u/knutolee

Hey everyone,

For about 2 years now I've basically only played on my ASUS ROG Ally Z1E and Steam Deck. I'm getting older (37 now), and instead of fast paced shooters I keep drifting into the cozy corner, games with simple, relaxed mechanics.

Darts has been a big hobby of mine for years, but I couldn't find any cozy/relaxing darts game on Steam, and definitely none built for handhelds. So late last year I figured I'd just try making one myself. What started as a dumb idea turned into a pretty deep hobby, and eventually into a finished game called Pixel Darts: From Pub to Glory.

The thing I cared about most, and the part I'd genuinely love your feedback on, is exactly what matters in this sub:

• native handheld controls (fully playable with a gamepad, no clunky mouse workarounds)
• runs smoothly on Ally and Deck, even on battery/low mode
• pixel art look, with a cozy pub to glory career mode instead of constant pressure

There's a playable demo, trailer and more screenshots on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4712560

I'm a solo hobby dev, so if you give it a try, please tell me honestly how the controls feel on your device. That's exactly what the demo is for. I’m always torn between the fact that the controller controls in this game tend to be too easy to get high scores, but on the other hand, I love the addictive feeling of achieving high scores. 😁

Cheers!

Hey everyone,

For about 2 years now I've basically only played on my Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally Z1E. I'm getting older (37 now), and instead of fast paced shooters I keep drifting into the cozy corner, games with simple, relaxed mechanics.

Darts has been a big hobby of mine for years, but I couldn't find any cozy/relaxing darts game on Steam, and definitely none built for handhelds. So late last year I figured I'd just try making one myself. What started as a dumb idea turned into a pretty deep hobby, and eventually into a finished game called Pixel Darts: From Pub to Glory.

The thing I cared about most, and the part I'd genuinely love your feedback on, is exactly what matters in this sub:

• native handheld controls (fully playable with a gamepad, no clunky mouse workarounds)
• runs smoothly on Deck and Ally, even on battery
• pixel art look, with a cozy pub to glory career mode instead of constant pressure

There's a playable demo, trailer and more screenshots on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4712560

I'm a solo hobby dev, so if you give it a try, please tell me honestly how the controls feel on your device. That's exactly what the demo is for. I’m always torn between the fact that the controller controls in this game tend to be too easy to get high scores, but on the other hand, I love the addictive feeling of achieving high scores. 😁

Cheers!

TL;DR up front, because this got long: Over the last 8 months I built Pixel Darts: From Pub to Glory, a 90s-arcade-style darts game with a heavy AI-assisted workflow. The Steam demo went live today, and the full release is about a month out.

If you just want to try it or wishlist it, here is the link:
👉 https://store.steampowered.com/app/4712560/Pixel_Darts_From_Pub_to_Glory/

If you want the long, honest version (how it was built, what AI did and did not do, the costs, and my thoughts on the AI backlash), read on. If not, that is completely fine, and there is a picture of my cat at the bottom as a reward either way.

The Approach
I am 37 years old by now, and like so many people here in this subreddit, I dreamed as a kid and a teenager of one day creating my own video game.
A bit about my background: I was always a "creative" spirit, I studied German philology and literary studies in Germany (M.A.), and sooner or later I wanted to write my own works. Naive, a little cocky, but definitely driven to "create something".
The reality in the field of literature was of course not exactly rosy even 15 years ago. Making a living from it was completely unrealistic. That was always clear to me, and the sobering realization that my own literary attempts would never reach the wider world, because that would require a lot of luck and marketing, caught up with me quickly.
So fairly soon after my studies I took an internship in publishing in India, and since then I have worked a traditional "9-to-5" job. Financially sufficient, but never fulfilling when it comes to my creative side.

When GPT went public for the "first time" in December 2022, I tried it out immediately, and in my circle of friends we had a lot of fun with the way "GPT" could even write jokes (which, in that early AI-slop manner, were of course unintentionally funny at the start). I kept using the technology continuously after that, played around with it privately, stayed on the pulse of the times, because it was obvious that something "completely new" was happening here.
My first attempts at programming video games with AI were in early 2025. Unfortunately, with that generation of models it was not yet possible for me, because context and intelligence were too weak. I did study computer visualistics for one semester before my German philology degree, and I have a fairly deep technical understanding (at least I think so), but I basically cannot code at all (or only very little).

The newest model generation from November 2025 onward (Opus 4.5, GPT 5.1) brought what felt like a "quantum leap", though. Sure, a lot of spaghetti code was still being produced in the background and small apps became bloated quickly, but "it worked".
With that generation of models I believed for the first time that programming a game with a simple gameplay mechanic might be possible at a level that other players would actually find "good".

What was important to me when choosing the project:

1. I myself have a connection to the gameplay mechanic or to the game
2. the gameplay mechanic has to be simple!
3. the engine should be something as well documented as possible (LLM-friendly) and "simple"

Since we play quite a lot of darts, especially in winter, and since I had actually searched for "darts" games myself but only ever found mobile games, my choice fell on this genre.
It seemed suitable above all because of the simple gameplay mechanic. At the same time, the question immediately came up: how could I translate the gameplay mechanic of playing "darts" onto PC/Steam Deck in a way that is fun and varied?

The First Successes
Around that time I also discovered "Phaser 3" as an engine. A lot of simple 2D games are built on it, but it is potent enough that you can reach a "better indie game level" with it (for example Vampire Survivors was originally built in Phaser 3, and has since been ported, as far as I know).

The first attempts with Opus as frontend dev and GPT 5.1/5.2 as backend dev went well, and the basic gameplay mechanic came together relatively quickly. These are the kind of prototypes that then often get shown on Twitter/Reddit et al. and get hailed as the death knell of the gamedev industry. But going from a prototype like that to a real game is a very long road.

At the same time, as I wrote above, the question came up fairly quickly: how can the game be fun when the mechanic is so simple? How can it be broken open without the player feeling "frustration"? The problem was: if you replicate the throwing motion with the mouse, then a player probably figures out fairly quickly how to throw in order to always hit high scores (and the game gets boring fast).

At that point there was no real genre or direction set for the game yet. There was a board and an arrow sprite that you could throw onto the board with a flick of the mouse, and which counted differently depending on where it landed.

In conversations with a friend I came to the idea that the genre of 90s arcade games would be a good fit. As a 90s kid I played Street Fighter and Tekken myself. The gameplay mechanic there was also very simple (different buttons = different combos, the principle was explained pretty quickly); he also pointed me to Super Punch-Out!!
Since then I actually set a certain focus for the game: I wanted to translate the "90s arcade feeling" onto the sport of darts. As it turned out, it lends itself to that pretty well.

1. simple gameplay mechanic with direct player feedback on whether the short action was successful (Street Fighter = punch and direct visual/auditory feedback on whether a punch landed; darts = throwing motion and direct visual/auditory feedback on whether the throw landed)
2. 1-on-1 gameplay: building rivalries, focus on the "individuality" of the characters
3. high score mechanic: speed, accuracy, the number of high scores during the leg etc. can be turned into a high score system relatively easily, just like in Street Fighter and similar games

The Game Becomes Playable and Fun!
Over the following months (especially January through April) I worked a lot on giving the game more "JUICE". While playing, the player should get that addictive feeling that something worked out well. More important than the pure gameplay mechanic became the feedback through visual flashes/shakes and SFX.

At the same time I definitely wanted to bring in my own ambitions as a humanities person and someone interested in literature. A career mode had to happen, and in the meantime I wrote the story, dialogues etc. pp. for it. That was the field I knew relatively well, and I decided to process the loss of my own father in the game in a way that is somewhat "autobiographical". A story about loss and the protagonist's self-empowerment was meant to be created, with grief and humor as the leading subject. This part was written entirely by me, and it is probably not quite as interesting for the subreddit, but I am genuinely proud of the dynamic and the development of the career mode. Above all, I have the feeling here that my literary work could "theoretically" reach a larger audience than I could ever have achieved outside the games space.

Around the same time, the decision was also made to offer the game for sale on Steam. Why was that decision made? For one thing, I wanted to lift the game from a "hobby" level to an "indie" level. A sense of value plays a role here, and by releasing on Steam it is performatively professional! 😁

On top of that, my time investment over the last 8 months has not been insignificant. I did a rough calculation once. In total I will have put a bit more than 1000 hours of work into the game by now and used AI tools worth roughly 500 EUR (various subscriptions, primarily alternating between Anthropic/OpenAI depending on the model generation, but also ElevenLabs/Suno). I held onto the hope that at some point I might at least recoup the cost of the AI tools, but when I ran that against the sales numbers needed and the Steam fee, I understood fairly quickly that this was basically illusory. Nevertheless I went down this road, and dealing with Steam as well as the marketing activities, just so that anyone would even see the game, took up a lot of time on their own.

The time investment of roughly 1000 hours (I basically worked on the game every minute of my free time; by now it has been almost exactly 8 months = 240 days * 4h per day, very conservatively estimated, probably more) surprises me myself, and I ask myself what exactly all that time went into.

In the process there are an incredible number of small decisions and adjustments which, partly due to the nature of "vibe coding", lead to bugs popping up again in other places. I did keep those astonishingly low overall through a rigid documentation infrastructure (I set up strict prompting for the game pretty quickly, with a documentation requirement for every smaller adjustment, which every agent has to read before working on the game, with a matrix [gameplay mechanic, design decisions, backend etc. pp.]). That did keep the larger bugs in check, but toward the end the token usage also rose quite sharply; I tried to keep the costs down by networking (sub-)agents together. The bugs still appeared, although that is probably also something that happens in "normal" game development.

Beyond that, the rework of the pixel images in Aseprite was pretty time-consuming. For the graphical assets I primarily used Nano Banana Pro and later GPT Image 2, but the assets were not usable in that form. They also do not match the level of what a human would create, but they at least satisfy my own standards (which for me was the most important benchmark during development). A dream remains that I could replace all graphical assets in a major update with human-made graphics. If, in an extremely unrealistic scenario, the game sold so many copies that some kind of "profit" was made, then I would use that profit to hire a pixel art artist and have the graphics redone.

Backlash from GameDevs, Hate Against AI
Since, independently of my interest in one day developing and releasing "a game of my own", I also saw the whole thing as a playground for using AI ("how far can I as a layperson actually get with AI toward a finished game?"), it was never up for debate to hide the use of AI. That is also why I adopted it as a basic disclosure on Steam. Listing it there in extenso did not seem necessary to me (the negative label is already assigned anyway; anyone interested can find out about the concrete usage here or on the internet).

Nevertheless it was clear to me that being honest about AI in the development of the game would probably mean it does not sell well. I also see it as necessary here to share my thoughts on AI and on the future use of AI.

Given my background, it should be clear that I do not come from the "business-oriented", "maximum profit" corner. By nature I was always a creative spirit. I write texts myself, I used to wish to be recognized as a person creating art in the realm of literary and prose texts.
I see AI as a tool. The main points of criticism concern:

1. in training the LLM, prior knowledge was used and intellectual property was stolen accordingly; correspondingly, you also sometimes find content from other games/works/art in generative AI
2. LLMs use a lot of water and are very resource-intensive

The first point in particular is valid, but in my opinion it basically ignores the fact that humans, too, have always copied intellectual property or referenced it to such a degree that their own authenticity can be massively called into question. I know this does not make me popular with the "anti-AI crowd". The fronts are so entrenched that a discussion or debate is useless.

But how did I dare to write my own literary texts back then? I had an idea. My idea was based on works I had taken in. It was based on things I had already read. I had specific writers, texts, subjects in mind that possessed no artistic "AHA" moment of the kind described in Honoré de Balzac's Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu. We humans ALWAYS orient our own creating around what already exists. We build on what came before. It is in our nature.
AI possesses no nature and no soul. I am aware of that. Accordingly, one-shot prompts ("game prototypes") and the like are also completely soulless. I hope that over the last 8 months I was able to give my game some "soul", because even though the coding and the first iteration of the assets were largely produced by AI, the end product, through countless adjustments and through writing all of the content components myself (NPCs, dialogues, story, and so on and so forth), corresponds to what I had imagined.

The text was very long, so it is quite possible that it disappears into subreddit limbo and you think "I ain't reading all that. i'm happy for u tho. or sorry that happened." and that is completely fine with me! Because primarily I did these 8 months of developing the game out of an intrinsic motivation to "create something", and I am proud of the end result.

If anyone wants to try the demo that came out today, or wishlist the game (would be great, of course!), they are very welcome to do so here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4712560/Pixel_Darts_From_Pub_to_Glory/

And to close, a picture of my cat:

https://imgur.com/3bb9h8x

Hi fellow game devs

I’ve been scrolling through a few posts here today and have spotted some interesting points. Above all, I was impressed by a truly outstanding-looking game on Steam by u/Redhowl_game, which has racked up 580 wishlist entries on Steam ahead of its release and whose demo has recorded over 1,000 downloads on Steam.

I’ve been working on a pixel-art darts game for over six months. What started out as a bit of a lark in autumn 2025 is now at a very, very advanced stage, and I hope to be able to release the game on Steam at the end of June 2026. At the moment, I’m really focused on how I can increase the game’s visibility and get more wishlist entries.

The gameplay is relatively simple (it is a darts game, after all), but the game also features a career mode with -- in my opinion -- a relatively in-depth story. I’m therefore trying, on the one hand, to attract players who are into darts, and on the other, players who used to play "1-on-1" battlers like Street Fighter, Super Punch-Out, etc. (I had originally set myself the "task" of transferring this arcade-style feel to a darts game with plenty of "juice" and an "arcade-like" vibe), whilst also appealing to casual gamers or occasional players thanks to the simple gameplay mechanics and the easy difficulty level (if you select "Easy").

I'll be honest: I celebrate every wishlist entry on my Steam store, and my "sales targets" are pretty modest; nevertheless, you’d still like to "spread the word" about the game you’ve created yourself... simply because it makes you proud when something you’ve created yourself appeals to other people.

To be specific: do you have any practical tips, for example, on how I can further improve the presentation of my Steam store? What do you think of it? Are the description, trailer and screenshots appealing? I’m thinking of replacing the static images in the description with GIFs; that might give it a slightly more polished look. Otherwise, it’s really hard to make the game more visible because it’s so niche, and it’s almost impossible to achieve any organic reach on social media channels (FB, TikTok, Twitter, etc.). I’ll probably try other subreddits as well, but I don’t want to spam them either.

Thanks!