Recently celebrated selling 100K+ copies of our game, over it's first month in Early Access.

Could not be more grateful for all the support we've gotten on this project.

It's been an incredibly long, strange journey getting to our first commercially successful game. 2 friends and I started making short punk games as Team Lazerbeam in December of 2014. Our games tended to defy genre, and were very short, alternative games with hand crafted art. Not the kind of thing you could really put on Steam and expect people to pay for, but we were stoked to self-publish them through itch. After 6 years we eventually strung together a longer experience (30 whole minutes of playtime!) and finally made our Steam debut, but that game bombed pretty badly. (That is to say, it sold very poorly, I still saw it as a creative success.)

I was always so stoked for any people that picked up on what we were putting out there. We had some decent numbers of downloads on our free titles. I was super proud of what we were making, and so grateful every time I saw one of our games resonating with someone.

Shroom and Gloom is our first proper, commercially released title. First time working within a more defined genre. First time releasing something that you could get lost in for hours. First release with a publisher. Basically, loads of firsts. Now we can add to that list, first Team Lazerbeam game to sell 100K copies. The fact that we hit that milestone in our first month on Steam is still mind blowing to me.

For anyone reading this that passionate about making things, I really hope this might give you some encouragement to keep creating. It might not happen for you overnight, but if you keep at it you'll be surprised where your art takes you. Or if you just reading this as an indie game fan, please know how impactful your support can be. It means so much to devs that people like you are out there, supporting unconventional games that are lovingly made by small teams.

I'm guess that out of the 100 894 copies that sold in the first month, at least a few of them could have been people that discovered the game through my last post on r/indiegames. If you're one of them, thanks for being getting behind this thing in these first days of Early Access.

Now the exciting part is what comes next!

So many ai slop games are being posted here daily with no disclosure. A lot aren’t even just assisted with ai but completely ai generated. It’s getting out of hand. “Developers” stop saying “I made this game…” when you did almost nothing. I think of a saying often, “if you didn’t care enough to make it yourself, why should I care enough to use it?”

Steadfast started as a solo project of mine a year ago and can't believe we've already hit 1,000 steam wishlists in the first two weeks of getting the steam page online! Super thankful for all the support and here's a teaser of the storm gameplay.

Official website: https://steadfast.game/
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5235740/Steadfast/

Hi everyone! I made a game based on What We Do in the Shadows for Halloween.
You can play it free here: https://edward-la-barbera.itch.io/laszlovania
Character Art by Lara K.
Choir Arrangement by Tiffany Palmer

Fields of Aaru is a farming life sim set in the Ancient Egyptian afterlife. There are two of us developing it full time, and we've worked on it for 3.5 years. The demo has been out since June, we just wrapped up Next Fest.

The people who play it are nice about it (100% on Steam after 28 reviews), but they mostly praise how it looks. We think the gameplay isn't really drawing people in, and it's been very hard to get traction on social media, which signals that the game just isn't appealing to people the way he hoped it would.

- If you watched the trailer or looked at the Steam page, what looks boring or is confusing? Is it clear what kind of game it is without looking at the genre tags?
- What would make you more interested, and what kind of unique gameplay experiences would you want from a game like this?

For those who've played it before and are interested in trying out the latest update: we've added irrigation channels, villager gifts, more character creation options, an enhanced graphics mode and six new languages.

Demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4665870/Fields_of_Aaru_Demo/

No need to be nice! Give us brutally honest feedback.

Dry Jerky is a survival RPG set in Oasis, a desert city with a rat problem, a shady snack industry, and a cast of characters you probably shouldn't trust. Find work, make questionable decisions, and try not to starve before the landlord shows up.

Demo. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4915010/Dry_Jerky/

Remnants of R'lyeh is a first-person survival horror where Lovecraftian nightmares meet a rusting steampunk world. Fight aquatic horrors in drowned ruins, then take on the creatures of Innsmouth with firearms, a grappling hook and tentacle attacks. Keep your sanity if you can!

DEMO IS OUT NOW ON STEAM!

During the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team.

She came. She crawled. She dreamed of becoming a butterfly. Unfortunately, the ants had other plans :) 🐜

A little moment from Garden of Ants, the ant colony RTS/sim we are working on.

Does the way she crawls look natural to you? Anything you'd change about her movement?

More about the game on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3016940/Garden_of_Ants/

Best

Tomas

Hey everyone! I’ve been working on Pillars of Pantheon for about a year with a small team, and it finally has a release date: November 3 on Steam.

It is a bullet heaven “tower offense” roguelite: you build your tower block by block and earn divine skills to fight off the waves. It’s heavily inspired by the Roman Empire and Roman mythology.

I’d love your thoughts on the trailer. What would you change before the launch?

What do you guys think of this progress? I am fully open to advices on both snowboard and ski controls and feels.

Hey guys!

We're a small indie team working on Ghost Yantra, a stylish Hack-n-Slash action game set in an Indian Cyberpunk world, featuring fast-paced combat and fluid parkour mechanics.

Every animation in Ghost Yantra is hand-animated, and we're working hard to bring this world and its action to life. For Ghost Yantra, we're inspired from Nine Sols, Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry & Prince of Persia, Akira, Ghost in the Shell.

I would like to share the latest trailer we made for Ghost Yantra.

Wishlist Ghost Yantra on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2872630/Ghost_Yantra/

Thank you for taking time to check out Ghost Yantra.

The one you see attached is actually one of the better ones. Some of the other shorts performed absolutely terribly.

But what really surprised me was just how few views you get unless your video somehow takes off on YouTube.

For the promotion of Burn With Me, we produced a whole series of shorts and posted them on YouTube Shorts and, more recently, Instagram Reels. And after all this, I can say that either there's something about our game that doesn't work for shortform content, or there's simply so much competition out there that making a good short isn't enough anymore.

You either need a really solid existing audience, which is incredibly difficult to build (aside from making the game itself), or your content needs to be completely different. I feel like a simulation game or a funny co-op game has a much higher chance of success than an average indie deckbuilder, or what have you. And I suspect our game, and perhaps card games in general, just aren't particularly well suited for these platforms.

So if you're thinking about investing seriously in shortform content for a similar game, I'd urge you to think twice and consider putting that effort somewhere else.

Our game is cool, it's already out, and judging by the reviews, people genuinely enjoy it. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good fit for this particular format. That's probably our biggest takeaway.

You can check out the shorts on our YouTube channel (Nozomu Games) to see how long we've been doing this and how our approach evolved. We made around 48 videos and gained only roughly 80 subscribers with an average shortform video staying in that 1-2k views range.

We didn't really know what we were doing at first, and we learned a lot along the way. By the time we got to release, I genuinely think some of our latest shorts were pretty good. But none of them brought in any notable number of wishlists.

And sometimes it just felt like the algorithm wasn't interested. We had videos with really good viewed-versus-swiped-away ratios, but even those weren't enough to get any meaningful boost from YouTube.

We've recently started reposting the same videos to Instagram Reels, and so far we're seeing pretty much the same results.

And it's not like we were just pumping out lazy AI-edited videos, either. We put a lot of thought and effort into every single one. I even started recording the voiceovers myself. Each short had its own little story we wanted to tell, whether it was about the development process, an interesting detail about the game, or one of its core design ideas. We genuinely tried to make something worth watching, rather than just advertising the game.

And still, none of it really worked.

Of course, that's just our experience with one particular game, and I wouldn't claim that shortform content doesn't work for indie games in general. But after 40 videos, a lot of experimentation, and very little to show for it in terms of wishlists, I think we've given it a fair shot before drawing this conclusion.

Hey everyone!

About a year ago, my friends and I released our first game, Livber: Smoke and Mirrors. It's a small psychological horror visual novel. Honestly, we didn't expect it to sell a ton of copies, and well, it didn't, haha. But this past year has been genuinely amazing for us ^^

After releasing the game, we didn't want to just leave it behind. Quite the opposite, actually. We kept working on it. We added 5 new languages, voice acting, 4 DLCs, and lots of new illustrations. We even rebuilt some parts of the game almost from scratch. And we did all of this despite the game not making us much money.

Because to us, indie game development isn't just about making a product and selling it. We love this little world we've created together, and we want to keep putting our hearts into it. Along the way, we've also met some wonderful people. Some volunteered to help with translations and voice acting, while others shared our story with more people.

I can't exactly say we've been making the smartest financial decisions, haha. But this is our first game, and it's kind of our baby. We're going to keep taking care of it.

Thank you so much to everyone who's supported us throughout this past year. I hope we can keep the indie spirit alive and make even better games in the future <3

Edit: I updated the link.

Hey everyone!

I recently started a small studio, Adriatic Software, and this is our first game: a luck-based roguelike where you push your odds as far as you dare. If you've enjoyed Balatro, Peglin or Clover Pit, it's that kind of "one more run" loop.

We're running a closed playtest on Steam in a few weeks, and I'm looking for players who'll give honest feedback: what's fun, what's confusing, what breaks.

How it works:

- Sign up with a short form (2 minutes)

- We invite testers in waves by email

- You get a free Steam key and access to our tester Discord

Sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe0MOcYq5Ivx7-6Eiy6pD4EgzqDmpO_KmN9vuUnbXfUA3M6xQ/viewform

Happy to answer anything about the game or making it in the comments!