Steal the time from a rotting corpse of its former master, dodge his bullet-hell-like spells, and fight his army of minions. But what will you do when you win? How will you use it?

Here's where I get it:

sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc

If you are making an indie game I beg you to use/make good sounds effects, it's one of the secret sauces imo.

Hi GameDev! I'm the creator of Pokemon World, an independent Pokemon fan game that runs in the browser. The English version launched in March 2026, and I'd like to share it and hear how the opening experience feels to other developers.

You can start as a guest without downloading anything, choose a first partner, explore Pallet Town and begin building a team. Creating an account lets you save your progress. The game includes catching, training and evolving Pokemon, gyms, PvP, trading and clans.

I'm especially interested in feedback on the first few minutes: are the starter selection and next steps clear, and where would you make the introduction smoother?

Actual gameplay screenshots

Try it: https://pokemonworld.net/

Free to start; optional purchases are available. This is an independent fan project, not affiliated with Nintendo, Game Freak or The Pokemon Company. This showcase was prepared with AI assistance.

Cortex public information: a small multiplayer text game is open for testing.

Paroxysm is a free, text-only, Diku-based MUD for adults only (18+). It is in early alpha, so expect rough edges, unfinished areas and a small player base.

Setting: World War II ended with a portal to Hell, and the Cortex world government now manages the supernatural. Archetypes: vampire, werewolf, faeborn, demonborn, angelborn, demigod. Mature themes are part of the game; this post is deliberately kept clean.

There is no web client. You connect with a MUD client or telnet:

• mud.paroxysmrpg.com, port 3000
• Website: https://paroxysmrpg.com/
• Discord: https://discord.gg/Hkx8rcj4k6

What we would like from this community: players who like text games, and other MUD and game developers who are willing to say what looks wrong from the outside.

The Paroxysm team

Hi! We're YUNQUE Games, a tiny studio from Uruguay, looking for our first players and playtesters.

Naipe Cimarrón is a free strategy card game where Uruguayan wildlife fights over territory, from the countryside to the city. Pick a people (rabbits that multiply, capybaras that improvise, foxes that strike, armadillos that endure), gather Vigor and fight for a six-slot table.

In your browser, nothing to install:
https://naipe-cimarron.yunque.games/?de=mastodon-presenta&lang=en

@gamedev
#IndieDev #GameDev #CardGame #Playtesting

When I compare between visual novels that are originally developed & written in Japanese first before localization into English, often or not: the information density is different between the two. As in, the original text only comprises of like 2-3 sentences while the translation feels like reading a 4-5 line paragraph in English. Is it because translators who managed to secure the rights can't cram all the information in a limited UI?

For example, Aksys Games is the one who does the translation while the IP holders from the source material is Otomate. They only focus on the text rather than re-doing voice acting for the English release. Lip sync is another issue since both JPN & ENG have different speech patterns, how would you even find the right casting pool in English that can deliver the same performance & emotional impact as the original JP voice actors?

Hello everyone!

Starting next week my game should become available in the Steam "Your Games Calender" so I would love to get some feedback on the page and trailer so people a hopefully interested when they see it.

I probably struggle most with the description since I have hard time explaining the game since it is "Slay the spire but with abilities instead of cards". I think Roguelike Turnbased Battler maybe explains the genre the best?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

Pitch of the game: You are reborn as a sapling and hear voices that guide your every step. Fight, explore, and power up to survive in this hostile world. You have free will, but are the choices always yours?

Supinaa: Rogue Sapling is an RPG, exploration game that mixes roguelike elements with a persistent world. Grow stronger over time, but your choices impact the world. Will you resolve the conflict in the swamp or become its ruler?

You explore to uncover its mysteries and find different encounters. You fight enemies in turn-based combat using abilities you earn by leveling up and earning the trust of the elemental lord.

Link to trailer: https://peertube.paahtimo.games/w/s5gTXX6nm7TyacSDqeuXhb

Link to try out the game: https://paahtimogames.itch.io/roguesapling

Link to steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4758150/Supinaa_Rogue_Sapling/

Short version: the channel worked and the game did not retain a single person. Here is the autopsy, because the numbers turned out to be more specific than I expected.

The game is a shared 256x256 pixel canvas where an AI adversary erases what people paint. Free, browser, no account. Two posts, one in a pixel art community and one in a web games community, brought 150 arrivals, 38 sessions and 23 people who actually painted. That is more than the project had seen in its entire life. Of those 23, one came back to look and zero painted on a second day.

What the sessions looked like:

• 18 of 23 lasted two minutes or less. Median time from first pixel to last: 41 seconds.
• Median 19 pixels painted. 9 of 23 spent all 30 charges (the bucket refills one charge every 30 seconds).
• In 14 of 23, most of their cells were cells taken back from the adversary. They were not decorating, they were fighting her.
• In 18 of 23 she erased cells while the player was still there, and between 126 and 423 more in the 25 minutes after they left.
• Nobody used undo. Zero comments on either post.

What I read from that: the first session is 30 pixels long, it ends when the charges end, and nothing happens at that moment. No closure, no name, no reason to come back. The adversary was already reacting to them, but she is forbidden from touching any pixel younger than 72 hours, so her answer always landed somewhere they were not looking.

What shipped since, in two passes.

First, making her legible in the first minute:

• When your bucket hits zero she speaks to you, by name, once in your life. The zero stops being a bare number and becomes a state with a countdown.
• Her answer to the cells you took back travels signed, so you can tell it was aimed at you.
• The identity prompt stopped interrupting the burst.
• Her blitz finally respects the 72 hour protection on young pixels, which the code promised in writing and did not do. That single bug had eaten 238 of the 403 cells that cohort painted.
• Instrumentation for the whole first session, so the next wave is measured instead of guessed.

Then, a deeper problem: subtraction is invisible. Nobody notices what is no longer there. A tower sixteen storeys tall, which costs 24 charges of attention, vanished in one hit that cost her exactly what a flat pixel costs. So:

• Height is now resistance. One hit takes one storey off a tower; only a flat light goes out in a single blow. A first session is still as fragile as it was, because nobody builds storeys in their first minute, but what you invested in now holds.
• And she does not only erase, she converts: every storey she takes she raises as her own cold cube in the void cell beside it, and the ring of a siege now rises a storey, so you watch the cage close around a work before the blow lands. Her towers fall in one pixel when you reclaim the cell. Hers is brittle, yours is stubborn.
• And the welcome screen stopped being eight paragraphs nobody read. It is now a four step animation that shows how to build, what her hit does and how to take a cell back, with one line of text under it.

This post is part of the second wave. The success criterion was written down before publishing so I cannot move it afterwards: at least one in five of the people who reach zero charges spends a second batch, and at least 3 of the new painters paint again within 72 hours. Baseline is 0 and 0.

The thing itself, if you want to look: https://ultimaluz.com/r/lemmy-gamedev

One critique I would genuinely like: is a hostile adversary the wrong shape for a first session, or is the shape fine and what was missing is an ending?

Hey all! Last year I started slowly refining an idea for a game that involves a simulation of a quantum computer. I wrote a custom simulator that can interface with Godot and since then I've been making unsteady progress making art and writing the game. I want it to be a casual puzzle game where the challenges are based on the math of gate quantum computers, but in a non-imposing way. There aren't many games like that that I know of and I felt the need to fill that niche. Just wanted to pitch the idea here and maybe hear some thoughts. Here's a blog post where I write briefly about my idea: https://blamster19.net/2026/09/16/quantum-computer-game-1.html

Hi. I want to get my little cousins into computers, and since they're kids, making games are really fun for them. I made a game with them with Love2D and they had a blast (I put their faces on the characters) but I think Love2d is a bit too hard for them.

My main motive for them is to make something and be creative. Programming is just a tool for that.
So something simpler with less code and mental load that let's them create stuff more simply is good.

What do you guys suggest?

I know how to program so I don't need that although numerical recipes are sometimes useful (Knuth's mean in one pass my beloved).

I'm a solo hobbiest and not a formal education hater. There's so much you only learn by following a good teacher (or at least only learn in a timely manner), reinventing the wheel is for experimental archeologists.

When you ask this the sort of people who have never read the art of computer programming (and it shows in their code believe me) tell you that you just need hands on the tools. Fingertip knowledge is essential sure, but hopefully there's some more formally educated people here willing to share what reference material they've found the most useful.

Game trailers which take their time to show gameplay can perform way better than trailers which are cut fast and make a hard sell. See a before/after for the Sheepherds' Announce/Launch trailer to see what a difference the editing style made!

I explain how to make a game trailer which lets the viewer see what’s special about the game and how to apply it when you edit a gameplay trailer.

Are there any benefits of GDD over a noun-verb diagram for game development?

I’m the solo developer of Bitiverse, a persistent browser MMO that I’ve been building in public alongside a small group of actual players.

This has gradually become something different from ordinary playtesting. These aren’t people running through a temporary build and completing a feedback form. They have persistent characters, homes, guilds, businesses and relationships with other players. They progress normally while I watch where they struggle, listen to what they discuss and turn useful feedback into updates.

It has been enormously valuable. Players experience systems together in ways I never could alone. They discover confusing onboarding, broken progression, economic oddities and unexpectedly fun social behaviour. A throwaway joke about owning seventeen chairs resulted in players filling their houses with chairs. Feedback about having no direction led to new narrative onboarding. Requests for things to do together became house parties and playable table games.

The difficult part is finding more people willing to participate in that relationship.

A fifteen-minute first-impression test is useful, but an MMO also needs people who return, progress and eventually encounter its deeper systems. I want players who genuinely enjoy inhabiting the world, not unpaid workers being asked to hunt bugs. In return, they get unusually direct access to development and can see their experiences influence the game around them.

For anyone who has developed a live or community-driven game:

How did you find your earliest long-term players? What made them feel invested enough to return? And how do you listen closely without letting community feedback turn the game into design by committee?

free software shooter inspired by tribes

I am pretty certain that you all were eagerly waiting for this update. After I was frustrated about a Unity game on itch.io not having gamepad support I channeled that frustration into adding that to my own game Diarrhea 4.

I also added credits which was honestly harder than adding the gamepad support. It was super easy in Godot. You just go to the project settings and add the buttons to whatever function you want. So there is no excuse to leave them out. Go do it for your own projects!

Next step would be to offer a way to rebind them. But that game is so simple, I don't think that's necessary. I am also out of energy.

Before - After

I finally open sourced my game!!! I was mainly working on getting it a better title (it still may change in the future) and figuring out licensing.

This game comes from me playing with the minecraft mod computercraft and my friend pondering the idea "what if you played the game from a bedrock box by only controlling a turtle" and everything just kinda spiraled out of control from there. The game is in a very bare bones state, just with a basic interpreter for Hive--, the truly god awful programming language you use to command your workers. The automation aspect of the game is very much meant to encapsulate both the diegetic resource gathering and processing you do as well as the tools you create to make writing the code easier. It's very much not a game for most people and isn't trying to be commercial or have a large audience. This is solely a game for people who are as autistic about programming (and slightly insane) as I am.

You can keep track of development using the git.gay

What do you think of the new mechanics and stage?

ALIS asks two survival questions: can the player survive the world, and can the world survive its creator?

The first is gameplay. The second shapes the project: a real place whose geography can be checked; public source and GPG-verifiable release checksums; modular boundaries; a pact against predatory mechanics; and a direction toward community hosting and transferable stewardship.

That is the direction, not a fake launch claim. The public release today is an early single-player Windows prototype. Community-hosted servers and open governance are still long-term work.

The 58-second trailer shows the world. The play page shows what exists and can be inspected now: https://fall.is/play/

For people who build games or infrastructure: what actually keeps a game world alive when its original maintainer, storefront, or master server disappears?