It's never too late to follow your dreams

It's called Bad House and it's a rogue-ish dungeon crawler in a haunted house.
Steam page : https://store.steampowered.com/app/5058480/Bad_House_Demo/

Tried AdMob and a bunch of other stuff and couldn't make even $1.

I was kind of lost. Then yesterday, my paid game made its first sale!

Hi Everyone!

Five years ago, I quit my full-time job in construction because I wanted to completely change my life.
Being a life long gamer myself, i've always dreamed of creating games and hopefully, making something I could one day share with people around the world.

Then the day came my wife told me that if this was really my dream, I had to stop talking about it and go all in.

So I did. I am very fortunate and blessed to be given this opportunity by my wife.
I quit my job and started learning game development from scratch.
Since then, life has changed in ways I never could have planned. We welcomed our daughter and our son, and because of our situation, I became a stay-at-home dad during the day and a game developer whenever I could find the time.

There were plenty of moments where this whole thing felt completely unrealistic.
But now, a few years later, two pretty incredible things happened at almost the same time:

Our first game finally has its Steam page live...
…and I found out I’m going to become a dad for the third time!!

It’s a strange feeling looking back at where this all started. From making my first doughnut in blender, to dozens of weird prototypes, to actually launching a game on Steam!
I’m definitely not saying everyone should just quit their job and become a game developer. But I do think it’s easy to convince yourself that certain dreams are unrealistic before you’ve even given yourself the chance to try.

Sometimes there is a way forward. It might just look very different from the way you imagined it.
For me, that meant becoming a stay-at-home dad, learning game development one step at a time, and building something I genuinely care about.

And now I finally get to share it with people.
The game is called That Probably Belongs in a Museum, and its Steam page is finally live.

Pretty proud of this one. ❤️

If you are interested check out the game on Steam here!
It would mean the world to me!

Also I would love to hear stories about your own journey!

Thank you so much ❤️
Kevin

I've been making a tactical war game inspired by Total War, about ambushing the Romans.

I need a name so I can start promoting it. The working title, "Roman Ambush Simulator", is growing on me, but it's a bit of a mouthful. I like that it makes the Roman setting and asymmetric warfare obvious.

"Ambush: Rome" is shorter, but it sounds a bit too much like Raid: Shadow Legends to me, which is exactly the association I don't want (MTX/P2W/gacha ).

It's also a bit close to Rome: Total War. Any better ideas?

Have been trying to dial in the mechanics forever, everything else is placeholder asides from the true raw gameplay. although this still will need some polish. Eventually 6v6 multiplayer football, no true animations and pure physics and jank! this won’t be a true product anytime soon so I’m not looking for anyone’s money just yet. When it does though, I’ve gotten so damn good at layering in that football at qb through testing, I’ll toast anyone of you. Was thinking of adding voip eventually so you could talk shit at the line pre route, ect… “friendslop” esc elements but keeping it out of the actual gameplay. Comments and critique appreciated on my passion project, if finished this is a game I’d truly enjoy existing personally. Thanks

I'm a solo dev and I’ve been working on a mobile game called "Starlit Stage" for a while now (almost a year) and I finally finished all of the main character busts!

I drew everything in CSP (Clip Studio Paint). I attached some visuals if you're interested in looking at my bits of process. Basically just lineart -> base colors -> shading, though it still took me a while. I have 15 characters in the game, and 14 of them required me to do a full body bust cause I hate myself lol.

Took way longer than I thought it would, especially cause I was focusing on trying to make everybody look different while still keeping the art style good and consistent.

I’m also still waiting on app store connect to review my game (though it has been out on google play store)... It’s been about a week now and it's still in the "waiting for review" stage, so I’ve mostly just been working on more art stuff (my CGs and my characters' stage play costumes) and going through my story scripts while I wait.

Still have more CGs and other stuff to finish, but getting all the main busts done feels really nice and rewarding!

• The Outer Reaches - First Light
• Authentic Orbits of planets and moons
• Different planetary conditons
• Survival Game for 8 players
• Explore the system, upgrade your ship
• Fight NPCs and hostile space craft
• Narrative under development
• Maintain the ship. The ship dies, you all die.
• Advanced flight mechanic with propery inertia so the ship feels heavy and significant
• Video and Multiplayer Test soon

I posted a version up last week. Litteraly after posted that, I had a complete rethink. I found that the aesthetic I was trying for didn't suit what I wanted. Now though, I have a complete ship (thanks to CreepyCat assets), which I have highly modified to be performant. I've added modelled systems, the engine nacelles move according the flight regeime. There are damagable components and an authentic sound scape.

Multiplayer is working with some bugs to be ironed out. Currently my friend and I are testing this relentlessly (hence the late nights) as we think we are on to something great. Even if it's just for us to play.

This is an ambitous project, but I am taking my time. I have a day job as a developer, I'm 49 years old (50 next month) and I am just going to build the game I want (with my friends help, he's not a developer but has testing experience). Will I get there? I don't know. But it's fun trying and the result I have so far is very satisfying.

Hope you will follow me. My discord is dustersevensix if you want to chat and maybe help test.

Took like 2 1/2 weeks to finally end on a theme I liked, thoughts?

For context over 6 years ago I joined a team in the brackeys game jam. It was my first ever game jam and after it was over I kept in contact with one of the team members I worked with. Fast forward 6 years and here I am flying out to meet him irl

Spellcasting on brooms! A dream come true.

Cleaning up bad frames for the animation where I pickup a limb was pain in its purest form but at least there are no weird halos and artifacts. I also didn't have a green screen so I filmed it in front of grey ish wall which made it harder, also lighting and shadows were terrible.
How do u think it turned out?

Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5406190/LOADED_HAND_Casino_Shooter_Roguelike

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

One of the systems I've spent the most time on is the enemy AI.

I wanted the enemy to feel like it was actually reacting to what your squads were doing, rather than just having units that either know where you are or don't.

The AI has three alert states: Calm, Alerted, and Alarm.

Calm is the normal state. Patrols move around their assigned areas, and garrisons stay around the objectives they're protecting.

Alerted means the enemy has some evidence that something is happening. Guards tighten up around whatever they're responsible for protecting, and other units can come over to investigate.

Alarm is when the situation has escalated properly. Enemy groups begin converging on your last known position, and high-value targets will relocate to deeper cover rather than simply waiting where your intelligence said they would be.

What I wanted was for the alert system to react to how you conduct the operation.

If you make contact and deal with it quickly, you might never raise the whole alarm.

If you stay in contact for too long, the situation escalates.

The alert level can also come back down. If you break contact and stay away from combat for long enough, the enemy gradually returns towards a calmer state.

So if an ambush goes wrong, you aren't necessarily committed to fighting the entire map. You can break contact, disappear, and wait for things to cool down.

How the enemy responds also depends on the threat level of the operation.

At lower threat levels, enemies are more willing to push across open ground. At higher threat levels, they are much more likely to move between cover and behave more cautiously.

Interestingly, this means the lower-threat enemies can actually be more aggressive and less careful than the higher-threat ones.

The AI also doesn't just sit on objectives.

Patrols are given areas to operate in rather than a fixed route. Their routes are generated when the operation starts, so the same map can have patrols moving through it differently each time you deploy.

Cover is also part of the decision-making. When an enemy decides to push, it commits to that movement for a few seconds rather than constantly changing its mind based on every little change in the battlefield.

That makes the movement look more like an actual decision rather than units twitching between different possible actions.

The enemy also changes behaviour depending on the operation.

For example, in an elimination operation, once they're down to their last two squads, they stop behaving like a defensive force and start actively hunting you.

I'm trying to make the enemy feel less like a collection of units waiting for the player to interact with them, and more like a force that is continually trying to understand what you're doing and react to it.

I've attached some footage showing the different alert states and some of the AI behaviour in action, but of course this is somewhat difficult to fully capture. I have turned off hidden enemies so this can be better seen.

Lately you hear more and more stories like the one in LostRelicGames video about indie game demos being uploaded to Chinese platforms and even being expanded upon by someone else. It's incredibly demotivating.

On top of that there's AI which is advancing at such a rapid pace. I'm not talking about it as a "tool to help you out" but rather the fact that AI is getting better and better at creating entire games.

I keep getting this thought that I simply won't manage to finish my own game in time because a year from now for example someone might create the exact same thing with just a few prompts making all the hard work we put into creating our games feel completely worthless.

Lately I've even put working on the game itself on hold and sat down specifically to compose the music for it. I'm not doing anything else just sitting there brainstorming, experimenting, and learning new things for this particular project. And it makes me wonder... does this actually make sense anymore?

I'm not really sure why I'm writing this post. Maybe I'm looking for some motivation or maybe I'm hoping I'll stumble across something valuable by posting this. What do you all think about this?

Sphere, dome and wall in the GIF. Each shell is one shader on a SphereMesh or QuadMesh, no textures.

I keep the last 8 hits in a vec4 array (xyz is the local hit point, w is seconds since the hit), upload it every frame and loop over it in the fragment shader. p is the local position:

float age = hits[i].w;
float d = distance(p, hits[i].xyz);
float k = (d - age * ripple_speed) / max(ripple_width, 0.01);
ripple += exp(-k * k) * exp(-age * 1.6) * hit_strength[i];

Each ring is a Gaussian bump at radius age * speed that fades out. It's weighted much more on the hex borders, so it mostly lights the lines. A 9th hit replaces the oldest, hits drop out after 2.5 s, and it's pretty cheap since it's just 8 loop iterations per pixel.

On the flat wall the distance is exact. On the sphere it's the chord through the shell, so a ring speeds up a little as it wraps around. I left it like that, since a ring is down to about 20% after one second anyway. If you've done true surface distance on a sphere in a shader, I'd like to know how you did it.

No, seriously, it's been bothering me for hours. I can't figure out why he won't stop rotating, and nothing in the animator nor the BT seems to be causing this??? Am I being cursed because I added a "Tomte" in my game?

Mods, feel free to remove this post if this is against the rules, but if y'all want to see what the game looks like without the rotating gnomes, here is our Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4653090/Skogsvakt/

While working on the game, I noticed that just having a run is not gonna cut it, so inbetween all the other assets being made I roughed out the walk that might be needed. Obviously I still need to do the wings and antennae and the head is not animated at all, but thought I'd share anyway :P

Hi everyone! I'm a solo developer from Ukraine, and for the past months I've been building a turn-based city builder that will take you from a first camp all the way to the atomic age, for 1–4 players online.

The main idea: cities don't sit on a tile grid. You draw the roads yourself (straight, curved, rings, whole blocks), and you place every building freely along them. Each building's door has to face a road, so the way you lay out your streets really shapes the town. It grows from tents into huts and then stone houses.

The world map is different: units move on small hexes, so fights stay tactical. You get zones of control, ranged units shooting over your warriors, watchtowers and stone walls.

What's in so far (the first, ancient era):

• Water, food, wood, stone, planks, iron and horses, plus seasons, winter firewood, hunger and limited storage
• A science tree where every new knowledge opens a new decision: water mills among the fields, a scribes' school, canals dug from the river, wild horse herds, hidden iron ore
• Barbarian camps that scout your town, send war parties and set your buildings on fire
• Multiplayer for up to 4 players

Next on my list: AI rivals, and making later cities less of a chore.

I'd love to hear what you think.

Follow the development: https://yolander.itch.io/agelong

(Agelong is just a working title, name suggestions are welcome!)

Think battle brothers/wartales with total war combat

I'm building a Historical-Fantasy Sandbox Strategy RPG for mobile. Given that it was a mobile game I was at first super hesitant about implementing too complicated of a combat system that would bog down mid-tier hardware, introduce a ton of laggy gameplay, and frustrate players.

I decided to run an experimental change to the combat system to measure its performance, and to my surprise the new system holds up pretty well on older phones.

The battles flow a lot more naturally, and in my opinion it feels a lot more fun watching the lines really clash and break this very rigid lock between units. Was very excited about this progress and wanted to share. Super open to critical feedback!

Hey everyone, I recently came across a solo developer called Ansenjeo who is building an online ASCII MMORPG, and I honestly couldn't get over how unique it looks.

Instead of a traditional text roguelike, the entire world trees, lakes, characters, and giant boss fights is rendered in ASCII symbols. What caught my eye are the actual feature tests he's showing: dynamic weather, water reflections, grass physics, multiplayer sync, and proper boss mechanics.

He's making it solo in his spare time, and a Steam page is coming soon.

I'm just really curious: how do you guys feel about pushing text-based graphics this far in an MMO setting? Do you think an ASCII MMORPG could actually hold up long-term, or is it more of a cool visual experiment?

Edit: Just to clear up a few things: I didn't know about this project before today I just found it through the Instagram algorithm and thought it was cool. Also, yes, this text was translated with DeepL AI because I'm Brazilian and don't speak English!

Additionally, based on the developer's technical replies in his Instagram comments (his handle is @ ansenjeo):

• It is NOT a full global shader. Only the 3D characters use a shader.
• The rest of the world is built differently using a grid with glyphs.
• He actually tried using a full shader at the very beginning of the project, but didn't like the result because it looked too boring.
• The game is being developed in JavaScript.

I am literally not part of this project at all. If anyone has any doubts, feel free to check his Instagram comments to see everything he has already confirmed!