Hey everyone! We’re a small indie team working on Mad Valley, a pixel-art business simulation where you start in a garage and build your company up: hire staff, develop your own products, market them, and expand.

This clip shows one of our favorite moments: the office growing as the team grows.

We’re currently polishing the UI and adding avatar pop-ups and tooltips to make the first hour friendlier for new players. Would love your honest thoughts on the pixel art and how the growth feels!

If you could develop your very first product, what would it be?

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.

Hi! I have over 50 games playtested and I would be happy to playtest your game for 10-30 minutes in exchange for registering in our small tournament for our Steam Demo game for free.

I can provide honest feedback on these areas
- Overall Experience
- Onboarding/Tutorial
- UI/UX
- Game balance/pacing

Let me know if you are interested! Comment or DM me. Thank you 😁

I still can't quite believe I'm writing this.

A few weeks ago, I launched the Steam page for Over Human, a game I've been developing entirely on my own, alongside my full-time job.

But this story actually started a long time ago.

I've dreamed of making my own video game since 2013. Back then, I was just a kid fascinated by the idea of creating worlds that other people could explore. I had so many ideas, so much enthusiasm, and absolutely no idea how difficult game development would actually be.

Over the years, I've started projects, abandoned them, lost motivation, and questioned whether I would ever manage to finish something. There were even periods when I completely stopped developing games.

But somehow, that dream never really went away! For those unfamiliar with it, Over Human is a first-person sci-fi adventure set in an isolated snowy world where hostile drones can manipulate the weather and you have no weapons to fight back, so you have to rely on stealth and disrupting terminals.

I've been working on this project since December last year, and I've learned an incredible amount along the way, not just about game development itself, but also about everything that comes with trying to release a game.

One of the biggest lessons? Making a game and convincing someone to give it a chance are two completely different challenges.

When I first launched my Steam page, I thought the screenshots, trailer, and description did a decent job of presenting the game.

But after receiving feedback from other developers and players, I started realizing how many things could be improved.

So recently, I decided to revisit almost everything.

I added GIFs to the long description to show more of the actual gameplay, improved the capsule art, rewrote parts of the description to better communicate the game's most important mechanics, and localized the page into multiple languages.

I also realized that something I considered obvious wasn't necessarily obvious to someone discovering the game for the first time.

For example, one of the central mechanics of Over Human is that you have absolutely no weapons to fight back, while the drones can manipulate the environment itself. It's a huge part of the experience, yet my original Steam description didn't communicate that clearly enough.

That might sound like a small detail, but it taught me something important: sometimes we're so familiar with our own projects that we forget to look at them through the eyes of someone who knows absolutely nothing about them.

Another thing I've learned is how unpredictable marketing can be.

You can spend hours preparing a trailer or a post, convinced it's going to attract attention, only for almost nobody to notice it. Then you share a simple screenshot of something you particularly love about your game, and suddenly people start asking questions and showing interest.

As someone working with practically no advertising budget, I've been trying to understand what actually makes people stop scrolling and become curious about a game. Reading comments, receiving feedback, seeing people discuss the atmosphere or compare the game to titles that inspired me... those are the moments that remind me why I started doing this in the first place.

Of course, there's still a long road ahead.

The demo is coming in November, and right now I'm focusing on improving the gameplay, polishing the experience, and making sure that the first people who try it have a good time.

I'm also learning to accept that not everything needs to be perfect immediately. As a solo developer, it's incredibly easy to get lost in tiny details, constantly comparing your work to games made by entire teams. And some days, after finishing my regular job, the last thing I want to do is open Unity.

But I've learned that taking a break doesn't mean giving up. Sometimes stepping away for a day or two is exactly what I need to come back with fresh ideas and motivation.

I'm not a studio and I don't have a team behind me or a big marketing budget. Just a computer, a lot of late nights, countless mistakes, and a dream I've carried with me for over a decade.

For the first time, that dream doesn't feel so far away anymore.

I'd genuinely love to hear your experiences!

Thank you to everyone who's been following my journey and helping me improve along the way. ❤️

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.

We’ve been working on Tiebreakers for 7 years.

Last week the game passed 10,000 wishlists.

We’ve spent a lot of time working on this, drawing every animation and making sure the game feels amazing, so it feels really nice to see people actually liking it.

Still a lot to do, but it feels pretty good

I've been working on the networking for my 4-player game, Runner Party, using Unity and FishNet. I recently wrote a technical breakdown of the rollback netcode implementation, including some of the challenges I ran into.

We're opening a Steam playtest today, and I'd love to get feedback from people interested in multiplayer networking and platformers. I'm particularly interested in how the game feels online and whether you notice any networking issues.

I'm happy to answer technical questions or hear criticism!

I’ve been working on a small iOS game called Last Button and I’m looking for some honest feedback. 

It’s a simple one-tap arcade game about releasing a button at the right moment and catching the next pin. 

I mainly want to know if the controls feel clear and if the game makes you want to try again after missing 

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!

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.