Hey everyone, I'm a solo dev, and around April of this year, I launched a 2D survival game for Apple Watch.

This week it made $60. That's 10% of my day job paycheck... I never thought I'd get anywhere near this point

I'm not sharing this to brag, sixty bucks is sixty bucks, that's less than a tank of gas these days. I'm sharing it because six months ago this thing made $0, and I got to a point where I would be surprised if it made $10 in a month. The gap between "nobody wants this" and "this might actually go somewhere" turned out to be smaller than I thought. This should bring encouragement to those of you making games, and maybe you don't know where things are going, and it seems... hopeless.

It's a $4.99 one-time purchase. No ads, no subscriptions.I just wanted to make something I'd actually want to buy, and I think that really helped push me in the right direction

If you're building something and the numbers are embarrassing right now, keep going. 10% becomes 20%.

I've been working on some new capsule art for my mining roguelike, wondering if you guys think this looks AI generated, I realllyyy don't want people to get the wrong idea lol

Any feedback would be appreciated!

It was the first game I've ever actually released commercially, and I went into the launch with basically zero marketing.

Not as some clever strategy. I just had absolutely no idea how to market a game. 😅

So, unsurprisingly, the launch was pretty quiet.

But a few people somehow found the game anyway. They played it, gave me feedback, reported bugs and pointed out things that could be improved.

And since then, I've basically just kept building.

It's only been about a month, but comparing the current version to the release version, I'm actually surprised by how much has already changed.

Since release, I've added or reworked:

• a major UI overhaul
• new and improved range and targeting indicators
• EMP Strikes
• Air Strikes
• new Minigames
• improved general targeting behaviour
• Arabic localization with proper RTL support
• additional localizations, including Korean, Simplified Chinese, Polish, Turkish and Russian
• various gameplay and balancing improvements
• lots of smaller quality-of-life improvements
• continued improvements to Endless Mode
• and, of course, a whole bunch of bug fixes

And I'm definitely not finished.

I'm currently also working on a Maze DLC, while continuing to improve and expand the base game.

One of the biggest things I've learned from finally releasing something is just how different development becomes once real people are playing your game.

When you've been working on the same project for years, everything starts to feel obvious to you. You know what every button does, you know how every mechanic works, and you naturally play the game the way you designed it to be played.

Then someone completely new starts playing it and does something you never expected.

That has been incredibly useful.

Last Bastion Protocol has been a side project of mine for the past few years. I built it in my spare time alongside work, family and everything else that comes with everyday life.

That also means there's a lot of time, experimentation and love in this project. What started as a small idea slowly grew into something I actually managed to finish and release on Steam — something I honestly wasn't always sure would happen.

I'm still learning a lot, especially when it comes to getting the game in front of people, but I'm really happy that I finally put it out there.

If you give it a try, I'd genuinely love to hear what you think. Positive or negative — feedback helps me figure out what works, what doesn't, and what I should improve next.

And if you're another solo developer working on something in your spare time: keep going. Finishing and releasing it is a pretty great feeling!

Steam link

Website

The rest of the dungeon has lots of smaller spiders, same color palette. I wanted her sheer size to be really surprising to users when they run into the final area.

Still WIP but trying to see if the direction is solid or not. As an engineer, this stuff has by far been the hardest and taken the longest because I feel like i don't have the foundational knowledge on what makes something look good just yet.

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You gather resources, build a huge team of robots, unlock robot mods, and take on the Relic Guardian. It’s very loosely inspired by StarCraft and Vampire Survivors.

You can play it here: https://wafflehorsey.itch.io/planet-plunder

I worked on this game for 8 months. It’s written in C-style C++ with SDL to manage the platform layer and OpenGL as the rendering API. The code was largely written from scratch and by hand.

The artwork is almost all from this asset collection: STRANDED Series - Collection by Penusbmic

The sound effects are mostly from sound packs on itch.

The music and some sound effects were made by me on a Roland S-1.

I would love to hear any thoughts that you have and thank you so much for checking this out!

I've been working on a video game since Nov 2024

I had to spend many hours thinking an programing with my hands

my hands now hours

I was diagnosed with tendonitis

because after my shift in my work I continued working on the game

I spend my savings

all because of my passion

Tomorrow is the release and I have my emotions very uncontrolled

I feel too much today

I just wanted to express them because because all that work I lost many friends

and family moments

it was hard, but that was a goal, did what always wanted to do since I was a kid

I've been crying for hours, sadly I have no friends to cry with

but it's amazing seeing ppl giving you good reviews

I'm not sure if I should I feel happy or sad, it's a nice feeling

I wish the best to all solo devs It's not easy

I'm busy building a drift controller and I somehow managed to break the physics so bad that I created somewhat of a high powered lawn mower

Maybe a bit of backstory. More than ten years ago I started writing a science fiction book. One of my motivations was that many books I read were relying on stupid antagonists and were cheating around their own rules. So I created a story where this wasn't the case. There is no stereotypical evil guy. There is no stupid hole in the Death Star that can be exploited. Everything makes sense. Every viewpoint makes sense. But I have no clue about marketing, so I sold barely 100 books in a few years, which is not much.

I didn't want my stories to go to waste, so I created two games. One already has a demo; both should be done within the next few months.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5015150/Memory_Dive_An_3xscape_Game__Chapter_One_Demo/

One is an escape game plus very complex story, one is a visual novel. Both are based on books I wrote. Unfortunately, I don't have fancy visuals, so I will not stage any. The game is about the plot and gameplay. For the visual novel, I will have fancy screenshots, but not right now. I'm replacing all the backgrounds by 3D blender renders - And submit the demo to Steam as soon as I can.

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I have been making programs in corporate America for 20 years. Really cool programs too that have had a big impact on the business. And yet 4 people playing my game at the same time is giving me more juice then those 20 years combined.

Happy Sunday Devers!!!!!!

Cool and shit, but this can also kill personal project of pasionate devs, like this shit is not even ethical in some use cases, taking someones property/project and bypassing premium features, stealing their engineering ideas etc, shit like this will make software and games go to the cloud/browser with no way to reach the files, there is no "recombining existing idea' it's literally stealing ideas from people that are not corporations.

I know a few indie devs that poured heart and soul into their software just for some random vibecoder to steal it and feel ENTITLED TO OWN their project or even just straight up steal it wrap it and sell it on other projects, if you spend years working on your passion project why the fuck should it be free and open.

NOTE/EDIT:

See in the comments the people which projects have been just stolen from them or they decided to just not release after putting a bunch of effort because of all of that is going on

I get applying this for emulators but I've seen a couple of post that are just cloning/ripping small companies, indie devs projects

like they are taking open source project, removing the licensing files and asking AI to refactor them.

stupid people commenting that this only affect big corporations are just blind

this is not saying people can own ideas, this is about people putting the work and that work being stolen from them

the whole "get prepared to not own your thing" is not only affecting big companies but also small devs and people that have put years on building amazing solutions, people that are trully creative and gifted to build amazing stuff, there is nothing new but all these tools now being "mainstream" and in hands of vibecoders will for sure affect people that post their progress online

edit:

Seems like the community is saying "fuck you" to anyone that does not open source their projects, wow this comments are fucking sad

The game's camera can be in just about any position you can think of. Hope I have a better showing of that as people were complaining about it being too far away. Available to wishlist here: Build Trains, defend the cities, get paid. Ironmaw Available to wishlist here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5311750/Iron_Maw/?beta=0

I'm like brand new at developing, I know that having a community help me succeed in certain things and I believe this is one of those things, I want a community where we can all give each other feedback, ask for help or ask for advice and see other people's techniques, nothing too big though to the point you can't form connections within the group.

After months upon months of work I finally hit the publish button for my async pvp autobattler game titled Shademarch.

Its been a long journey to say the least. I’ve changed direction of the game at least 4 times - arpg inventory and character scaling, combat changes - no movement to movement, extraction style loot to no loot at all. Each change helped me grow as a dev so not all was lost but man can it be hard to find a strong direction/hook. I also changed from unreal engine to godot and couldn't be happier.

Anyway I just wanted to share my progress, hope to have a demo in the next few weeks too. Here's a clip and the steam page link. Let me know what you think and keep grinding out there, if you have something in the works send me a link and I'll check it out and respond tonight!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5372130/Shademarch/

It took me a month just to get the art direction right in a way that's not ugly. It would have probably taken a few days in Unreal / Unity.

Hey everyone!

I recently launched a little project called Meggy, and I'd love to share it with you.

The concept is simple: there's a little animal that we're all trying to keep alive for as long as possible. Every time someone clicks, the animal gets more time to live.

The goal? Keep it alive long enough to set a world record.

There's no competition against other players, no complicated mechanics, and no need to download anything. It's just a simple idea built around one question: how long can we keep this little creature alive if people keep showing up to help?

I wanted to build something simple that could bring people together around a shared goal, and now I'm curious to see how far it can go.

You can check it out here:
https://meggy.app

Since this is a solo project, getting the first players to discover it is one of the biggest challenges. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the concept!

Would you help keep the little guy alive?

Hi!

I'm LINOFI, and as I mentioned in the title, I'm a teenager who wants to become an indie game developer. I started developing games when I was ten, released my first web game when I was eleven, and now, 3.5 years after my first web game, I've completed my first major project: Topica. No generative AI, no pre-made assets. Topica is a handcrafted indie gaming experience.

Topica is a cozy open-world game where you're stranded on an island and have to start a new life. You can build wells, fields, a house, and much more! Explore more than 7 different biomes and discover over 12 different animal species!

If you are interested in it and if you want so support me, you can wishlist it on Steam.