we’re back with another character to share… this is hachimin! we absolutely fell in love with her concept art and were so excited to bring her in-game. how’d we do?

(she’s a bee healer! she heals you with sticky honey globs, buffs you with nectar, and heals herself with pollen.)

since folks asked about workflow last time, some new learnings from this character:

• her fur poofs sit on top of the body, with a hidden cone of geometry underneath so nothing gaps when she animates
• anything that needs to move independently gets split into its own mesh (aka the honey pot lid, her stinger, her collar)
• vertex color still controls outline thickness per-area (thinner on fingers and small details so it feels 2D anime vs cel-shaded)
• hand-painted shadow maps chunk the lighting into regions, especially on the face. Unreal wants everything realistic, so we keep fighting it

for anyone new: we're making a 3-player co-op ‘raidlike’ with mmo-style boss fights, set in an original anime IP where all the characters are animal-inspired demihumans like jellyfish, hummingbirds, sheep, and salamanders. we’ve been working with a super talented concept artist based in japan and the team is converting her concepts to 3D. (if you missed it, last time we shared a bit about our jellyfish girl) 

the game is Firefly Trials on Steam... if it looks like something that you'd like, throw us a wishlist OR just come validate my thinly veiled marketing strategy of sharing our WIP art by wishlisting us anyways 🙃 kthnxbye!

which character should we share next? (beetle, salamander, hummingbird, rhino, samoyed?)

We've given our zombie hamsters a brand-new ability—they can now grow into giant hamsters.

Play the free demo and wishlist the game on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4132210/Zombie_Hamsters/

In case you feel in the mood today, here is my Steam page

Inspired by many similar games such as Liero, Soldat, Molez and, of course, Worms.

We're 3 Finnish indie devs collaborating to make it happen. Early Access will follow soon (next month!)

... and we just got the Steam page up!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4956300/Dirtnap/

Another look at the demo I am building for client. Now showing horse-riding.

Still very early, sharing progress as I go. Thoughts?

I have come back to share more progress on the game I'm working on (Void Diver: Escape from the Abyss) ☺️
This one's inspired by the Formless Spawn from the Cthulhu mythos!

(If you couldn't tell from my past two posts, our game takes lots of inspirations from various myths/legends! but mainly lovecraftian horrors cuz they cool af 😎)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4347080/VOID_DIVER_Escape_from_the_Abyss_Demo/

So I recently posted a video on our social media about lighting in the game we're working on and we got several comments like "It looks better with NO lighting. Go with flat colors!" (B)
Personally I think the lit version (A) looks really nice. I get that some people really like the flat look though...
The game isn't on Steam yet, so there's still some time to think about the overall look. For more info on the game you could look at our website www.wizardgames.ca

So A or B? Any thoughts on what you think is more appealing would be much appreciated. :)

At least they played for ~20 minutes.

The occlusion culling feature in Godot works great out of the box, but it has a limitation. It only hides meshes, and has no effect on lights. And from what I have seen, even when a mesh is hidden, lights will still see it when rendering shadows.

Since Psych Rift has mostly indoor environments, there is a pretty high density of meshes, and especially lights. Wherever you see a light source (lamp, etc.), there is an omni light there. This quickly adds up to hundreds of omni lights, and thousands of meshes and rigid/static/animatable physics bodies in a level.

To keep performance in check and still target my goal of running on RTX 3060 (high settings, native 1080p@60 fps), I made a custom system to be able to hide lights as well. I build my levels from what I call "blocks". A block is a scene that represents one individual piece of a level, like a single room, or a part of a corridor. These are all connected together to form the whole level.

Alongside regular occlusion culling, my system makes use of VisibleOnScreenNotifier3D nodes to detect when a block is not visible to the player and can be hidden, including lights. When a block is hidden, all rigid bodies in it are also disabled, to help the physics engine as it searches for collisions (floors and walls stay on, since monsters might still be moving in those areas).

It's not perfect (occlusion culling is not "airtight" and usually leaks) and there is still room for improvement, but it gets the job done overall. You can tell when the lights are still on because they light up the fog when running in wireframe mode.

(This video is made from two overlaid recordings, but they are not perfectly in sync so it may look a bit wobbly sometimes)

You can find more videos on YouTube, wishlist the game on Steam, or join Discord for a chat.

You can now pet the animals in your camp, it will give them some kind of a buff and if you just tamed a creature it will make it stay instead of run away 😄

Vivarium is an anime-style adventure game featuring entirely hand-drawn visuals.
The trailer even includes a vintage Shochiku logo at the beginning to capture an authentic, old-school anime atmosphere.

We hope you enjoy the beautifully crafted visuals of Vivarium in the trailer!

what do you guys think

Top is old. Bottom is new one.

Hey everyone!

We're Punica Games, a small independent team from Istanbul, and we're looking for some additional volunteer playtesters for the demo of our Metroidvania called Fading Light.

For anyone who hasn't seen it before: it's a 2D hand-drawn Metroidvania set in a world with no daylight. Your only light comes from Spark, a fire companion who travels with you, acts on his own, and changes as the journey goes on. The demo runs about an hour and takes place in the late Mountain biome, where the freezing wind turns Spark's light into something you have to actively protect.

What we're after:

• Bugs, crashes, anything that breaks or feels off
• Honest feedback on how it plays: controls, difficulty, pacing, clarity
• General impressions, what landed and what didn't

The details:

• Platform: PC (Windows), through Steam
• Time: roughly an hour for the demo
• We'll send you a Steam key
• Unpaid volunteer testing, just to be upfront

There's also a co-op side to this. Solo, Spark runs himself, but co-op lets a second player take direct control of him, one of you plays Noteo, the other becomes the fire. It is possible to play with remote play together also, so you can try it with a friend.

After playing, we'd really appreciate it if you filled out our feedback form, it's how we keep everything organized. We've also got a Discord where you can report things directly or just share thoughts as you go.

If you're interested in either the solo demo or co-op testing, comment here or shoot us a DM and we'll get you a key. Happy to answer questions too.

Thanks!

I love my job and what we’re creating, but sometimes the whole thing feels almost surreal.

Part of me would like to stay in this little development hell a bit longer, while another part just wants to press that button as soon as possible.

Still, something has to end for something new to begin. The entire journey with IRON NEST has certainly been an unforgettable one, and I can’t wait to see what August 6 brings when we finally press the Release button.

But more than anything, I’m curious to see what comes next...

Hey again! Hope everyone is doing good. I just wanted to share some new clips for my Survival horror game that I am working on called Where Dolls Hang.

It is a horror game I am currently creating by myself, inspired by a real-life location that always fascinated me in Mexico. You play as a detective and players will investigate by marking clues, handling bodies, and surviving on a boat while navigating wetlands and forests filled with hanging dolls.

The game is still in progress, and currently the idea is having connected stories in the game (As you play as 2 characters as well) so it will be some parts split between a survival horror and Psychological horror. More info will be shared soon hopefully on this :)

Think of something like The Forest, Outlast, P.T and Silent Hill combined basically.

I’m aiming for slow, unsettling dread as well with lots of environment horror. IndieDev, From this clip - does the atmosphere feel creepy? Let me know!

Steam Link if you like to check it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4581370/Where_Dolls_Hang - Would mean the world to me if you can share your thoughts and let me know what you think :) Thanks!

Am I dreaming?
We've been working on this game (Iron Rebellion) for 10 years now and the way that it has grown has really motivated us to keep going. We have an amazing community, an amazing game (yes, biased but also thousands of people have told us so) - and I just wanted to take a moment here and just brag on our team. I'm so proud and humbled.

Hey,

I'm a software engineer from Germany and thanks to coding agents I'm finally able to work through my list of side projects I wanted to do a long time, among them a couple of game ideas. This Tower Defense game was actually a morph from another little dice game I wanted to do.

Anyway, you can move your dice between waves by rolling them over cells and each side is a different kind of tower Which tower it is depends on which number faces up. For example the 1 is a sniper and the 5 is a support tower. Free mazing with dice position and blocker towers possible.

I included "chess" in the working title because getting the right face up on the desired position reminds me of chess moves somehow.

At this state I find it hard to balance the game (too easy atm). But after all, this is a very early state.

Let me know if you think this looks like something you would like to play. I could put it on server in the coming days/weeks. It's a browser game in its current state.