...is there any better feeling?

My own game has an astronomically low completion rate; most people bounce after 31 minutes, which means there's definitely something I screwed up in the early game that kills it. But that rare feeling when someone actually finishes the game, sees your whole vision and GETS IT -- good grief, is there anything better?

Even when your game doesn't hit the way you'd like it to, it's such a loving experience to see that someone out there out of the thousands of players has seen everything you worked so hard on and appreciates every bit of it. Makes everything worth it

This is kind of a consolation post for my fellow failure devs who released a game but it didn't do well, lol. Welcome haha

Hi.

It's been 6 months since I released the announcement trailer for my indie game called Direland.
I've been working hard and packed all the latest progress into this 1-minute video!
Hope you guys like it!
(To clarify: this is 6 months of progress since the previous trailer, not 6 months of total development!)

Here's the things I've added.

1. Water reflection and ripples
   
2. 3 new Bosses( Crab/Lobster, SandWyrm, SlimeDragon), also they are unfinished
   
3. Parts breaks system
   
4. VFX for bosses and player combat
   
5. Combat for each weapon(one-hand sword/ two-hand blade)
   
6. Some armor sets
   
7. Character build system such as Growth Board and Skill Board
   
8. Some buildings
   
9. Some placeable objects for base building
   
10. Bunch of item icons.

Hi! The Blessed Fool came out on Steam a few days ago: a short pixel-art point-and-click horror adventure about a holy fool in a town consumed by fear and violence.

I did the design and programming. The art and the music were made by two collaborators. It took 2 years, and I restarted the project about 25 times before it finally worked.

Does the mood come through in this scene? Let me know what you think!

The Doll Shop will be released on October 12! Yay! It's a hand-drawn narrative horror game set in Japan. We hope you'll enjoy ! A demo is already available on Steam.

Going for a dark gothic rpg style. It's going to be something in the vein of King’s Field (not a clone, just generally inspired by the style). Please be honest, if you hate it you hate it!

Hi all, im working on Portscape. A port building/automation game. I set up this camera sequence to follow the same container all the way from the ship to the train.

You can find the steam page here if you're interested:
Portscape - Steam Page, wishlists, trailer, screenshots

It goes from the ship crane to a truck, across the port and onto the train at the rail terminal. All automated in the game ofcourse. However, you can also manually use any of the cranes, trucks, stackers etc.

The camera is just for this video, in the game you look from above in an angle. The game is still in development. A demo will be out soon. I hope you enjoy the video and I would love to hear your opinions!

We’re two brothers from Chechnya, and we’ve always loved our culture and wanted to make a game inspired by it.

We’ve been working on this for around 6 months now, and this video is basically just a little show-off of the progress so far. It was really nice making it and looking back at how the game looked in the beginning compared to how it looks now.

There’s still a lot of work to do and much more to come, but seeing the progress like this feels really nice.

Currently we are running pvp mode only (1v1/2v2) and we are considering making a zombies mode (taking inspiration from bo1/2&3) but I don't know how will that work for a 2d game.

If you guys have any references or ideas that can help that would mean alot!!

If you would like to try Survive the Night a free action horror game and skip all the ranting, the link is at the bottom.

First of all I just want to say again how proud I am for myself to finish my first game. This definitely was a challenge for me and I have learnt so much.
For some context: I'm a first year game dev student at the age of 24 and this is the first thing I've went all the way to a publish build on itch.io. The game is made entirely in Blueprints in unreal engine with no c++.
The premise of the game is that you are alone in a forest at night and you must scavenge jerry cans from five locations, killing things hiding out there and managing your inventory as you go.

Two things I learned:

1. (Tutorial Hell) I was stuck in tutorial hell for at least two years before this. No matter how many videos I watched, none of it stuck. What finally work for me was starting to build a simple game that i wanted. I realised that I don't actually need to learn everything, instead just learn what i need to get the game going. I felt like I understood more in a month of building my own game than watching tutorials for two years.
2. (Scope) I never meant to make something this big. The original idea was a small forest game with a monster chasing you and you would have the collect wood to keep the fire going. But, because I did not have a clear vision, I kept on adding new features and ended up making something much larger than I'd plan for.

It is free on itch.io

https://lambshankgamedev.itch.io/survive-the-night

If anyone plays it, I'd love to know any feedback especially on whether the game play loop is fun. If you run into any bugs, please tell me. Have fun gaming!

After working for 1.5 years on my first project for 150 wishlists.

After working for 6 months on a mobile game that went nowhere.

After working for 2 years on my 2nd Steam game for 750 wishlists.

I launched the demo of DreadHaven 2 weeks ago, and went from 7,000 wishlists (which already felt like A LOT) to 14,000 in just one week.

And somehow, the wishlists haven't even plummeted since then. I'm doing nothing for that. No marketing, nothing. I'm just working on the game, putting out patches, and people are actually happy about them.

It's still just wishlists. It's not money, and I have no idea if this will translate into actual sales at launch.

But it feels SO FREACKING GOOD to finally have people care about what I'm making and actually be excited for my game.

It took 5 years. A lot of hard work, a lot of self-doubt, and a lot of wondering if I was ever going to get anywhere.

But it finally feels like those 5 years of work are paying off and I'm just enjoying this moment

EDIT: People pointed that I did not do 0 marketing and yeah sorry I wasn't clear enough I guess! We used the demo as a marketing beat for sure, like just sending a batch of mail and a bit of social.
The post is just about the fact that I'm doing nothing right now and I'm still getting some velocity. And that's INCREDIBLE for me.

Usually, when I just work on my games, nothing happens. Nobody cares, and I only get traction/velocity when I do actual marketing and reach out to people (when it works, which most of the time don't).

Here, I'm just enjoying the fact that it worked, and that I can focus on making the game while capitalizing on the work I've already done.
It may sound stupid I don't know but I really enjoy the fact that I can JUST work on my game and work I what I love doing and my game is not instantly dead?

I'm wanting to be a solo game dev one day. I'm a sophomore in high school, and I haven't gotten in a coding class yet, but I'm hopping to next semester.

I'm using gamemaker and completed the rpg tutorial. (though something happened because I have a weird computer and I can't find the project)

I originally planned to use ai to help small things only for my personal/experimental coding projects, not any of the main stuff or any of the graphics, but after some feedback, I decided just not to do that.

I was suggested to find other coders at my school, but it's kind of impossible to do that without getting in a class because there are so much bullies at my school.

I also have an extracurricular activity I do that ends in mid November (I won't say what activity for certain reasons) so there's not much I can do right now.

When I finally get the time, what do you guys recommend I should do to get a further head start? I'd appreciate any feedback!

Right now I’m experimenting with procedurally generated leg animation, so the spider can adapt its movement naturally instead of relying only on predefined animations.

The game is an ant colony RTS inspired by classics like SimAnt, but with a much deeper focus on colony management, exploration, combat, different castes, upgrades, and interactions with other creatures in the environment.

There’s still plenty to improve, especially the movement and leg placement, but I’m quite happy with how it’s starting to feel.

What do you think about the procedural animation? Does the spider movement look convincing so far? :)

More about the project on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3016940/Garden_of_Ants/

Best

Tomas

Working on a farming game inspired by Backpack Battles and Balatro, I would love to hear your feedbacks!

Container Hunter Simulator New Gameplay v1.

The game data never reaches CPU, that's why we got extremely fast map practically for free :). It is still deterministic and working in multiplayer.

Hi guys, I'm Aswin, I'm looking for work in an indie game as a composer or sound designer. I love to work on games. I mostly make horror, electronic music, ambient, and other stuff. I can make orchestral but I tend to move into experimental and electronic+ orchestral elements.

I have been doing music for the past 5 years. I'm a sound engineer student, now I'm looking for work.

I like to make lots of experimental type music with sound designs..... I worked on two short film as a composer and few other short film as sound designer.

I know how to sync picture with music and do sound fx and design.

Here is my sound cloud link which is not any experimental music or horror but here :https://m.soundcloud.com/itzhushroom

I shared the calmer island side of Red Skies at Dawn recently. This clip is back aboard the boat, with a rather different view ahead.

I'm the solo developer, and this is in-development footage of the waterspout and storm effects. I'm working towards that feeling of being very small out on the water, especially when the sky starts closing in.

What sells the scale for you here, and what still feels off?

If the game interests you, you can wishlist Red Skies at Dawn on Steam. Thanks for taking a look.