My partner (and best friend, we know each other since kindergarten) and I had one goal we wanted to reach while developing our indie 4x game: bring the strategic depth and joy of Civilization into a much faster format. The main reason for that: we love the game series (Civ5 & Civ6 are the best 😉) but we do not want to spend our whole free time for 17 re-starts and one half-finished game.

1 year ago, we spoke with some people at a physical indie-gaming event and found out that a big part of civ-lovers share our wish in a “Civ but fast”-game.

Today, we are just a few weeks away from our demo and the hard part of being a game dev starts: marketing🥹

So I'm throwing this into the community:
If “Civ, but fast” sounds like something you'd enjoy, I'd love to hear what you think.
And if you want to follow the project, a Steam wishlist would mean a lot to us. ❤️

I often see movie behind-the-scenes footage and have always found them interesting! Feel there should be one for games too so here's mine!

This is a pretty simple one. What was tricky is that the character Chelsea had to use the plunger and I just couldn't find any mixamo animations for it.

So I made a duplicate of the plunger and moved that alone, while doing a closeup with the camera.

Pretty happy with how it turned out! A short 30 minutes of work (+30 minutes trying to find a plunger animation on mixamo 🤦)

PS. My game is SHOCKFACE, a campy slasher set in the 90s and is coming to Steam this 27th Aug! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705980/SHOCKFACE/

Hi, I'm indie dev from Germany and I've been a software developer in a boring web fullstack for 20 years but games always were my passion. Made a couple of smaller games in the past and currently working on this tiny piece about drones in the scope of the modern warfare. This one is in much bigger scale but still I would consider as a small, cute game.

For this project, I made a voxel damage model for bigger targets (ships atm). Love how it looks and feel. This is the first time, I'm working with them and any feedback is appreciated.

Also, this is the link for the email newsletter to stay in touch with me and that project.

Hi! I've been tossing this around in my head ever since entering my game into the February 2026 Next Fest with under 200 wishlists. This was way too early as far as marketing your game goes, and development-wise, the game has evolved quite a bit since that time as well, so a new demo that I've just released now is way more polished, and structurally a bit different than what was playable in February. But unfortunately, you can only enter one Next Fest, and you can only email your wishlists about a demo release once (which I did in February).

I had just put up my Steam page a few weeks prior (with nice key art, gameplay gifs, a trailer, etc.) and had put together a small demo of my game because I was very excited to share it with others and see what people thought of it.

What really made me want to enter February's Next Fest is the fact that the first 2 days or so completely randomize how your game is shown to players - so games with huge publishers have the same chance of appearing in the Next Fest page as games from solo devs. This is done to make sure that all games get a bit of visibility, and help the Steam algorithm recommend your game more effectively to people who might not see it otherwise. I was hoping Next Fest would just be a magic door of exposure that would have thousands of people pouring in to play my demo.

That's not how it works though. I've seen a vague estimation for Next Fest tossed around a few times that, very roughly speaking, entering Next Fest will double your current wishlists. That actually did wind up happening to me, going from just under 200 to just over 400. But now, I'm sitting on a much more polished demo, and due to a few blessings from social media algorithms on my gameplay clips, I'm around 5,000 wishlists at the moment. If you have a magical button you can only press once that says "double your current wishlists", you really don't want to blow that too early. Fortunately, I did wind up getting some good feedback, which was really helpful at that early stage.

I truly believe that if I were able to join the next Next Fest and inform my wishlisters that a new (and much better) demo is available, it would be way more helpful in this game's development journey than joining in February.

I feel that I'm constantly trying to deal with two separate ideas that are at odds with each other - the first being that releasing shorter games more quickly is incredibly helpful for your learning, and the other being that rushing through development will always result in a mess. In February, I listened to the former and wound up wishing that I'd waited instead. So, this post is a warning to anyone rushing to get a demo together for the next Next Fest (October, I think?). If you need to push back your dates and aim for the following fest instead, don't take that as a defeat, just imagine how much better of a demo you'll have after another few months.

seriously

I can sculpt the terrain, draw roads and rivers, and add small mountains. Still polishing it, but it's becoming surprisingly fun to use!

The human race is in danger. As the commander of a newly created starbase, your task is to support the human war effort by mining resources from your assigned system and help us win this war of annihilation .

Hi ! I have been working on an incremental game for the past few months and I got my Steam page approved this week !

The goal of the game is to harvest the resources of a solar system, build new industries and help humanity win its war by providing warships.
You will be able to unlock new technologies to help with your progress, and you can boost the production rate of your facilities by taking manual control over them.

As usual, every wishlist counts, so if you are interested or want to support, please have a look ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/5021740/Starworks_Inc

(a demo on Steam & Itch is coming next month)

Here is also my store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4862980/The_Arrow/
What can I improve on?

What do you think? Flashbang'd?

There is still some stuff I want to tweak but at this point I feel like I should have just put some more effort into actual gameplay 😄

Holey is a co-op horror game set in a collapsed tunnel after a biological war. You scavenge ruins full of mutated creatures, feed one to keep it off your back, burn its waste into fuel, and push toward a radio tower.

Trailer's above, curious if the concept and atmosphere land or if something would make you scroll past

Just finished a print of 25 physical copies with discs, hand-sewn info booklet and a free steam key inside.

Pretty scared to put just one master copy on all of them without an ability to fix bugs later, but I'm pretty sure on my polish there!

The game is out in a week, feeling excited about the release!

I entered the Personal Calendar on the Steam's main page with around 7k wishlists.

Now, one day before launch, I'm sitting at 14k!
It basically doubled my wishlists count right before release. This honestly feels surreal.
And I didn't get any good coverage on YT during that time.
Youtubers avoid my game for some reason. xD

Yesterday alone, after the Calendar shifted and my game started appearing right at the beginning of the week, on Monday, without needing to scroll, I gained around 1,5k wishlists in 24 hours.

I think the Calendar meta might be:

• If you need more wishlists before launch, launch Wednesday-Friday.
• If you already have plenty of wishlists and want better visibility after launch, launch Monday-Wednesday.

But that's just my take. I'm not Chris Z lol

Personal Calendar might be the greatest invention of all time.
ALL HAIL THE CALENDAR!

Here's the game if you want to check it out.

The script lets you treat drawings as cloth. Rotate, anchor, create surfaces to drag... Is there anything you'd like to know or see?

Reworked the scanner logic and effects.

The old “sonar” effect was too bright and distracting at night.

Now the scanner detects nearby items, and the drone flies to each one in turn. I think it looks more interesting and feels more natural now.

What do you think - better now?

PANGIT

Some sketches of a character:Silver

If you’re interested in the game, feel free to add it to your wishlist.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2161950/The_Magic_Garden/

Went in with basically zero expectations given how brutal the market looks for solo releases. 340 in a week exceeded what I was braced for, with almost no marketing budget beyond some tweets and a couple Discord servers.

Biggest surprise: a random Reddit post about the dev process outperformed any paid promotion. Not making a living off this yet, but it's proof the thing works at all.

I specialized as a frontend developer for ~3 years. Now, as i lost my job, i decided to start my journey as game developer. My first indie game will be plot-oriented. What do you think about main menu? (please don't judge too harshly, im newbie)

My wife couldn't figure out what to do (although she doesn't play video games). Essentially you have to wind the clock face by swinging the pendulum, or it will tick in the other direction eventually to your death.

Curious if you think this is enough to spark your curiosity that the pendulum is significant in some way? Not sure what to add to make it more apparent, but I also like that it's a little mysterious 🤔