Hey everyone! I'm a solo dev and a dad of 3 young kids. 18 Summers is a first person lawn mowing game. Each level is one summer in the same backyard. Between summers your kid gets older.
Mowing finishes patches of the yard and brings back memories and toys from that year. The goal was to make something satisfying to play that also shows how fleeting time can be.
The Steam page just went live. I'd love any feedback on the trailer!
Just wanted to share the new trailer here for my horror game that I am working on inspired by a real life location in Mexico. The game is called Where Dolls Hang, and mostly the inspiration is Mexican Folklore, Silent Hill, Outlast and Resident Evil.
Let me know what you think of the new trailer! Mostly it's showing off the atmosphere that I am going for. It would mean the world to me as a solo developer if you can wishlist and tell me your feedback :)
Thank you all so much and do let me know what you think, appreciate you all!
I also recently launched a Patreon If anyone like to support development, get your name in the game's credits, and receive early access, you can join here: https://www.patreon.com/c/steelkrill
Of course, it's completely optional, but every bit of support really helps me out a ton. Thank you! :)
Only 19 days left until release!
It’s been an incredible 2–3 years of development, and I really hope players will enjoy my game!
It’s a game about a little RC car searching for a missing boy.
This is a standalone real-time scene in Unity 6 URP, with no game or Steam page behind it. Sound on.
The monster lives inside the URP skybox shader as a 2D signed distance field, a function that tells each sky pixel how far it is from the edge of a shape. Every bone and claw is one of those shapes, merged into one outline that stays sharp at any size. It adds no triangles of its own.
The glow is one temperature field run through a blackbody ramp, the colors metal goes through as it heats. A fullscreen ink pass reads the monster's mask to draw the beams and the cut through its arm.
The knight and the whole town, cathedral included, are CC models by other artists. The monster and the shaders are mine.
Would you have built it as a mesh, or in the sky?
Credits. Models: BSP Colossal Gothic Cathedral by NeoKg (CC BY-SA 4.0); The Forgotten Knight by dark_igorek; Medieval house h2 by Annielighta; Medieval house (Generic Textures) by by__Rx; Medieval Houses (3 Pack) by Ajay Gawde; Medieval wooden cart by rakutin (all CC BY 4.0, Sketchfab); Gothic-Like Structures by loafbrr (CC0); Poly Haven (CC0). Moon maps: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. Sound: Sonniss GDC Game Audio Bundle recordings; BigSoundBank (CC0); OpenGameArt, Ylmir and WuxiaScrub (CC0).
Hey everyone! We’ve been working on a game for a long time, and some of you might already know it: Leafborn.
You control a character made of thousands of leaves and fight robots trying to wipe out all life. This is our first game, so we’d be really happy if you played the demo and shared your thoughts and criticism. I’d also love to hear what you think of the trailer.
Music is a placeholder I slapped together in Cubase and is not final at all.
For additional context, I have written the vulkan-based graphics engine. as well as all the weather systems, world/biome generation algorithms and used machine learning to help map biome geometry to actual LIDAR scans of subject environments. it's been a wild ride. That's the tip of the iceberg though.
It has a lot of problems still, as with any custom engine, so we're still a long ways to go, but very excited to share 'something' now we've gotten this far.
Excited to share more what this game actually is when it's a bit further along.
Hey again! I shared my brother's Tiny Brutalism sandbox here a while ago, and the response was honestly incredible.
He's been working hard on it ever since, adding nature, new building possibilities, and even a way to walk around and parkour on your creations.
And now it finally has a Steam page!
I know a lot of you really connected with the atmosphere and visuals, so I thought you'd appreciate seeing how far it's come.
I wanted to talk about things we don't discuss enough in indie game dev.
Factors out of our control like luck, then there's having serious amount of patience, not all of us have equal access to resources like Kickstarter for example, AI games entering the market (actually thats spoken about enough), but the hardships nobody rarely mentions.
I feel like we're often told there's some kind of "formula" to succeeding as an indie developer. And if our game doesn't succeed or hit certain metrics, well, clearly we just didn't follow the formula correctly.
But what if there isn't actually a formula? What if there isn't any way to succeed at all?
My game Twilight Tavern which honestly I've been working on for years, now has been growing in WL and has been progressing at a rate im more satisfied with atm. But that was likely due to luck in the marketing I feel as well.
Some devs get lucky and get more attention in a week than others may get in a year.
Now im NOT saying that skill, marketing attempts, and other obvious factors have no influence in success. Of course they have some influence to some extent like everything else.
Im trying to say that Luck is rarely spoken about or admitted.
What do you guys think?
______
Edit: my game is here btw if anyone wants to bring it some luck and wishlist mwahaha😈 :
I spent an embarrassing amount of time making this trailer, including composing and recording the music. Although it has a couple thousand views on YouTube, my expectations were a lot higher, and I’m disappointed in both the views and engagement ratios.
Do you have any suggestions on how I can make this more engaging/interesting/enjoyable to watch? Is there something I’m failing to emphasize? Any part that falls flat?
One thing I’m aware of is that the EQ is off, making the music and game sounds quiet, so I’m going to be re-uploading to YouTube with fixed audio. Before I do, I would really appreciate any input! Thank you in advance.
I'm a solo dev. I've been building Ruin: Apocalypse by myself — design, code, App Store submissions, all of it. Growth has been slow, and I've spent real money on ads with so-so results.
Then GunnarTV, a YouTuber who played the old Loot Wars / Scavenge Wars games back in the day, posted a video and spent about 2 minutes hyping Ruin. He didn't ask for anything. We went from 700 players to 1,400 in less than a week.
Biggest lesson so far: one genuine recommendation from someone people trust did more than everything I've paid for.
What the game is:
• A multiplayer loot-collection game — scavenge locations for items using energy that refills over time
• New finds take 1,000 minutes to "research," and until then other players can steal them
• Once researched, stash them in your duffle (safe) or show them off in your public trophy case
• 8 rarity tiers from Common to Godly — same itch as opening card packs and finishing a set
Fair warning: it's not a very visual game. But the players who get it tend to stick around, because of the community and the open-ended play style — you play it your way.
You can now jump in with a quick guest start, no sign-up wall. Free on iOS, Android, and in your browser at ruin.world.
Happy to answer anything about building and marketing a game solo. And I'd love brutal feedback on the first few minutes — that's where most players drop off.
Also curious how other small games have had the best results promoting their game.
Hi
I like to play some games you all made. I am trying to just pass some time on weekends. So i believe it would be great to help some of you. I am looking for web playable games only for now. NO mobile games for now either. So you can send me the games. I am gonna try to try you what i feel about the game. I am no expert but still i can give you a raw review and a game rating. As i am done playing games i will reply to those comments. Don't mind if i can't review all. I will try as humanly as possible.
What worries you most when you make an indie game?
I think a lot of people would say marketing.
I'm an ordinary backend developer who always dreamed of making games. Before this, I built apps, web services and chatbots, and started a few businesses. One of them was a global service with 2 million monthly active users.
But even with that many users, ads were our only business model, and our server costs were higher than our ad revenue. So we had to shut it down, even though a lot of people were still using it.
Since then, I've focused on keeping server costs as low as possible so a service can run for a long time, and on improving it based on user feedback. That actually worked for some of my later projects.
I still always wanted to make games, though. Now that AI can help a lot with the client side of a game, I finally got the chance. After about 3 months of development, I launched my game on the App Store and Google Play.
Like I said, I brought the same "keep running costs low" lessons into this game. There's no server at all: no backend, no database. Saves are backed up with iCloud, and I'm using Game Center and Google Play Games for leaderboards (those ship in next week's update). The game works fully offline, so my running cost is $0. I designed it this way on purpose.
Next is probably what most devs here find hardest: marketing.
I'm a beginner as a game developer, so I don't really know how to market a game or what works. I was sure that if I started with paid ads, I'd lose money. And you can't keep making games for long while losing money. I learned that the hard way with my earlier services.
So I thought about how to market for free, and my answer was posting short-form videos on TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Threads and X.
How the videos get posted
- Every platform except TikTok has an official API for posting: YouTube Data API for Shorts, the Instagram API for Reels, the Threads API, and the X API.
- TikTok only lets you post publicly through its API after a separate audit. So I upload each clip to the TikTok app's inbox through their API, and publish it from my phone with one tap.
- Things that bit me: YouTube keeps API uploads private until your project passes their API audit (2 days for me). Instagram needs a public video URL and some waiting while it processes. Instagram and Threads tokens expire every 60 days.
Of course, making the videos takes a lot of work too. So I automated that as well. I plan each season of 10-15 second clips together with AI, and the intros are generated with MiniMax H3 from my game's own sprites. That way I can make 5 or 10 clips in a few hours. Each clip is an AI intro, then real gameplay, then an end card. Here are three of them side by side:
- An AWS EventBridge schedule fires every day at 9:00 and runs a small Lambda function (Python). It picks that day's clip from a list and posts it to every platform.
- A second run 40 minutes later retries anything that failed. Each platform's result is saved separately, so a retry never posts the same video twice.
- When it's done it sends me a Discord message with the results and the TikTok caption, so I just open TikTok and hit publish.
- Cost is basically zero: Lambda stays in the free tier, and X's API is about $0.015 per post.
Of course it's nowhere near paid marketing, but here's what it got me so far:
- 252 installs in the first 3.5 weeks, and 78% of them played at least one fight
- D1 44%, D3 24%, D7 12%
- 24 clips, about 15,600 views in total
You can check the channels yourself. Some videos only get 10-30 views, and the best ones are over 1,000:
Since launch I've been riding a dopamine high. My game has no ads and you can play almost everything for free, so I didn't expect much revenue. But a few impatient players have been buying anyway, and since my running cost is $0, the game is already in the black, even if just a little.
Valve pushed a big achievements update last night and it's honestly all good news for small teams. Here's the short version or not that short haha
You can now import/export everything with CSV files. Names, descriptions, icons, translations. If you've ever clicked through 40 achievements one by one at 2am, you know why this could be game changer!
Steam can generate the grayscale "locked" icons for you. Yes. No more opening Photoshop just to desaturate 40 tiny squares. You can still upload your own if you're fancy or ask your best LLM to work for you but it's now integrated Yoohoo
The editor now tells you when a translation is missing. Goodbye "ACH_BOSS_3_DESC" showing up for German players. That was part of the fun but I guess Valve don't want that kind of joke.. :D
Then the new stuff:
Achievement sets. You can group achievements and each set has its own progress. By DLC (only shows for people who own it), by character, by game mode, or seasonal.
Dev-only sets that only your team can see. So you can test everything before launch without players spotting "test_achievement_final_v2" on your page that's beautiful and kinda boring but we take it !
Archiving. Achievements for content that doesn't exist anymore can be archived. People who got them keep them, everyone else can finally get their 100%. Completionists are saved. Amen.
And the best part, no SDK or game update needed. Everything still works, it's all in Steamworks: Edit Steamworks Settings > Stats & Achievements > Achievements.
Trying to make each weapon have a unique feeling ultimate. The mace is for instantly wiping weak enemies, displacing larger enemies, and creating a permanent spike trap to defend choke points.
Think it looks juicy enough or something else I could do?
I'm developing Admiral Yi: The Imjin War, a historical RTS set during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592.
Players can choose a location to bombard, then switch to grapeshot when enemy infantry gets too close. In this clip, Joseon cannons fire on advancing Japanese troops until their morale breaks and they flee.
I'm working on making targeting, ammunition choice, and morale work together. Combat AI, animations, and effects are still a work in progress. How readable does the combat feel to you?
Hey everyone! I'm one of the devs of Rebel Roar, a roguelite deckbuilder that we've posted about here before.
Everything in it is made by people - Our animator poses the characters by hand directly in Unity, then we render each pose in a halftone-ish, dithered style.
The video shows one card from start to finish (a card from the Stomper deck called MyHero.SYS), and the second image shows some of the cards from the upcoming Coldblooded deck, like AcceleratedHealing, BigHit, Grapple and InfectedBite. They're all made in the same way.
This is kind of a time consuming process, but we thought it was important for the card name and the illustration on it to communicate the same thing instantly, and become recognizable so you can identify your cards at a glance.
Do you think our cards are sight-readable enough? Is there anything you think we could do better on that front?
You play as Starla, a park ranger, and Shorty, her giant robot best friend. A strange force has scattered their national park across the sky, and the two of them have to explore it, solve alien cube puzzles, and piece together what happened. Shorty seems connected to it all, too.
I love Princess Maker, and I love raising sim where you gradually raise parameters, so I'm making a game like that.
There aren't many visual growth elements...
I'm not good at drawing, so I'm commissioning artists to do the illustrations, but I don't have much money so I can't add many more pictures.
Games like Princess Maker, or games like Volcano-princess, which have lots of characters and multiple endings, tend to stand out, so I wonder if my game will look inferior in comparison?
Since I'm making it alone without AI, I can't make it super long.
