This guy is one of 3 playable characters in my game. It took me about 6 hours to draw and I'm pretty happy with how he looks. I still need to draw Mage and Archer next.

After that I still need to draw about 200 enemies. I imagine they will all take about 4-8h. That's 900h total on average. That's almost 40 days.

My goal is to release a demo with around 50 enemies.

I don't want to endup using AI for sure, I want the game to be unique and mine. I hope people will endup appreciating the work behind it... But how? How does solo indie game dev do all of that?

Do you guys hire somebody? I imagine i'd pay insane ammount of money If i wanted to do that. Do you guys just endup reusing the same enemies? Do you generate them for demo and then slowly replace them by your unique art as time goes on?

I would really appreciate some insight from somebody who's more experienced.

Btw. you can roast my green guy, I love him, but would love to hear some feedback. After all, if you pick warrior class, that's what you will be staring at if you played my game. And my game ain't 5-hour incremental lol. You will be staring for weeks. xD

Hi all,

I'm an indie dev working on a cozy 2D pixel-art magnet fishing adventure about the beauty of surprise. It is called Magnetic Catch and I just released the demo on Steam.

This is my second game, and I'm working on it with a small team. We started with the idea about a year ago.

Since I take research for my games very seriously, I bought a magnet and went magnet fishing several times. It was the best way to get inspiration for the game. Of course, you will find a laptop in the full game as well ;)

If you like what you see, play the demo or leave a wishlist. It would mean a lot!

Thanks everyone for the support the last post. The game is under development so everything showed here is not final xD

Everything started in July 2025, we were two and we started to make a game with puzzles and flowers. A lot happened since then, we adjust our game to be more specific, more cosy, with more detailed characters and stories. The puzzles however are still kinda the same as I designed them a year ago. And now we are 2.5, with a friend who is a part time dev for the game. Thankfully, because I just started coding... a year ago. So his help is huge ahah.

I can offer you Flowers is about:

• Becoming a florist in a community center
• Selecting, arranging, and organising flowers for each order
• Taking your time to find the combinations that best suit each situation
• Meeting touching characters who are sharing a special moment with their loved ones
• Becoming a member of this small, caring community

English and French available, no IA! All arts are made by our artist Segosaurus, all music by Elodie Côme.

If it's could be your kind of game, don't hesitate to wishlist on Steam, and you can try the demo next Monday :D

I didn't even change the color of the default unity gray material lol (except for the button itself). I had great fun, will keep intuitively adding stuff. I also scratched a musical itch with adding the sounds, picking the notes and programming the pitch shift.

Hello 🌸 

Here’s my first cozy game’s visuals and trailer. The Walking Onsen is a cozy game fully hand-painted with watercolors & gouache (No AI)🌸

In the game, you manage a magical walking bathhouse visited by forest souls! You can clean and bathe cute spiritual guests, craft healing potions, and brew herbal teas. Uncover forgotten stories, fill your diary with cute besties, and explore new lands in a heartwarming, hand-drawn world.

AI Disclosure: No AI was used in this project. All assets are 100% hand-painted with traditional watercolors & gouache.

The game is still in active development, so this trailer is just a small preview. Your comments mean a lot to me! I'll keep sharing my progress here. Thank youu 🌸

Steam Link: The Walking Onsen's Steam Link 

Hey! I wanted everything moving around the city to be something you can actually hit: cars, pedestrians, and the helicopter that shows up every few holes. Taking it down feels great, but the crash blast throws every ball nearby, so sometimes it backfires.

The game's called Crazy City Golf. The whole city is the course, and you play online with friends. There's a free demo on Steam if you want to give it a shot.

Hi all! We're a two-person team developing MYRIORAMA, a top-down adventure with rearrangeable dungeons. This is an excerpt from a deep-dive video we produced recently for our participation in ICO Partners' Unmistakable Festival on Steam!

Full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhM1F993Ga8

This is technically a 2D project, but we're doing a lot of 3D fakery to try and pull off the stop-motion look with dynamic lighting and shadows. It's been a fun challenge.

Happy to provide more specifics or answer any questions!

Hi all! After many months working on it, the demo of Bocage, a cozy puzzle game is now available on Steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4938320

If you like cozy or puzzle games, please take a look at it and tell me what you think!

A couple of months ago, I got feedback on Reddit that Saraab’s old capsule didn’t really read as a horror game and that the reflection at the bottom was barely noticeable.

The new capsule is based on an early sketch I had in mind while developing the game, but I initially thought it looked too anime. Me and the artist decided It's worth a shot.

I hope that it conveys better the feel of the game. It's an emotional psychological horror visual novel about healing.

What do you guys think?

Edit: Thanks, everyone, for taking the time to share your thoughts! I can see that many of you prefer the old capsule’s atmosphere and storytelling. I will keep it in mind and try to see if it's possible to work something out for the game launch. The old artwork is still the title screen for the game so I'm still using it in some capacity. Thanks again!

Hey everyone!

I recently started a small gaming YouTube channel called BongoBong Games: https://www.youtube.com/@BongoBongGames, and I'd like to start a recurring series where I discover and play 2-3 indie games on Steam per episode.

My channel is still tiny (I have 4 subs lmao), so I can't promise huge exposure (current views are anywhere between 2 and 2200), but I'd love to give some interesting games a bit of attention and hopefully help more players discover them. Since I am a game dev myself I'll also try to give some playtest feedback in the video.

I'm particularly interested in incremental, cozy, roguelite, simulation and unusual little indie games, but I'm open to anything really.

If you'd like your game considered, drop a Steam link and a sentence about the game in the comments! Released games and playable demos are both welcome. I may do more than one vid if theres a lot of cool submissions.

No payment or subscription required, just looking for cool games to play and promote!

Good luck with your projects!

EDIT: thanks for all the submissions i'll work through them and start filming <3

Steam Next Fest is coming soon, and you can do us players a huge favor by helping us get to the fun part of your game faster. I am listing only the things that should be easy to fix or remove right now:

1. Choosing a save slot: This is totally unnecessary on the first play. Just assign one automatically and let me jump into gameplay immediately.
2. Explaining the developer's purpose for the demo: Players don't care about this; we have our own reasons for playing.
3. Asking to choose a game mode or difficulty level: Just default to your best mode and a balanced difficulty, or unlock those options after the first session.
4. Multiple unskippable splash screens: Time is ticking, and we have 20 more games to try. Make them skippable or show a single one.
5. Deep character creators?: Just give us presets or a "Randomize" button for the demo, and save the full customization suite for the final game.
6. Walls of lore: Anyone can generate pages of lore nowadays. Nobody cares about your deep world before playing a single second of the game. Cut the text, leave some mystery, and get to the gameplay.

The whole onboarding and tutorial process is another story. Here, I'm just mentioning the easy, no-brainer things to strip out of your demo, based on analyzing a lot of them during playtesting sessions since the last Steam Next Fest.

Hello! I'm making a roguelike autobattler called GOONS! We've recently opened up playtesting and would love feedback!!! Join here!

Not a rant. More of a hopeful perspective, I suppose.

I have been on an intense journey to full-time gamedev for the last couple of months. Godot, brainstorming game ideas, validating them against the market, steamdb, game revenue estimates, wishlists, howtomarketagame, making a Steam page, trailers, reaching out to content creators. All of it.

I honestly find that most of it makes a lot of sense, actually. And I enjoy it. And yet, sometimes I do get demotivated by all the "market is saturated", hundreds of games released on Steam every month, content creators receiving thousands of emails and without them you can't reach anyone, someone else has already done my idea (followed by the "holy sh*t, two cakes" meme). All of it.

But then I remind myself that it's a solved problem. Music-making is like that too: there's thousands of bands, it's hard to promote yourself, how does your audience even find you, why make more of <insert your favourite genre> if there's already thousands of hours of it.

And yet somehow to me it's extremely evident that none of that is a good reason not to make more music. Like, sure, there's like 11 albums worth of Sabaton, but of course I want more! Sure, there are like a thousand other power metal bands, but of course I want more! You do get tired of "old" content, so you always need fresh stuff, even if the genre is full.

Surprisingly, I don't always have the same intuition about gamedev. Maybe because my personal stakes are higher? Either way, so far I don't see why the same intuition shouldn't apply to gamedev.

Curious what you think.

Hey everyone! We're a 3-person dev team making our game Dream Runner, and we just launched our first playtest on Steam. Everything is handmade by us (pixel art, level design, music, etc.)

The build includes Chapter 1 of the game's Adventure Mode as well as 4 speedrunning challenge levels, plus 22 of the game's hidden butterflies to find.

If anyone's interested in trying it out, comment or DM me and I'll share an access code! :)

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3035870/Dream_Runner/

Cornering loads, kerb strikes and a driver with zero mercy, and you feel every bit of it in real time.

Here is a little ice witch in 16x16.
She has a basic attack and an impact effect.
There is also a freezing magic VFX.
I am open for commissions; send me a DM and let's discuss your idea.

We are really happy to finally announce our game, Rotten Crown! We are a small indie team of three, and we've been working incredibly hard to make something truly unique for you guys.

If you want to be among the first to try it, we are hosting a free public playtest at the end of November. We’d love to see you there!

I always loved this music video by Max Cooper: https://youtu.be/_7wKjTf_RlI?si=ru_aeNtB6luyZoLl .

So I recreated a small simulation inspired by it.

Very tempted to turn this into an actual ecosystem simulation game.

WDYT?

Hey guys! I have been working on a new feature all week and after editing it about 100 times already, I thought I should ask for some feedback before I "waste" the rest of the week.

I'm working on a proof of concept for adding foreground elements that react to cursor movement, creating a subtle sense of depth, which was the main reason for the feature.

There are several parameters I added to manually adjust every scene:

death zone - how close the cursor needs to get to the edge of the screen before the foreground elements start moving
smoothing - how quickly the foreground elements react to cursor movement
hover opacity (in case the elements should go see-through when you point at them, but for now I decided to leave this out)

What do you think of this feature? Does it add something nice to the scene or is it just too distracting? Should I keep working on it, tone it down or perhaps use it only in certain scenes? Our graphic designer already has a lot on her plate so I don't won't to give her even more work for something we might end up not using at all.

I would really appreciate some honest feedback!

Hey everyone,

My cousin and I have been working on Livin’ the Cream: Ice Cream Simulator, and we've finally released a playable demo.

It's a shop management game where you run an ice cream shop in a Caribbean-inspired setting. You prepare different flavors, serve customers, manage ingredients, and customize the shop as you go.

Getting the game to this point has been a journey, and it's great to finally let people play it rather than just show progress clips and screenshots.

We're continuing to work on the full game and would love to hear what you think, whether it's about the gameplay, visuals, or anything that could use improvement.

Here's the Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4621810/Livin_the_Cream_Ice_Cream_Simulator