It is a simple platformer where only 1 player in the world can play at a time, the rest are spectating. You can put yourself in queue and wait for your turn to play, and chat globally while waiting.
A weird experimental game, but totally free!
I'm a huge believer of making content creation as fun as possible, as I think it results in better outcome since the designer will have a more enjoyable time creating and iterating.
In this case I am also the level designer, so all the better reason to make it fun!
Anyway, in this video there are clips of some of the tools I've created for this project specfically, although they can be used in future projects too.
I'm making a somewhat experimental "game" on Steam, where you can play around with music by visualizing it in many different ways, fiddle in a physics-based sandbox while each ball-hit plays a note, play a guitarhero-like rhythm game on the music, compose music or import midis... just a playground for visualizing and "playing" music.
The idea came from seeing those mesmerizing videos on social media and figured to make a (sort of) game from it.
I want to add all sorts of things, any thoughts what could fit?
Just got the store page up too:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5011870/Ballad
Today I opened reddit and within the first 5 posts 3 of them were copycats or each other; sorting games, pretty much exact copies of each other - nails, hay, trash, toys, books, pixels, and the list goes and on and on, and has been for an incomprehensive period of time already.
A lot of the feedback they receive on reddit is negative, but they all get upvoted by the hundreds and they get millions of views on all social media platforms.
Who are these games for?
Are there truly millions of people who want to spend hours on something incredibly ”boring”?
Is it some hidden tick in people’s brain in this age where they want to ”meditate” by doing something like that to combat doom scrolling and instant gratification generators?
Or is each sorted item also instant gratification, but even more simplified than a varying video on TikTok (or something), making the experience even simpler?
Dirtnap, a "realtime Worms", launches on 28th August.
It is a nostalgy-filled 2d multiplayer arena shooter sharing similarities with legendary games such as Worms, Liero, Soldat and Noita.
Featuring multiple characters, 30+ weapons, 4 game modes (deathmatch, TDM, battle royale, CTF), along with its incremental-like single player mode, and ability to create custom and share custom maps through Steamworks.
Can be played with here:
https://dirtnap.parttimemonkey.com/sandbox
Lemme know if you simulation people know how to make it better or more interesting to play with!
Game Title:
Dirtnap - Battle Royale
Playable Link:
https://dirtnap.parttimemonkey.com/battleroyale
Platform:
Browser
Description:
Similar to Liero, Worms (realtime), Soldat and Noita, but the game mode is Battle Royale with a constantly rising lava that'll eventually get everyone.
Round-based games - who gets 10 points first wins, then it restarts.
The game always has 4 players and empty slots are filled with bots. When a real player joins, the lowest-scoring bot gets replaced.
If you share the link to a bud and they join, they automatically join your game (as long as the room is not full, in which case they would open a new room)
Free to Play:
Yes
Involvement:
I'm one of the 3 developers behind Dirtnap
Game Title: Dirtnap
Playable link: https://dirtnapgame.com/duel
Platform: Web
Description: 1v1 duels with a friend
Free to Play Status: Free to play
Involvement: 1 of the 3 devs
It's been a looong time since I did pixel art the last time, so looking for feedback.
I drew the characters in low res but when it was time to scale them up for this capsule resolution, the pixels got wonky because I couldn't scale them up in steps of 100%. Any idea on how to battle that?
These characters combine hand-drawn pixel art, bone-animations, code-based dynamic squishing and a code-generated black outline around the silhouette.
Things are much easier to understand now even though there's still a lot of going on on the screen at once.
The game was originally inspired by Liero, Soldat and Molez, now with a bit of Noita-vibe too.
Would be nice to hear what you think!
The game is Dirtnap:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4956300/Dirtnap/
We went from a retro look ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3EVJtMjT0k ) to a more modern look, with much more dynamic characters.
The game was originally inspired by Liero, Soldat and Molez, now with a bit of Noita-vibe too.
Would be nice to hear what you think!
The game is Dirtnap:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4956300/Dirtnap/
Earlier we posted about our upcoming "realtime Worms" game called Dirtnap:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4956300/Dirtnap/
We received tons of feedback for the game. In general the comments were great, but there was quite a bit of people saying how the visuals look unpolished and noisy - totally fair.
So we listened, and revised the general look from the retro-ish to a more modern, Steam-suitable style.
Would be great to hear what you think of the new and improved look!
I'm trying to decide whether a game like this would have any future on Steam. What do you think?
This is one of those posts, yep!
We published our store page on the 24th July 2026, i.e. 9 days ago:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4956300/Dirtnap/
There were no miracles, just good old boots-to-the-ground DIY "marketing". I'm gonna go through each of the successful things we've done so far.
I've seen many times people do posts like this and I've always had my disbelief on it; what do devs actually do when they succeed, what is the "secret", how could I do it too, and so on. This is the first time I have something that has proven traction (more on it later), and that makes it possible to succeed further.
I've always had a grudge against the "just make a good enough game and it'll sell itself" ideology, but I think I understand it better with experience. What it actually means is that "if you have a good enough game, your marketing will make a difference", but it does NOT mean that there would be no need for marketing. I believe our game would still have close to zero WLs if we didn't do any of the below.
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We've sent about 200-300 emails to press, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean outlets. Altogether we're had perhaps 10-15 worthwhile articles come out, but it's hard to track wishlists from them - although I think they didn't do much in comparison to the actual successful social media posts, apart from the IGN/GameTrailers video, which I believe brought in perhaps 200-400 WLs.
We have also sent a ton of emails to influencers/streamers with Steam keys, but no luck yet. Although I imagine those things take time, even if they get excited about the game.
For each successful social media post, there were perhaps 2-3 failed ones. Here's a list of the successful ones.
X (Twitter):
IndieGameJoe format, 18K views:
https://x.com/parttimemonkey/status/2081000687429652913
Custom fluid simulation, 170K views:
https://x.com/parttimemonkey/status/2083227548276646379
Reddit:
r/gamedevscreens, 700 upvotes, 60K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedevscreens/comments/1v54i9s/were_making_a_realtime_worms_with_destructible/
r/IndieDev, 300 upvotes, 22K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1v5ajzc/were_making_a_realtime_worms_with_destructible/
r/IndieGaming, 350 upvotes, 33K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/1v67tuv/were_making_dirtnap_a_realtime_worms_with/
r/godot, 500 upvotes, 25K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1vbqz58/destructible_terrain_and_fluid_simulation_in_godot/
r/oddlysatisfying, 12K upvotes, 2.1M views (however I don't think this one brought many WLs since it doesn't have the game name or link embedded)
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1vbup03/pixel_fluid_simulation/
r/worms, 260 upvotes, 15K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/worms/comments/1v7wqvx/realtime_worms_has_lived_in_my_head_since_i_was_a/
With these posts and my previous experience, I believe the thresholds to get any meaningful WLs (more than ~25) for each platform are something like this:
Reddit: 200+ upvotes
X: 10K+ views
TikTok: 10K+ views (300 is standard, 1K is the first ceiling)
YT Shorts: 10K+ views (haven't gotten it with this project yet)
Instagram: Don't know, no success yet
Bsky: Don't know, no success yet
... but you do need to have your game name/link in it, otherwise it's kinda pointless. Although I hope mega-successful posts like the r/oddlysatisfying one could bring some other kind of attention later down the road, but hard to say.
---
How I plan to develop and evaluate my games in the future:
I know it sounds a bit non-indie to think like that, but I do this as a living so there must be some logic to the madness in order to some day make an actual sustainable income from this.
---
Personally my main takeaway from this (small) success we've had so far is that it IS possible, and there is NO magic to it - no hidden hashtags or boosted posts or pre-existing contacts or follower counts.
It's deeply frustrating to believe your game is good enough, yet lack the traction needed to validate that belief. It's also mega-frustrating to not have traction after posting tens or hundreds of times, but that's when the alarm bells should be ringing.
We're making Dirtnap, a realtime Worms in the footsteps of the great Liero, Soldat, and Molez. To make our game stand out, we also wanted to add fluid simulation in to the mix, even though this is a multiplayer game and it can prove to be difficult...
We're 3 Finnish indie devs collaborating to make it happen. Early Access will follow soon (next month!)
We just got our Steam up about a week ago, too:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4956300/Dirtnap/