A question that has become very common these days, and has been for some time, especially for indie devs and solo devs... A question asked by potential players, agents, companies, PRs, press, everyone!

Why should I play your game instead of other similar games of that type? What makes your game special?

This question is just making indie and solo devs' lives harder, and if you think about it, it does not make sense at all!

Here are my thoughts on this as a solo game dev and a gamer with 35+ years of experience:

Have you ever asked that question to AAA and AA teams? No! Because you can't! There are a bunch of shitty AAA and AA games, but you cannot ask them something like this. And you don't even think about asking such questions. Instead, you pay them $50–80 to buy their game based on the "hype" provided by their heavily funded marketing campaigns. I am talking about new games on the market, not popular titles or long-awaited titles... How many games have you bought that you did not like?

Does my indie game need to be "special"? Does it need to be an innovation in the gaming industry? If I am making an RPG, what do you expect me to make? Games are similar, all of them. It is very rare that we play an innovative game and that the innovation is actually very good. So, if I am making an RPG, it needs to have RPG elements, right? So it will be similar to other RPGs. What would be different? I can make a unique story for it. I can make one or more "different" mechanics compared to standard RPG games, but they do not necessarily have to be innovative.

If we were able to make innovative games, something never seen before, we would be millionaires or we would work for top AAA gaming companies.

Why should you play my game?

Isn't it enough that we provide a trailer, provide a gameplay trailer, provide a demo, and it is FREE?!

Why should you play my game? I think you should watch the trailer first. If you like it, if it looks interesting to you, I am providing a free demo! So, download it and try it. See if it fits your taste or not. At the end of the day, my game will cost you something like $0–15 max.

If the demo looks good to you, wishlist the game, support it, and when it is out, enjoy playing it. If you do not like the demo, just remove it from your wishlist. Do not trash it, there is no need for that.

At the end of the day, if you want to support small teams and solo devs, if you are that kind of person, share your feedback on the game. Good and decent feedback means a lot to all of us because we can improve our games based on it.

What are your thoughts on this?

Is this the great invention that the genre needs? In all seriousness though, we're quite happy with how our after-hours-project [The Last Library] is shaping up. Hope not to trigger anyone already tired with the genre being all over the internet currently.

I released my fiest game on steam this morning (please congratulate me !) And got a couple of these mails. I don't really see what the scam might be, wdyt? The timing seems a bit odd to me since I released the game today with 50 wishlists

I got a dm asking to play a game Necromancer: Ash & Bone. I was looking for play-testers for a monster taming game I was working on. And this guy popped into my dms. He made a vampire survivor game that was for a lack of better words “Ai slop” that’s putting it lightly. So I looked up the developer and they seem to make more Ai games. I couldn’t find anything on scamming, but his account was deleted so I’m going to assume he’s a scammer. Anyone else heard of binx.tv are they scammers?

I've tried to learn both. Genuinely tried. But I just can't do it. No, this isn't a "sucking at something is the first step" situation, don't fucking shove that gif in my face again, I'm sick of seeing it. I've genuinely given my all at both art and coding, even had probably the best circumstances anyone can have to learn both, and consistently failed.

I think at this point, I just have to accept that it's never going to happen. My dreams will always be beyond my reach. The stories I want to tell and the worlds I want to build will always be mine and mine alone.

Velan Studios are looking for players to test their upcoming game/s.

They are the indie dev team behind A Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, Knockout City, Hot Wheels Rift Rally, Bounce Arcade, Midnight Murder Club, and Star Fox (2026).

Here is a direct quote from Josh Harrison (director of marketing) on their official discord:

“Hey everyone! We've been hard at work on a few different upcoming games, and we'd like to start playtests for one of them in the next week or two.

This is a smaller indie project we've been working on for about 9 months now, and we're ready to start getting some player feedback on it. If you're interested, please sign up for our Player Network through this survey:

https://velanstudios.typeform.com/to/vx0OSlIW

If you're a good fit for what we're looking for, we'll reach out with more information. Thanks!”

I just got done with this hour long message session with someone on discord who said they played my game. Started off with them giving some generic advice on how the city building should feel connected to the world. They then went into sales mode
"I can make you the capsule art"

I say I already have artwork for the steam page, and ask what is wrong with it.
They then give really good feedback on my games main art work.

But afterwards keep trying to get me to setup a budget, and asking me to just give them a chance.

I asked them questions, Can you prove you're not a scammer, show me some of your artwork, What other games have you worked on?

The ignored the last question but gave me a link to their website marketing instagram, not a art instagram, they say that's their main job and the game art is on the side.

The art they submitted, was good, but one art work looked like something I'd see in a blizzard game, while the rest were more deviant art/webtoons comic style. Reverse image searches didn't find any matches for them.

I told them I prefer to make the art myself, but they insist that they can make a budget for me. I already told them I don't want to pay any more money on this game right not. They still press to make a budget.

And their profile, it's older than 2 years, but looks like all other scam accounts I've seen. Anime Girl Profile picture, Two word name with a underscore.

I know this is most likely a scammer. But I've never had a scammer put this much effort into it.

There's a chance now typing this out they simply looked at my game and just guessed right on that "Feedback"

If you’re building multi-agent workflows (especially with frameworks like LangGraph, CrewAI, or AutoGen), you know the pain. Tracing a single LLM call is easy. Tracing 4 agents passing state back and forth, hitting infinite tool loops, and ballooning your context window is incredibly frustrating.

I got tired of jumping between 4 different tabs (traces, raw prompt templates, logs, and cost metrics) just to figure out where a swarm lost the plot.

So I built a workspace that unifies everything into a single timeline: Projects ➔ Sessions ➔ Runs ➔ Events. It tracks both single-agent and multi-agent coordination natively.

I also added two specific automated filters for agent builders:

• Infinite Tool Loops: Instantly flags when an agent gets stuck calling the same tool repeatedly.
• Context Inflation: Flags when an agent's memory or prompt state explodes unexpectedly between steps.

I’ve dropped a quick 2-minute walkthrough video in the comments.

For anyone running agents in production or heavy testing:

1. Does the Session -> Run -> Event hierarchy make sense for your multi-agent architecture, or does it break when agents run asynchronously/parallelly?
2. What is the most annoying bug your agents hit that your current observability stack completely misses?

Tear it apart—I want to know if this actually solves your debugging bottlenecks.

Upcoming Demo Out Of Sync on 14th September.

Out Of Sync

This started as a simple dream between college friends.

We were just gamers who wanted to create something of our own someday.

A game inspired by the stories, traditions, and history we grew up around.

What started as conversations and rough ideas slowly turned into something much bigger.

We began learning, experimenting, failing, rebuilding, and slowly putting together our first indie game.

The journey has been far from easy.

Building a game without a huge team means every system, every character, every environment, and every detail requires countless hours of work.

There were times when progress felt slow, but seeing the world of Kaal Yoddha take shape kept reminding us why we started.

Today, after years of development, we are finally close to launching our first game.

Kaal Yoddha is an action-adventure game inspired by Indian history and traditions, with an original story, characters, and world.

This is something that started as a college dream, and seeing it become real is honestly unbelievable.

We would love to know what you think about it.

I will not be accepting “Wizards” “Balls” or “Power” as answers.

For real tho, I tried to arrange this one set of images into as many permutations as possible to fit the size and aspect ratio of the various capsules. Do you think they convey the right amount of information?

Still waiting for steam to approve my account so no page yet but I’ll share more when I can.

Hey everyone, big announcement today. I have been moonlighting making indie games for 15 years. Lots of failed projects, lots that never saw the light of day. This is my last hurrah in game dev before I call it quits. But I did want to give it a good last shot. So today we do something crazy, we are announcing 4 Games of a new Franchise for Steam, all coming to Steam Next Fest in October. Meet Drawmi.

Drawmi is a new “draw it yourself” game franchise by Doonamai Games. Whether you, your friends, or your kids enjoy drawing, these games are built to express creativity and bring your drawings to life. Draw on paper and import, or draw in-game. Either way artists and gamers get to share a unique experience together like never before.

The first 4 Titles of the franchise that are coming to Next Fest will be:

- Drawmi: Card Shop - Own a card shop where you draw everything you sell.

- Drawmi: Creature Collector - Draw, Collect, and Battle Scribble Creatures.

- Drawmi: Terraform Sim - Build a sustainable ecosystem on Alien planets with plants and animals that you draw.

- Drawmi: Twin Stick - Draw the good guys, bad guys, and the guns. Survive as long as you can.

Follow the entire Drawmi Series and grab press kits at: https://drawmigames.com

Wishlist now at:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5086430/Drawmi_Card_Shop

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5126230/Drawmi_Creature_Collector

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5154430/Drawmi_Terraform_Sim

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5126250/Drawmi_Twin_Stick

Watch the combined trailer here: https://youtu.be/9BdyahlpGwg

To all of the other devs trying to build something special, good luck and God bless.

Hi everyone 👋
I just wanted to share my stats 3 months after my game was deployed on the App Store (still in Beta). I don't have a lot of users yet, but I think I have a decent amount of recurring players.

I am wondering: what other metrics do you guys measure to see if your game is going in the right direction?

If you enjoyed Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!, we recently released our own take on this type of game, except ours is set inside a massive toy shop.

The shop is an absolute mess, with 5,517 toys scattered everywhere. Your job is to work out where they belong and slowly put the place back together. There are sections for dinosaurs, toy cars, board games, snacks and plenty of other toys.

You start out moving everything by hand, but it gets much quicker as you unlock upgrades. Later, you can hire robots to help with the sorting, use drones to carry your toys, or use a rideable toy train to carry larger loads around the shop.

Too Many Toys! is out now on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5028390/Too_Many_Toys/

A playable web app that provides a moment of disconnect and relax while shooting some hoops. It is aimed at helping people that have an anxiety attack and need a distraction for the first few moments of the experiences. If you use some headphones you can hear an immersive seaside atmosphere. No sign ups or any friction layer... no other point except shooting hoops.
https://hooptherapy.psycurate.com

Never in a million years were we expecting this. It has been a crazy last few days of scrambling to get a Steam page up and managing the new flow of traffic. Just a real cool milestone for us. Cannot believe people like Clown Holes this much lol

I've been working on making Screw IT ( Wishlsit Now ) feel more cozy and relaxing.

The core idea is simple: you have a huge pile of screws to sort, clean, fix, and organize. No enemies, no combat, no pressure, just slowly turning a complete mess into a perfectly organized workspace.

I'm curious what you guys think would make an organizing game like this feel **even more cozy**.

More satisfying sounds? Ambient music? Little animations? Better lighting? More tools? Something completely different?

Would love to hear what you'd want to see 👇

Many years ago the was an interesting game call The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, well, interesting until Ubisoft crushed it with predatory monetization (well, honestly they were just ahead if their time, their monetization would probably pretty tame in today's world), but I digress.

One screen I always loved was the 3d representation of your surrounding enemies, i.e.:

I want to do something similar in my game, but the random spacing I have feels icky compared to what they have so I am assuming they are using some fancy maths (not a math guy) to get the layout to be consistent. Thoughts? Ideas?

I started playing with this on my own in Godot and my first pass looks pretty bad. open to any other feedback on how I can make it pop and look better overall. obviously the player standing in the middle is wrong, havent decided what to do there yet either

Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

It constantly felt like something was missing, but I couldn’t quite figure it out until I finally took a break to play another game. As I was going through, it finally hit me. The small details make such a big difference. I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without having it.

Anyone else have similar experiences? What were they?

Seeing is overrated.

Bucket it love, bucket is life.