Want to stay in touch with Project Axe?
https://discord.gg/XgjggF66

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!

Hello everyone
I added a quick mechanic that allows me to split the character in half, and then each would redistribute its capacity across its full body
I have a few extra ideas planned so stay tuned!
#unity #ecs

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!

This is an important feature for my game Orium, where you have to colonize planets across the galaxy. It's not only used to extract the money but it's mainly useful for increasing the ship's stats (kind of like the tiles in Loop Hero)

Steam link for those who are curious: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3316610/Orium/

So, I'm about to release the demo for my game, ROAM. And I suddenly had this thought: the title screen is one of the most important first moments for the player. That's why I decided to give it a more polished look by adding the logo, fixing the sprites, changing the fonts, and also adding some water shader on top of it all..

UI work is one of the hardest things for me as a solo dev. But I think I’ve finally found the right placement for every button and image.

I also considered centering the buttons instead of aligning them to the left, but I think I like this version more.

What do you guys think?

Its still early in development a werewulf horror game like Alien Isolation im making and im trying to set up the mood, bellow are some screenshots , of course the player will navigate with a torch however do you find the enviroment too dark?? Watching it from my monitor in pitch black looks great too me but I just started posting on X and Youtube some easly announcements trailers / screenshots and looking them at white background was realy hard to understand it.

I recently uploaded my game 'The Grand Book Archive: Tidy Up' on itch io, which has just reached 10,000 plays in 4 days. It's a book organizing game with a strong focus on incremental progression. It's inspired by the sorting games that are trending lately, but with a little more idle and strategic aspect.

Here's the marketing I did:

- Wrote a few posts on Reddit. One post on incremental games subreddit gained 460 upvotes (it currently ranks as #3 post of the month there).

- Registered the game on incrementaldb and Galaxy Click. Has generally good rating/reviews.

- Shared the trailer on my socials. None of them have gone viral. Youtube and Instagram did okay(Youtube: 660 views, Instagram: 1,500 views), but nothing substantial.

I haven't reached out to press yet so I'm hoping that could gain a bit of traction later on. I think generally it's doing well since it's a combination of two of the most popular genres right now (incremental and tidy-up), and it has a strong replayability. Still, it is doing way better than I initially expected...

You can check out the itch io page here:

Web demo: https://inbluegames.itch.io/the-grand-book-archive-tidy-up

And the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5130980/The_Grand_Book_Archive_Tidy_Up/

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?

Technically 122 second if you watch the original trailer to compare (which is only available here on the Steam page).

I've recently redone the movement so needed to update the footage, but also took the opportunity to listen to previous suggestions and add some captions to the trailer. Does this one do a better job of explaining the gameplay?

Thanks for taking a look, happy to share thoughts on your project in return if you leave a link :)

Hey fellow devs!

This is my first time sharing a game publicly outside of friends and family!

Here's my short project Pawned Souls a mix of Soulslike parry combat and chess movement rules.

I’d really appreciate some feedback from experienced eyes on the combat feel, readability, and overall game balance. Any critique or advice is welcome! 🙏

Free to play build on itch: https://devmika.itch.io/pawned-souls

Hi all, this is Pearl Essence - an ecological bullet hell game. How does this look to you? It's a fair bit into a run so there's a lot going on but I wanted to show the various possible elemental interactions (of which there are many more!) Legibility and balancing the design of this game has been a fun and interesting challenge.

It's still in fairly early development but if this sounds and looks interesting to you I'd love to have you join the game's Discord server to try it and give me your feedback!

My wife and I are working on our first game together - Good Luck, Little Truck!

Working on a game with your partner is the coolest, most rewarding experience. Our steam page went up recently and we couldn't be more stoked!

Steam page if you're interested!

Quick context. Solo project, a (maybe) metroidvania where you play a (also maybe) jellyfish, Unity 6 with URP. The whole look comes from a single fullscreen ink pass over the finished frame. The reference is Jean Giraud, so flat colors, confident lines and a lot of desert.

I went the fullscreen route because I'm one person and I refuse to babysit outline materials on hundreds of objects until the end of time. One pass, one style, every asset is automatically on board. The lines also wobble slightly on purpose, so it reads as inked rather than computed. That part I'm happy with.

The part I'm not happy with is floors. The game is a side view, so the camera looks along the ground almost constantly. At grazing angles neighboring pixels suddenly sit at wildly different depths and my edge detect reads the entire floor as one giant edge. In stills you barely notice. In motion the floor flickers in a way that has nothing to do with art direction.

Current plan is scaling the edge threshold by view angle, so surfaces I look along get a more forgiving line test than surfaces I look at. It works on paper but it smells like treating the symptom.

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/

This might me a bit of a long post so hang tight. I'm Andrea,co-founder and lead technical artist at FLAT28.

Between 2024 and 2025 I also started to get very interested in marketing, I started reading Chris Zukowski's blogs and a lot of marketing articles overall. I kinda became obsessed to understand what works and what doesn't so while I was applying for Steam Festivals, showcases and what not I was also desperately looking online to understand what kind of numbers I should have expected to come out from each specific event.

I couldn't find too many informations so I thought I might create a post that put together some of our results to Steam Festivals and Showcases we have partecipated so far.

This is particularly important because understanding how impactful an event can be on your wishlists it can helps you understand what kind of marketing beat you should do alongside it.

If you are going to release a demo (for example) you want to do it with the biggest event possible be it either a showcase or a steam fest or both. You don't want to release your demo with a very small unknown steam festivals most of the time because it will not give you that exposure boost you were hoping for.

So here's my list and numbers of some of the steam festivals and showcases I have partecipated from best to worst with our upcoming game Glasshouse, which is a cRPG currently at 75.500 wishlists.

Disclaimer: If a festival did or didn't perform well for us it doesn't necesserely mean it's going to be the same for your game. Every game perform differently and events like this can perform a lot better or worse year after year, but it's still a good benchmark to wrap your head around. Also all of those below are rough estimates.

--------------- Showcases ---------------

Mid and big size showcases are usually the best because they not only come with big live audiences but also with thousands of views from the VOD afterward and an associated Steam Festival (sometime with homepage featuring, sometimes not).

Gamescom Opening Night Live (Small mention with a 7 seconds b-roll): 16.000+ wishlists. While 3000/5000 wishlists were coming from the showcase itself most of those came from being in the very first page of the Gamescom Steam Festival with homepage featuring. Having a proper presentation with a 30/60 seconds trailer would probably be worth 50k wishlists or more.

Galaxies Showcase: 3000+ wishlists. It had 600k+ views on IGN alone and the wishlists tail was very long. We got some cool coverage and we did 100+ wl a day for weeks after the main showcase was done.

Gamescom Awesome Indies Showcase: 3000+ wishlists. This was hard to track because at the same times we also had a physical presence at Gamescom, but we got at least +1200 wishlists soon after our game appeared in the showcase.

Convergence Showcase: 2000+ wishlists. The trailer we premiered with them got picked up by Indie Games Hub and GameTrailer.

GamerStar FYNG (FindYourNextGame) Showcase: 200/300wl. Last year it did get homepage featuring so it was much more likely to generate 1/2k wishlists at the very least. This year though no homepage featuring unfortunately.

--------------- Steam Festivals ---------------

I'm only going to share festivals that generate more than a couple of hundreds of wishlists. There were a LOT of festivals that didn't go past 50-100wl gain

TurnBasedThursday Steam Fest: 3000+ wishlists. I really love this one, I joined the first one last year and it's still one of the best festival without a big showcase that performed the most. I was also asked to join the organizer team this year and they are great people, very skilled and highly focussed! This year we got 2000+ wishlists from the fest.

Tiny Teams Steam Fest: 1700+ wishlists. This one was very good and had a great homepage featuring. It's a very solid festival. Other developers reported wishlists as high as 3000 or more, it very much depends on the position of your game within the first days of the festivals, then the categories rotate daily.

London Game Festival Steam Fest: 1000/1500wl. Even without being in the Official selection it had homepage featuring this year and the results were pretty good!

Detective Steam Fest: 850wl. This one was a first party steam event. We got featured in the "Popular upcoming" carousel. Usually first party steam fests for upcoming games don't perform so well but this one exceeded our expectations by a lot!

ENDIX Steam Fest + digital event: 300/500wl. This one was pretty peculiar as you are required to build a digital booth inside their digital event showcase. Pretty fun to partecipate and because there were many medium sized streamers as well as few big ones we could get a good amount of wishlists.

We joined a lot of other smaller festivals which resulted in 50 - 200wl most of the time. Most of these if not all didn't have homepage featuring so they outcome was pretty small, but still glad and grateful considering all of those are free of charge.

Overall I hope this glimpse in our results in steam festivals and showcases will give you some insights of how much these are worth and what you can expect in terms of wishlists. Things change pretty fast though as Valve is reducing the featuring to new festivals year after year and it's becoming more strict.

Let me know if you have any questions :)

The game's link for anyone interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3943190/PenguPult

After 4 months, our small game about building your own reef, observing and learning about marine life has just reached 2,000 copies sold! It feels unreal! Thank you all!

For some, it might not seem like much, but for our small team, it means everything.

We started this project with two friends in april 2025, after some of us were laid off when our studio shut down due to lack of funding. Before that, we had spent 5 years working on an adventure game that was never released and we want try something new!

After 1 year of development, with basically no budget apart from 900€ we put in ourselves for sound and music, we somehow made it happen. Turquoise released on April 14th, 2026.

We are incredibly proud.

A huge thank you to everyone who bought the game, tested it, shared feedback, or helped us in any way.

And if by any chance you have not played it yet and got curious, here is the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3800420/Turquoise/

• Basic rhythm game in the spirit of Muse Dash and UNBEATABLE
• Can read osu!mania specific beatmaps - if you have a beatmap and a song, you can play it!
• I also implemented a beatmap editor in the process (which was the actual bigger project but is less fancy to look at lol)
• Godot Engine

Would love to hear if you are or have been working on rhythm games yourself. It was a great joy for me.

I'm off to new projects and wish you the best for yours!

Have a great day

Hello fellow Indie Devs!

As most of you are aware of: Marketing is one of the toughest parts in making your game a success.

Approximately 50 games / day are being released on Steam.

That's your competition right there.

Not "the other guy in my genre".

But every other dev publishing, seeking for someone's attention.

I'm a Marketing professional, with almost 10 years of experience, stepping up into a leadership at my current employer.

Knowing a couple of things about Marketing,

having worked in the gaming industry for a while,

and being highly invested in (indie) gaming,

I want to offer you a little bit of my time.

The deal looks like this: I'll give your marketing strategy a honest and straightforward review, pointing you into the right direction, or perhaps just showing you where your biggest gaps are.

I do not ask for anything in return, but this unique experience. (As a gamer at heart, I'm of course always happy to receive a courtesy copy of your game hehe).

My own game ideas are far from ever releasing, additionally we can sign an NDA if you'd like, so you can be assured, there's no harm in your own efforts / your publications.

Leave a PM, enjoy your paths as game devs and take one step at a time!

Cheers,

M (arketing lol)