I’m making an in-game notebook for Black Ledger, our story-driven antique shop / crime management game.
These are early mockups for the report pages: daily report, weekly report, ongoing events, and special characters.
I’m mostly trying to figure out if the UI is readable and easy to understand at a glance.
Does this layout work, or does it feel too busy?
I’m making an in-game notebook for Black Ledger, our story-driven antique shop / mafia management game.
These are early mockups for the report pages: daily report, weekly report, ongoing events, and special characters.
I’m mostly trying to figure out if the UI is readable and easy to understand at a glance.
Does this layout work, or does it feel shit, maybe?
Made in Figma :p
Totally normal item testing process:
New item set in progress. 🏺
We went through a few different directions for the items in our antique shop / mafia management game, and this is the style we decided to move forward with.
We wanted the items to feel valuable, old, readable, and a little suspicious.
Does this style put you in the right mood for an antique shop game?
We recently opened the Steam page for our first game, and I’ve started obsessively checking the wishlist graph like every totally normal indie dev.
For people with more Steam experience: do these wishlist spikes tend to get bigger over time if Steam starts showing the game to more people, or is this just random traffic from individual posts?
I’m not sure if Steam is slowly pushing the page to more players, or if I’m just reading too much into the graph.
We’ve been working on the customer cast for our antique shop / mafia management game.
We’ve been working on the customer cast for our antique shop / mafia management game. ✌️✌️
Uncle with the cat is my favorite.
A Steam curator marked our 3-person indie game as “Not Recommended” because we changed our female character designs after Reddit feedback and made them less “sexy-first.”
Their comment says we took “terrible advice” from “feminist and woke Redditors” by desexualizing our characters, and argues that “sex sells.”
I thought maybe it was just normal art criticism, but their other public curator comments tell a pretty clear story: games get marked negatively for pronouns, LGBTQ+ characters, feminism, non-binary options, Black protagonists, anti-colonial themes, body types, and even for removing “boob window / upskirt” content.
So yeah, this doesn’t feel like criticism of our gameplay or art direction. It feels like our game got caught in a culture-war filter because we tried to make our female characters more grounded and character-driven.
But if you want to help a tiny indie team push back against this kind of curator behavior, the best support is wishlisting the game.
Steam page:
Previous Reddit post:
Thank you. It genuinely helps.
A Steam curator marked our 3-person indie game as “Not Recommended” because we changed our female character designs after Reddit feedback and made them less “sexy-first.”
Their comment says we took “terrible advice” from “feminist and woke Redditors” by desexualizing our characters, and argues that “sex sells.”
I thought maybe it was just normal art criticism, but their other public curator comments tell a pretty clear story: games get marked negatively for pronouns, LGBTQ+ characters, feminism, non-binary options, Black protagonists, anti-colonial themes, body types, and even for removing “boob window / upskirt” content.
So yeah, this doesn’t feel like criticism of our gameplay or art direction. It feels like our game got caught in a culture-war filter because we tried to make our female characters more grounded and character-driven.
But if you want to help a tiny indie team push back against this kind of curator behavior, the best support is wishlisting the game.
Steam page:
Previous Reddit post:
Thank you. It genuinely helps.
A Steam curator marked our 3-person indie game as “Not Recommended” because we changed our female character designs after Reddit feedback and made them less “sexy-first.”
Their comment says we took “terrible advice” from “feminist and woke Redditors” by desexualizing our characters, and argues that “sex sells.”
I thought maybe it was just normal art criticism, but their other public curator comments tell a pretty clear story: games get marked negatively for pronouns, LGBTQ+ characters, feminism, non-binary options, Black protagonists, anti-colonial themes, body types, and even for removing “boob window / upskirt” content.
So yeah, this doesn’t feel like criticism of our gameplay or art direction. It feels like our game got caught in a culture-war filter because we tried to make our female characters more grounded and character-driven.
But if you want to help a tiny indie team push back against this kind of curator behavior, the best support is wishlisting the game.
Steam page:
Previous Reddit post:
Thank you. It genuinely helps.
Instead of only typing the number on your keyboard, we thought using the register buttons could make pricing items feel more satisfying.
Would this make the interaction more fun, or would you rather just type the price directly?
After our last post, a lot of people pointed out that some of our female character designs were leaning too much into “sexy first.”
Fair feedback.
If you’d like to check it, I’ll leave the Steam link here. Thanks a lot!
After our last post, a lot of people pointed out that some of our female character designs were leaning too much into “sexy first.”
Fair feedback.
So we tried changing the direction a bit. We pulled back on the sex appeal and focused more on personality, silhouette, clothing, posture, and making the characters feel like different people from the world of the game.
Does this feel like a better direction?
If you’d like to check it, I’ll leave the Steam link here. Thanks a lot!
After our last post, a lot of people pointed out that some of our female character designs were leaning too much into “sexy first.”
Fair feedback.
So we tried changing the direction a bit. We pulled back on the sex appeal and focused more on personality, silhouette, clothing, posture, and making the characters feel like different people from the world of the game.
Does this feel like a better direction?
If you’d like to check it, I’ll leave the Steam link here. Thanks a lot!
After our last post, a lot of people pointed out that some of our female character designs were leaning too much into “sexy first.”
Fair feedback.
So we tried changing the direction a bit. We pulled back on the sex appeal and focused more on personality, silhouette, clothing, posture, and making the characters feel like different people from the world of the game.
Does this feel like a better direction?
If you’d like to check it, I’ll leave the Steam link here. Thanks a lot!
We felt that some of our older female character designs looked a bit rough and didn’t quite fit the art direction we were aiming for.
So we tried shifting the style a little. We pushed the silhouettes, posture, and overall personality more than before.
The top-left image is closer to the older direction, while the others show the newer direction we’re testing.
Does this feel stronger?
If you’d like to check it, I’ll leave the Steam link here. Thanks a lot!
We felt that some of our older female character designs looked a bit rough and didn’t quite fit the art direction we were aiming for.
So we tried shifting the style a little. We pushed the silhouettes, posture, and overall personality more than before.
The top-left image is closer to the older direction, while the others show the newer direction we’re testing.
Does this feel stronger?
If you’d like to check it, I’ll leave the Steam link here. Thanks a lot!
We felt that some of our older female character designs looked a bit rough and didn’t quite fit the art direction we were aiming for.
So we tried shifting the style a little. We pushed the silhouettes, posture, and overall personality more than before.
Does this feel stronger?
If you’d like to check it, I’ll leave the Steam link here. Thanks a lot!
Hover over a clickable building, its light turns on and it gets an outline. I also tested a slight scale-up on the "Antique Shop" building as an example. The other buildings in the video only get the outline for now.
Would you keep the slight scale-up, remove it, or use some other kind of hover feedback?
Would it feel bad if some customers used the same base character design with different colors, hair, or small outfit changes, as long as they are meant to be ordinary people visiting the shop?
Not planning to do this for important characters, but for regular customers it could help us add more variety without redrawing every single person from scratch.
