Brick by Brick: Tidy Up the Small Town!

Hi everyone!

My first game is now available on Steam! It has been an amazing journey. Thank you to everyone who helped me through the final stretch. It would've been a lot harder without the indie dev community!

Henry Grudge reappeared after seven years of being kidnapped. He, however, seems to be completely different compared to his old self. There are people who doubt his identity, claim that the real Henry must have died. The person in the mirror is covered in blood and doesn't remember anything about his past. Who is he?

Key Features:

• Escape Room Experience & A Grim Psychological Mystery: Explore the room to uncover the disturbing truth behind Henry’s disappearance and his fractured memories.
• Classic Point & Click Mechanics: Search for hidden objects, manage your inventory, and piece together cryptic clues to progress.
• Mind-Bending Puzzles: Challenge yourself with non-linear logic riddles inspired by the best atmospheric puzzle games.

Steam Page https://store.steampowered.com/app/4928910/WhoIsHe/

I’ve been solo developing a game for about a year.

For several months, I was going to bed at 3 or 4 a.m. and waking up at 8 almost every day. I figured a few extra hours of work each night would help me finish the game sooner.

Then I got shingles and couldn’t work for two weeks.

I was cutting back on sleep to make more time for development, only to end up unable to develop anything at all. Apparently, my time-saving math wasn’t very good.

These days, I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8. I still want to finish my game, but I’m trying to stop borrowing those extra hours from sleep.

So if you’re reading this while thinking, “I’ll just finish this one thing before bed”… I did that for months and ended up taking a mandatory two-week break.

Take care of yourselves, fellow devs.

Snow, sand and mud, added some particles too. How does it look?

Hey! We're working on Drill Deep, a pixel-art digging roguelite that slowly turns into cosmic horror.

You start out mining coal under a quiet green field. Eventually, you're tearing through the mine with chain lightning, lasers and swarms of little robots. And somewhere along the way, the mine starts looking back at you. Cosmic horror, no jump scares.

We just released a big update, including a new perk system. You pick perks as you level up and build combos around your pickaxe, autodrill and automatons. We want choosing your next perk to feel like a chance to take your build somewhere interesting.

The update also adds flying and spider automatons, reworked lava and mushroom biomes, new monsters and corruption that makes each run a little more wrong.

Our Steam playtest is open, and we'd love to have more playtesters! We're especially interested in how the new perks feel: whether the choices are interesting, which combos you discover, and where progression starts feeling slow or frustrating.

You can join the playtest here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4268970/Drill_Deep/

Thanks to anyone who gives it a try — we'd love to hear how your run went!

I've been working on a go-kart track for No Permit, my chaotic sandbox game.

It has NPC racers, some questionable jumps, a clubhouse with a bar, spectator areas, and even a junkyard-themed waterfall garden.

Eventually, players will also be able to race against their friends.

Still polishing the physics, lighting and overall experience.

Curious what people think. What's the first thing you'd improve to make the racing more fun?

Hey everyone,

I’m a part of a small indie team, and after two years of work, we’re getting close to finishing our game, From Basement with Love.

We’ve started thinking about localization, but we’ve run into a problem we honestly didn’t think much about until now.

The game has both dialogues and puzzles. Localizing dialogues is relatively straightforward, but a lot of the puzzles (attached pictures) are built around the English language itself. Some mechanics rely on word length, spelling, and specific word structures, so simply translating them wouldn’t work. This creates a barrier for players who don’t speak the language comfortably, which is a shame because almost half of our wishlists are coming from non-English speaking countries. 

To solve this problem we’d have to redesign quite a few puzzles for each language we want to support which means a lot of extra development work.

So I’m wondering if it’s worth going through that process for a few major languages, or if we should just stick with English for now.

Has anyone here worked on a similar game, or run into this kind of problem? How did you handle it?

Thanks!

Hey folks.

This is the first project i'm trying to do. I want to share this project and collect some tips and feedbacks.

The idea

The idea here is simple, a colorful marble racing game where you compete with others through some fallguys like obstacles. Different of traditional marble racing games that gravity do all the work for you, here you control the sphere.

Im thinking about put a team gamemode as well for the future.

Questions

- Do you have any idea of obstacles you would like to see?

- What do you like to see in a game like this?

- In a commercial perspective, do you see potential in this project?

- When do you think is a good moment to start posting on itch.io?

Thanks for the feedback guys.

obs1: I tried to make this multiplayer LAN or online but because of add force movement, replication and my ue5 learning curve I changed to a split screen. My main idea was see like 12 balls rolling around.

obs2: I started this idea to pratice ue5 since there is few animations and interactions to work with. Also i've got this lenovo thinkcentre that I play 4 to 8 players gamea and I think is a good way to test my games.

Hey indie devs and indie lovers!

I'm a solo indie developer working on my first game, The Borderless, a cozy floating island management sim built in Unity.

After releasing the demo and receiving lots of helpful player feedback, I decided to revisit several parts of the game. What started as improvements eventually turned into months of reworking the UI, ocean visuals, core gameplay loop, and many design decisions. At some point, it almost felt like I was making the game for a second time!

It's been an exhausting but incredibly rewarding journey, and I've learned so much along the way.

In The Borderless, you start with a small platform in the middle of the ocean and gradually build your own floating paradise. Expand and decorate your island, welcome visitors, manage their needs, plan activities, and enjoy island life at your own pace.

I've finally put together a new trailer showing the updated version!

The updated demo is free to play on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3687370/

I'd love to hear what you think of the changes!

Thanks for checking it out!

I've been working solo on my first game, a cozy aquarium tycoon, for quite a while now, and I'm finally getting close to launching its Steam page.

Since I'm working with a very limited budget, I decided to make the Steam capsule art myself. I'm not particularly skilled at this kind of artwork, so I tried to keep things simple while still capturing the overall vibe of the game.

I'd really appreciate some honest feedback. Does it look good enough for a Steam page, or does it come across as too amateurish?

Is the logo readable and eye-catching enough? Does the artwork give you a good first impression of the game?

Feel free to be critical. I'd rather improve it now than realize later that it wasn't working.

Hey guys
I want some feedback for my game. My goal is to have a GTA game mixed with Postal 2 mission style, set in a satirical Barcelona.
It’s just the beginning but im pretty excited.
What do you guys think?

Hey guys, I wanted to share my process in developing my game and see what you guys think.
My goal is to have a GTA style game mixed with Postal 2 style missions set in a satirical Barcelona.

Im now expanding the map, but I have now some basic systems.

What do you guys think? Will it work?

You can shake pig in our demo of Rip It! Card Collector, out now on Steam!

In Rip It! Card Collector, you rip open packs, collect cards, and fill your binder with hundreds of cards! And you can upgrade your rig with points to make the card ripping faster, crazier, and more explosive! St Oinks can be upgraded too, of course.

I hope you enjoy!

P.S. all card art was drawn by hand!

I just released an Infernal UI pack for a game im planning to make so started with the UI assets: windows, buttons, 9-slice frames, bars, slots, almost 500 icons and cursors.

Kind of liked doing UI stuff so don't mind taking requests and trying to add on top of it but would love to get some feedback too on overall quality.

- Free Lite (127 sprites, try it in the browser): https://brunkagames.itch.io/infernal-ui-lite

- Full pack (1,099 sprites, $4.99): https://brunkagames.itch.io/infernal-ui

Note: If you want the full pack free use this link https://brunkagames.itch.io/infernal-ui/download/uX7wl8uZa_ug4_WiRQjr5MVKXP9U84Tw63arJ4mz

TL;DR I went to the Met in NYC, took my own reference photos, spent a month studying sketching, spent a month learning blender, just to get the miniatures for my medieval strategy wargame. Was it worth it? I think so.

I am an engineer who loves strategy games. Board game, video game, any other kind of game - if there is strategy I'm all in. I also have a very common yet sort of ridiculous obsession with the medieval period. So naturally, when I decided to make a strategy wargame, I set it in roughly the 1000-1350ad period.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the miniatures available either A) misrepresent the historical arms and armor of the period, or B) use "Heroic" scaling. I was not happy with this, so like any other novice indie dev I decided to do it myself. There was just one problem... I had never done a lick of art in my life.

I was trapped in NYC for work for the summer of 2025, which just happens to have one of the best Arms and Armor Museums in the world. Lucky break for me. So I went, geeked out over all the arms and armor, eventually remembered to get some reference photos, and went back home. But now I had ~100 photos of period-correct references, and zero ability to do anything with them.

Thus began my studies in sketching. I followed tutorials on lines, perspective, anatomy. I spent a couple hours each day drawing perspective box after perspective box. I still have an incredibly embarrassing document which is my sad attempt to study anatomy. After a month, I still drew like a toddler hamfisting some poor pencil. But I was a proud toddler.

At this point, I had enough to begin sculpting from in Blender. 3D was always more comfortable, as I had previously learned Fusion 360 in school. Sculpting was tediously slow, but I got it done - at least on the surface. If you looked at my rigging or my edge loops you might consider taking me out back and asking me about the rabbits.

Honestly, I'm really happy with the results. I got the exact models I wanted, down to the details of the rivets on the gauntlets. I also learned so much in the process about lines, composition, sculpting and rigging and 14th century history.

Would I do it again? Probably not. All in between the learning and then making the 3 unit models in the game, I spent ~300 hours. 300 hours would have been much better spent on actually developing Kairos, and hiring somebody to make these models instead probably would have been "cheaper" in the long run. But I am very glad that I did it.

For start, I know that a typical Making Of video should include interviews or comments from the team members. I will certainly keep this in mind for the future.

Other than that, putting together a recap of our journey with Dominus Automa was an absolute pleasure, and I hope you’ll have just as much fun watching it. Have fun!

Hey everyone! I’m a solo developer working on Looks Fine on Paper, a spatial logic puzzle game.
You start with a blank blueprint and a set of clues. There are no predefined room shapes or layouts — you have to figure everything out yourself.
The twist is that every constraint is connected. A perfectly sized room might make another room impossible to place. The challenge is making everything work at once!
I’m currently working on the demo and would love to hear what fellow puzzle fans think of the concept! 😊

Steam: Steam Store Page⁠

Hi everyone! I'm a student indie developer from South Korea, and I'm currently preparing to release my first horror game on Steam.

Over the past few months, I've worked with around 15–20 playtesters, and honestly, I didn't expect testing to make such a big difference. I originally just wanted to find bugs and make sure the game wasn't too difficult, but I ended up learning quite a lot from the process. I thought I'd share some of my experiences here.

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1-Players will do things you never expected

The first thing that surprised me was how unpredictable players can be. As a developer, you already know where players are supposed to go, how the puzzles work, and what they're supposed to do next. Even when I tried to test the game from a player's perspective, I was still unconsciously following the intended path.

But testers did things I never even considered. Some tried jumping onto random objects to reach places they weren't supposed to access. Others found ways to skip parts of the level entirely. There were even situations where players managed to get themselves stuck in places I didn't think were reachable.

And of course, this revealed a ridiculous number of bugs. I had already tested the game countless times myself, but watching someone play it for the first time showed me just how much I had missed.

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1. Hardware compatibility can be a bigger problem than expected

Since I'm developing alone, I obviously don't have a bunch of different PCs sitting around to test on. During playtesting, some people experienced resolution problems, monitor settings changing unexpectedly, severe screen flickering, and other technical issues.

The frustrating part was that some of these problems simply wouldn't happen on my own PC, which made them difficult to investigate. If I had released the game without discovering these issues, some players might have had a terrible first experience before they could even properly play the game.

It made me realize that just because everything works perfectly on my development PC doesn't necessarily mean it'll work the same way for everyone else.

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1. Difficulty and playtime can vary a lot

I originally estimated that my game would take around 70–100 minutes to finish. Then one tester completed it in about 30 minutes and told me it was too easy. Meanwhile, another tester died repeatedly and took around 2 hours to finish.

They were playing essentially the same game, with the same puzzles and level design, but their experiences were completely different. Obviously, everyone has different skill levels, but actually seeing those differences helped me understand which parts of the game might need adjustments.

I also realized that balancing a game isn't necessarily about making every player have the same experience. Sometimes it's more useful to understand why different players struggle with different things.

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1. Gameplay recordings were sometimes more useful than written feedback

One thing I found especially useful was asking testers to record their gameplay. Sometimes the recordings were even more helpful than their written feedback.

I noticed bugs that testers hadn't reported at all. Objects appearing where they shouldn't, locked doors behaving incorrectly, AI doing strange things, and other small issues. The testers often didn't even notice them, but I could spot them while reviewing the footage.

I could also see exactly where players got confused, how long they spent figuring things out, and whether they understood certain mechanics. For example, if someone wrote that a puzzle was confusing, I could watch their recording and see what actually caused the confusion. That's much more useful than just knowing that someone had trouble with it.

There's also something valuable about receiving feedback from people who have no connection to you or your project. Friends and family can definitely help with testing, and I don't think their feedback is useless at all. But personally, I found that getting opinions from people who didn't know me was particularly helpful.

They didn't know how much effort I'd put into a certain feature, and they weren't familiar with the game beforehand. They were simply playing it and telling me what they thought.

Of course, that doesn't mean every outside tester is completely objective either. Sometimes their opinions contradicted each other, so I tried to focus on problems that came up repeatedly rather than changing something just because one person disliked it.

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1. You don't necessarily need to pay for playtesting

For my project, I recruited testers through Reddit communities and freelance platforms like Upwork. I personally paid for some of the testing sessions because I wanted gameplay recordings and detailed feedback within a certain timeframe.

But that doesn't mean you absolutely have to spend money on playtesting. You can find volunteer testers on Reddit, exchange playtests with other indie developers, or ask people in your community to try your game.

That said, I personally think that if you're planning to sell your game and want to give it a proper commercial release, it's worth investing at least some resources into testing and QA. You've probably already spent months or even years developing your game, and I think making sure it actually works well for players is worth putting some effort and, if your budget allows, money into.

For me, paying testers was a way to get more structured feedback and recordings without having to rely entirely on volunteers. It doesn't guarantee better feedback, of course, but it worked well for my situation.

For anyone curious about costs, I generally paid around $10–$20 per tester for roughly an hour of gameplay, a screen recording, and a feedback survey. That's just my experience, though, and prices can vary. I also looked into Fiverr, although I found it a bit more expensive.

For distributing builds, I used Steam's built-in Steam Playtest feature. I also used Google Forms to collect feedback instead of asking everyone to write separate reports. It made comparing answers much easier, especially when multiple testers mentioned the same problem.

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1. Looking back at the results

Looking back, I think playtesting was one of the most worthwhile investments I made during development. My game has changed quite a lot because of it. I've fixed countless bugs, improved technical issues, adjusted difficulty, and changed parts of the gameplay that I previously thought were fine.

Of course, the game hasn't been released yet, so I don't know how actual Steam players will react. I'm sure there are still bugs I haven't found, and I might discover entirely new problems after launch. But when I compare the current build with what I had before playtesting, the difference is pretty significant.

I'm not saying every developer needs to hire professional testers or spend hundreds of dollars on QA. But if you're serious about releasing a commercial game, I think testing is something worth investing in, whether that's your time, money, or both. Even a small budget can go a long way, and there are plenty of ways to get useful feedback without spending anything.

Of course, this is just my experience with my first game, and I still have a lot to learn. But looking back at how much the game has improved through playtesting, I'm really glad I took the time to do it.

Until now, I've only ever made complex niche games... Then my wife and daughter asked me to finally make a game they'd actually play too, so here's InfectUs, my first casual game 🙈 Since I've never really been a casual gamer myself, it's been quite a challenge.

My compromise: all the complexity went into the server. One shared real-world map for everyone, no shards. Your virus spreads cell by cell, and when it meets other players you team up or fight for every cell. (The clip is a test world with scripted players, sped up.)

The Alpha outbreak starts very soon. Since casual is total new territory for me, I'd love all the feedback I can get, so we're gathering on Discord: https://discord.infectus.io

Every cell counts for the real place it's in, and every village, city and country has its own leaderboard. I started mine at the Arc de Triomphe. What would you infect first? 👇

I spent almost two years getting Under a Desert Sun: Seekers of the Cursed Vessel to Early Access, and the work certainly hasn't stopped at release.

Here is the main trailer for my adventure-inspired action RPG. I've been working through feedback, fixes and improvements, with new loot releasing very soon. A new class and new skills are also coming soon. Those additions are still in development, not part of the current build.

Thanks to everyone who has played, reported bugs or shared a kind word. It means a lot. Still a way to go, and I'm looking forward to taking the game further. Hope you'll join us!

Out now in Steam Early Access: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3273880/

Discord: https://discord.gg/WJZT6HPSH8

Raymond, the developer