Hi all! I wanted to make this post since Steam Next Fest is now in full swing, and I want to set clear expectations for r/playmygame.
I'm seeing a lot of people posting on this sub to self-promote, hoping it'll boost their standing in the Steam algorithm.
First, let me remind everyone of the purpose of the sub:
"A place for indie developers to share their freely playable games for feedback!"
This sub exists so you can find playtesters to try your prototype, tell you what's working (or not), what bugs you may have missed, etc.
It is not a sub for self-promotion (with an exception for Trailer Tuesdays). If we suspect your intent is to advertise, your post will get removed. Repeat offenders will get banned.
A quick reality check, and why self-promo doesn't make sense here:
With 4,400 posts in the past 30 days, that's about one post every ten minutes. The odds of your post getting seen in the first place are pretty small.
There are other subs that are better suited for that. They exist to advertise your game. r/gameDevPromotion is one.
Other devs, generally speaking, are not your target audience. They may put in 15 minutes to help you out, but it rarely converts to sales.
Let's give developers who actually need playtesting the visibility they need, so when you need feedback on your new project, it's easier for you to get it as well.
Hi new Redditor! We're excited that you want to post about your game and have people play it. However, there's something you should know before you do.
Reddit will ban you if your first few posts/comments are links to somewhere.
Reddit has a robust, over-exuberant filtering system, necessary but for groups like this, it can be a slight pain. When you post your game and it's your first post, Reddit ASSUMES FIRST AND DOES NOT ASK QUESTIONS LATER! You will be automatically shadowbanned, which means unable to post or even potentially comment.
Then we get a lot of posters coming to us in Modmail, asking " Why did my post disappear?" Nearly all Modmails are about this issue, roughly 3 a day.
Reddit is also a bit secretive about certain processes - how to get un-shadow-banned is not even really known to be possible. We don't see the record of shadowbanning at all so unless we know of the name and check it regularly, we wouldn't see it un-shadow-banned. We don't know how long your account needs to be open or how much Karma needs to be on it in order for the Filter to stop paying attention to you but we suspect around 100 Post and 100 Comment Karma.
So, if you are new to reddit and want to share your game - DON'T! Not yet, please go post cool/helpful/ positive comments and posts in other groups. Playtest other people's games here and comment on them prolifically. Once you have some "Reddit Post/Comment Karma" under your name first, THEN post your link to your game! You'll be less likely (but not immune, never immune) from being shadowbanned that way for sharing your game.
Edit: If AI recommended you post your game here....Don't Yet until you've developed your account as a good karma community member! This really isn't a "post and ghost" platform, it's community-first. AI doesn't realize this about Reddit.
P.S. This group is 100% responsible for getting accounts banned (when you don't do the steps above) but it's literally out of our control to reverse. So please....don't modmail us unless you KNOW you are not shadowbanned, you have the required karma, and yet your post is not showing up. Only then we can be of some help.
Web browser based (on PC) multiplayer game set in a Waterworld.
Sail a rusted out trimaran, scavenge dirt, and harpoon smokers off jet skis and seaplanes.
Description:
The ice caps melted and dry land is a myth. You sail a lone boat between five ring atolls, fishing floating dirt out of the sea and hauling it to the atoll trading posts for points. The Smokers want you dead: their jet skis hunt you across the open sea and their seaplanes come in low to strafe your deck. Shoot back with the bow harpoon, or press R to man the stern gun, which locks onto anything near the reticle: planes, skis, other players' boats, even the drifters anchored out in the deep. One hit brings a plane down in flames for 40 points. A head-on ram at speed splits a ski in two.
Description: Meowfield is a casual minesweeper game. The rules are classic minesweeper: tap a tile to reveal it, use the numbers to work out where the mines are, and double-tap or long-press a tile to flag a mine. When you flag a mine, the numbers around it count down, which makes it easier to see what's left. The first levels teach the rules step by step, so it works for people who have never played minesweeper. Later levels need harder logic, and some add twists like levels where you can't flag at all.
Free to Play Status:
[x] Free to play (ads)
[ ] Demo/Key available
[ ] Paid (Allowed only on Tuesdays with [TT] in the title)
Hi All! I've been building Swords and Cavalry on my own engine, and the playtest is now open on Steam.
Overview of the game:
- Build your own town/castle: free build roads and walls, burgage plots and upgradeable house, farm status changes with season build markets, taverns, guilds and create town policy.
-Play in third person view, combat system with heavy attacks, feints, parries and counters with the spear, or sword and shield, on foot or mounted. command your army while in it
- Raise your army: build your troop upgrade path up to tier 10, formations, castles you design tower by tower, and siege engines.
- A living world: a campaign map where armies march between towns, AI lords and outlaws roam, and diplomacy lets you make peace or trade. You can host a world for friends where each holds a town, swears into realms and fights the others.
I'm trying to mimic actual historically medieval war and sieges as much as possible while maintain the fun, so I need everyone's feedback!
Description: Phantom Rush is a platformer race royale. 100 runners play the same one-minute stage at the same time, each in their own lane, and the goal is to reach the finish first. The twist is sabotage: when you stomp an enemy it doesn't just die, it drops into another runner's lane, and you choose who gets it: whoever is in first place, the runner next to you, or someone random. So the leader usually ends up buried in enemies, and the race can flip in the last seconds. Your best run of the week also becomes a ghost. It keeps racing in other people's matches after you close the tab, can knock them out, and earns you points to rank up while you're offline. You can also send a friend a link to race against your ghost directly. To be upfront: it's early, so there aren't 100 real people online yet. Ghosts of real players and some bots fill the rest, and the game shows how many of each are in your race. I'd especially like to know if the sabotage makes sense the first time you see it.
Free to Play Status:
* [x] Free to play
Involvement: I'm the solo developer. I designed and built the whole game, including the gameplay, the multiplayer server and the art.
Description: Fully Funded is a first-person co-op game about the most stressful thing in futures trading: the prop firm evaluation. You and up to three friends trade a simulated market on ONE shared account, under the same kinds of rules real evaluations use: a daily loss limit, a trailing drawdown, profit targets and a consistency rule. Every trade lands on the same balance, so when your friend goes short while you're long, you all feel it, and since the office is a physics sandbox, you can settle it in person. Charts have candles, indicators, drawing tools and real order types. Five accounts take you from a garage to a trading floor, a glass tower and a yacht off Miami, and passing all five unlocks an endless live account with no rules. No real money involved, it's just a game.
Giveaway: comment below (feedback, questions, your worst trade, anything) and in 48 hours I'll DM a Steam key to 20 random commenters. One per person.
Free to Play Status:
- [X] Demo/Key available
- [X] Paid (Allowed only on Tuesdays with [TT] in the title)
Involvement: I'm the developer (PTL Studios). I designed and built the game (first one) and I'm reading every comment/feedback.
Platform: Web — PC and mobile. Use landscape mode on mobile.
I've been making Legendfall on my own for a little over seven months. You build an army, place your troops and defenses on a hex board, then watch them fight automatically. Between battles, you can upgrade your units and take more territory, with the aim of destroying the enemy fortress. There are different legends, soldiers, buildings and spells to combine, so positioning and which units you put together matter a lot. I'd really like to hear how it feels to someone playing for the first time. Did you understand what to do? Were the fights enjoyable? I'm honestly unsure whether to keep working on it, so hearing what you liked or what put you off would help me a lot.
Free to Play Status:
[x] Free to play
[ ] Demo/Key available
[ ] Paid
Involvement: I'm the solo developer and have been working on Legendfall for over seven months.
Hey all. This is my first game. You owe money to a guy named Vinnie. Your plan to pay him back: collect cans, cash them in, and blow it all on scratchers at the Quik Stop.
You start out digging through the recycling behind the store for a few bucks at a time. Win enough and things open up: upgrades, the Wheel of (Miss)Fortune, hired help, a truck stop, and eventually Vegas. Every win gets you closer to paying off your debt, and every loss digs you deeper.
Friends who tested it keep telling me "this is dumb, but I played it for way too long," so I want to hear from people who don't know me. A full run is about an hour to an hour and a half, and there's a New Game+ and prestige system to keep it going after that. Trailer is in the comets.
I'd really like to hear:
- When you got bored, if you did
- Anything that felt unfair or confusing
- Whether you wanted to keep going after you beat Vinnie
Any feedback helps, harsh is fine. There's a Google Form on the itch page for feedback. I'm planning a Steam release this winter.
Free to Play Status:
- [x] Free to play
Involvement: Solo dev. I came up with the idea, designed and balanced it, and did all the playtesting. I built it with help from AI for the code.
Description:
Mini Factory is a compact top-down factory-building game made with python/pygame and inspired by Factorio. You start with nothing but your hands, mine your first resources, craft buildings manually, and gradually automate everything until you launch a space probe.
The game focuses on clear logistics, power management, and research progression in a playthrough that typically lasts 3–4 hours. Key features include two-lane conveyor belts, inserters, splitters, underground belts, a coal-powered electricity grid, 28 technologies across four science tiers, fog of war with radar exploration, custom map settings, blueprints, production statistics, and a built-in replay/timelapse system.
Feedback is very welcome!
Available in English and German, and currently in development on itch.io:
Description: You’re climbing a dying space ark to reach the King at the top. Every turn the sun moves through Sunlit, Dusk, Shadow and Dawn, and that changes how much Energy you get and which side of each card plays. On top of that you’re managing air: every room and every turn costs O2, and when you run out you start paying in HP.
There are two heroes so far. The Knight builds up Heat until he hits Overdrive and everything hits twice. The Huntress covers enemies in moths and lets the swarm do the work.
It’s early, and I’m patching it every few days.
What I’d love feedback on:
Did the sun/orbit thing make sense on your first run, or did it take a while to click?
Does the air pressure feel tense, or just annoying?
Knight or Huntress, which one felt better to play?
Is the game too difficult? I want the challenge to be there, but not if it feels unfair
Any mechanics I should expand or remove or add?
If you hit a bug, please let me know through comments
Free to Play Status:
[ X] Free to play
Involvement: I’m the developer. Design, code and writing are mine; the art is AI-generated (disclosed on the page).
Description:
A number flashes on screen and you type it back from memory. It starts at 3 digits and each new number is one digit longer, so you go 3, 4, 5 and on until you miss. The first miss ends your day. Everyone gets the same numbers, so you can compare how far you got, and there's a Wordle-style share grid and a streak.
The number stays up for 1 second plus 0.6 seconds per digit, so the 8-digit round gives you 5.8 seconds. That's the part I'm least sure about. If you get that far, tell me whether it felt fair or too tight.
When you miss, the result screen rewrites the number you lost as a few words using the Major System, a code that turns digits into consonant sounds. That's how memory athletes hold long numbers.
Free to Play Status:
- [x] Free to play, no account needed
Involvement:
I'm the solo developer. I designed and built it.
Build a maze, roll for tower cards, combine their synergies and send monsters to pressure your rivals while growing your income. You can keep building and attacking while the battle runs. The current mode aims for about 10 minutes; close games can run longer.
Click Play online to join the public queue. It starts at four players, or fills empty seats with labelled practice opponents after 30 seconds. Private friend rooms and solo practice are also available. Online matches are unranked during this alpha.
You can play as a guest without installing anything, on desktop or a phone held in landscape. Sign-in is optional for account progress. This is an early build with AI-assisted development and artwork.
I'm especially looking for feedback on:
• Do the first two minutes make sense?
• Can you tell which towers work well together?
• Does choosing between defence, levelling and sending monsters feel interesting?
Description: Ordos is a turn-based fantasy tactics game built around drafting three magical pieces from a roster of 30. Each piece has three spells, giving you nine abilities to combine on an 8x8 isometric board. Pieces have DPS or support roles, and you win by defeating the opposing DPS pieces. Experiment with terrain manipulation, portals, displacement, summons, and support abilities to find combinations your opponent cannot answer. You can play against the computer, challenge someone online, or share a local pass-and-play match. If you prefer solo challenges, there are also 310 limited-activation puzzles, all currently unlocked for playtesting.
Free to Play Status: Free to play
Involvement: I'm the developer. I created the gameplay, spells, and pieces and built most of the Godot engine years ago. I used AI to develop assets and assist with code generation; sound comes from Soundly. Thanks for trying it!
Hi! We're a small team from Portugal and this is a major update for our free anomaly horror game, Doctor's Appointment.
Quick recap if you haven't seen it: you're stuck in a clinic waiting room that keeps repeating. If something's wrong, you take the EXIT. If everything's normal, you go into the exam room. Since 1.5 there's also an online mode for 3 players: one of you is the doctor, watching the waiting room on CCTV and picking what goes wrong in each room, and the other two have to find it and leave through the same door. There's voice chat, but the doctor hears you through the camera mics.
Here's what's new in 1.6:
Lockdowns
Two new scare cards for the doctor. Both lock the doors while they play out, and they never show up in the first three rooms.
- He is in the room: both doors slam shut, and the doctor bursts out of the staff door and hunts you around the seats for 18 seconds. He's slower than you, but if he touches you, the team loses a life. The doctor player can walk him himself. In the second act you can only see him through the camera.
- Someone on the other side: the doors lock, and someone starts pounding and pulling on them from behind, faster and faster. Then silence, and the exit opens by itself.
Both count as anomalies, so when the doors let go the right answer is the EXIT. The journalists also get a new card for this, the master key: it opens the doors again, but whatever locked them is still in there with you.
Only the camera sees it.
Four new anomalies that the player without a camera can't see at all. Only the camcorder (and the doctor's screens) show them: a child standing by the exit, the same woman sitting twice, bloody hands on the reception glass, and words on the wall. So the one holding the camera has to convince the other one which door to take.
The doctor drives more
Two more cards the doctor now controls live: he picks which journalist the old man stares at, and which camera feed shows up on the TV.
Other changes:
- The game now tells you when there's a new version, on the title screen and in the co-op lobby, with a link to the download. Online needs everyone on the same version, so this should save some confusion. It only asks our website which version is current; nothing about you is sent.
- No group? There's now a link to our Discord on the title screen to find other players.
- Locked doors say "Locked" and rattle when you try the handle.
Fixes
- Players were getting dropped in the middle of a match. That one was on our server, so it's already fixed for everyone.
- Your mic stayed on after a partner left the match. It now closes with the match.
- A round could start on one PC while the others were still loading, and get stuck. The doctor's first hand now waits until both journalists are ready.
- Drowning in the blood room put you in the wrong place afterwards.
- If you got caught on your last life, the other journalist could get pulled back into the waiting room.
- The doctor could fire more than 3 lures by clicking fast.
- If the doctor opened his cards or the chat while walking the stalker, the stalker kept walking on his own.
- "Escape without losing a life" unlocked even if you lost one and won it back with a bet.
- Practicing against the computer doctor no longer unlocks the 3-player achievements.
One heads-up: online, 1.6 only plays with 1.6, so everyone in your group needs the new version.
It's free on Windows, Mac and Linux, three rounds so everyone gets a turn as the doctor, about half an hour. If you've got two friends this Halloween week, it's a good one to play in the dark. It's still an open beta, so feedback is very welcome, especially what broke and who screamed first.
Sudoku Sprint is a sudoku game for Android that adds a bit of competition to a classic puzzle. Every day there's a new Daily Challenge, the same puzzle for every player, with a 30-second penalty for each mistake. Your time goes on a Google Play Games leaderboard, and you can build a daily streak. Sprint mode gives you five minutes on a clock that never pauses. You score points for every correct number and finished puzzle, and lose points for mistakes, so it's a race against everyone else's best score. If you'd rather relax, Classic mode has endless puzzles from Easy to Expert, plus a Relaxed mode with no timer and no mistake limit. There are notes, undo, hints and auto-notes, and a step-by-step walkthrough on a practice grid for anyone new to sudoku. It also has dark mode, unlockable colour themes and a colour-blind mode. I'd love honest feedback: what's confusing, what's missing, and what you'd change.
Free to Play Status:
[x] Free to play
[ ] Demo/Key available
[ ] Paid
Involvement: I'm the solo developer (Kakes Studios). I designed the game, tested it with friends and published it myself, using AI tools to help with the coding. It's my first released game.
Description: Sorter is a puzzle game about building little machines. Colored seeds drop from a chute in a known order, and your job is to route every one of them into a matching bin. You place arrows, sorters, splitters, painters and other pieces on a small grid, then press Launch and watch your machine run. If a single seed lands in the wrong bin, falls off the board or crashes, the run stops, so you study what went wrong, adjust your design and launch again.
The campaign has 80 puzzles across 10 worlds. Each world introduces one new idea, such as splitting a stream between bins, recoloring seeds, avoiding crashes with bridges and delays, levers that flip switches, or portals, and then combines it with everything before. There is also a Daily Machine mode: one new puzzle every day, three launches to solve it, and a result you can share. Hints, undo and short animated tutorials help when you get stuck. Puzzles reward planning: solving on the first launch and using fewer pieces earn extra marks.
Free to Play Status:
- [x] Free to play
- [ ] Demo/Key available
- [ ] Paid
Involvement: I'm the solo developer. I came up with the concept and designed, built and published the game. I'm actively updating it based on player feedback.
Platform:
Browser (HTML5). Best on a phone, works on desktop. Also on iOS and Android, links in comments.
Description:
Sortwave is a one-thumb arcade sorter. Coloured blocks slide down a neon conveyor, and you drag each one sideways into its matching lane before it crosses the line. Miss and you lose a life; chain correct sorts and your combo builds.
There’s a campaign of short levels, each with three star goals (clear it, no misses, hit an 8-sort combo), plus a daily challenge and unlockable themes. A Halloween campaign, Midnight Shift, is running now with ten levels. Each level gets progressively harder
Each level lasts about a minute, so it’s meant for quick sessions. It supports haptics and has a reduced-motion option.
I’m after honest feedback, especially:
At what point did you get bored, if at all?
Was anything confusing in the first 30 seconds?
Would you play another round, and why or why not?
Phone or desktop, and how did the controls feel?
Blunt answers are more useful than kind ones.
Free to Play Status:
Free to play (The link above is a free version of the full game, on the iOS app store and Google Play you get the first few levels for free, then it's £2.99 to unlock the full game)
Involvement:
Solo developer. I designed and built the game and released it under my own small studio.
Jelly Grove is a free merge puzzle set in a living forest. You drag jelly blocks onto a board; equal jellies merge and grow, 2048-style, and the dealer keeps handing you new pieces. The board stays simple, but the pressure comes from the game itself: bigger jellies take more room, and every placement matters.
The twist is the legends. Once you push past 2048, forest legends begin to wake up – the Stag, the Moon Wolf, the Tide Whale, the Earth Bull and more. Each is born from its own element and brings a power that changes how the board plays: pulling twins together, shaking the board, gathering jellies, lighting up dark corners. Seasons change as you climb, forest events (star rain, fireflies, aurora, tides) shake things up, and you can adopt a companion animal that reacts to your moves.
There are daily boards, a global leaderboard, quests and streaks. No sign-up needed, works fully offline, and ads are optional – you watch one only when you want a bonus. Available in 11 languages.
Free to Play Status:
* [x] Free to play
* [ ] Demo/Key available
* [ ] Paid (Allowed only on Tuesdays with [TT] in the title)
Involvement: I'm the solo developer – design, code (Flutter), art, music and sound are all mine. Happy to answer anything about how it works or how it was built.
I saw somebody do this on the indie game subbredit and it seemed fun.
I love games. An aweful lot. So on Friday, starting at say noon pst, I'm going to livestream (if I can figure out how) playing games from this subreddit, for my whopping 72 YouTube subscribers for 4 hours. If I can't figure it out, I'll just record and post.
I have been making games for a long time, I play a ton of them, I'm a student of all genres and a fan of most. I'd love to play your game and give honest but not mean feedback.
If you want me to jump on yours, throw it in as a comment to this thread. If there's not much of that I'll just start by recent and work back I think.
Open to feedback if you think there's a way this could be more gooder or more useful to you as a small developer.
Platform: Windows PC (standalone executable, no installer required)
Description: A forgotten floppy disk. A government department. 1,440 KB of unanswered questions.
Floppy//144 is a retro-inspired exploration, puzzle and mystery game set within the wonderfully dysfunctional Government Department of Records (GDR).
You’ve discovered an old floppy disk. Naturally, you decide to investigate its contents.
What follows is an unexpected connection to a government department whose offices are strangely deserted, whose records are fragmented, and whose computer systems appear to have survived considerably longer than anyone intended.
Your assignment? Recover the records, reconstruct the department, and discover what happened.
Explore offices and corridors, inspect your surroundings, operate old-fashioned computer terminals, recover damaged documents and gradually uncover the secrets hidden within the department.
The game features retro pixel graphics, CRT effects, command-line interfaces, a Recovery Notebook, procedural sound and music, and a healthy dose of dry British humour.
There’s also a technical twist: the entire Windows executable is constrained to fit within 1,474,560 bytes, the capacity of a 1.44 MB floppy disk. (I started learning C, and a couple of months later found the 2PG Arcade 1.44MB Game Dev Contest, so aimed to get a game in. I missed the deadline! )
Beta 1 is now available, and I’m looking for players willing to explore the department and tell me what they think.
I’m particularly interested in feedback on the controls, puzzles, first-time player experience, atmosphere, and, of course, any bugs you encounter.
Even 15–20 minutes of playtesting and some first impressions would be enormously helpful. You don’t need to complete the game!
Screenshots and further information are available on the game’s website: https://greydoorrepublik.github.io/floppy144/
Bug reports and suggestions can also be submitted here: https://github.com/GreyDoorRepublik/Floppy144-beta/issues
Free to Play Status:
☑ Free to play
☐ Demo/Key available
☐ Paid
Involvement:
I’m the independent developer behind Floppy//144, working under my studio name, Grey Door Republik.
I’ve been responsible for the game’s design, programming, narrative, puzzles, graphics and overall development.
This is the game’s first public beta, and I’m hoping to get feedback from people who haven’t been involved in creating it.
Thanks to anyone willing to give it a try!
The Government Department of Records appreciates your cooperation. All feedback will be filed, cross-referenced and potentially acted upon within 6–8 working decades.
Hey everyone! I’m a solo programmer happy to announce the release of the demo build of my game, Fusebreak. It’s heavily inspired by the old shareware classic Dynamite Joe, blending spatial digging mechanics with chaotic stealth. A retro-inspired, top-down action-puzzle adventure where every explosion could be your solution — or your next problem.
