my apologies if it looks like ass. this is my first attempt at gamedev with 0 prior coding knowledge.

any criticism is welcome!

hey, I make low poly stylized props and environment assets in Blender, with hand painted textures. no characters though, just props and environments.

I’m mainly into fantasy RPG stuff, so that’s what I’d love to work on. not after paid work, I just want to practice and get better by making stuff for a real project or jam team. hit me up if you need props or a scene built.

portfolio: https://www.artstation.com/whymoze

I’ve just finished my second hobby game, Ballbuster, a multi-screen maze puzzle platformer in the vein of Prince of Persia.

A lot of it was challenging: game mechanics, physics, rules, characters, story, but none of that was the hardest part.

Level design was, and I built every level brick by brick, considering:

• Difficulty progression: how do you introduce each mechanic in a way that does create drastic shits in difficulty.
• Teaching without tutorials: early levels have to show the rules, and moves through play.
• Pacing across screens and levels: a multi-screen maze needs rhythm, and each level needs to progress the narrative and introduce some different themes.
• Solvability: every route has to work, with no accidental softlocks, or shortcuts that break the puzzle.
• Knowing when a level is done: I could keep tweaking forever, and I had to decide when enough was enough.

Every code problem has a right answer. Level design has judgment calls.

If you want to see how it turned out, it’s free to play online (no downloads) here:
https://ballbuster.lorenzoprinci.com/

I’m mostly curious how other hobby devs handle this. How do you approach level design and difficulty progression? Do you plan on paper, build and iterate, or rely on playtesters?

I was generating an image and noticed the dotted loading animation in the bottom-right corner. I tapped it, and THERE WAS A WHOLE SNAKE GAME.

Is this common knowledge, or have I been living under a rock?

I've been around here a lot before, my name is Rose, I run an indie press domain + streamer collective under the same name of Probably a Game.

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS MEDIUM PRESS, PLEASE INCLUDE SOME WAY FOR US TO REACH OUT TO YOU IF WE ARE INTERESTED IN YOUR GAME. BE IT TWITTER, AN EMAIL, A WEBSITE, SOMETHING, HOLY FUCK.

We just got approved for our first steam event. A ton of games that we are finding thru next fest, currently ongoing, that we would love to include in our event, HAVE NO CONTACT FORMAT OR WAY. It's to the point, I've left comments on most recent updates, because there was absolutely no way to contact.

I'm not asking for keys, nor am I offering paid marketing, just trying to invite devs to a free steam event that's happening in February.

I just finished a 338-sound interface pack for a cozy pixel game (clicks, menus, notifications, inventory, dialogue, coins), and wanted to share what keeps UI sounds from getting annoying after the hundredth menu open.

Rotate variants, don't loop the first one. Every sound type ships with 5 to 8 variants (click-wood-1 through click-wood-8, for example). Picking one at random each time is the single biggest fix for repetitive-sounding buttons in playtests.

Keep feedback sounds under 0.1s. Hovers and clicks in the pack run 0.04 to 0.09s. Anything longer starts to feel like input lag on fast menu navigation.

Reserve the big, layered sounds for big moments. Level-ups, purchases and crafting results get longer, richer sounds (up to 1.8s) so they read as a reward, not spam.

Never loop a UI sound. Menus, popups and notifications should always resolve to silence; looping belongs to ambience, not feedback.

Free Lite (30 sounds) and the full 338-sound set: https://aquumgifts.itch.io/cozy-ui-sounds-300 - Free Lite; Complete $3.49 until November 30.

What UI sound category does your game always end up needing more variants of :)

The sounds come from our own Python code (no recorded samples or audio generators); the code was written with AI assistance.

I've been working on a game called Phosphor Command, a real-time tactics game with a base builder behind it.

This post is about how the game generates the operations you send squads on.

A contract tells you which map type you're going to, but the environment itself is generated when you deploy.

Each map has its own rules for generation. Maps are generated in layers. Big objects first and the details after. For example on the alpine pass; the generation starts biggest with two rock walls with a gap through each, then a deep gorge with a few bridges across it, and then woods and rocks.

Once the map is built, the procedural generation checks that troops can reach all parts of the map. If some environment generation has sealed off a pocket of the map the generator will create a tunnel through, so there's always a way in.

Objectives and exfil need to always be accessible. The objective sites are spread out and kept well apart, and exfil usually goes on the edge, as far from them as it can be, to create difficulty.

The enemy force is placed in a similar manner. Each difficulty has a range of hostiles and affects generation. Guards hold the objectives, and other troops go out on patrol.

Operations that you can select are randomised as well. If you don't like what's on offer, you can spend a reroll to draw a new one.

I've attached a showcase that shows the alpine pass being built layer by layer and a few of the other maps.

https://monkeyboxstudios.itch.io/the-new-owner
The New Owner — Demo

A psychological horror visual novel about a quiet house, an unexpected visitor, and a past that refuses to stay buried.

Doc wanted a quieter life. He got one.

After leaving his old job in the city, Doc moves into a house on a hill and tries to start over. Then Dave arrives with an unusual request: he wants to buy a painting Doc has kept on the wall.

The visit should be simple. It isn’t.

A hidden note, a strange remark about the house, and a set of stairs beneath Doc’s laboratory lead to a place that feels uncomfortably familiar. The deeper Doc and his unexpected companion go, the harder it becomes to believe that his old workplace was only an office.

About the game

The New Owner is a psychological horror visual novel that begins with an awkward, sometimes funny story about starting over. As the characters uncover clues, the tone shifts into mystery and dread.

You play as Doc’s friend and confidant. Your choices shape conversations and how Doc responds to the people and events around him. Some choices seem small when you make them. Their meaning may become clearer later.

The demo follows Doc from his former life in the city to his countryside home, Dave’s unsettling visit, and the discovery waiting beneath the house.

The demo includes

• A story-driven visual novel demo
• Hand-drawn scenes and original music.
• A gradual shift from dark comedy into psychological horror.

i used ai for help with coding

Estimated playtime: about 20–30 minutes.
Language: English.
Controls: Mouse or click to advance dialogue and select choices.
Platform: Play in your browser.

Working on the storm lighting in Long Haul, my zombie delivery game. Evening light and longer rain streaks keep the downpour visible from this coastal angle. I want the scenery to be worth looking at while the fight keeps moving through it.

Filmed in Unity with a staged horde, auto driving and firing, maxed gear and truck damage off.

Another update on Fill-In Crosswords, my take on the Cruzadex puzzles I grew up with in Portugal (no clues, just a grid and a list of words).

I’ve been having a lot of fun building it.

This weekend I redesigned the home screen. A few things that came out of it:

• The game’s name no longer fitted in the toolbar once the streak and Quills (the in-game currency) moved in, so I dropped the toolbar and added a logo instead. ChatGPT made the PNG, but its SVG version was a messy trace. Claude rebuilt the SVG from scratch and checked it against the PNG pixel by pixel. Now the same file works in any theme, with just the colours swapped.
• The track cards took the most iterations. They started tall and square, then went wide, then became small tiles, then went back to wide. I struggle to make decisions 😅
• The card at the top is now always there and changes with the player’s progress: Start here, Continue your puzzle, Pick up where you left off, Get Perfect, and Play a random puzzle.

I’m getting more and more excited to release this game 🤩 , but there’s still work left on difficulty, the game economy, monetisation and a few other things.

You can check a full write-up with the iterations I went through at https://joaoalves.dev/posts/cruzadex/redrawing-the-home-screen/

Happy to hear any feedback on the design or the process 🙂

I'm currently developing a game (beginners) and I'm looking for pixel artists who might be interested in collaborating with me on this project !I'm hoping to find people interested in creating pixel art, character sprites, backgrounds, animations, or other visual assets for the game. Kindly DM me if your interested!!

This is the first room, can you escape from it? We'll find out soon 😎👍🎮

This has been a side project of mine for quite some time, and I felt like it was finally time to share it. Voidbreach is a sci-fi twin-stick roguelike built entirely in Android Studio using Kotlin Multiplatform.

Game Loop:

Enter the Drop Pod, land in Sector 1-1, and make your way to 1-5 where you fight the sector boss before stepping into Sector 2-1, all the way up to Sector 5's final boss. Throughout the floors, you'll discover shop merchants, relic altars, and perk choices on every other floor. Primary currency earned from boss kills is used to rank up the operatives, unlock new characters, or gamble at the Sanctuary slot machine for a better starting gun.

Replayability & Progression:

• Replayability comes down to the large variety of randomized guns and relics and how they synergies with the operative's kit.
• Progression mostly includes ranking up characters, blueprint crafting to expand loot pool(bosses drop materials and blueprints to craft permanent gear in the main Sanctuary hub) and weapon mastery which has rewards.

Some Key Features:

• 2 player online WAN co-op using room codes.
• Procedurally generated dungeon layouts (room connections, doors, and enemy wave spawns)
• Supports auto target or manual aim with aim assist (in settings)

WIP Areas:

• Sound design & BGM polish (currently refining audio synthesis and reverb/impact layers). It needs work and some guns use the same audio at the moment.
• Deeper more meaningful progression, thinking maybe adding optional modifiers after first completion for more aether payout. I'm open to ideas here.

Backstory:

I've been a long-time fan of Soul Knight, Enter the Gungeon, and roguelikes in general. I wanted to see what I could create in Android Studio using Kotlin Multiplatform outside of my day-to-day Kotlin engineering work.

If you have any thoughts or recommendations on what I could add to make the game loop more replayable ("one more run") or on progression to hook players I am open to all suggestions

¡Hola a todos! He estado trabajando en este juego de preguntas y respuestas en 3D llamado Trivia Auction y acabo de publicar la beta en itch.io.

La clave está en la fase de subasta: ambos jugadores comienzan con 60 segundos en su reloj, y antes de ver la pregunta completa, solo se muestra la categoría y la dificultad. Luego, se puja con los segundos del reloj del oponente para ganar el derecho a responder. Se puede farolear para agotar su tiempo o apostar todo en categorías que se conocen bien; pero si el reloj llega a cero, se pierde inmediatamente.

Tiene multijugador online 1 contra 1 (con WebRTC y Supabase para emparejamiento y códigos de sala), un desafío diario con clasificación y 9 bots de IA con diferentes estilos de puja si se prefiere jugar en solitario.

Es gratis en itch.io (Windows, Linux y macOS):

https://elabsurdo1234.itch.io/trivia-auction

¡Me encantaría saber tu opinión o si encuentras algún error!

I've been working on a little game called Crossfire Blast, part of my iMessage app, aBop.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/abop-games-for-imessage/id6802109273

The idea is simple: up to 4 friends compete on a 6×6 board, racing to move their pieces to the opposite side while blocking and outsmarting each other.

What started as a simple 2-player game turned into something much more chaotic (and fun) with 4 players. The best part is that everyone can play directly inside their existing iMessage group chat, without switching to a separate game.

I put together this short gameplay video to show how it works.

I'm an indie developer and would love some feedback from other game devs, especially on the gameplay, visuals, and whether the mechanics are easy to understand just by watching.

What do you think? Does 4-player Crossfire look like something you'd play with friends?

I’ve been working on a game called Phosphor Command, a real-time tactics game with a base builder behind it.

My last post was about how the base grows over a campaign. This one takes a closer look at the buildings themselves and what each of them does.

Every building has its own spot on the base, and they’re grouped by what they do. The Command center sits in the middle, with signals, housing, research, logistics, industry, training and the air wing around it. Once you know the base, you know where to go for what.

You can walk up to a building and press E, and each one opens its own screen. The ops centre opens the operations console, where you pick your next contract. The HQ is where you buy upgrades, the research lab opens the research tree, and the barracks and motor pool have their own menus for your squads and vehicles.

For example the ops center is a good early game build and upgrade. Each level unlocks new operation types and gives you an extra contract to choose from, plus an extra re-roll, this can help you kickstart a good economy.

The barracks decides how big your company can be. You start with room for four squads, and each barracks wing adds three more. When you unlock a new troop type, its building goes up too, so a firing range appears when you unlock snipers and a hospital when you unlock medics.

Most of your money comes from contracts, but the base helps. The power grid and contract office add income every cycle, and the factories add income and make your troops hit harder.

Every vehicle needs a slot of its own: garages for ground vehicles, helipads for helicopters and hangars for planes. The options of transport comes down to what you’ve built for it.

You can also upgrade base defence: The perimeter wall in three tiers, each guard tower has mutiple levels.

I also wanted the base to feel alive. Radar dishes sweep, the jamming tower pulses, helipad beacons blink, factory chimneys smoke, and your squads walk around the base between operations.

I’ve attached a video that goes through some of the intresting buildings and upgrade.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on my own 2D trading and economy game for a while now. I’d like to show it to you and find people who are willing to share their opinions and suggestions that could help the project grow.

In short, it’s a game about building your own path in a living city. There is no single way to progress, and it’s not a typical tycoon where you click and watch numbers go up. Decisions and strategy actually matter here.

Here is what you can already do, or what I’m currently working on:

You can drive cars, with their own physics, a gearbox and engine sound.

You can own an apartment and trade apartments with other players. Inside, you decorate everything your own way with furniture, wallpapers, floors, lighting and extras. There is a furniture store and an edit mode where you can rearrange everything to your taste. You can also trade plots of land and build your own buildings on them.

You can build an industrial business or a farm. It’s not a place and forget system. Animals need to be fed and watered, fields need watering, machines need maintenance, and weather and random events can always shake things up.

You can become a clothing designer. You design patterns at a dedicated tailoring table, sew the clothes and sell whole collections to companies or other players. It pays to follow trends and product prices, because they decide how much you earn on a sale.

You can invest in stocks and cryptocurrencies. The market is shared between players and constantly moving. You can also mine crypto on hardware that you assemble yourself from parts.

You can work toward energy independence. You set up solar panels and wind turbines, run the cabling and store energy in batteries.

You can start your own companies and cryptocurrencies. The idea is that other players can invest in them. You can grow your own coin alone or together with others, for example by accepting it as payment in your shop with a discount. I want to add many more mechanics like this.

You can customize your character with hairstyles, beards, tattoos and accessories, so everyone looks different.

The game is at a very early stage. Some things work well, some are still sketches, and many parts need polishing. That’s exactly why I’m posting here. What matters most to me is that the game includes your ideas too.

I’d love to hear what you feel is missing in games like this, what annoys you about them, and which feature would make you want to keep coming back. Which of the things above sound the most interesting, and which seem unnecessary?

Thanks for reading, and any feedback, even harsh, is very welcome.

Here is a full match from my TCG, Connectionz Interrupted!! I lost here but to be fair, I wasn't even trying!

**Game Concept:** Choose your Apocalyptic Creature to fight against aliens, zombies, robots, and more in this Kirby-like Platformer. Level up your creature by logging in daily to track your habits.

**App Goal:** Build a simple habit counter tool to help motivate people to track their habits through gamification, which can improve mental health.

**Mechanics:** Complete real-life habits/tasks to unlock levels, rewards, cosmetics, new characters, power-ups, etc.

We are currently looking to build a core team:

* **Game/Mobile App Developer** \- We need someone who has been through the ropes, whether that’s one unreleased indie project, or someone who’s been designing games for a decade.
* **Lead Character Designer/Illustrator** \- looking for someone who loves character design/creatures/pokemon/transforming original concepts for a 16-bit style world. Similar styles to Adventure Time’s Explore the Dungeon game. This person would also be in charge of UI/items and environments.
* **2D Animator** \- Someone specializing in character Movements, fight mechanics, character animation, general UI animations, and rewards. They will play a part in making the app/game feel “alive.”
* **Map/Level Builder** \- Someone dedicated to producing high quality levels with set themes and assets created by the Lead Designer.

I built a quick working prototype of the app with some hand-drawn sketches and Claude.

[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WxTDmT3HcUKJ\\_YqPnLy\\_sEwPTXcrG8bh?usp=sharing\](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WxTDmT3HcUKJ_YqPnLy_sEwPTXcrG8bh?usp=sharing)

I can bring to the table:

Creative Direction | Music Composition | Marketing | Video Editing | Project Management

Please share some work you’ve done if you’re interested in working together to make a potentially life-changing game!

PORTFOLIO: this is my first project and do not have a portfolio of any kind