r/tycoon

My husband (former EA game designer/development lead) and I (former Disney web producer/dev) have been building our passion project, National Park Tycoon, for 8 months now and we just released our trailer and published our Steam page!

It’s a 2D, isometric game very similar in style and gameplay to classic Roller Coaster Tycoon, but:

• instead of building rides, you build hiking trails, campsites, scenic viewpoints, and activities like kayaking and rock climbing.
• instead of hiring handymen to clean guest vomit and mechanics to fix broken rides, you hire park rangers to clear fallen logs from blocked trails and rescue lost visitors.
• instead of walking around with balloons and umbrellas, visitors take out binoculars to watch wildlife and don hiking backpacks they've purchased at the gift shop.

Some similarities our game does have to Roller Coaster Tycoon are:

• you can manage your finances, including revenue from park entrance fees, activity fees, and gift shop sales, as well as expenses from construction, park ranger wages and building maintenance.
• all visitors have attributes like Mood, Hunger, and Excitement, and their scores change depending what things you build in your park, and where you build them.
• there are 3 objectives you need to meet in each park in order to unlock the next park, but you can also just play for fun without ever trying to beat the objectives in Sandbox mode.

The game is loaded with cause-and effect mechanics. For example:

> If you build a fishing activity for your visitors, you can choose whether they can keep the fish they catch, or release them.
> If visitors get to keep their catch, their “Excitement” score will rise as they fish.
> BUT, they will start to deplete the fish from the lakes, and the bears in your park will get hungry.
> If your bears get hungry, they will start invading your trails and stealing food from visitors, which will decrease your park’s “Safety” score.

There are countless scenarios like this. It can be a fun and challenging balancing act to keep everything in check!

If you miss the thrill of roller coaster tycoon and love national parks, we would love if you could wishlist the game on Steam or share the link with someone you know who might enjoy a game like this!

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4520000/National_Park_Tycoon/

Our social links are on the Steam page if you’d like to follow our progress. We’re hoping to release a demo in about a month and launch by the end of the year.

I'm happy to answer any questions or listen to any suggestions anyone might have about the game :)

We pledge to donate a percentage of profits to the National Park Foundation to aid in the protection and preservation of America's beautiful national parks.

Generative AI Disclosure: AI was used in the initial generation of some assets, but we edited them in Photoshop to adjust proportions and remove any obvious AI Slop.

As this is primarily a management game, we focused heavily on the game mechanics, ensuring the game is bug-free, fun to play, and, dare we say, addicting!

That said, we would love for the art to be more authentic and beautiful. We have an artist under contract who can replace all of the art in the game if the game gets enough traction/wishlists.

One important disclosure up front: I used AI tools extensively during development, especially for coding, implementation, debugging, UI work, and some of the website copy.

The underlying idea, game design, energy system model, mechanics, balancing decisions, testing, and direction of the project are mine. I have a background in energy systems, and a large part of the work has been deciding what the game should actually simulate, how those systems should interact, checking whether the results make sense, and iterating on it until it became something playable.

AI is ultimately what made it possible for me to turn an idea into an actual game rather than leaving it as another unfinished side project.

10 years ago I posted on Reddit looking for people to help me build an energy-economy simulation game. I finally built it.

Back then, I had the slightly foolish idea of making a city-building / construction-and-management game focused entirely on the energy system ALONE. I posted about it on Reddit looking for people to join the project.

The idea was far too ambitious for me at the time, but the post got quite a bit of interest, and the concept never really left me.

Now, almost 10 years later, I finally have a playable version: Powerstate.

It’s essentially a city builder where the “city” you manage is its energy system. You build generation, manage demand, deal with changing conditions, and try to keep the system reliable and economically viable.

My goal is to make it easy enough to jump into, but deep enough that understanding and optimizing the system actually takes some effort. It’s definitely a niche game, but I suspect this might be one of the better places to find people who enjoy exactly that kind of niche.

Gameplay: https://www.powerstate-game.com/gameplay/

The game is currently:

• free to play
• still rough around the edges visually and mechanically
• occasionally unbalanced in ways that can make a run much easier or much harder than intended
• fairly demanding in the browser; I’m planning a desktop version as well

I’m planning to keep developing it, and I already have a long list of things I want to add and improve. But at this stage I’m especially interested in what people who actually play city builders think.

What feels good? What is confusing? What would you want a game like this to simulate that it currently doesn’t?

I’d genuinely love feedback, criticism, and ideas.

For anyone curious, here is the original Reddit thread from almost 10 years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/5hp6sc/anybody_interested_on_working_on_a_energyeconomy/

I’ve also set up r/PowerState for ongoing development updates.

Hey r/IndieGame,

I’m Japhet, the developer of Scream Operator: Haunted House Manager. A cozy-spooky pixelart management game in which you are invited to take place in the control booth of a haunted house dark ride.

You can read everything about it, and wishlist the game on it's steampage here!

A few weeks ago, IGN exclusively revealed the game's first trailer,, which you can check out here!

In this game:

• You manage the full ride flow, from loading anxious guests to dispatching carts. You push the buttons and control it all.
• You must drag-and-drop props, lighting, and animatronics to design scares and raise your max Scare Score.
• You can unlock upgrades, new items and automate manual work (Expect staff, shops & snacks😏).
• and you can enjoy a great cozy/spooky atmosphere and a original composed soundtrack + a neat little origin story involving everyone you meet on your new work.

And great news! A free public demo is planned for this Halloween season, alongside Steam Next Fest 🎃.

I'm a solo developer, so any feedback on the atmosphere or mechanics is genuinely valuable to me. Let me know what you think, and if you have any questions or suggestions, also please feel free to hit me up in the comments below!

No Generative AI was used for the art, animations, code, or assets. All pixel art and mechanics were created by me and the artists I've worked with, and the soundtrack was composed by a great musician. 

Playable Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4493130/SkiEO_Ski_Resort_Tycoon/

Platform: Steam (Windows, macOS, Steam Deck)

Description: Ski-E-O! Ski Resort Tycoon is a cozy management sim where you build and run a ski resort on real-world mountain terrain. Paint trails onto actual elevation data, connect lifts, and keep thousands of individually-simulated guests warm, fed, and happy. Real weather patterns, seasons, and a GPU-simulated snowpack ensure that no two winters are the same.

Free to Play Status:

• [ ] Free to play
• [X] Demo/Key available
• [ ] Paid (Allowed only on Tuesdays with [TT] in the title)

Involvement: I'm the founder of Falling Damage Games, and Ski-E-O is my debut indie title. After getting laid off from Meta earlier this year, I decided to make the indie game of my dreams ❤️.

Thank you so much!

Hey everyone! I’m developing King in the Mountain, a peaceful, combat-free strategy game about digging out a lost kingdom. Think Dungeon Keeper but focused purely on the satisfying rhythm of mining, upgrading your dwarves.

You can play the web demo directly on Itch here: King in the Mountain by Dweomer

No Generative AI was used in the making of this game

Link to itch Demo: https://magicwoodlabs.itch.io/shroomy-garden-demo

Hey everyone! I’m working on Shroomy Garden, a cozy little park-building game where you can create your own theme park and watch adorable Shroomies move in and bring it to life.

You can place rides and attractions, decorate your park however you like, and build at your own pace. There are no timers or fail states, just relaxed sandbox building.

I’ve just released the free demo on itch.io, and I’d love for you to give it a try!

I’m still polishing and improving the game, so feedback is very welcome. If you play it, I’d love to know what you enjoyed, what felt confusing, or what you’d like to see improved. 🍄

Hey r/CityBuilders! Some of you have followed Traffic Architect since I posted the first version here about 5 months ago - a traffic management game I've been building solo, free in the browser. Since then it's passed 140k+ plays with a 9.2 rating on CrazyGames, and the most common request by far was "put it on Steam." So - the Steam page went live today:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5028050/Traffic\_Architect/

The Steam version isn't a port, it's a big expansion of the game:

- Much bigger maps - up to 18×18 km (the whole web map is 6×6)

- Highways and multi-level interchanges

- Public transport (revealing details over the coming weeks - it's the biggest thing I've built)

- Congestion heat-map, turn restrictions, smarter traffic light control

- Map editor with Steam Workshop support

- Full stats - 20+ live charts tracking your city

The web version stays free.

If you enjoyed the game or the posts here, a wishlist genuinely helps a solo dev more than anything else right now.

Happy to answer anything about the game or what's coming and thank you for previous feedback!

I made a low-poly banana skyscraper. Would you live here?

Built a 3D cozy room widget that pins to my desktop. Lo-fi music, transparent window, memo/todo/pomodoro built in.

I spent five years as an engineer at Amazon watching the AI gold rush from the inside, and the whole time I kept thinking this industry is already a tycoon game. So I built it.

You start in a garage in 2015 with one GPU and a chatbot that outputs word salad. You buy racks, pick your training data (the licensed corpus is expensive, the "public web dump" is cheap and morally flexible), hire researchers with their own specialties, and balance scale against alignment against actually shipping. Your models climb a benchmark leaderboard as you reinvest, and between runs you raise funding rounds at valuations that make less sense every era. The clip is the 2015 garage era; it escalates from there.

There is more management here than pure idle: team composition, dataset choice, and where you slide your compute all change what comes out the other end.

Free on iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lab-tycoon-ai-startup-sim/id6787330715

Happy to answer anything about the design. Feedback very welcome, especially on pacing.

AI disclosure: I use AI coding tools heavily in development, which felt thematically appropriate for this game. Design and writing are mine.

Campsite Architect is a not just another tycoon game, but it's one where you actually play as the owner: you can walk around and do the most urgent jobs, or you can leave the character be and he will just do the most important things (a bit like in the Sims or Rimworld). You start from your little campervan, but as the game progresses and have spare money you build your own luxury cottage with a private pool/sauna.

Because all guests and staff have background stories (similar to Rimworld) this creates a lot of interesting playthroughs.
The management part is very deep, staff, logistics, planning, marketing, ... it is supposed to be easy to grasp, but hard to master, with a lot of replay-ability.
Graphics are handdrawn by me (learning it while doing it, so after a few iterations it should become better).

I am doing closed playtest sessions at this point. Soon I might put a playtest video on youtube. And if all goes well a demo will be on steam somewhere in spring 2027.

About me: I am a software developer/team lead during the day, already for 25+ years, also actively developing Rimworld mods (Hospitality/Hospital).

Capsule art is by Giulia Boscolo
The music by Matthew Mcguigan
the mandatory disclaimer: I use AI to assist me with coding/bugfixing both at work and for this project.

All feedback is welcome

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3896980/Campsite_Architect/

My solo project Legends of Rock is launching on Steam soon!
Please wishlist if you like it - it helps a lot. Thank you!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4227560/Legends_of_Rock/

(no AI tools were used in making this game)

hey all! 🐝

We just release a new trailer showing all the new features and visuals of the game! 💛

Bottled by Bears is a cozy management game about a family of bears running their honey farm. A demo is available if you want to try the game out!

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4390080/

Discord Community: https://discord.gg/M6cwrCZawB

AI Disclosure: All assets are hand-drawn and music composed by the team (humans 🙆‍♂️). We do use AI tools to make custom editor tooling for development and aid on testing/bug fixing.

This is a next‑generation airline management simulation built around a living, dynamic passenger ecosystem.

I’ve created a free to join airline sim that aims to recreate the current world but allows you to rewrite the current hub and spoke model… if your human competitors will allow.

The goal of this game is to be realistic but to make it difficult for entrenched players to easily dominate and steamroll the competition.

How does this game do that and what makes this game different from all the other airline sims?

Realistic Passenger Demand:

The demand and passenger model was created to be realistic and uses real-world passenger location, travel trends and economic data, not based real-world passenger flight numbers. You have the ability to create a new hub-and-spoke system based on the real world, not recreate the same hub-and-spoke system that is currently in place in the real world.

Demand is modeled at a granular passenger level, which means you compete for passengers by location and they are not captive to specific airports. Passenger choice and selection is dynamic, and depending on the type of traveler (business, pleasure, VFR) they have a preference and the ability to compare connecting flights to direct flights to get to their destinations.

Dynamic world

Much like the real world, the airline industry and broader economy are always in a state of flux, and you should be poised to react to numerous economic challenges that may threaten even the most entrenched airlines. Be prepared to withstand pandemics, production delays, wars, fuel spikes, economic downturns, and a few pleasant surprises much like airlines in the real world have to overcome.

Competitive Operating Models:

The game has been developed from a competitive perspective to support multiple types of airlines, and if you play it right you can succeed as a legacy carrier, a point-to-point carrier and also as a savvy/nimble low-cost carrier.

Decent Pace:

One Day = One month in game time

Free to play:

The game is free to play with premium options that don’t impact competitiveness but help offset hosting/server costs.

 

 The first competitive world went live today! I’d really appreciate any feedback on the game:

www.ChiefAirlineOfficer.com

Built using Cursor AI.  AI was necessary to create an airline sim with this kind of depth/data and also to allow it to be free. The amount of human creativity and testing applied to the game was significant

 

Hi! I am a solo dev, and I just released my esports management game on Steam. Its called CS Manager.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3418500/CS_Manager/

I have taken a lot of inspiration from Football Manager and Motorsport Manager. If you like those, this may be for you. I have always loved the genre and felt that esports lacked a game with the same kind of depth.

If you are curious, I recommend trying the demo. It is identical to the game itself and lasts a season. I would love any feedback you may have!

Disclosure: The game uses AI for a portion of graphics, mainly the logos you see in game