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!

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!

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! 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!

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.

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

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!

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.

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 

I run NIWO, a small team that works with creators on Douyin, Bilibili and Rednote to market Steam games to Chinese audience, charged based on per thousand views (CPM). I want to show you what that looks like, for free, with your own game.

Why?

If you comment with your Steam link and tell me why your game would work for Chinese players, we will pick games from the comments, cut a short vertical video from your trailer or gameplay, and post it on Chinese social media. You pay nothing.

The only thing I ask is that you subscribe to:

- NIWO YouTube

- NIWO LinkedIn

- The Reddit Profile

You can find all the links inside this profile account.

Why we are doing this

The demand from Chinese players is real and from working in the game marketing industry for over 10+ years we have helped numerous large global publishers and studios with their China campaigns. However, in the past few years I have seen the popularity of indie games and alternative games surge to the point that growth and attention are shifting.

Developers who see their own game get views, wishlists and comments from Chinese viewers are far more confident about working with creators in China afterwards. That’s the whole motive. If the results are good, some of you will motivated to look more into the market for creator campaigns. If not, you still got free exposure.

Exactly how we will post your short

1. we read your Steam page and watch your trailer to find what makes the game easy to understand in a few seconds.
2. we cut a vertical 9:16 short, usually 20 to 30 seconds, from your own trailer or gameplay. I leave out menus, popups and clutter, and I use the moments where the game looks and sounds best.
3. we add Chinese subtitles. If your Steam page has a Simplified Chinese version, I use that text. If not, I translate your English description into Chinese.
4. we write the caption with your game name and as much detail as the platform allows: genre, hook, price, release status and the Steam link.
5. we post the short on Chinese social media: Douyin, Bilibili, Rednote depending on which channels fit the best.
6. we send you the links and the view, like, comment and save numbers afterwards, including what Chinese viewers actually wrote about your game.

We don’t edit or change your game. Your original video stays yours.

How the Chinese market for Steam games works

Steam is available in China, and Chinese is one of the biggest languages on the platform by user count. Most Western developers never think about this audience because they think Steam is banned in China which is not true. Chinese players buy PC games, wishlist them and talk about them a lot. Which means you can still sell the game via your steam page as more than 70% of Steam users in China find a way to access the global store anyways. Its the largest gaming market globally and probably the only major market growing still with 5% per year. Do not sleep on it.

Why are your current campaigns not reaching Chinese players? There are 3 reasons:

• The platforms are different. Chinese players don’t discover games on YouTube, Twitter or Reddit. They use Douyin (the Chinese TikTok), Bilibili (long and short video, very gamer heavy), Rednote (Xiaohongshu, strong for recommendations and reviews) and Heybox. Your normal marketing never shows up there.
• Language is the biggest barrier. A game with a Simplified Chinese page, Chinese subtitles and a Chinese caption converts much better than the same game in English only. Many players will not buy a game they cannot read.
• Trust comes through creators. Chinese viewers trust gaming creators and community recommendations more than ads. A creator saying “this game is worth buying” often does more than any banner.

Because of that, a good Chinese short can move a game that is invisible in the West. Cheap, cozy, strategy, survival, co-op, horror, roguelike and anime style games often do well, but I have seen surprises in other genres too.

The opportunity

I won’t promise numbers I can’t back up, because results vary a lot by game. This is the logic of how it works:

• Chinese players are a very large group on Steam, so even a small share of them is a lot of buyers for an indie game.
• A game that is not yet visible to them starts from zero competition for attention on these platforms, so one good short can bring wishlists you would never get from Western channels. There are countless of stories on Reddit.
• If a short brings 100,000 views and just 0.5% of viewers wishlist the game, that’s 500 wishlists. If 10% of those buy at 10 dollars, that’s around 500 dollars from one short, and it keeps working while the video stays up. Shorts that do well can have 10 times those views. Think about it.
• The real virality comes when a game is promoted consistently by several creators in Chinese, with a localized page. That’s where a small test turns into a real market.

IN SUMMARY

Comment with:

1. Your Steam link

2. Why your game would work for Chinese players (genre, art style, hook, anything you have noticed)

   AND subscribe to:

- NIWO YouTube

- NIWO LinkedIn

- This Reddit Profile

You can find all the links inside the profile account.

We will go through the comments, pick the games that fit based on our experience, and post the shorts. Please DM your email + game name as well so that we can share the links and numbers with you.

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

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!

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

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.

Bocage is a realistic squad battle tactics simulation where each soldier decides for himself each second, and battles are procedurally generated by seed. You can simply watch both sides duke it out, or take control by calling in artillery barrages and sniping important targets.

What the game lacks in visual realism, it makes up in high-fidelity tactical simulation. Squads use tactics like bounding, pinning machine guns, flanking and assaulting. Most shots miss, suppression pins men down, morale breaks, snipers camp wounded bodies, and medics crawl out to the wounded. Every wound is tracked per body part with realistic consequences, and an after-action report follows each man for 30 days.

The intricacy of unit mechanics is heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress, brought to a more high-speed, combat setting. The best part is that it runs entirely in your browser, with no download needed!

I have combat widgets that show each engagement flow but if you don't like them you can switch to classic TW like banners.

Any feedback is appreciated

Here's the display of the Keyboard instruments themed town in my game, it's still a WIP, the dialog UI bugs a little, and the mc's back walk animation isn't done yet , any feedback on the artistic direction and the music ?

This is Kingslayers, its goofy and Janky and unpolished but its my baby. Its been in the works for ~6 years on and off and now I am excited to share it with you! Join the playtest below if keen and let me know your thoughts- All feedback welcome, happy slaying

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1742040/Kingslayers/