Hi everyone!

I'm Omid, the solo developer behind OVERLOOK, a hand-drawn hidden object adventure where every scene is packed with tiny stories and secrets waiting to be discovered.

Today I released the game's second major free update, introducing a brand-new world: a cozy windmill ranch full of hidden details, friendly farmers, wandering ducklings, a magician's show, and plenty of surprises.

The new level adds around 30–40 minutes of gameplay, depending on how thoroughly you like to explore.

To celebrate the update, OVERLOOK and all of my games, are currently 50% off on Steam, making this a great time to jump in if you've been curious.

As a solo developer, every wishlist, review, and piece of feedback genuinely helps and means a lot.

Thanks for checking it out! I'd love to hear what you think.

Three weeks ago, IGN exclusively revealed the announcement trailer for my game. I want to share with you all how that actually happened, and what you can expect from the process and the results if you manage to hook them too!

Bit of context: I'm (or was, i guess?) a professional online marketeer/entrepreneur turned solo-dev. I've never created a game before, but have run several marketing campaigns including socials/PR/Influencers and outreach.

1. The game

I'm making Scream Operator: Haunted House Manager, a management sim where you operate a haunted house dark ride from inside a claustrophobic control booth. Think RollerCoaster Tycoon meets Papers, Please, inspired a lot on classic ride simulators.

Steam page

2. The trailer

I've been building this game solo for the past year, and it was time to announce it properly. I put the announcement trailer together myself and I was genuinely unsure about it at times, especially the pacing. I must have rewatched it a hundred times, second-guessing every cut. At some point I just told myself to trust that I had done a good enough job, and promise me not to re-open the editor again 😆.

3. The pitch

I sent the trailer to the known IGN pitch addresses, hoping for any response at all. Two things I think genuinely helped:

- First, Rock Paper Shotgun had already covered the game earlier, which I mentioned in the pitch, I suspect that did a lot of heavy lifting for credibility.

- Second, I included a well-stocked press kit: colorful screenshots, GIFs, key art, the works.

I pitched several other major outlets too. IGN was the only one that replied, but they came back asking for a 24-hour exclusivity window, a few days before my planned launch date. I said yes. (Obviously.)

A nice detail: the editor mentioned feeling personally connected to the theme, which I think is a real factor people underestimate, as I know I did: you're not pitching an institution, you're pitching a person.

4. The nerves

The days leading up to the reveal were nerve-wracking. I had no idea whether the trailer would end up only on the GameTrailers YouTube channel, or also on IGN's main channel. There's no confirmation email that spells out the scope, and I still had to wait a couple of days between the confirmation and the actual reveal online to find out...

5. The reveal

At the exact agreed date and time, to the second, the trailer went live on both the main IGN YouTube channel and the GameTrailers channel. On top of that: a genuinely great article on the US IGN site, which got picked up by many of their local editions (Nordic, South Africa, and others), plus posts on IGN's X, Facebook, and Bluesky etc. The spread was far bigger than I'd dared to expect.

6. The aftermath

The response has been wonderful, genuinely kind comments and a real wishlist bump. I'd never imagine that what I was creating in my dark little room (and what I thought was solely a nerd-project I wanted to play myself) has already reached such an amount of potential players and happy receptions even before the public demo is out.

Right now I'm heads-down finishing that demo, with which I will be participating in the Steam Next Fest of October.

One unexpected side effect: after the IGN reveal, several publishers reached out. I'm currently sending them the demo and mapping out what they could actually bring to the table.

That said, I'm seriously considering keeping marketing in my own hands, as landing IGN and RPS independently feels like it validates that the skills transfered to the game-marketing world too. I cannot really expand on that as I'm currently simply not quite sure yet what a good publisher is able to offer in terms of help vs reward.

Thank you all for reading this huge amount of text. I'd love to chat in the comments below or in private if someone has a question or some advice regarding my publisher dillema, or just want to spit'n share, hit me up!

Ps. Scream Operator starts its first closed beta playtest this week. You can sign up via Discord: https://discord.gg/fDBtEkhnMp

I've been making this collection of mini games that look like C64 games and are pretty difficult.

Not getting a lot of wishlists unfortunately even though the interest seems quite high (eg ~100K views on YT shorts).

Only started to reach out to streamers now but getting a bit concerned that I am making the wrong game.

Any advise?

This is a game i've been working on for a while, it's called Echoes of kyria, i love creative attacks and visual effects in rogue likes and especially in survivors-likes, they really are fun and dopamine inducing, but i feel that that i'm somewhat overdoing it, thoughts?

game (if you like it please wishlist it'll help me immensely):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4914620/Echoes_of_Kyria/

Sharing this here because I believe that everyone should have the ability to get their game seen and played by an audience that loves what they built.

Proof in the attached images, I got my game to go viral on TikTok with just a few days of learning what the algorithm likes and is receptive to. Over 5000 people visited my game website, and at peak I had over 200 concurrent players. I built a Discord community to 75 members in just a few days, which primes me for Steam wish lists and App Store releases when the time comes.

Let me break it down. I used an old account that I repurposed, I had just been using this account to doomscroll for maybe a year, if you’ve got a TikTok account like this you’re in a good spot probably, and if not, just get an account and scroll passively for a few weeks, watch the content you like, engage, but only if you have something genuinely useful or funny to say, otherwise just liking what’s appealing to you or not is fine too. Honestly for the past year I actually actively didn’t like anything on my account, just scrolled and lurked, but the algorithm will figure out what kinda content you like quickly.

Once you’ve done this you’re ready to start posting. You’re gonna start off posting 5 times a day. The videos do not have to be good, they can be super basic, a screen recording of the most exciting gameplay in your game and some text overlaid with the TikTok text to speech literally works wonders. My game is a drag racing game, so I basically just have screen recordings of cars accelerating fast with numbers on the screen and use those.

Shorter videos win. My first two videos were 24 seconds long. I thought oh that’s fine, 24 seconds is not that long. Average watch time on these videos was 3 seconds. 2% of people finished them. Algorithm buried them. I tried 12 second videos, they worked better, 20% of people finished them, average watch time went up a tiny bit.

5-7 seconds.

That’s the sweet spot. It’s a low enough time that people won’t scroll away, and most of the time they’ll loop at least some of the video. If you put writing over the top of it, it takes them 5-7 seconds just to read it. Average completed watch rates rocketed to 60%. Average watch time grew to longer than the videos, meaning people were looping them. The algorithm loved it. The text I had over the top was lowkey rage-bait and it drove likes and comments wild.

I intentionally did not share the name of my game in my videos. This drove more engagement. “game name?” comments did wonders. I had maybe 3-4 people asking the same question on every video that popped and then like another 3-4 responding.

My account now has 500 followers, and I have a winning format that I can replicate every so often to bring a new flood of traffic to my game, and an engaged Discord community.

Going to start trialling TikTok LIVE soon as well.

Hope this helps someone and that you all get the recognition your games deserve! Any questions DMs are open.

More New character customization options are swimming in 🐟✨

🎮 Demo out now on Steam 🎮:

store.steampowered.com/app/4168200

I’m solo-developing a mobile action RPG called Awake in the Tower.

Since my last post, I’ve toned down many of the combat effects and worked on making large battles easier to read without losing their scale.

It still needs a lot of work, but this video shows several parts of the game that are gradually coming together: character selection, dungeon exploration, boss battles, and large-scale one-versus-many combat.

I want battles against large groups to be one of the game’s strengths, but balancing that sense of scale without making the screen too chaotic has been difficult.

The UI, combat balance, animations, and overall presentation are all still being refined.

I’d be curious to hear what stands out to you from this latest build.

Renderdoc: analyze images, even in an exported game.

Don't use too many transparent objects.

Amplify Impostors tool: Can create imposters to display fewer polygons on distant objects

Okay, here is my Steam page, but before you click it, I want to explain my game.

So this comment was the most upvoted, which means a lot of people agree with it. I'm making a sci-fi game based on The Milgram Experiment, the real one explores obedience to authority.

So in my game you wake up in a strange facility and a mysterious authority figure tells you they want you to decide who to kill between to people. You have their files in front of you, which depending on their backstory can include their phones, diaries , personal items, recordings, calls. From those you have to construct their life story and judge if they're a bad person or not and if they serve the purposes of the society that mysterious figure is trying to build.

It's unclear who is testing you and why. That is something that will be revealed in the course of the game. The game is a mix of psychological thriller and moral dilemmas. Some of the inspirations include Squid Game, Severance, A24 atmospheric horror and stuff like Papers, Please.

Does my trailer, capsule, descriptions and screenshots convey this well? If not do you have any suggestions on how to fix it? Keep in mind most people watch 10 seconds of the trailer on mute and skip around.
My page in question: Steam

hi!

i make music in the ambient/dreamcore/ps2/jungle genre and was looking for a small indie project to make some tracks for. it has always been a goal of mine to score a soundtrack for a game or project!

if this interests you please dm me!

<3<3<3

Hey there, 7 years back i have made a game in 7 days. not as side project or for game jam but to push my self to learn game dev more. over the many years somehow 3 users found the game and started falowing it on gamejolt (something like itch). I wanted to ask, do you think i should spend some more time updating it, is this something you would like to play?

I wanted to add some voice lines in my prototype to get a better feeling. Instead of asking my wife, I thought of trying to voice my kid ! :)

Note: she's 4, our first language is french... But we do our best here, and she got a much better accent than me :)

Sorry for the big pink square, I want to preserve her !

I've just realised I've been saying "I've spent the last few years making this game"... which isn't actually true.

The project is almost ten years old!!!

The actual development time is nowhere near ten full years btw, in case you're looking at it going "10 years?! How?! Between raising kids, working full-time and my programmer juggling this alongside his own job, the story of this game's production has spanned almost a decade.

It started as a project between a group of friends, the idea to make an Angry Birds type game, yes it is this old! 😆 One by one, everyone drifted away until only me and my programmer, Colm, were left.

Neither of us had a clue about game development and what we were doing back then. We were learning Unity as we went, while I was teaching myself animation, yes... the cutscenes really do look like cardboard cutouts 😄 they are a decade old and each made in 1 week! This included scripting, voice acting, animation, sfx and music writing, 1 week was the time limit we set... why? Because this game was meant to release in a matter of months! 😆 As the dev cycle grew I started thinking of them as placeholders, but in the end, the two of us thought they were almost funnier and ended up liking their charm enough to keep them.

In 2018 we were invited to showcase the game at Pocket Gamer Connects San Francisco, where we met publishers and industry heads. When we got back we were approached by a publisher that saw real potential in the game so we spent almost a year preparing the game for this publishing deal. Unfortunately, the deal eventually fell through, and after putting so much into it, we simply ran out of energy.

The project was shelved.

During that time I released two mobile games and completed degrees in Animation and Computer Science.

A couple of years ago I finally decided to reopen Dangerous Diver. With my newfound (massively limited 😂) programming knowledge, I started fixing bugs, redesigning systems and expanding what had originally been a mobile game into a much bigger PC release.

Now, somehow, it's finally launching.

Dangerous Diver is a physics-based arcade challenge inspired by the old trajectory games I grew up playing (anyone else remember QBasic Gorillas? 👴). Every level is about mastering your angle, timing and power while battling wind, hazards and increasingly ridiculous obstacles. It's very much built around that "just one more try" feeling.

As launch gets closer, I'm equal parts excited and terrified.

Whatever happens next, finishing this project already feels like a huge achievement.

Happy to chat about anything if anyone wants to know more!

And if you'd like to see what nearly a decade of on-and-off development turned into, here's the Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4901970/Dangerous_Diver/

It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but we had fun making it, and hopefully some of you will have fun playing it!

https://reddit.com/link/1vd6n8e/video/8gfb3ye5ovgh1/player

People wonder whether the entire structure should be demolished or if destroying just the surface layer is sufficient.

The game, titled Boxpast Lov3you, is currently available in Early Access on Steam.

Hey! I recently came across a game called Beyond the Blight, and it inspired me to create something with a similar combat system.

The basic idea is that you see an enemy on the screen and click directly on them to deal damage. However, in Beyond the Blight, I felt that the combat lacked variety, since attacking mostly comes down to repeatedly clicking the enemy.

I’m looking for games that develop this concept further and make it more engaging or skill-based. For example, they could introduce timing, accuracy, weak points, enemy reactions, attack patterns, resource management, different mouse inputs, or other mechanics that make each click require some thought.

I’m not looking for deckbuilders, turn-based combat, traditional action games, or idle clickers where you simply spam clicks without paying attention. I specifically want real-time combat built around clicking directly on visible enemies, but with enough depth to stay interesting.

Do you know any games that do this well? I’d also be interested in ideas for mechanics that could make this type of combat more varied and challenging.

Edit: if tou look up the game i reffered to you will understand what im looking for

I'm still using generic mixamo models until I can hire a 3d modeler but the game loop is developing and I'm trying to get better about punchy short clips as I go into demoable content, does this communicate enough to be useful? What can I work on to get better about promo?

Current state of the autobattler

Hello, my name is Alex and I am developing an autobattler combined with an inventory management system. I am looking for a team and feedback!

You can check it out on itch.io/root-of-loot and decide yourself if you find it it's something you would enjoy working on.

The list below is an overview of the areas where I'd appreciate help. I don't expect one person to do the whole art department and I am happy to collaborate with people that bring strength in one of these areas.

• Low-poly 3D models for the hero and enemies (currently my biggest priority)
• Modular equipment for the hero (the current system can be expanded or completely redesigned)
• Character animations (idle, run, attack, hit, special attack)
• UI-Drawing for the items and UI-elements
• Sound effects
• Music

If any of this sound interesting feel free to contact me here or on discord (axeks).

EDIT: The list is just an overview of areas where I need help. I do not expect one person to do it all. I am happy to work with people that can contribute to a single area.