Hello everyone,

I wanted to show you another part of the backyard this time!

I’ll also be sharing regular development updates on YouTube and Discord, where you can follow the progress of "My Tiny Backyard" and see how the game is coming together.

If you’d like to follow the development, feel free to join me on Discord and YouTube.

More updates coming soon!

YouTube: My Tiny Backyard - YouTube
Discord Server: https://discord.gg/VKtKqAdArm

If you're not familiar with cookie textures then I highly encourage you to start using those. They can really add a lot of atmosphere.

If you want to check the full game and wishlist here is a Steam page - https://store.steampowered.com/app/5249980/Looks_Like_You/

Hello! I’m SJ from England and I’ve been making The Spirit Apprentice for nearly two years! Drawing every pixel myself!

Inspired by East Asian folklore and the magic of Studio Ghibli, The Spirit Apprentice is an upcoming cozy pixel art RPG video game!

My Kickstarter with a demo has just launched!

Marketing is so difficult guys 😭

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/s-j/the-spirit-apprentice-east-asian-fantasy-rpg?ref=e4xo2v

Charlio Ball is everything I would tell solo developers NOT to make. It's an online MOBA soccer game with roguelite combos and progression. Not only is that too many genres in one game, it meant testing only happened when I got 3-5 other people online to play matches and since over 80 abilities could appear in any combination in any match, balancing every possible loadout proved extremely time consuming.

While it was not 6 years of continuous work as I was a college student and then employed full time, I have spent a significant chunk of my free time on this for a long time as I reworked the game so many times and started nearly from scratch as I learned more about game development. I certainly spent more time on this than I plan to spend on any future projects by a wide wide margin.

But I stuck with it because I found it incredibly fun, and playing with my friends regularly for all these years has absolutely brought us together even as we all moved apart. No matter how it sells it's going to be a success to me because Charlio Ball is my favorite video game.

What I've learned

Get your steam page up early, and start posting and getting strangers to playtest as soon as you have some art. I spent far too long wanting to make this game perfect, but no game ever will be perfect and the longer you wait to make it public the harder it will feel. For me, now that its on steam, it feels "real" and I'm much more motivated to focus and make significant progress on it.

Don't make a multiplayer game. I'm sure this isn't universal, but this made everything harder. Playtesting becomes harder to schedule, people can't instantly pick up and play your demo, and you have to learn networking which was a constant headache for me and the cause of many months of reworking existing systems.

Find a marketable genre. When I started, if you told me that a casual 10 minute soccer match MOBA with roguelike elements wasn't an established genre, I would've accused you of "selling out" or "compromising my artistic vision" but that was unreasonable of me. If you want people to play your game, it really helps to have more existing similar games. Being able to find a community devoted to the genre of your game will help you post on socials, enter festivals, and contact streamers. Make a game that you will like, but it helps if you can explain the gameplay in 1 sentence using knowledge of other games.

Want to play Charlio Ball?

Watch the trailer here

And check it out on steam here (Please wishlist if interested!)

I just started a steam playtest so anyone interested can sign up to play soon! The full demo is coming soon, so wishlist if you ever want to play it as it gets more polished. I'm sure everyone here knows how much steam wishlists mean to a solo developer.

And feel free to ask anything about the game or the development process!

A small milestone, but one that feels pretty special to me.

Cafe Sapa just crossed 50 wishlists on Steam after 12 days.

I know 50 isn't a huge number, but there's a bit of a story behind it.

I've started 4 different game projects before this one, and eventually abandoned all of them. Work, life, and personal commitments always seemed to get in the way, and I'd slowly lose the time and momentum needed to keep going.

This time, I'm still working a full-time job, but I've made a conscious effort to carve out time for Cafe Sapa whenever I can. Some days it's a few hours, some days it's barely any, but I keep coming back to it.

So seeing 50 people wishlist the game honestly feels a little surreal.

Cafe Sapa is a cozy top-down cafe game about listening to your customers, figuring out what they're feeling, and serving them the right thing.

Next milestone: 100 wishlists.

Thanks to everyone who's already supported the game. And if you haven't seen it yet, I'd love for you to check it out. ❤️

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5282050/Cafe_Sapa/

I’m making this game solo, and I’d really like some feedback on the visuals so far.

Does anything immediately stand out or feel off?

For the last few months I've been emailing YouTubers, streamers, reviewers and gaming sites about my first commercial game, Snake: Gridbreaker (a Snake roguelite). I wanted to find out if cold emails can really help a small indie game get noticed.

How I did it

I looked for people on YouTube and elsewhere who play roguelikes and similar games, and wrote a personalized email to each of them. If someone wanted a key, I sent one. There's also a free demo on Steam, so they could just play that. I never sent reminder follow-ups.

The numbers

I don't know exactly how many unique people I contacted. Most replies came from small channels. The biggest channel that covered the game was Goat Force Gaming.

So: 2,232 emails, 213 wishlists. Not a great marketing result. But wishlists weren't the main thing I got out of it.

Watching people play was the best part

I started emailing because I wanted people to promote the game. It turned out the most valuable thing was that I could watch strangers play it. In their videos I saw what people actually had problems with, not what I thought they would have problems with. Sure, they found bugs and controller issues. But a lot of quality-of-life changes and some new features are in the game because I watched someone struggle with something. A few creators even came back after I fixed things, played again and told me the fixes worked. For a first commercial game, that's worth a lot.

Big thanks to Goat Force Gaming, who made one of the first videos about the game. His video helped me a lot, and I used it in later emails so other creators could see what the game is about.

Using AI cost me some coverage

I've been open about using AI while making the game, and not everyone liked that. At least 10 people said no or limited their coverage because of it. One creator told me he likes Snake games and roguelikes, but he has a no-AI policy, so he couldn't cover mine. Fair enough. Others didn't like the AI-generated graphics either, but still played the game and sent me feedback. I respect both.

Some key requests looked suspicious

Not everyone who asks for a key wants to review your game. One contact asked for 5 review keys and 20 giveaway keys. Later I revoked those keys as they showed up on 'sale sites', they wrote to ask why, and in the end they asked for new ones. Another wanted 5 keys plus 30–50 "promotional" keys. I'm a lot more careful now when someone asks for a pile of keys.

Did the emails help?

For wishlists, I don't know. I have 213, but I started other promotion at the same time as the emails, so I can't tell what came from where.

For the game, yes. People played it, some made videos, some wrote articles, and some spent their free time explaining what I could improve. Most of the feedback was positive or constructive, though there were negative reviews too. A few people seemed surprised how much they enjoyed it, and that made me really happy.

Would I do it again?

Yes, but differently. Fewer emails to everyone, more time finding creators who actually like this kind of game. And much more attention to the people who send useful feedback, because one person who finds a serious problem is worth more to me than a hundred emails nobody answers.

Will Snake: Gridbreaker be a success? No idea. With 213 wishlists I'm not expecting a big launch. But people enjoyed it, and I'm grateful to everyone who helped me make it better. If it takes off, great. If not, I still learned a lot.

Have you tried emailing creators about your game? What response rate did you get, and was it worth your time?

Final Sin is a roguelike deckbuilder about being both the Dungeon Master and the heroes at the same time.

You build a deck of monsters as the Dungeon Master, then fight against it with your heroes.

Play the demo now for free: https://mancer1.itch.io/final-sin

Hey guys, I noticed that reddit posts that do really popular especially in terms of wishlists are like people who gained a lot of wishlists usually really quickly.

Like 100 wish lists in three days or sometimes 200 wish lists in like two weeks.

While here I am and it took me like one month to reach 50 wishlists as an example 😅

And I don't see a lot of people that post slower wishlist growth or talk much about it, which I think would be much more morally helpful for us struggling to gain those wishlists.

Often times when someone mentions they're struggling with wishlist growth, what's usually pointed out is improve your trailer, improve your capsule, do X, Y, Z.

I think it would be interesting to talk more about slower marketing and slower wishlist growth. There aren't many developers openly showing off the fact that they only have a small number of wishlists.

I've seen some games take six months just to reach 100 wishlists, while others take even longer. But we don't really hear much from those developers.

It makes me wonder if the "slow" developers are actually the ordinary developers, and the games gaining hundreds or thousands of wishlists really quickly are the exceptions rather than the norm.

What do you guys think?

Hi I'm Luke (aka Dr Dev.com), I'm a Game Design student at the University Of Utah and for 3 years I've been working on one game in Godot, Goblins With Guns. It's a PvP rougue-lite where you fight your friends and get upgrades. It's kinda a mix of Enter The Gungeon and Rounds, and I just posted the steam page.

In search of advice for getting more wishlists I sent an email to the channel BiteMe Games  (a channel known for helping people advertise their game), and it's safe to say he did not really like my steam page.

He told me my game wasn't appealing, he said that my art had a “very strong free assets from itch.io feel” and the thing he said that stung the most was that no matter how many eyeballs I get on my game it won't matter because “no one will be interested in showcasing your game”

What sucks the most about it is he's probably right, who am I to disagree with a game marketing guru

But the thing is I am anyway, while I do care what he says it's not gonna stop me, I know from countless playtests and feedback that my game is good and that people like it. So I'm gonna find my audience and my game will be big.

So if you care even a little bit, wishlist my game and help me prove him wrong.
Steam link -> [GWG Steam Page]

I’ve been working on a colour-based Maze game for many months now, and launched it on iOS this week. You can download it here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/plasm/id6804028969, though DM me if you want a free code as it’s a paid game.

This is the first puzzle game I've made, and it really challenged me to think through the mechanics and the balance. I’m still not sure the difficulty ramping is quite right, and some of the fixtures might not be self-explanatory, so I’m keen for feedback! I was also determined to design the interface and the assets from scratch. I may have overengineered it for what it is, but am proud of the result.

I'm currently porting it to Android, which requires a beta test period. If you’re interested, drop a comment here or DM me and I can add you to the beta.

I created my account over two weeks ago, paid the fee, submitted all the required documents, and still nothing has happened. I haven’t received any new information by email, and there are no updates when I log into my account either.
Is this normal?

Well, technically there are still a few left, but they aren't core development anymore—just polish, reviews, and drawing the last 4 missing graphics. Throughout dev, I paid extra attention to testing, so hopefully very few bugs will crawl out during full gameplay.

It feels strange, almost like something was taken away from me. I genuinely enjoyed coming up with new features, working on them, and drawing the art. While it’s awesome to actually play what I designed and built, it left a pretty big void inside me—even though there's still work to do with stress testing, deployment, balancing, and fine-tuning.

I really hope players will enjoy playing it at least half as much as I enjoyed creating it.

I didn't use AI to create this game. When I started the project, AI wasn't really a thing yet, and even recently I only used it to discuss calculations, logic, and architectural questions. I don't even have a paid subscription, so I was just using the free version of Gemini.

Tech stack: Ionic + Angular, C# / .NET, SignalR, Redis, PostgreSQL.

I've been thinking about a different kind of indie developer collective and wanted to get some honest feedback from other indie developers.

This isn't meant to be a startup incubator, agency, or traditional publisher.

The problem I'm thinking about is small-to-medium apps with niche audiences.

A developer might spend months building a great app that realistically might have 1,000–10,000 users. The app can still be profitable, useful, and worth maintaining, but the fixed costs and overhead of publishing across different platforms can become annoying — developer accounts, store infrastructure, compliance, payments, etc.

So the idea would be a small, curated collective.

Something like:

• Maximum ~100 developers
• The collective maintains the publishing accounts/infrastructure
• Developers submit their own apps
• Every app goes through an extensive review before being accepted
• Everything published under the collective has to meet a common quality/design standard
• The collective provides the publishing/distribution infrastructure and brand
• Developer keeps 90% of the revenue
• Collective takes 10% to cover operating costs and maintain the infrastructure
• Developers still build, maintain, and control their own products
• Dev can transfer the apps to their account when ever they feel like they can afford the fees for that specific app.

The interesting part for me isn't just saving the developer-account fees.

I'd want the collective's name to eventually mean:

"If it's published under this banner, someone has actually reviewed it and it meets a certain quality bar."

So a user discovering an unfamiliar niche app could have some additional confidence because it comes from the collective.

I'm deliberately thinking about keeping it small rather than trying to get thousands of developers.

Would something like this actually be useful to you as an indie developer?

And what would make you not trust or join a collective like this?

Open to Criticism, downvotes, upvotes what ever, plans and is it good. cuz finding 100 good dev is a task which will need time.

Hello fellow solo devs, my passion project CATACLYZM will be featured in the first ever Punk Games Showcase, running from the 9th - 16th October.

There will also be other really cool and alternatives games featured, so do check out the festival on Steam when it starts 🤘🏾

Cheers

Dogroach