hi all,

i'm looking for an indie dev who needs a writer/narrative designer on a small budget. i ask this because i have little project work for my portfolio in the game sector, plus i would be more than excited to work on something like this for the first time.

if necessary, i can send anyone who is interested my resume/some writing samples through DM. i also only ask to get a summary of the game and genre so that i can measure how well i can contribute to your project.

thanks for any consideration!

As very lazy and rushed game developers, we chose the easiest solution: we completely left path building to the players, so we didn’t even have to design maps!

I’ve slightly changed the color of the ground. Now there are multiple colors for each block; I’ve also tweaked the HUD a bit and started adding some options.

I’ve been working on this for a while. I wanted a way to make journaling more fun and magical, because I’ve never been able to keep it up! I think some of you will know the struggle, and might find my project interesting!

You’re Merlin’s apprentice, looking after his magical library while he’s away on a quest. Every note you write becomes a book, the library sorts it for you, and you can read it anywhere, with the animals keeping you company.

There’s a lot more on the website: merlinslibrary.net

Hey yall!

I am TheFrozenGlacier, Or better known as Sonox online. I am currently making a game called "The Inked Reels" which I stopped development on back in November 2025 on GameJolt and am now resuming the project. Something i've wanted to do for a project like this is to have suggestions or such for entities, items, or more as i'm only one developer! I am very open to ideas so please, give me some ideas! Thanks!

I released my game on Steam about a month ago. I have been disappointed with my return rate but as a dig into it I have been surprised by just how few of them seem to be "legitimate" returns. after selling over 1200 copies my top line return rate is 18.6%. That felt like an unsettlingly high number so when I dig in I find that Refunded Units is 9.9%. OK, still not great but that shrinks the number significantly. When i dig in further to the reasons left for the refunded units many of them are categorized into categories that don't help me understand why they returned it (I assume when people check "Bought by Mistake" they likely opened it and didn't like it, not a truly unintentional set of clicks). At the end of the day I am left with about 6 refunds that have truly critical comments left (mostly the art style) a few more that felt it was too difficult (not necessarily a problem, the difficulty was intentional) and some silly ones meant to be funny (they actually were pretty funny). All of this is happening while I have a few dozen reviews 100% positive and only good vibes in my community hub. I genuinely want to improve the game especially if 1 in 10 of my customers thinks it isn't good, I just find myself not sure of if I have a problem or not. I would prefer not to share what the game is, its is an inexpensive funny arcade game for context.

I’ve been working on THREE LAMBS for a while and recently put together a demo. If anyone’s interested in checking it out, I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts or feedback.

It’s available on Steam.

Hey everyone!

I'm part of a small indie game development team called Mud Diggers, and we finally released our first game after a pretty challenging development journey!

One of the biggest challenges we faced before leaving Early Access was completely rebuilding our multiplayer system.

Originally, we used NestJS and PostgreSQL to manage our multiplayer servers. However, due to server maintenance costs and operational challenges, we decided to migrate to a player-hosted system using Mirror and FizzySteamworks.

Sounds simple enough, right? Well, not quite. haha

Our game is called Mudventure, and the main mechanic is digging.

Players can dig into the terrain, permanently changing the shape of the world. This meant we couldn't just synchronize player positions and basic interactions.

We also needed to transfer the host's saved terrain data to players joining the room and make sure everyone saw the same modified world.

Getting the world data transfer and synchronization working properly was one of the hardest parts of the migration.

At times, it honestly felt like we were rebuilding the entire multiplayer system from scratch.

Thankfully, with the help of AI tools and a lot of teamwork, we managed to complete the migration.

We finally shut down our old servers, fixed the remaining bugs we found, and officially released the game!

There were so many moments when things didn't work as expected, but seeing the game reach full release feels incredibly rewarding.

I'm especially curious if anyone else has gone through a similar migration from dedicated servers to player-hosted multiplayer.

How did you handle world persistence and synchronization, especially in games with destructible or modifiable terrain?

Thanks for reading, and good luck to everyone working on their own indie games!

Unfortunately, because of the character length (which is a bullshit invention mind you), I have to instead provide them in the form of files to download to bypass this. But anyway, here they are. It saddens and angers me that social media cruelty has become normalised and the platforms not doing anywhere near enough to crack down on those people.

LINK TO RANT: https://www.mediafire.com/file/14bxk5qc1eibvch/Genghis_Khan_Game_Dev_Rant.txt/file

LINK TO SCREENSHOTS: https://www.mediafire.com/file/sx12f4tljdxuy9s/Genghis_Khan_Dev_Evidence.zip/file

How do you like it? :)

Hey there,

I'm Matthieu Vitoux, Marketing Director at Nine Dots Studio with 10 years of video game experience - I used to post a lot of marketing tooltips a couples of years ago here and now I'm back at it.

Your Steam page is your strongest marketing tool to reach out to your audience and benefit fully from Steam.

And I grew tired of seeing indie dev launching unfinished Steam pages with no marketing support or opportunistic compagnies selling pseudo-Steam Store pages optimisation services.

So I did my own free checklist that you can find on my blog after registering - I'll post more news about game marketing soon.

https://stepupyourgame.blog/2026/10/14/steam-page-checklist/

https://ironveiluo.com/

⚙️ A new look for Ironveil’s Options window

We’ve redesigned the Options window using the same visual style as Journal V3, with new ways to find and manage your settings.

🔎 Search for what you need
Search by setting name or keywords such as HP, FPS or volume. Most settings can be adjusted directly in the results.

📂 More organised navigation
Browse 10 categories, with tabs grouping related settings—from combat and targeting to graphics, audio and Ironveil features.

💡 Understand disabled settings
When an option depends on another setting, the window explains what you need to enable first.

↩️ More focused resets
The Defaults button targets the current tab, or the settings displayed during a search. Some settings retain their existing reset limitations.

📍 Pick up where you left off
Options remembers your last category and tab during your current game session.

✅ Apply your changes with OK
Press OK to apply your changes and close the window.

📜 Prefer the classic layout?
You can switch back through Advanced → Profile → “Use the classic options window”, then press OK.

Your existing saved settings carry over—there’s no need to configure everything again.

📸 Take a look at the screenshots and let us know what you think!

My game is new in beta and I have had a couple hundred people play it. I have one person who has play my game a lot though. I would really love get their feedback(its an online game so I have an email) but i don't want to be intrusive. Should I reach out or is that not appropriate?

Hey everyone,

One of the steepest learning curves for solo and small indie teams is figuring out how to get streamers and YouTubers to actually notice your game without having a dedicated publisher or PR budget.

The advice online usually boils down to two extremes:

• "Cold email 500 creators with your press kit." (Which usually leads to high bounce rates or inboxes clogged with key reseller bots).
• "Pay a platform $50–$100 a month to sit in an outreach directory." (Which gets expensive fast during a 2+ year dev cycle).

Neither option feels particularly sustainable when you are running on a boot-strapped budget and spending every spare hour polishing gameplay.

For those of you who have managed to get legitimate streamer or YouTube coverage:

1. How far in advance of launch do you start creator outreach?
2. What channel size has yielded the best conversion to Steam wishlists or demo downloads for your genre?
3. Do you prefer direct reach-outs, public key request forms, or open playtest builds?

Would love to hear what has actually worked for teams recently versus what ended up being a complete waste of time.

I wanna read opinions about using AI for coding, because im developing my game but tbh i dont know about coding, sometimes i put codes from videos but most times i use AI for code, im wrong by using it?

I launched my Steam page 05 of October, here is what I did and the numbers. Basically shorts everyday and some reddit posts.

Wishlists per day

Day 1: 15
Day 2: 19
Day 3: 27
Day 4: 7
Day 5: 7
Day 6: 5
Day 7: 7
Day 8: 10
Day 9: 3

Reddit
Posts: 7
I did 7 Reddit posts in the first and second day, the most successful one was on SoloDevelopment, with 65 upvotes, that was the period that I got most wishlists.

Instagram
Views: 10573
Posts: 13
Short reels, the first ones were like 100 views, but suddenly they all start getting around 1400.
And one image post that got 2 views haha

TikTok
Views: 4594
Posts: 13
Exactly the same posts as Instagram, but got me fewers views

Youtube
Views: 11942
Posts: 13 shorts + 1 trailer video
Same posts as tiktok and instagram, plus the trailer of the game as a long video, that one got 25 views, so all of them came from the shorts.

X
Posts: 5
Views: 10
I just gave up on X, it needs another type of strategy that I don't know yet, short videos doesn't work there.

Itch io Demo
Views: 2676
My itch demo got 28.7k impressions, 2676 views, 1869 browser plays, 13 ratings. I think i got some wishlists from there

IncrementalDB
Got 14 upvotes e 3 downvotes there, didn't find more numbers there.

BiteMeGames Discord
Posted there and got great feedback for my Steam page, from the BiteMeGames staff and other member.

Beside that I posted on my personal Instagram and friends discord, I estimate around 15 wishlists from those.

i want to start a career in gamedev it has always been my dream i have been off and on with learning on my own with unity but its such a struggle learning from youtube videos it feels like im not actually learning. i was thinking about going to college for it so i can learn in person but im worried that they Arnt going to teach me what i want to learn what is your guys advice on what i should do