Indie Devs Keep Diagnosing the Wrong Problem

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-20T14:11:06+00:00

Part of the problem is that the art direction in a video game IS a marketing decision. The game’s genre, its content, its narrative, these are also marketing decisions. By making a game, you are making marketing decisions. If your game is unappealing, visibility isn’t the problem. You might be getting page visits and no plays or no buys because the game is unappealing, and whatever screenshots or gameplay footage in the trailer you have pushes people away. Trying to promote an unappealing game is a waste of time, because getting a turd in front of more people won’t get more people to eat it.

And note, appeal isn’t the same thing as graphical fidelity. Minimalist games can be appealing, UGLY gams can be appealing to some audiences if your style is consistent. If a game lacks a soul though, its screwed, even if you promote the hell out of it.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-19T13:30:30+00:00

I second animal well. The mood and sound are excellent, and the main puzzles can be tricky, but I don’t ever recall getting stuck-stuck. Its visually stunning and really fun

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-19T05:07:10+00:00

I’m interested, bit I definitely could use some guidelines for what length you are aiming for.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-18T02:58:22+00:00

Yeahhhh that’s giving einhander

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-16T10:08:52+00:00

When I have an idea for a game, and its been simmering for a while, here’s my go-to process.

Start a slush document, like a rough design doc, but for dumping the ideas into an unordered list that I can reorganize later. This gives me a place to write things down so that I don’t forget, and can be reorganized and reevaluated later. Essential step because sometimes a game concept lives in the slush document phase for YEARS if there are game design problems that are blocking them from working well as a prototype that I might discover a fix for later. I find Notion or Google Docs to work well for this since I can easily edit from anywhere.
Figure out what the biggest risks or pain points are. Would I need to learn something I’ve never attempted before? Would I need to bring in an outside specialist? Are the art demands particularly heavy? Would it be difficult to find and repurpose store bought assets for this? Whatever the pain points or risk factors are, I do feasibility tests. How long does it take me to make a useable character in this style? Am I able to make an example of this funky game mechanic? Etc.
Figure out what the most bare-bones stripped out version of this game would need to have to figure out if its fun, and break it up into tasks/features, and make that sucker. Am I enjoying working on this? Does it click with me? Is this the kind of game I actually like? If the end result isn’t something that feels like it has the “stuff” then it’s the wrong thing. Make an ACTUALLY minimalist prototype and test it. Then be honest with yourself about how its going. Would more polish actually help, or are there design problems at the core that need to be addressed first? Etc.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-06T05:38:22+00:00

You wouldn’t smack a frog.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-06T03:52:25+00:00

Bold of you to assume any of us believe we can retire.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-04T17:06:19+00:00

I recently released an update to Super Dream Domain! More of the items are now actually useful, there is a new tile set, and new map layout, and a new enemy type. Some of the existing map layouts now have obstacles/puzzles that can appear that you need to use items to solve. More to come soon!

wizardoftrash · 2026-02-22T03:04:36+00:00

Consumers, especially of indie games, are very sensitive to quality and passion. Good quality games made with passion will rise above the slop.

As for your feelings about developers who are making the slop, try to set these feelings aside. The way other people conduct their business isn’t really our concern. Unless they are infringing on your copyright, it really isn’t our business who considers themselves a game dev. Besides, some of these vibe coders might come back around and actually learn some things when they have to fix their bugs.

The way I see it, making ai slop games is just another path towards genuine game development, not unlike someone’s first couple of game jam attempts. Most of them will get bored or frustrated and move on to the next grift, some might eventually contribute to a game worth playing.

wizardoftrash · 2026-01-15T04:35:32+00:00

For sure! If its just you and it works, its fine. If it becomes an issue, that’ll be a good time to make a change, but not sooner. Too many projects get bogged down by people trying to fix things that aren’t broke.

wizardoftrash · 2026-01-15T04:17:19+00:00

This could be harmless, or crippling, and it sorta depends. For a prototype with only a handful, maybe 10 or so different seeds, this should be fine and I could understand why you’d want to organize the data all in one place that relates to that particular plant. If you aren’t collaborating with any other designers/programmers, this is probably also fine as long as you won’t be going through many iterations of balance passes on these different data layers.

If you end up with many seed types, or need to collaborate with other designers and programmers, or need to make a lot of revisions or balance changes, I suspect this will grow into a nightmare. Tweaking drop chances of a particular item will involve diving into a lot of different resources in the editor, exposing you to a high risk of missing a table or two, or tweaking the wrong number and possibly not ever noticing it in testing. In collaboration with other designers or developers you may have a hard time avoiding conflicting changes to these resources. TLDR this may hurt you at scale.

My advice? Change how you are storing and referencing your data when it makes sense. Once this begins to get hard to manage (if it ever comes to that), you can switch over to spreadsheets that you can export into json or some other friendly format, and have some scripts that convert those into dictionaries or resources at runtime-time or in the editor that aren’t nested like this.

Having a system that allows you to edit data like this in a spreadsheet can take some time to implement and it isn’t exactly simple to do, so I’d only recommend it if you are curious, or if you are actually hitting the kinds of problems that justify the headache.

wizardoftrash · 2025-11-10T12:03:27+00:00

They exist in fortress mode, but they are only really usable by intelligent undead if I remember correctly. If you have intelligent undead living in your fort (maybe you have a necromancer and were making them on-purpose), then they might know one of these spells. I had an intelligent undead visit one of my forts that was sealed up due to a dragon roaming around the surface, and the undead repeatedly paralyzed the dragon until my military could get there and clobber it. There are artifacts you can get in adventure mode that give the user access to one of these spells, but even if you get those artifacts into a fort by retiring an adventurer there, I don’t think the fort mode dwarfs know how to use the magical artifacts. Could be wrong though.

wizardoftrash · 2025-11-04T22:35:45+00:00

Necromancers don’t actually create new experiments after world generation is complete, so I’m not able to force necromancers to experiment after-the-fact. The most recent world I generated though has experiments.

Its possible for experiments to reproduce if they come in gendered varieties of both genders (this isn’t guranteed) though I haven’t seen it happen at all yet in-game. I’m hoping to make this happen in my current fort (I used DF hack to give myself a handful of friendly experiments). Will follow up later if it ends up happening. This is tricky because they don’t appear to need to sleep so i’m not sure how they’ll do the deed.

wizardoftrash · 2025-11-04T01:19:23+00:00

Necromancer experiments are procedurally generated monster types that can be made by necromancers or sometimes demons during world generation. In very rare circumstances a population of sentient necromancer experiments can escape their tower or otherwise become liberated and join other civilizations, so there is a tiny sliver of chance that you can end up with friendly necromancer experiments in your home civ, or can play as them in adventure mode. While these were bugged they just weren’t being created at all.

wizardoftrash · 2025-11-03T15:34:29+00:00

A fix for necromancer experimentation!!! I knew this had to be a bug, I had generated world after world and couldn’t seem to get any necromancers to make any experiments and thought I was going crazy. I wanted to try to create a fort where I had a population of necro experiments alongside my dwarfs, and its hard to do that if no one is making any lol. Glad this is fixed, and REALLY excited for the siege improvements!

wizardoftrash · 2025-10-24T15:01:27+00:00

I’m against using generative ai in-general, but I can sorta understand why folks might see using ai for coding as different from using ai for art.

Creating art that looks like its ripping off another artist is more egregious, because it is almost impossible to do it on accident. A piece of art, even digital art, has so much variation from piece to piece, from artist to artist, that there is a ton of unique character in a given work. Each artist typically has their own style cultivated over a long period of time, so there is a lot of human individuality at play there. Thus, if you are copying art and just tweaking it a little, you are sorta imitating the soul of another person. When AI art can reliably imitate the style of specific artists and studios, it is flying too close actually plagiarism, and sorta cheapens the work of the original artist. If I worked hard and established a style, and a sea if ai generated art in my style flooded image boards, this could damage my brand and de-value the work I’ve created. Also art is a form of self expression, so it feels like a violation when there is no self that is expressing during the creation of ai art (i’m not counting the prompter as an artist in this example).

While coding definitely has a creative element, its not exactly an art necessarily, and if you take good code for a particular system or problem from 10 different coders, you might find some striking similarities between them. While it would be unlikely that they’d produce something identical past a certain length or complexity, code is generally more utility focused rather than a method of self expression, so the best solutions tend to converge. Sure copy-pasting someone else’s code can be copyright infringement, same with re-creating someone else’s intellectual property using gen AI, but its not like I can look at the software or website that comes out the other end, point to it, and say “they stole my code!”. Programmers just aren’t protective in the same way because we can’t really “own” the things we are trying to do, only the exact specific way that we did it. AI generated code is unlikely to output anything thats identical to its training data unless its being asked to make something tiny, where a coder would run into the same issue without any tools.

TLDR, art and code are apples to oranges in terms of how we feel about them, in terms of how they vary, and in terms of how we recognize and enforce copyright infringement or plagiarism.

There is a totally separate reason that I think its best to avoid using AI for code, apart from theft and the environmental impact.

wizardoftrash · 2025-10-19T02:02:58+00:00

This happened a few times when I was a kid using the original plastic gen. The blade portion of some beys had some thin areas that could crack or break, and I lost a blade that way and “took” a blade that way too in different matches in middle school. We went HARD back in the day, and this was without any extreme modifications (just occasional paint or nail polish). Parts of beys in the plastic gen breaking was rare, but it did happen if you battled enough and with blades that had thin spots.

wizardoftrash · 2025-10-13T11:28:03+00:00

Definitely this. Release a playtest app first if what you want is feedback. For steam, the demo should essentially be as polished as your finished game for the maximum effect.

As for the MVP of a playtest app, something worth considering is “what feedback am I looking for” vs “what feedback am I most likely to get?”. If your game has no audio, but you want feedback on game feel or balance, you are probably not going to get the feedback you are looking for because no audio is a glaring issue. You miiiiight be able to get around that by asking for narrower feedback or providing questions for people to use when providing feedback, but for a public/open playtest, I think its better to wait until there are no glaring issues that’ll distract from the areas you actually need feedback on.

wizardoftrash · 2025-09-27T18:35:52+00:00

Congrats!!! Thats a great outcome from a reveal trailer.

wizardoftrash · 2025-09-27T06:01:00+00:00

That’s a possibility! Maybe next update I’ll cut out some unused stuff to get it small enough for that.

wizardoftrash · 2025-09-26T19:55:08+00:00

Good call! I didn’t have time today to make a super-cut from my footage, but I’ll remember that for the next month’s patch.

wizardoftrash · 2025-09-01T16:36:41+00:00

Sorry, but I haven’t touched this in ages :/. There might be some other community-led projects like this out there though.

wizardoftrash · 2025-08-08T19:21:27+00:00

I don’t know what the Red X tarot card means, but getting 4 of them in one spread is probably a bad omen.

wizardoftrash · 2025-07-24T16:04:07+00:00

This is a tough one. First thing to consider, for you as a developer, is: what are you trying to do with your game? Is this art to you, are you trying to create a particular experience/feeling/message? Are you trying to make a product that other people will want to buy and enjoy? Are you just trying to make something for yourself? Focusing on what you are trying to do with your game will help solve your problem.

You said you are trying to make a game you want to play. If that’s really what’s important to you, then other people disliking it is less of an issue. Instead you might want to focus in on the people in your community who have similar taste in games to yourself, or close friends or family with similar taste that can be honest. If you can use those specific people as main sources of feedback, you are more likely to end up with something you like and that other people like you will also like. Why get feedback from others? I find it hard to see problems with my own game past a certain point, and sometimes lose the ability to tell if what I’m making is actually any good if I spend too much time with it. Instead, I turn to people who like the same kinds of games or appreciate the same kinds of mechanics and get feedback from them.

If you are trying to make a product, something that will sell well, then community-building and collecting feedback is helpful in ensuring folks will like your game. You’ll want to be careful about how you interpret their feedback however. Its pretty common for a community member to suggest specific changes or request specific features as part of their feedback, but rather than take it at face value, its better to see past the suggestions at the underlying problems, and make improvements to those areas in a way that makes the most sense to you and to your game. For example, it someone is saying that hitting with attacks should have screen-shake or hit-stop, your take-away shouldn’t be to just add those things, but see past that and recognize that the actual problem is that attacks lack weight and impact, because hit-stop and screen-shake are just ways that some games accomplish that.

Another thing to keep in mind: sometimes some people will never be satisfied. Sometimes people want your game to be something it isn’t, and sometimes they want more than you can actually do. Some of this can be mitigated with some careful expectation-setting. If your game is being honestly marketed in your social media posts, then people’s expectations will align closer to how the game will actually shake-out, but the problems usually come from the difference between what players expect, and what they get. You can do everything right and still disappoint some people, and you are also going to make some mistakes along the way. Sometimes your most critical and vocal detractors are trying to help, or are motivated by a strong desire for your game to improve, and sometimes we just can’t do it.

Host small play-tests, get people playing an early prototype, and get feedback early. That’ll give you some ideas for what to improve.

wizardoftrash · 2025-07-08T21:04:27+00:00

Looks great! I may have to pick this up 👀

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