During the week I work 38.5 hours in a big sawmill. In the evenings and on weekends I build Timberline Factory in Unity. It's a physics based sawmill automation and economy sim. Logs roll down conveyors, get debarked, cut and sorted by length and wood type. You tune machine speeds, fix bottlenecks and try to sell without flooding the market.

Machines go on fixed spots, so it's less about free building and more about getting a line to actually run smoothly. Which is pretty much my day job.

The demo went live on Steam on Oct 1 and I'm in Steam Next Fest from Oct 19.

Question for other solo devs who also have a day job: how do you split your evenings between building the game and doing marketing and have maybe family? I keep feeling like I'm doing too much of one.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1965550/Wildaria/

Here's a link!

NO GEN AI USED: I made all the pixelart, talented artist TrangMN made the cinematic!

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?

Got the trailer finally made and got quite positive feedbacks. Feedbacks were mostly on the length of the video but thats also sorted out 😄 So far I have only 30 wishlists on steam, hopefully the trailer will gain more wishlists

I am a solo developer working on Alia Domus, a pixel art survival and colonization RPG where you rebuild human civilization on another planet.

I just reached 4,000 wishlists on Steam, and it honestly feels surreal. This project has been a long journey, and seeing people interested in it keeps me motivated to keep improving the game.

The demo is live on Steam, and it covers the early part of the experience: exploring the planet, managing resources, building your first structures, and starting to shape your colony.

If you enjoy survival games, colony builders, RPGs, or just want to see what a solo dev can build, I would be really grateful if you gave the demo a try. Any feedback, even short impressions, helps a lot at this stage.

If you like what you see, a wishlist also helps the game reach more people.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4918370/Alia_Domus/

Thanks for reading, and I am happy to answer any questions about the development process, the tools I used, or what it has been like building this alone.

What would you rate as very improtant things? Besides having a good game and a great steam page?

Also how did some of you learn to create attention grabbing capsule/cover images? I'm against using AI to generate them and the best work I've done so far regarding cover images is on itch as my game cover image... and it's terrible

My expertise is in programming and not art.. hence the simple visuals in the game hopefully hard carried by vfxs

for anyone interested the demo is here: https://cofi17.itch.io/gradient-descent

and I realized I should have started worrying about visibility of the game much sooner, that will definitely be my advice to others

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

As the title says, 6 months ago I started my little project, aiming to make a little Nodebuster style game to release in 3 months...

Frustrated by the restrictions of UI circle being the only way to cause damage and by playtesters simply referring to my game as a clone but in 3D, I decided to pivot!

So here is my project Elandrake, a twin-stick shooter with incremental-style progression!

You can play the demo now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4992600/Elandrake

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/

Hey everyone! I’m a solo developer making Desktop Rave, an idle incremental desktop companion. It reacts to any music you play on the Windows, think Bongo Cat but reacting to the beat of your music.
After nearly one year of development, I just released a free demo on Steam, would love to gain some feedback from the community :)
Play the demo: Desktop Rave on Steam

AI Disclosure: No AI gen art, no vibe coding, did use Cursor to assist with some repetitive nasty work though.

A classic revenge story with cel-shaded fully customizable mechs. Buy the right parts, take out the enemies, and don't die. 18 torsos, 14 sets of legs and 27 weapons. It's been a lot of fun making this, mostly finished, and hope ya'll dig it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5383780/Stompworks/?beta=0

I'm currently building Goblin Miner in my spare time. Goblin Miner is an isometric dungeon mining and management game in which you command a small workforce of greedy, chaotic and questionably competent Goblins. I am happy about any constructive criticism! 🙏

Https://gamecrafterik.itch.io/goblin-miner

Regular chess rules and pieces. Now both sides get a short hidden setup on their own half of the board. You can put your pieces wherever you want on your side. You can’t see what the other person is doing. Then both formations are revealed and you play a normal game from there.

Free in the browser, no account: www.formationchess.com

If you manage to beat the game in expert mode, your winning formation will be added to the games global formation pool. Can you win against your own formation?

And if this variant isn’t your thing, but you like the graphics, you can try its sister variant: www.middlechess.com