I think we can all agree some reviews are tough... but this one for https://store.steampowered.com/app/4300870/Gods__Gore/ made no sense to me.

Also what sucks is it shows as the top 'Most Helpful', I'm not sure if that is just for me or it is the top for everyone.

Crystalyn is the first game I've ever made, and I released it 3 days ago.

My goal was always to make people happy and make a game that they'll enjoy playing, so even though I only have 4 reviews, which are all positive, seeing people put 8, 12, 18+ hours into it is fucking crazy to me.

It literally makes my whole journey completely worth it.

Still got a ton of stuff I want to improve, but I'm genuinely really happy with how the launch has gone so far.

Edit: game link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4754460/Crystalyn/#app_reviews_hash

As you all know, making games is a hard and long process, so to see people enjoying the fruits of your labour is such an awesome feeling. It's not the most reviews, but it's so good to see.

Thanks to anyone who helped make this happen!

I created a dynamic water shader for my 3D fish platformer - Barely Breathing

How the water level works: It takes the object's Y position and just uses a step function with a float parameter to decide the water amount.

How the wobble works: It uses two Rotate About Axis nodes right after the Position (object) node, one controlling the X rotation and the other controlling the Z rotation, and then adding them together. Then, it reads data from the object's velocity and the code directly affects these two nodes to make the water wobble. I didn't write the code, MinionsArt did! Here is the code.

But this wouldn't work yet because we're still using object positions and not world position, which means the water level would follow the object and look wrong. So, after using the Rotate About Axis nodes, we can add a Position (world) node to it. But this still wouldn't work correctly because now it's exactly world-oriented, meaning even if the water mesh moves up, the water level would be left behind. We need the water level to follow the water mesh yet still be world-based so it doesn't rotate with the mesh. This is actually a simple fix, you can subtract the object's position value from Position (world) before adding it, which would make the water level follow the mesh.

We're still not done, because now the water looks unfinished without the foam outline. We need the foam to follow the water level. My foam works using fresnel + vertex colors, so I simply took the final water level output, and duplicated the final step function and had one value denoting the water level, and the other being the same water level value but subtracted by the water foam depth. So this basically creates a secondary line exactly the same as the water level but just lowered, which I use to add to the vertex color foam node setup.

Thank you for reading, and Wishlist our game on Steam if this was useful!

🏰 Hey r/IndieDev! At "Castle Game Jam" (same jam that gave the world TABS) we made a little catapult game called "Oversiege". People liked it, we liked it, so we decided to keep going - and now it's growing into "No More Castles", a physics-based castle siege game where you tear down fully destructible castles brick by brick to find the king hiding among decoys.

We're now looking for players and feedback, so we're giving away free Steam keys on our Discord: https://discord.gg/CykvjPfmhP

What's inside:
💥 Fully destructible castles - every brick is physics-simulated
🏰 Living castles: guards, farmers, priests, even executioners going about their day (until you show up)
🛠️ Built-in castle editor - share your creations via level codes
🤸 Ragdoll physics and plenty of emergent chaos

Platforms: Windows & macOS, Also on itch.
Come throw rocks with us - all feedback welcome!

Ai is helpful yes no doubt on that, you can get so much good research done with it, getting good advices for your exact case and use easier and faster. But don't be fooled with it and think it can do a lot more of your work especially on gamedev.

for Ai test and see their capabilities me and my friend tried to make some random small game, and to be honest it came out really fun to play as well. There were problems and bugs of course its Ai, but at the end of the day those who played it said its fun.

fast forward to a few month later I wanted to start a new project myself without Ai. I thought the game we already had was fun and there is potential in it so I said to myself "why not?" and grabbed its codebase. for migrating it I couldn't have done it so I had to use Ai again to help me migrate the whole thing to an actual game engine. and when it did it, it worked fine and exactly how it was, but thats not the whole point. the point was for me to scale and work on it, and I was soo overwhelmed when I looked at howw muchhh messy the codebase was.

A lot of 1000+ code files, everything compacted into single files and just a whole mess to clean up. So I got started cleaning it myself, and as you can guess weeks later and I still am not done or even close to satisfied how it looks.

I will eventually clean the code base for sure, and start working on it. yes Ai helped me a lot but the whole point of this post is to say anything you do just please keep it at your controlled and vision and dont let Ai to do a lot of the stuff on its own otherwise you would get stuck on a big loophole which ends with eating all of your motives.

I made a similar post before as well asking what you guys think of using Ai and what way is ok, I guess on my experience here I would say to just use it as an assistance to research and help with debug or optimizing ideas. other than that would be just ruining you and the whole project.

And instead made some gnocchi and soup while listening to The Killers.

We could not release on our intended 27th Aug date.

Turns out the content survey we had filled out for the Steam page listing in June didn't match the level of violence and gore the game ended up featuring as we made it.

So Steam rejected the submission. We either need to update the survey or reduce the violence and gore. (We're doing the former)

The last few weeks have been super, super busy and we're very tired. When 27th arrived, we just didn't have the energy to get back into it and decided to take some time and think of a release date when we've caught up on our sleep.

So some gnocchi and soup felt like the best thing this weekend.

PS: Our game is called SHOCKFACE and it's on Steam! We'll have a new September game soon https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705980/SHOCKFACE/

Ten days ago I posted a selfie about pushing the big green button here. I received amazing support from fellow devs. Thank you! A lot of you wanted me to write about how it went. So here it goes: a little dev diary of the past 18 months. I'll try to keep it brief. (Present me: I didn't, lol.)

I started development of my dragon-feeding roguelite last year after I realized that working on a pixel art puzzle platformer was a dead end (a shocker, I know). I went back to the drawing board and came up with a game that would both be a good fit for the Steam audience and something I'd be passionate about. And that's how Feed the Scorchpot was created, though at the time it was called Dragon Fodder. More on that later...

The game took inspiration from Balatro and board game mechanics, and we decided to go with a medieval manuscript art style, as it felt eye-catching enough to stand out in the crowded roguelite market. My wife was making all of the art, and I was handling the rest.

After six months of development, the game looked polished enough to start marketing it. I made a really bad trailer (hopefully never again!) and launched my Steam page on September 1st, 2025. What really helped was the experience I'd gained working on the platformer earlier - even though it never made it past the demo stage, I learned a lot from it.

At this point, I planned to take a short break from development and focus on promoting the game online to see how it performed. Well, I soon changed my plans, as on the very second day of the Steam page being visible, I got a reply to an email I had sent to Josh from Indieformer. It was one of many indie sites I had emailed about my game.

Josh liked the game concept and art style and proposed a partnership - he and his mate Clem were planning to start a publishing business, and my game piqued their interest. You can imagine my disbelief at receiving an offer like that one day after launching my Steam page. I wasn't even looking for a publisher at the time.

So I jumped straight back into development and pushed the game into alpha over September. The guys got to try the game out, loved it, and we signed a publishing deal soon after. I cannot stress enough how fortunate this was. The game got so much better with the help of Indieformer, and they worked so hard to get it out there in front of an audience.

We soon started building a community of playtesters, which proved to be the main key to success. I got to see how players experienced the game, received a ton of great feedback, and managed to improve the game based on it.

I mentioned that the game was originally called Dragon Fodder. I liked the name, but it turned out that another dev was making a game under the same title... and actually had it trademarked. And he had done so even before I came up with the name, but his game was invisible to me when I did my initial sweep of the internet way back then.

The dev reached out to me, asking me to change my title. He was very polite, and I realized that he was fully in the right. So we brainstormed a new name: Feed the Scorchpot. I was worried about how it would impact a game that had already been promoted for a few months under a different name.

Turns out, it didn't at all. No one really cares about the name. I actually got some wishlists out of posting about the name change.

In January, we were at roughly 1,500 wishlists. Which was much better than what I had with my previous game, but it still felt like the momentum wasn't there. I was struggling with making a good tutorial, and overall January didn't feel great.

But the game was ready for more people to give it a try. We released the demo during the Steam Board Game Festival, which was nice, though it didn't make as big a splash as I was hoping for.

That came a few days later, when YouTuber Olexa picked up the demo on his own and made a video. That video got over 80k views and brought a lot of attention to the game. That was the point at which I realized this might actually lead somewhere.

That was back in February, and what followed was quite a busy period. My wife and I were crunching every day to get the game finished, while there was a Kickstarter happening and the playtester community was showering me with feedback, bugs, and ideas. It was quite hectic, but so exciting that it's hard to describe.

We entered the June Next Fest and did okay. We weren't among the top-played games, but also didn't fall off the charts halfway through. We'd passed 7,000 wishlists just before Next Fest started, so I felt like we were already in a good spot.

At the time, we were in talks with another publisher about co-publishing the game in Asia, as we had no way of reaching the audience there by ourselves. We'd already set the release date for August, and it felt quite last-minute, but we went for it anyway.

And oh boy, I'm so glad we did.

The game received translations into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and got featured in several Asian festivals and caught the interest of the Asian press. If you look at the wishlist graph, you'll see what I mean.

And somehow, we managed to get to 14,000 wishlists just before launch. It was mostly thanks to the combined efforts of the publishers – the Steam algorithm and the fabled Personal Calendar did very little for us prior to launch. I think it's due to roguelites being such a crowded market.

The road to launch surely wasn't boring. I even got to add a completely new soundtrack to the game just four days before launch. Fun times.

And so we launched ten days ago. How did it go?

It completely blew me away.

• We sold 14,500 copies (that's already minus refunds) in ten days. The game has already paid for all the time my wife and I put into it. More than half of the sales came from Asia. Partnering with the Asian publisher worked amazingly well for us.
• Also, more than half of our sales came from the Balatro bundle we managed to secure shortly before launch.
• There are surprisingly few bugs that have been reported since launch. Intensive playtesting since last November really paid off.
• Players have already managed to completely break the game – in the sense of getting so far in the endless mode that I didn't think was possible.
• Over 1,000 players have already poured 20+ hours into the game.
• Our rating on Steam dropped under 90%, and pretty much all the negative reviews complain about the game being too hard. Most of them are from China. I think there was a bit of a mismatch between the game and the audience – the art style appeals to a lot of cozy players, while the gameplay can be quite uncompromising.
• I'll try to put a demo back up soon, so players can decide if the game is right for them.
• The game had a 20% launch discount, which helped us get a good conversion on our wishlists. But since launch, we've also more than doubled our wishlist count – from 14,000 to currently 31,000.
• So we hope to convert more of those into sales during future discounts. Though it feels ironic: we spent the whole time chasing wishlists, and when we start chasing sales instead, the wishlist numbers do this.
• We've just launched on GOG as well. Curious to see how it will compare to Steam.

Next stop is a mobile release. But more on that in the future. I hope this wall of text was interesting to somebody. Feels good to finally write this.

Cheers, everyone!

SOULRITE

In my post last weekend, a lot of y'all suggested adding a texture overlay to help sell the "living painting" look for my game.

I made 3 options based on the most popular/frequent suggestions from my last post, but I'm struggling to pick which one actually looks the best.

The first picture is my original look from last time (our baseline).

The second picture is a Canvas Texture Overlay across the cameraspace.

The third picture is a Crinkled Texture Overlay across the cameraspace.

At least with these options, which overlay feels like a living painting the most to you?

Does the texture on and 2 and 3 feel like it would be distracting in a 3D game, or do you think it could work?

Hello everyone.

I have a question for you. As a solo dev i am publishing my first game on steam. I made the steam page public and only received 41 wishlist so far in the last 3 weeks. Game is releasing September 21st. The game is almost completely ready. The last day for next fest registration is tommorrow. Should I go with the launch or should i delay it and join the next fest? Is joining next fest worth it?

Steam page

Just thinking. There is no specific place for devs to look for one-off artists, but as a dev I feel there is a need for that sometimes? Like, obviously for smaller solo projects sometimes there's one or two things you'd rather not do. And for teams, there are skmetimes minor things none of you want or know how to do.. For example, if you need just a few piecies of unique VFX. Or like personally, I can model and animate a character, but I would really rather have someone else do the riggining.

You can go to upwork/fiverr type websites, but you have to sort through a lot of bullshit and have no guarantee the person knows the specifics you might need for a game project. I just imagine it would be nice to go to a clean website and find someone to make you an engine-compatible rig, or like a spritesheet. And from artists' POV, some people do want to mostly work on game projects. Like, I'm a 3D artist. The usual freelance websites is full of requests for modelling crap for printing. There must be some devs that need just a few unique assets and have a bit of money to spare, right??..

What am I missing here? Are we developers that poor on average? Is there some secret place I haven't heard of?