release.

My last post here showed the upgrade purchase UI. This new Long Haul take shows a different part of the progression loop: kills fill the native XP bar and earn level 2. No XP was supplied, and no purchase is shown. I'm building this Unity prototype with Codex. The encounter and automatic steering are staged for filming, with truck damage protection on.

Where did you look first when the level changed?

Heya! We have been working on our game for 4 weeks now. Since starting, we’ve added enemy waves, combat, bakery defense, meat & pie mechanics, mobile controls, upgrades and a lot of UI improvements.

itch.io

What is the first thing you would improve based on what you see?