r/SteamdeckGames

For anyone interested, you can wishlist "Tiebreakers" on Steam !

Edited the video slightly to remove the cinematic intros etc.

Trust me, I wasnt expecting this either! But holy crap this game absolutely blew me away, it is such an achievement in game design that I had to put aside grievances and come back to r/shmups to talk about it a little.

For starters, this game is basically "Zelda 1 x Geometry Wars" which on paper sounds okay, but its one of those crossover bangers which completely eclipses the source material. Visually/aesthetically, it kind of does its own thing while not having a super strong style. I would actually say that the art itself is arguably the *weakest part of the game* and its not bad in any way, its just fine.

The sound design is kind of where I started to lock on and think "okay this is unusually good for a small indie game" and it just keeps getting better as you go. Everything from ship noises, rocks breaking, item pickup, its all perfect. Then theres the score/soundtrack. My god, its just sublime. This is an all time great soundtrack! This game is the reason headphones where invented!

Now onto the part where I take everyone who ever wanted to design a game in their life and force them, Clockwork Orange style, to play through or watch a playthrough of Minishoot Adventures. It should be required material for any game design program, because the lessons here dont just apply to 2D games.

Honestly the closest game I can think of to compare it to is ELDEN RING yes the Fromsoft game which is mostly renowned for being incredibly long, obtuse, and hard to finish. Minishoot Adventures isnt long! It isnt even hard! But it can be obtuse, in just the right ways which make the player feel smart when they figure out what to do and where to go. Youre breadcrumbed just enough to fumble your way into the next section of the game. And if you cant figure it, just go explore! The world is EXACTLY big enough that you wont totally get lost. The areas are PRECISELY blocked off so you can see something without being able to reach it.

The combat itself, is fun and not at all punishing on Easy/Normal and many players here would cruise through Hard. But actually, one of the only flaws of the game is, it should really have both a Very Easy and Very Hard difficulty.

Other than that, all I can say is I owned this game for 2 years and barely touched it, mostly due to its weirdly generic name, kind of generic art style, and the fact that exploration games require a certain level of player commitment (I kind of avoid Metroidvanias). This is an exploration game which could turn even the most jaded heart of stone into flesh.

Looking at the history of Cute-Em-Ups, its basically all arcade games. I think if anything, its a deeply underappreciated and underdeveloped genre of game. Frankly, as much as I love Sexy Parodius and Muchi Muchi Pork, and whatever else you want to throw on the top of the pile, none of the games offer the same kind of immersion into a fully realized world that Minishoot does. While I think the art style of both those games is incredible and arguably superior, I dont find myself thinking about playing them often or wanting to revisit them. Theyre novelties.

Minishoot Adventures is a Cute Em Up I want to return to again and again - its not just a novelty or a fun diversion, its actually an instruction book for game design and creating a non narrative, gameplay based world which demands your attention and feels nostalgic and new at the same time.

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

Hello everyone!

I’m one of the Devs of Dice of Kalma and I wanted to share how I managed to gather 2000 streamer emails by myself. First of all, I’m sorry but I can’t share those emails here for legal reasons. Don’t want to take any risks at this point. My point of this post is that after grinding really hard with this task I found multiple ways that we’re much quicker & efficient than the ways that we use gather influencer emails in the beginning. Hopefully these Tips and Tricks help you as well!

Background (if you don’t like storytimes you can skip this part ): During our 2-year game dev journey I have noticed multiple reddit posts how other devs got their games covered by influencers. BenBonk made an awesome video how he contacted 200 influencers (A BIG recommendation for this video: https://youtu.be/ebWYi7ko_u0?t=37 )  and since we really didn’t have much on our marketing budget, this seemed a really good way to gain some traction.

After first 200 emails I can say that it wasn’t a great success, but it clearly did something. I soon realized that it’s also a numbers game – The more influencers I contact, the better the odds are that someone will cover our game. We also tried writing very customized emails to about 30-50 influencers who we though were ultimately the best match for us. This took a lot of time, and we didn’t receive any replies nor none of these streamers covered our game in anyway. So, I kept grinding and here are the  best two strategies so far:

Strategy 1:

Ultimately my best tools were SullyGnome (https://sullygnome.com/) and Twitch. Here is the quickest and the most efficiest way:

1. You use search tool on SullyGnome to find all channels that streamed games that are a good match with out game. This because if you offer Tekken for a Horse Simulator Streamers, they’re most probably not gonna cover it.

2. You’ll get a big list of streamers, so now you copy streamers name and paste it to Twitch. The trick here is to use the mobile version and just replace the ‘STREAMER* part with streamers name so https://m.twitch.tv/*STREAMER*. This because mobile version is much lighter and has no ads that pop up straight away on your face**. It also shows you the “user bio” right away.** This the first place where streamers often put their emails.

If this bio doesn’t have an email address, the next step is to click users About section. It’s very common that streamers have their email here. For me about 90% of the time I was able to find the email just from the bio or from this about section.

3. If a streamer didn’t have an email on Twich, there’s still a couple of quick ways to find it. Next to their bio there’s often links to their X, Instagram or YouTube. Very often if I didn’t find email address from their Twitch, it was in their bio on X or Instagram! So, try those first!

The last option is YouTube. Some streamers have added their emails on YouTube description which is still very quick to find. If not, there is a chance that you can view their email address, but you need to do a bot verification – which is slow and after about 10-20 attempts your daily limit is full. I would recommend going this far only if the streamer is one of your the top priorities – otherwise, like I said it’s a numbers game so go back to your list and try your luck with another streamer.

4. Obviously you want to copy paste Streamers name & email to a some sort of spreatsheet. SullyGnome also give you a csv. version of your search which might make things quicker. I personally just made a sheet with name, email, language (if not English)

5. (Optional): I would highly recommend that if your game is localized, ask your translators to translate your email as well. In SullyGnome you can search streamers based on their language. We got much better results when approaching streamers in their native language, so big recommendation for this!

 Strategy 1 TLDR

1. Use Search Tool on SullyGnome to find Streamers that have played similar games than yours
2. Copy paste streamers account name on https://m.twitch.tv/*STREAMER NAME* (Mobile version)
3. Check Bio under the username -> check “About” section -> Check links X & Insta -> Check Youtube Description
4. Copy paste to a spreadsheet

Strategy 2.

1. Find a streamer on X/Twitter that has streamed similar games than your game
2. There’s a “You might like” box on the right side of the feed. Click: Show More

3. Now you have a list of “Similar To” and “Suggested for you” Infront of you. You can quickly notice that many accounts you see here have their email in their bio as well.
4. When you have copy pasted all the accounts and emails, just click one of the accounts in this list and open of “Similar To” and “Suggested for you” lists again. It often has different accounts than the first one.
5. It’s easy to just copy paste accounts and emails but I would strongly recommend checking just briefly every account. In case of the account is inactive etc

Strategy 2 TLDR

1. Find a streamer from X
2. Open “Similar to” list
3. Copy paste the accounts and emails
4. Click another account and open “Similar to” list again

Additional Tips:
Remember that you don't need to get 2000 emails in one day. Just simply 50-100 every now and then can help you a lot. For example I often sat on my couch watching tv-shows and at the same time I had my laptop on my lap and I was just copying emails. It didn't feel that bad when I was able to do something at the same time.

What after this:
Now it’s time to write the emails and send the activation keys. That’s a whole new world and it probably needs a separate post as well. I’ll just drop couple of tips that have helped us a lot:

First of all watch BenBonks video:
https://youtu.be/ebWYi7ko_u0?t=37

These things helped us:

1. Personalize your emails a bit. Just adding a streamers name have made a huge difference for us. I’ve used Gmail Merge plugin to send bulk emails with customizations.

2. Translate your emails: Use the streamers native language if possible

3. Have a link to your game easily accessible – It’s been better if the receiver doesn’t need to scroll down to find a link to your

4. Remember to add your Press Kitt

5. Add Gifs to make your email more approachable

If you made it this far, thank you for reading and hopefully you found something that helps you on your game dev journey! Would be also great to hear more tips & tricks regarding to this topic, so if you have something, just drop a comment or DM me :)

Cheers!