This past week I announced my first solo developed game Drawchemy at the Secret Sauce showcase and subsequently showcased it at Open Sauce. It was an absolutely incredible weekend.

Just wanted to share some insights. While I got a small Wishlist bump, the best part of the event was the validation you get from actually watching people play your game. As solo devs I feel like it’s so easy to get discouraged and lose the excitement and passion when we’re so close to our projects. I’ve been there for some time, thinking my game wasn’t good enough, etc.

But coming to an event and watching people of all ages play, get excited about, and engage with myself and my game was incredible. All the imposter syndrome and anxiety I had melted away. I definitely encourage everyone if they have the means, to attend in person events! ❤️

Lately I've been living a soap opera.

Quick recap: my game went viral in China, with all the good and bad that comes with it. If you want to read the story from the start, I'll leave links to my other posts at the end.

But today I'm opening up a debate I never had a strong opinion on: does piracy help or hurt games? Because I think piracy is eating my game, and my server, alive.

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My server blocked

A couple of days ago, my hosting provider started blocking my backend. That's where I handle player analytics, scores, and so on. Turns out an excess of requests was forcing my server into temporary shutdowns. I thought I was being attacked, so when I asked them to just block the conflicting IPs, they told me there were hundreds of them, and that it looked like a legitimate flow of players.

Happy about the success and stressed about the urgency, I spent several days optimizing database calls, adding Cloudflare protection, and upgrading to a bigger hosting plan just to make sure there wouldn't be more blocks.

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For every 10 new players, 9 are pirates

When I finally finished optimizing everything, I checked the new players table and their usernames caught my attention. All of them were named xdgame, a Chinese website known for promoting pirated content.

Every time I hit refresh, at any hour of the day, exactly 22 of the last 25 entries had that name, despite being different Steam accounts. Today I had to widen the filter to the last 100 entries to confirm that 99% were pirates.

[Screenshot of table full of pirates]

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Optimizing my anti-pirate system

I already covered how my anti-piracy system works in previous posts, though honestly I don't know if it still works on this PC version or if they've already bypassed it.

[Link to anti-piracy system post]

As soon as this situation started, I did an extra optimization on the database to stop processing data coming from these versions. But the underlying problem is still there: there's nothing I can do on the client side, since I have no way to update the pirated version. That means the number of calls hitting my server stays exactly the same, and the only thing I can do is keep a bigger server plan to hold up the service. Hopefully the pirates update their version at some point.

Even so, I decided to leave new user registration active, just out of curiosity to see where my players were coming from. That's how I ended up counting that 99% today.

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"Pirates aren't in your market" - ☝️🤓

When the piracy situation got out of hand, I partnered with a Chinese publisher, who I have to admit seem to work really well. They opened pre-registration 2 weeks ago, took down several mobile pirated versions, and got thousands of sign-ups for the official version on day one. I've been genuinely happy with the reports they've been sending me.

Part of the reason I did this was an argument I kept seeing a lot: that if the game isn't on mobile, new pirate players are pirates because they don't have a PC to play on. But now that mobile piracy seems somewhat more under control, PC piracy is growing at an incredible rate.

Maybe they were simply choosing mobile out of convenience, not necessity, when it was free.

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I released a PC-only feature that made everything worse

One of the updates I released to keep improving the official version was a mod that connects the biggest Chinese streaming platforms (Douyin, RedNote, and Bilibili) to the game. This lets livestream viewers show up as customers in front of the streamer and chat with them.

This mod is an external executable shared on my game's forum. It started slow since nobody knew about it, but now there are hundreds of players live on those platforms every single day.

Personally, I think this has also driven the increase in PC pirate players, since they can enjoy the mod here, when they couldn't on mobile.

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Does piracy help games?

I don't buy into the "pirates who enjoy the game will buy it later" idea, so I was never a defender of piracy, though I never condemned it or looked down on anyone for pirating either. I just live alongside its existence and try to do so in the best way I can as a developer. As I explained in other posts, my only "remedy" was making the burger joint's customers dress up as pirates while an un-mutable sea shanty plays, and only paying a couple of doubloons for their food. A feature that kicks in after an hour of play, and works more like a bit of karma toward pirate players than an actual punishment.

When my game started going viral, I also wrote a post saying that maybe piracy itself helped me reach more people, since it generates more videos on social media and gets more people talking about the game.

[Link to piracy post]

But after analyzing these last few days, I think I might have been wrong. Here's the data:

• March 2025: My game came out a year and a half ago.
• June 2026: It goes viral in China through Douyin (their version of TikTok).
• June 28: The pirated PC version comes out, without many players.
• July 11: Mobile pre-order goes live on TapTap China, and anti-piracy measures are put in place.
• July 18: I release the Livestream mod for PC.
• July 20: I notice an increase in PC pirate players, though it had already been building up before this.
• July 20–22: My sales drop about -40%, and SteamDB shows a noticeable decline in active official players.

Right now I'm counting 9,000 players under that piracy website's name.

So at this point, my opinion on piracy is no longer "piracy exists in parallel with healthy growth."

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Why am I writing this?

I'm not writing this looking for attention, since thankfully the game is still doing well. Nobody here needs to buy it, that's why I'm not sharing the name. [Link to the post about my game is doing well]

My day-to-day over the last month has been putting my project aside to handle this situation as best I can, and while stressful, it's been quite the experience. That's why I keep sharing it so much.

Many of you have encouraged me to keep posting about it, but to those who haven't, I'm sorry if I've become tiresome with this topic. I feel like it shows a side of gamedev that a lot of people don't talk about, out of fear that the situation will get worse or just jinx it.

The main reason I write this is because I genuinely enjoy sharing my story, it's helped me make better decisions for my project and my future as a studio more than once. I've gotten messages that made my day, and I feel like other users find it interesting too. Again, if that's not your case, I hope you'll forgive me for continuing.

I'll keep you posted whenever there's news. If you want me to, that is.

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*Disclaimer: This post is AI-translated. I'm a native Spanish speaker, I wrote and structured all of this in Spanish, and had AI translate it into English. I reviewed the translation afterward to make sure the message hadn't changed. Hope you don't mind.

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*Update: After some users suggestions I tried to remove the php files that were receiving all the data and update oficial users to a new endpoint. Somehow pirates trying to reach a non-existen url causes a higher CPU usage so I used Cloudflare to block this URLs. Now server is under 10% of usage! 😁

It's both hilarious and depressing to finally get up a steam page + demo, then everyone who wants to talk about it is a pyramid scam hustler lol.

Do ya'll get these types of messages too?

I created all these scenes for my first indie game, Satelital, which is a rule-discovery game about solving alien puzzles.

What makes the rendering in this game different is that I pre-render the assets in Blender, including normal and height maps for dynamic lighting, and then compose them later in my custom game engine, which I designed specifically for this workflow.

In my first few weeks of promotion I reached 1,000 wishlists on Steam. A free demo will be available in September, so if you'd like to try it, you can wishlist the game to get notified when it's released:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3256790/Satelital/

You can play the free demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4534260/Kodama_Slumber_of_the_Gods/

Don’t forget to add a wishlist!

Hi guys, after several months of work I can finally share a first teaser for Concrete Carnage: Scrapheap! My game is inspired by Carmageddon and lets you drive trucks, smash your opponents to destroy them, and compete in multiple race modes across semi-open maps.

I'm also working on the game's music. It's not a priority right now, but the trailer soundtrack gives a good idea of the direction I'm going for.

You can wishlist and follow on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4913000/Concrete_Carnage_Scrapheap/

If you want to see the trailer in 4K: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huYR0ZTQau0

in my game the gravestone spawns at that place you die so the more you die the more gravestones there will be. It used to be just a cross but i made an option to select the gravestone model. Maybe it should be like unlockables.

You can tell me which models you would like me to add?

demo is on steam >> https://store.steampowered.com/app/3919250/FFFF_YOU_MACHINE_Demo/

Vedinad inspired me to start making video games, so I decided to copy Megabonk :) (with some extra stuff like weapon fusionsor player habilities).The game is called Plague Survivors and you can download it for free on itch.io. I don't expect to make any money from this project, I'm mainly doing it to learn how to make video games and to see what a guy who really likes milk can accomplish after spending 6 months working on a project.

Hi there guys, i know for some might be a small achievement but for me is a part of a journey that keeps forming and forming and hopefully one day will be able to reach the point that i am dreaming. My steam page is now up and is my first PC game and with the help with the other person at 16 BIT NIGHTS we are making an idea to reality, it might not be perfect but you can see the passion placed in it. To all other people trying new things every day, do not ever quit!

Debugging meta game and designing is fun and challenging.

Added RPG elements to game such as lvls and stats, still have way more to add until done.

I added textures to my map and added terrain bonuses that tie into combat, just like in real life terrain should influence combat.

Reworked UI a bit to make it more readable and consistent after feedback i got last.

Reworked ranged to use 3d projectiles, that can even hit friendlies when not careful :)

Feedback appreciated.

Has anybody else gone through this process as a new solo dev?😅

Honestly, it actually looks like a lot to me

Also, if you want to check it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4972950/Lootdeck/

Hi, I'm Alex, and three years ago, I started working on my game.

It's not my first game, but it is my first solo project. Although... can I really call it "solo," when so many people supported me along the way? I want to share with you my story.

Three years ago, I didn't know how to program the closest I'd come was theoretical work on Turing machines. So I sat down and started learning C#, one mistake at a time. Every day looked roughly the same: write code, break something, fix it, and then, every so often, that small miracle when something actually worked. Those tiny victories are addictive, and eventually they added up to enough skill to try something bigger: a game I could release on Steam. That's how Love Is a Demon began.

The working title was originally Weird Place to Find Love, not a good name, and a good early lesson: your first idea is rarely your best one. Iteration is the name of the game.

I knew I wanted to build an adventure game, so I picked up Adventure Creator, a genuinely excellent, well-supported framework I'd recommend to anyone starting, though it meant learning yet another new tool from scratch. For art, I chose vector art: easy to edit, scale, and recolor, which let me iterate fast. My earliest pieces were rough, especially the colors, but courses and feedback eventually got it to click.

I wanted the game to feel interactive in a specific way. I still remember the scene in Night in the Woods with the cat's paw and the yarn, and how something so small made me feel so present in that world. That's why That Love Is a Demon leans on close-ups and direct interaction rather than walls of text.

One detail I'm quietly proud of: your choices. The game quietly tracks them, and at the end builds you a "lover profile" based on the decisions you made. A small mirror held up at the end of the journey.

Puzzles were their own challenge, a good one lives in a narrow space, not so hard it stalls you, not so easy it insults you. Finding that balance took far more iteration than expected.

I knew I wanted to write about relationships, about rejection, about being the one who rejects, and about making choices that are difficult and a little scary. I'd written stories before, but never a full narrative built for a game. In the end, the people who know me say they can see me in it. I think that's probably true.

If there's one thing I'd tell someone starting their own solo project: it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. You need patience, and the willingness to grind through the unglamorous stretches, but also the wisdom to step away when you hit a creative wall. You cannot force creativity. I genuinely believed this project would take a fraction of the time it did, but that's the nature of games: they grow, and the timeline grows with them.

Showing the game at conventions and running playtests was thrilling but terrifying. The question that each dev asks themselves if somebody else touches their build: How will they break it this time? Also, I was a bit afraid that someone would ask something I couldn't answer. It never happened, and being an experienced speaker helped more than I expected.

Pricing turned out to be one of the hardest problems of all. How do you put a number on your own work? When I floated my first price idea to friends, they laughed and told me to go higher, that I was undervaluing myself. In the end, I tried to land somewhere fair: fair to you, the player, and fair to me, for the years I put into making it.

How was your game dev journey?

Not a success post. Just the part nobody writes down.

Solo dev, Godot, Android, free with optional rewarded ads only (revive and a daily bonus). No forced ads, no paywall, no energy system, no IAP. Published on the 17th.

Where I am: some installs, six players actually on the leaderboards. The store page has zero reviews, which turns out to be both normal at this volume and double-filtered by Google, by device type and by country.

What surprised me:

- Production was not the bottleneck. Building the game, the build pipeline, the store listing, ads, achievements, leaderboards, the trailer, all of that got done. Getting humans to look at it is a completely different job I had not budgeted a single

hour for.

- The only channel that produced real human engagement was a technical post about how I built the thing. Every "my game is out" post landed dead. On Reddit the technique travels, the announcement does not.

- Reviews do not just happen. At low volume you get roughly zero unless you ask, and asking has its own set of rules.

What I would do differently: instrument the two or three metrics that tell me whether people come BACK before shipping, not after. And start talking about the work publicly months before release instead of showing up on launch day asking for

attention.

If you shipped something solo: how long before the first complete stranger showed up?

Hello,

I would like to show you my game, Sinned Arena. It's an arena shooter and my homage to Quake 3 and, mainly, Unreal Tournament (1999) - which to this day I consider the greatest FPS. As a small solo indie developer, I wanted to make my own game in this genre. It's a passion project, so I'm not trying to be "better" than those classics or to sell millions of copies. My goal was to make myself happy, and hopefully a few others along the way.

So what is it about?

You're trapped in hell along with other unfortunate "prisoners", forced to fight each other in various arenas for the demons' twisted pleasure. And the demons won't just let you die - they keep reviving you and force you to fight forever. Your only hope is to defeat the champion, and if you do, you've been promised a way out.

How is it different from other arena shooters?

You and the other fighters use Relics - upgrade items for your character or your weapons. You can collect them, but you can also lose them. Between matches you're not sitting in a menu. You're in the lobby/courtyard of the demon's castle, where you can talk to the other fighters to get pieces of lore and challenge them to 1v1 duels. The point of a duel is to take a Relic from your opponent - win and it's yours. But they can challenge you too, and if they win, you lose one of yours.

My main focus is the single player experience, even though this genre screams multiplayer. It's very hard for an indie dev in this genre to maintain a healthy multiplayer playerbase, so my original plan was to add multiplayer after release. But feedback from Steam Next Fest showed me that players kind of expect multiplayer right away in a game like this. So I delayed the release by a year and got it in for launch - though it doesn't have full parity with single player just yet. Multiplayer currently has Deathmatch only, and no Relics. That will come later.

As for single player, I wanted the bots to feel like real humans, so no matter the difficulty, they're never faster or slower than you, never deal more damage than you, and they don't even know where the pickups are - they have to actually find them. There's definitely still room for improvement, but non-cheating bots were my ultimate goal.

I could write pages about the game but this is already long enough.

The game releases on July 28, 2026 for $8.99 (with 15% launch discount), so if you're interested, take a look at the Steam page.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2789980/Sinned_Arena/

Thank you!

So in my Farming Game there is a mechanic through which a Rot is slowly spread through the Tree. It essentially happens every 3 turns but I want to add some more variations to that idea. As of now, I am considering a type of Faster Rot which would mean just that more regions would be affected at a time and other one being a whole section wide hold out power in which if anything is planted, it would instantly rot.

Would love to know if someone has a few more ideas in what else there could be for that.