Is anyone else experiencing this thing where the less effort put into a game, the more people are liking it? I've released like 6 or 7 games now (Some complete garbage) but the games I made the fastest with lowest effort are by far the most played and highest rated. I just released a Hamster game that I made with my kids. Put hardly any time or thought into it and its like 10 mins of gameplay and people seem to love it. Right after I released a game about llamas throwing bombs and I personally love it and am putting a lot of effort into it and doesnt seem to resonate with people.

Sorry if I make any weird grammar mistakes here, English isn't my first language.

I am a software engineer by trade, and I started with exactly zero experience in game development. About ten months ago I was just messing around on my phone, tapping through the businessman career track in Bitlife. It was fun for a minute, but I remember closing the app feeling kind of disappointed. I kept thinking, man, why is there no sandbox game that actually goes deep into this? Like, a game where you have to build the real, boring, complicated infrastructure of a company.

Because I write code for a living, I had that typical blind developer confidence. I literally told myself, "I can build a better version of this in two months. Easy."

That was a massive delusion, and it led to my biggest mistake.

I wanted to skip the hard parts, so I leaned heavily on AI to write the code and logic. I thought I was cheating the timeline. But by month three, I hit a brick wall. The codebase was a giant, bloated nightmare. And honestly? The game had absolutely no soul. It was pure AI slop. It felt like playing a spreadsheet that was built by a robot who didn't understand what fun is.

My head was full of these big ideas. I wanted to build the "everything game" for business simulation. I wanted angel investors, scaling friction, personal stocks, factories, airlines. Everything. But the reality was I couldn't even make a basic game loop work. I had days where I just stared at my messy screen, feeling so burned out and frustrated. It was hard to admit, but I finally realized my game design instincts were just terrible. I was blindly trusting beginner's luck, and I was failing.

So I made a really painful choice. I highlighted like 90% of that AI code and I just hit delete. Started from scratch.

I banned AI from my game code entirely. I forced myself to actually study game design, to learn what makes a loop feel rewarding. Yes, it was hard, but it was my dream game and I wanted it to exist no matter what it took. The next seven months were just a brutal, daily fight against burnout. I wrote every single system and mechanic myself, line by line. I only let myself use AI for some visual assets and store screenshots, because graphic design is definitely not in my skillset.

Today, ten months later instead of two, it's finally live on Android. I couldn't be prouder.

I'm a software guy, so my eyes are trained to look at clean, structured data. Because of that, the game visuals look a lot like a sleek productivity app, not gonna lie. But underneath that simple interface is a really deep simulation. I poured my actual soul into it.

In Bizworld, you don't just watch numbers go up. You build companies using these modular blocks, and every block changes the operational logic of how things work. If you get too greedy and grow too fast, your company will literally collapse under its own administrative weight. You can manage gyms, restaurants, factories, or airlines. You can go pitch to VCs for funding, or take your cash and risk it all in the stock and real estate markets.

For months, I was trapped in this fantasy of the game going viral and becoming a huge hit. But standing here today, I actually don't care about that anymore. The real win for me is just the product itself. I finally broke my old bad habit of leaving projects unfinished. I beat the temptation to use lazy AI shortcuts, and I built a complex thing completely by hand.

It’s out now on Android. I’m genuinely excited to see how you guys will break my simulation and what kind of crazy strategies you come up with. Check it out and let me know your thoughts!

Google Play Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ahmedhossam02.bizworld

Solo dev sharing a bit of progress. My game's a satirical Wall Street idle/clicker — you go from coffee-fetching intern to trillionaire: trade meme stocks, run a rigged casino, mine Bitcoin, survive SEC raids as boss battles, then prestige into a global empire.

Just finished the new Steam capsule and wanted to share it — went for a flat look: navy background, gold wordmark, and rising green/red candlesticks climbing to a coin. Reads nice and clean at thumbnail size.

Launching August 15. Wishlist if it's your kind of thing: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4738620/

We are implementing the last few features in our incremental game, "You must evolve it! Incremental", before opening playtesting. In the meantime, we decided to improve the look of a few menus that were a bit less polished from an artistic point of view.

We'd love to hear your thoughts.

If you'd like to compare it with the previous version you can still find it on our Steam page.

Hey folks,

In the interest of sharing and getting feedback, I just wanted to provide a rundown of Sludgineers wishlists after the conclusion of Frosty Games Fest > Summer Game Fest > Steam Next Fest, with some info on our marketing efforts. I’ll keep it fairly light, but happy to answer any specific questions or provide additional detail on request. I would love to hear feedback and suggestions on what we could improve also, ahead of our full game release at the end of August.

Overview

Game: Sludgineers

Summary: Clean, mine and refine pollution in this active incremental game. Cruise through the countryside earning cash and resources, build a refinery, process materials, upgrade equipment, unlock new areas and complete quests.

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4073860/Sludgineers/

Status: Steam Demo Available

Release Date: August 25th 2026 PT  

Timeline

February 13th 2026 > Itch Demo + Steam Page Release

First build of Sludgineers is released to the public on itch, and linked to from incrementaldb, with a post in incrementalgames subreddit, a release trailer on youtube and general social posts on bluesky, instagram etc.

• Feedback was generally positive across itch, incredb and reddit, and we received some critical feedback to improve the game ahead of the steam demo launch. Primarily focused on improving the upgrade tree, adding more variety and mechanics beyond the basic ‘stat upgrade’ types. Along with general suggestions, quality of life requests and bug reports.
• Marketing was minimal, the main driver of traffic was incrementaldb.
• Result after 1 month was roughly 800 wishlists.

March 18th 2026 > Steam Demo Release

Sludgineers demo releases on steam, with a post in incrementalgames subreddit, a release trailer on youtube  and general social posts on bluesky, instagram etc. I emailed 300 content creators, from youtube and twitch, with a revised email template I’ve been improving over time.

• Feedback was very positive, we received around 50 reviews over a month, with additional feedback, bug reports and suggestions to action ahead of steam next fest.
• Marketing was primarily focused on the 300 content creators, we received multiple spikes of wishlists over a sustained period of a month. We had a very high uptake rate, with the largest creators in the incremental genre all making videos, resulting in smaller creators following suit.
• Result after 1 month was roughly 10,000 wishlists. 
• We updated the demo around May 17th with a range of improvements based on feedback.
• Leading up to Frosty Games Fest we gained roughly another 2000 wishlists, for a total of 12,000.

June 6th 2026 > Frosty Games Fest (Summer Game Fest)

Sludgineers was a part of Frosty Games Fest which was included in Summer Game Fest and highlighted in the Steam Summer of Games promotion. This is the build up period to Steam Next Fest. I emailed 350 remaining content creators, we created a release date announcement trailer which was showcased in the Frosty Fest, posted on social media and reddit and opened key campaigns with Keymailer and Lurkit. We have used Keymailer before, but Lurkit was a first time experiment.

• Feedback was very positive, we received roughly an additional 30 reviews.
• The Frosty Fest / Summer Game Fest / Steam Summer of Games combination was the key booster for the game, gaining us an additional 7,000 wishlists over a few days.
• The Keymailer key campaign was a free campaign, but we did pay a small fee to be promoted in their newsletter to draw attention to the demo. We received around 74 videos / streams in total.
• Lurkit is an annual fee to post as many free key campaigns as you want, then you can additionally run paid campaigns. The free key campaign received around 64 videos / streams. Then we trialled a small budget, and paid out to 52 creators. We tried to target incremental genre creators, ultimately it was very twitch streamer focused and felt light on incremental specific creators.
• Generally speaking my thoughts are that incremental genre youtubers are far stronger in wishlist gains than what we received from twitch streamers for our game. But, because we couldn’t get the same youtubers to cover the Next Fest demo, as they had already played the initial Steam Demo, it did serve as supplementary marketing and provided a slightly higher baseline of daily wishlist gains. I’m still in the process of doing a more in-depth analysis on the cost effectiveness of these services though.
• Heading into Next Fest we are at a total of 19,000 wishlists.

June 16th 2026 > Steam Next Fest

The critical idea leading into Steam Next Fest was to pre-build wishlist momentum, by way of creator content and festivals primarily. It’s important to note at this stage that we had partnered with Gamersky to handle marketing the game in Asian regions such as China, Japan and Korea. Next Fest was their first marketing campaign. The benefit of working with them was to better market to and provide support for players within those regions, and to better generate content on sites like bilibili etc.

• Feedback was very positive, we received roughly an additional 40 reviews.
• Marketing was in full effect at this stage, we had multiple creator streams and videos, although we missed the massive youtubers we had previously. The above stats from Keymailer and Lurkit apply here.
• In the incremental genre on the next fest page we slowly rose up the list from top 25 up to top 10 at times, rubber banding up and down a bit.
• We received some late bigger youtuber videos in the last week.
• Two weeks after Next Fest we gained 8,000 wishlists for a total of 27,000 wishlists.
• By Chris Z benchmarks we were at the mid-high range of expected results.

Basic Demo Stats

• 124 total demo reviews, Very Positive (96% of the 58 user reviews in the last 30 days are positive).
• 30,000 lifetime unique users
• 92% passed the 10 minute mark for play time
• Median play time was just over an hour

Summary

Overall we’re obviously very happy with the results so far. While we’re hard at work on the full game, my thoughts are on our pre-release marketing campaign, which will start 2-3 weeks before full release. This will be a combination of my creator email campaign, Keymailer boosted campaign and likely another Lurkit free + paid campaign (to be determined), along with Gamersky marketing efforts and reddit / social posts. I’m also keeping an eye out for any additional festivals to enter. 

Otherwise I’m open to suggestions and ideas. I am by no means an expert, and am constantly learning and trying to improve our approach. My main thought at this stage is maybe pushing shortform content, we have some cool stuff to show off in the full game, so I might experiment with that more.

If you read through all this, thank you! Hopefully you found it interesting and helpful, and I would love to hear your thoughts or ideas on how we could do things better.

I’m more than happy to answer questions and provide specific details if I am able to.

Cheers

Hey r/PixelArt ,
I'm solo-dev one man army working on incremental pixel RPG.
Art is not my main spec but it's so fun to do. I just like the symbolism it requires.
So frame by frame animations, enemies design, attacks, UI, icons etc. I've done it all.

I may not look like, but the design and coding part was huge here. It's already done, project is available in early access to smooth things out.

So I'm at the stage when finally I can focus more on ART!
Before I go to more enemies etc. I want to upgrade current assets.

- For sure a combat summary looks poor.
- Some icons are in different resolution like Prestige Point Crown vs Coin.
- Ascention has a little photo-story sequence of lore, which is nice, but the overall UI needs some love.
- Prestige Buff info popup is weak.
- I re-use a label art, just stretching it with unity 9-slice and with colors.

For sure you're better experts on art and pixel style so any feedback would be golden for me.
Roast it, give tips and tricks, give ideas, you name it.
I don't mind it because my goal is to upgrade the overall quality.

So far in scope of first 300 players no one complained on art yet.
Genre is also more focused on the incremental upgrade progression than art so some things are forgiven to me.
But well, it's far away from perfect yet ;p
I don't want to do the minimal effort, I want to give my best shot.

Let's talk it out folks!

I am releasing my incremental game about trading on July 9th.

-263 WL atm
-demo average playtime of 1hour
-demo median playtime of 20 minutes

I know these aren't crazy numbers but I am willing to share more steam data if you are interested.

Hey everyone,

I've been working on WasteIdle, a browser-based post-apocalyptic idle/incremental game, and I'm currently looking for players willing to jump into the Alpha phase and help shape the game's future.

The game is still actively under development, and right now the focus is on building out core systems, content, and features. New mechanics are being added regularly, and player feedback is directly influencing development priorities.

What I'm Looking For

I'm searching for players who enjoy:

• Testing new features
• Reporting bugs and issues
• Giving honest feedback
• Suggesting quality-of-life improvements
• Helping shape progression, crafting, combat, economy, and other systems

If you've ever wanted to get involved early in a game's development, this is the perfect time.

Alpha Roadmap

The current Alpha phase is focused on:

• Expanding gameplay systems
• Adding content
• Improving UI/UX
• Building the foundation for launch

In a couple of weeks, I plan to release the final Alpha patch, which will mark the transition into Beta.

At that point:

• The Alpha server will be wiped
• Major feature development will largely be complete
• Focus will shift toward balance and tuning

Beta Roadmap

Beta will be dedicated almost entirely to balance testing.

This includes:

• Resource generation
• Crafting progression
• Combat balance
• Economy tuning
• Skill progression
• Endgame pacing

The goal is to make sure the game feels rewarding and balanced before launch.

There will also be a full wipe at the end of Beta before the official release.

Why Join Now?

This is the stage where feedback matters most.

Many of the systems currently in the game are still being refined, and suggestions made during Alpha have a good chance of making it into the final product.

If you'd like to help build a post-apocalyptic idle game from the ground up, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Play: https://wasteidle.com
Official Discord: https://discord.gg/3aNbTyXYzt

Feedback, bug reports, and suggestions are all welcome.

Hey there. I am very early in development, but I wanted to share how a game can look after this period of time ( note that I am spending only a couple of hours every day on it).

Disclaimer: it's VERY early. Absolutely ALL the art is placeholder, from UI to 3D, to VFX.

This is a little early footage with all my current talents unlocked. Does this qualify as an incremental? I plan on having a Performance Screen after each lockdown.

Here's the game breakdown:

-Unlock Containment

-Kill Demons / Gain Energy

-Close Containment

-Use Energy for Defenses, Demon Augments, Utility

-Repeat

I made my first game — you play as a campfire keeping frozen spirits alive 🔥

Spent 2 weeks building this solo. No coding experience — just AI tools and a lot of playtesting.

You hold the fire, feed it logs, warm the spirits before they freeze and turn against you. Gets tense by night 4.

~9 min, free, browser.

Would love to hear if the tension actually lands — drop a comment 👇

https://nosenss.itch.io/come-closer-its-cold