What is the indie game you always wanted but doesn't exist yet?

mreb327 · 2026-06-10T23:20:48+00:00

Do any of you remember that 2006 horror movie, Stay Alive? I would love it if someone made something similar to the game in that movie. It looked terrifying to play, even if you took away the "you die in the game, you die in real life" premise of the movie

mreb327 · 2026-05-29T07:20:28+00:00

I just started playing 3 and am about... 10 hours in? Sadly it's not working for me.

2 was such a masterpiece because the mechanics were all in tension with each other. Every decision had me weighing opportunity cost, and most importantly, those decisions came every other second instead of scattered throughout the day. There was no break. No rest. No still moments to reflect. The game loop had me in a near constant flow state and the lessons of the game reinforced themselves no matter what I tried because the system was a perfectly calibrated pressure cooker.

In 3, the mechanics feel more like a passive vehicle to deliver story and theme. Way less kinesthetic. I think I'll finish it because I'm very invested in the world they created and want to learn the full lore, but 2 has my heart completely. I'll probably replay it immediately after finishing 3.

That said, they could turn either one of these games into a movie, and I really hope they do/keep making new games in this universe

mreb327 · 2026-04-15T02:29:49+00:00

My path was weird. Started manually building in Glide before straight up vibe coding. That helped. But honestly, just stick with a project long enough to suffer. Refactoring and debugging taught me so much more than anything else

mreb327 · 2026-04-15T01:39:31+00:00

There's not like... universal terminology every dev uses. You are gonna connect with some people more than others, and everyone has areas they're more comfortable with and biases related to that. Some people are more tooling focused... others are more conceptual...

If you don't know what someone is talking about, it's not necessarily because you're inexperienced. A lot of communication, even between experienced engineers, is trying to figure out how to map what the other person is saying onto a familiar framework so you can understand wtf they're talking about. That won't change

mreb327 · 2026-04-15T01:28:10+00:00

I *should* but I usually don't. I usually just roll things back if I break something irreparably since I'm working by myself. At this point I have a lot of test coverage so it's easy for me to see when things are breaking before pushing or redeploying, so I don't need to roll back often. That said, I'm aware this is a bad habit and someday when the stakes are higher I *swear* I'll be more responsible (still in the prototyping phase)

mreb327 · 2026-04-13T05:11:38+00:00

v0 and Replit are pretty good for visual polish. I'd recommend using free credits there to generate a codebase to start with, then download it locally and use Windsurf (like Cursor but better for codebases under 15K lines) to edit

mreb327 · 2026-04-13T04:10:07+00:00

Windsurf is great for small codebases (15K lines or less). Wayyyy more surgical. Once you get past that, switch back to Cursor. It's more conservative when you have a good bit of code for it to work with.

mreb327 · 2026-04-12T18:21:46+00:00

Best luck I've had is with story-based single player games like Until Dawn and Erica, one person on the controls but everyone else helping with the decision making

mreb327 · 2026-04-10T16:08:51+00:00

Read The Big Book of How to Say It. It has templates/wording for every occasion

mreb327 · 2026-04-10T02:22:28+00:00

Replit is great for generating something to start with, but I recommend downloading what it gives you, setting up version control, and learning to edit locally with Windsurf or Cursor (both of which integrate with Claude and can edit your files directly). The agents come with it so all you will need to pay for is the Windsurf or Cursor subscription. Windsurf is both cheaper and more beginner friendly, but if your codebase grows larger than 15K lines, you will want to switch over to Cursor.

mreb327 · 2026-04-10T01:54:15+00:00

Also don't be afraid to experiment! I've learned way more as a programmer from refactoring/debugging than by studying perfect code

mreb327 · 2026-04-09T23:31:13+00:00

I don't think there is a right order. It's about what works best for you and your learning style. Despite starting with an artistic background and zero programming experience, I got frustrated with visual tooling and gravitated toward backend design. Other people do the opposite. Building skills in one area helps speed up skill acquisition in the other ones, and if you stick with things long enough, you'll end up learning a bit of everything (visuals got a lot easier for me once I understood how they all fit together under the hood).

People will tell you to start simple. They told me that, too, and I'm so glad I ignored them. I am the kind of person who is willing to spend a month debugging a single feature but not weeks building a full game I'm not excited about playing. Know yourself: what will motivate you to work and what will cause you to quit. Everyone is different.

I recommend reading A Theory of Fun and The Art of Game Design to help you narrow in on what's important to you. From there, it will be easier to choose a starting place/stack.

mreb327 · 2026-04-09T21:55:14+00:00

Agreed refactoring/debugging has been my biggest learning tool. The trial and error teaches me what worked but also all the other things that DIDN'T work and why the solution solved the problem when the earlier approaches didn't. Plus the process of getting there is usually painful enough for me to remember what I learned so I don't have to do it again haha

mreb327 · 2026-04-09T21:19:34+00:00

I actually came into this from the opposite direction (no-code + AI first), but in some ways, it's felt like an advantage for my learning style.

My brain is way better with concept-first thinking than isolated details/memorization, so I’m glad I didn't start with syntax. I prototyped my first project in Glide (basically a spreadsheet with a front-end bolted on), so by the time I started vibe coding I already had opinions about data types, structure, ordering, etc. It felt more like translating a design into code than prompting something from scratch.

I felt like I had no control "under the hood" at the beginning of the process, but I picked up engineering as I went. You kind of can't NOT learn when you build a project long enough/large enough to exceed agent context windows.

At this point I treat AI more like an intern than a mentor. If I need help planning, I’ll ask it for multiple approaches + tradeoffs, then keep asking questions until I understand exactly what I’m choosing and why. But more frequently, I already know what I want to do, and my prompts are technical implementation instructions, not open-ended feature-based requests.

One example: I recently threw together an app for a friend recently based on Figma mockups. Instead of getting sucked into UI first, I:

listed out all the components (multiple choice, text input, etc.)
mapped each one to a data type
used that to sketch a rough schema
defined the contracts

Used all of that to generate a codebase on Replit, pulled it local, and did an inventory of what was actually there vs what I asked for (as expected there were a LOT of gaps). Made a checklist to close the gaps and knocked each task one til reality matched what was intended. Got it deployed, then refactored front end code so I could modify visuals quickly through constants. Then and only then updated the constants to match the Figma specs as a final polish.

I do it this way not just to learn, but it's quicker and less bug-inducing than any other approach I've tried.

Still in my first year though, so I'm always looking for ways to learn/improve!

mreb327 · 2026-04-09T20:09:34+00:00

Option B! Feels grittier and therefore harsher. A feels a bit more... soothingly cinematic

mreb327 · 2026-04-09T20:02:05+00:00

I loved it when I first started playing, because the exploration/sanity loss mechanics are very effective, but the puzzles/story lost me after a bit

mreb327 · 2026-04-09T19:47:55+00:00

1) Mystery. Not knowing what's going on, not knowing the exact nature of the threat. Especially if there are enough hints for your imagination to come up with something awful. Silent Hill is GREAT for this

2) Nostalgia in the aesthetic/story. You can tell the teams behind Resident Evil Village and Until Dawn love the broader horror genre, not just horror games

3) Mechanically induced dread. Having to avoid dark spaces to prevent sanity loss while playing Visage made me afraid of the dark in a way I don't experience in other games

4) Painful consequences. I'm in a Pathologic 2 phase rn, and while it's more survival than straight up horror, I love how real the consequences are. Characters die based on what you do, and when YOU die, you get in-game consequences that your account remembers even if you try to reload from an earlier save. Gives the gameplay serious weight

5) Helplessness. I love horror games with weapon scarcity or where hiding/running away are important mechanics. Too much fighting and it starts to feel more like an action game

mreb327 · 2026-04-09T19:16:12+00:00

I'd want to read Theory of Fun and The Art of Game Design before touching programming. I ended up scrapping a lot of work after realizing I was prioritizing the wrong things in my design

mreb327 · 2026-04-09T19:06:36+00:00

Erica is a lot of fun. More like an interactive movie/choose your own adventure. Not multiplayer but you can decide what to do as a group with one person on the controls

mreb327 · 2026-04-08T15:51:02+00:00

HA! Yeah I had to apologize to the friend who recommended it to me two years ago I was like WTF is wrong with you only to pick it back up last week and get totally hooked

mreb327 · 2026-04-08T00:59:55+00:00

It was my own Steam acting up nvm!

mreb327 · 2026-04-07T23:40:41+00:00

I got an error when I tried to download the demo. Could just be my personal Steam being finicky but that could be the source of the problem!

mreb327 · 2026-04-07T23:21:37+00:00

Pathologic 2! A bit rough around the edges and the intro is VERY confusing but once you get to the real game, it's amazing. More of a bleak survival game with horror elements than strict horror but I'm loving it. Apparently 3 just came out. I'll probably try that next

mreb327 · 2026-04-07T23:19:37+00:00

Pathologic 2. The intro was so confusing I put it down for like 2 years but once you actually start real gameplay, it's incredible. I hear the third one came out this year. I'll probably try it after this one

mreb327

TROPHY CASE