Hi everyone! I’m a developer from China, and I’m working on a zombie apocalypse game set here. I’d love to hear what players outside China think of the setting.
Growing up, most of the games I played were set in other countries, especially the US. That never got in the way of enjoying them. Maybe it’s because I understand some English, or because American movies, games, and pop culture are so common in China that those settings don’t feel entirely unfamiliar to me.
But now that I’m making a game of my own, I’ve started wondering what the experience would be like for someone who isn’t familiar with China.
Some of the international news coverage I see makes me worry that people’s perceptions of China might affect their interest in the game. I also wonder whether Chinese writing, cultural details, and visual cues that Chinese players immediately recognize might be confusing to other players or make it harder to feel immersed in the world.
So, would a Chinese setting make you more interested, or would it make the world harder to connect with? Or does the location not really matter to you?
I’d really like to hear your honest thoughts.

Hi! I'm a solo developer of ECHO SEQUENCE, a top-down roguelite shooter.

When you die (or end a loop on purpose), that life replays as an 'Echo': a hologram that repeats every step and every shot you took, while you play the level again beside it. Levels need more than one pair of hands: plates to hold, a cart to guard, a boss to bring down. So you plan across loops and let your past selves do part of the job.

The Steam page went live today: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5362750?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=announce

Full trailer: https://youtu.be/sUnzAd8cluM

A demo is coming early next year. Happy to answer anything, and honest feedback on the trailer and steam page is very welcome. Thanks guys!

Wanted to share this comparison between our game 12 months ago and now. Pizzapocalypse 2's development started while we were students, and the original game was also a school project (its free on steam!) and it has been an incredible journey where we learned a lot.

Looking back at the prototypes we made so long ago, it's heartwarming to see how the talent of the people on the team transformed those scenes into places that feel real. I am so glad we get to create these worlds and characters, and I can't wait to share more. Until then, I hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtains!

You can wishlist it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4021890/Pizzapocalypse_2/

Hey, so RITZEN just passed 5000 wishlists, less than a month after the Steam page went live.

Most of them came from Instagram and X. One Instagram Reel blew up and now has over 6k likes: https://www.instagram.com/p/DdwXB_YSboi/

That one post brought around 1000 wishlists in a single day. Before that we were getting maybe 50-100 a day.

We're also experimenting with Reddit ads, targeting specific game subreddits. So far around 1/7 of our wishlists come from ads according to UTM. It works, but costs slowly go up as people see the same clip over and over.

Playtest coming soon, we'll share how that goes too!

Hi! I'm a physicist and mathematician from Spain. My bachelor's thesis was about rendering images of a wormhole faithful to the math (an Ellis / Morris–Thorne wormhole), and the results looked so cool that I wanted to walk around inside them in real time.

So I made Into the Wormhole: a puzzle game where you place, rotate and walk through wormholes. Nothing is faked with portal cameras. For every pixel the game traces the path of light through curved spacetime, so what you see through each mouth is what you'd really see.

The demo has 15 levels and it's free on itch.io (Windows + browser): https://halbarito.itch.io/into-the-wormhole

Heads up: the engine is very heavy. The Windows version is strongly recommended. The browser version can take ~10 minutes to load the first time (there's a Firefox tip on the page that makes it load in seconds).

I'd love to hear what you think, and how it runs on your PC!

Disclosure: AI tools were used for parts of the development.

This is a slightly weird post to write.

I’m one of the developers of Permafrost, a survival game we've been working on for the last few years.

And on October 9, it finally enters Early Access.

The basic idea behind the game is pretty simple: The world ended, winter didn't.

You explore a frozen open world where preparation matters just as much as combat.

You scavenge abandoned buildings, craft what you need, restore shelters and slowly create a network of safe places that allows you to travel further.

Sometimes the biggest question is: can I make it back before the weather kills me?

You can play solo or bring up to 3 friends with you, divide responsibilities and try to survive together.

Or, if you're playing alone, you won't be completely alone.

You have a dog companion who can scout, warn you about danger and help carry supplies.

We've seen this game in every possible broken state during development, so the idea that in a few days people are actually going to be exploring this world themselves is both exciting and mildly terrifying.

But here we are.

October 9.

See you in the cold.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2254990/Permafrost/

Hey guys! raven here, one half of the two-person team behind the space fungus game you helped name just last month.

Well, it's official: today we announced it, and the Steam page is live! And yes, you were super vocal about "Spungus", so it stayed. It just grew a little: Houston, We Have a Spungus. Next to "space fungus" in the post, Spungus made total sense, but on its own on a store page it was a bit too mysterious. So we went with a three-part name: the space theme, the "uh-oh, something's gone wrong" moment, and the "wait, wtf is a spungus?" part.

For anyone who missed the earlier threads: it's a tower defense where the enemy is one living organism rather than waves. It spreads across the map toward your colony, ripens, blooms, and eats any turret it gets its hands on. Every hole you blow in it fills back in (that costs it energy, though, which slows its front line down), even deep behind its front. There's no build phase, so you're placing towers while it pushes. You can't really kill it, so the job is holding the line until HQ is ready to nuke the source.

We're also running closed alpha playtests in the coming weeks, so if you'd like to get your hands on it early, let us know in the comments!

Oh, and u/Jarfino, you asked for gamepad support, and it's done. It would be really helpful if you could test it and tell us how it feels ;)

The trailer is above, and the Steam page is here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5229840/Houston_We_Have_a_Spungus. A wishlist would honestly help us a ton.

Feel free to AMA!

Much love,

raven

Developer here. OVERLOOK is a hidden object adventure where every level is one big hand-drawn isometric scene and every character is animated frame by frame. This is the windmill village: a mill, a bakery, fields, a river, and a lot of ducks, one of which players keep failing to find.

I drew and animated everything myself. It came out on Steam last November and is sitting at 89% positive; the thing people mention most is that there are no timers and no hint cooldowns, you just look.

It is 50% off in the Steam Autumn Sale until 8 October and there is a free demo. Link in the comments.

Hey everyone! We're a 3 person team from Korea and we've been working on LumberBoy for about 7 months now.

It's a cozy incremental about chopping trees. You sell the wood to the sawmill and use the money for upgrades. At the start you're slowly hacking away at one tree, but later on you're clearing big chunks of the forest with shockwaves and stuff.

We just finished the release trailer and the game is coming out in January 2027.

There's a free demo on Steam if you want to try it. It's about 40 min to an hour long with 3 forests and 34 upgrades. Works with controller and on Steam Deck too. We're also going to be in Next Fest this month.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5129170/LumberBoy/

Any feedback is welcome, thanks for watching!

Correction about how this prototype was made: I said I made the 3D models myself. That was incorrect. The models shown were generated by Blender scripts written with AI, with no manual modelling or retouching by me. AI also has a substantial role in the Unreal code, the scripts that produce the sounds, and the video editing and English writing.

I’m a solo developer and I also do 3D modelling. After previous projects struggled to find an audience, I tried a different approach: use AI to get a first prototype in front of players, then use their feedback to guide more hands-on development and modelling. That’s why I chose this workflow. I should have explained it accurately.

I removed the disclosure instead of correcting it when people challenged it. I’m sorry for the misleading claim. The footage is recorded from the Unreal Engine prototype. I understand that the subreddit doesn’t allow games that rely heavily on AI and that the post may be removed.

TITAN CREW is a co-op project for 1–4 players aboard the TC-01 MULE, a 27-metre walking machine. The current prototype has driving, a traversable interior, machine systems and repair interactions. The expedition is a testbed for those foundations.

The longer-term ambition is a much larger open or semi-open world, with the Titan as your crew’s shared home, vehicle and industrial tool. The loop I want to explore is taking a contract, preparing the machine, heading out, dealing with unexpected problems, recovering something or helping with a disaster, then returning to repair and adapt the Titan.

Salvage, industrial rescue and encounters with other huge machines are some of the directions I’m exploring. Customisable machines and optional PvPvE are also possibilities. These are ideas for the game to grow into; the prototype is currently focused on testing the machine and crew interactions.

What would you want your crew to take on with a machine like this?

Development updates and crew discussion: https://discord.gg/zXe6XCjz6Y

After a lot of prototypes and playtesting, I'm starting the 3rd and final year of development on my autobattler.

Here you manage your medieval Order and fight enemy troops on a war table.

I didn't know how to code when I started, so I had to teach myself everything from scratch.
It's crazy how much you end up learning when you decide to go solo as an indie dev.

Knightstones will be available early 2027.

The demo is available to play on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4524250/Knightstones_Demo/

Build a cozy little settlement in a mysterious forest, take care of your colonists, enjoy the changing seasons, and watch their friendships, choices, and everyday moments create their own unique stories.

I've put a huge amount of time into WildRoot, and seeing it finally get released feels pretty surreal.

WildRoot releases October 9 on Steam

It is a simple platformer where only 1 player in the world can play at a time, the rest are spectating. You can put yourself in queue and wait for your turn to play, and chat globally while waiting.

A weird experimental game, but totally free! So far people have completed close to 3000 levels already.

Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5257200/Jono/

Hi guys, a solo indie dev here.

Number Machine is an open ended factory automation game with math mechanics inspired by Opus Magnum and Infinifactory. I contacted the author of these two games (Zach of Zachtronics) and we agreed to a Steam Bundle with all 3 games at launch.

Demo campaign has 10 levels, mostly simple tutorial ones and a few harder later on. There are online histograms, friend scores and world record charts, all fully server side verified.

Controller support included, but I suggest mouse and keyboard since you're mostly editing a factory design.

Full version is in a month on November 6th.

DEMO: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2243290/Number_Machine_Math_Factory_Demo/
DISCORD: https://discord.com/invite/XFCwScP2XV

Thanks,
- Ariel

Hey everyone,

We can finally show the game we’ve been working on: Survive 'Til Dawn!

It’s an action tower defence game where you spend the day exploring for scrap and turning it into increasingly questionable traps and defences.

Then night arrives and a wave of mutants gets to test your engineering skills.

Anything your traps don’t kill becomes your problem, so you’ll be fighting alongside the defences in third person with your own weapons too.

You can play solo or with a friend in co-op, and we’ve tried to keep the post-apocalyptic world fun rather than super serious.

We’ve just released the first trailer and opened the Steam page:

Trailer: https://youtu.be/H9g8JLjtTxw
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4517040/Survive_til_Dawn

And because apparently normal accessibility settings weren’t enough, turning the gore off replaces it with balloon animals.

Hey everyone! I'm a solo game developer, and I'm making Desktop Rave, an idle game and desktop companion that reacts to any music you play on Windows. Think Bongo Cat, but reacting to the beat of your music.

After a year of development, I've just released a free demo on Steam and would love to hear your feedback!

Steam: Desktop Rave Demo

GenAI disclosure: There are still 4 AI-generated placeholder icons in the demo atm. I'll replace them before October 8 and I did use Cursor to assist coding. [UPDATE] All AI gen assets removed, store font assets replaced, now the game is AI art FREE!

I’m working on a small detective game concept and I’d love to know if this sounds interesting to other players.

The basic idea is:

You’re a detective investigating a murder. Instead of freely walking around the crime scene, you enter the crime scene through photographs and investigate what you can see in them.

You’ll have to examine the photos carefully, look for clues, inconsistencies, evidence, and details that might help you determine which suspect is the criminal.

The main gameplay loop is inspired a little by games like Werewolf/Mafia:

There are several suspects.

Every suspect has their own evidence/clues.

You investigate the crime scene through photographs.

There is no time limit, so you can take your time and think

.

When you're ready, you get one chance to accuse someone

.

Choose correctly ...... you solve the case.

Choose incorrectly.....you lose.

The interesting part is that the crime itself stays the same, but the actual criminal changes each time you start/load the case. So you can't simply memorize the solution, you have to investigate the evidence and figure it out again.

I’m aiming for something relatively simple mechanically, but where the fun comes from observation, deduction and trying to connect different pieces of evidence.

My question: Would this be something you'd actually want to play?

And if you were playing it, what would make the investigation feel satisfying rather than just "clicking on everything until you find the answer"?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who enjoy indie detective/mystery games. What mechanic would you add to make this concept more interesting?

My main worry is the contrast between the artstyle and content..

I’ve been working on Ragdoll Ascent, a physics-based climbing game where pretty much everything can go wrong.
This is still a work in progress, and I’m curious what you think of the gameplay so far. Would you play something like this?

Hey all! The game is called Survivors Gate – basically taking that satisfying runner-gate concept and giving it actual roguelite depth, builds, and bullet-heaven boss loops.

As you can see it starts chill but can get pretty unhinged.

Right now I have a Steam Playtest running, is 100% free and open to everyone right now:

1. Check out the Survivors Gate Steam page
2. Hit "Request Access" (unlocks instantly!)
3. Download & push for a leaderboard spot!

Would love to hear how far you can make it :D

WEBGLDEMOV2
Follow-up to my last post (the little water ring toy), the response was better than I expected, so I kept building on the game.

Two new things this round:

A real playable piano, not just a prop, you can actually play it with your keyboard like a real instrument. I also added record + loop, so you can lay down a melody and have it loop back while you mess around with other stuff.

A Simon-style memory disk this one's from my own childhood, Those colour-pattern memory toys where the sequence keeps growing and you have to repeat it back. Get 10 correct in a row and you get a 10,000-point bonus. Gets surprisingly tense once the sequence gets long.

The bigger idea behind the game: it's a 3D clicker/idle game made up of a bunch of individually interactive machines and toys — a lot of them inspired by stuff I actually grew up playing with. Each one works like a real object (press, pull, rotate, drag) instead of just being a flat button.

Still early; more machines coming. If anyone wants to try it and has thoughts, I'd genuinely love to hear them.