I had long dreamed of making my own game, until I found a simple guide explaining how to get started with indie game development from scratch. The first step is choosing the right engine: Unity uses C# and is easy for beginners, while Unreal Engine is more powerful graphically and offers the Blueprint visual scripting system for those who don't like writing code.
After that, I began learning programming basics: variables, functions, conditionals and loops, and how to connect code to the objects in a scene. The most important thing is designing systems logically, such as health, point collection and enemy AI — I start with a simple system and then improve it gradually.
A game isn't complete with code alone; graphics and sound are half the experience. I learned free programs like Blender for 3D modeling and Krita for 2D drawing, and those who aren't good at drawing can use ready-made asset stores. Sound effects and music give the game its atmosphere and deepen the player's immersion.
The most important piece of advice I followed: start with a very small project, like a platform jumper or a block-matching game, so you learn the full development cycle from start to release. Joining game jams is also a golden opportunity to build a complete game in a short time and share experience with other developers. Mistakes are part of the journey, and every mistake brings me one step closer to releasing my first game.
Source: هاو عربي
Nerial, the British studio behind Reigns, Card Shark and The Crush House, has announced that it is entering what it calls hibernation mode. Development ends and the remaining staff are being laid off. The news came in a social post from co-founders François and Tamara Alliot, and it closes a 13-year run of unusual, system-driven games.
The post opens by joking about the many studio announcements written on a somber background colour, then admits that this is another one. After 13 years and 11 published games, the founders say they decided together with their partners at Devolver to end development at the studio. Devolver acquired Nerial in 2021 and laid off 40 percent of its employees in 2024.
The founders said they launched the studio with no expectations or ambitions, and they urged other studios to hire their team, praising each person individually in follow-up posts. They also thanked collaborators on licensed titles such as Reigns: Game of Thrones and Reigns: The Witcher. Importantly, they say it is not the end of game development for them: they need a break and some reflection before going back to their roots.
For small teams, I find this a sobering one, since Nerial was a celebrated studio. The coverage also points readers to developer-written deep dives on how the systems behind Reigns and The Crush House were built, which seem like a good way to remember the studio's craft.
Source: Game Developer
The SAGA Barcelona Game Fest takes place at Fira Barcelona Montjuïc from October 9 to 11, and the figure that catches my eye most is this: around two hundred independent development studios will be there. Eurogamer España has published a first selection of ten projects, and I am drawn to the ones that tell something about their creators' journey.
Altered Alma, from 2Awesome Studio (AK-xolotl), is a 2D platformer with metroidvania structure set in Neo Barcelona, the same futuristic city as their previous game Aeon Drive; it arrives after completing a crowdfunding campaign. Mango Protocol, with more than a decade of experience, presents Angie Magica, an adventure inspired by Link's Awakening with the visual style of its art director, Mariona Valls.
Among the younger teams, Aubac from 64 Studios stands out: a group of students from ENTI-UB who make the operating system itself part of the puzzle. There is also Traces from Auralis, from the Catalan studio Loadstar, formed largely by former staff of Novarama after its closure, and the debut of Narvalian Games, born from a game jam, which takes the legend of Sant Jordi into a 2.5D platformer with a paper-and-cardboard look.
The main attraction is the new game from Deconstructeam (The Red Strings Club), which makes the jump to 3D, is published by Devolver, and comes out on October 27. The list is completed by Wilderings: The Lost Spring, from the Endling team, and Starfinder: Afterlight, a turn-based RPG with a demo on Steam.
I like seeing that the local scene does not depend only on established names: incubators such as GameBCN or Game Gi, game jams and studios formed after a closure keep appearing on this list. If you go to the fair, there is a lot to try.
Source: Eurogamer España
Order of the Sinking Star, the new puzzle game from Jonathan Blow, who made Braid and The Witness, was released on PC (Steam) on October 9. According to Dengeki Famitsu Gamer, the game passed 470 Steam reviews shortly after launch, with 97% positive, a "Very Positive" start.
The game is a top-down puzzle adventure with more than 1,000 puzzles. Characters such as a queen, a thief, a warrior, a wizard and a talking ship appear, and the game moves through four worlds. It costs 3,400 yen (tax included), and a Japanese-language version for PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2 is said to be coming from PLAYISM before the end of the year.
What interests me most personally is the development time. It has been roughly ten years since The Witness. A small team staying with one game for a decade, without relying on the funding of a big publisher, is a fairly rare choice even within indie development.
Whether it succeeds is a separate question, which is why the high opening reviews feel like a reassurance. With puzzle-heavy games I wonder whether they keep up their pace in the later stages, but I will be watching to see whether the reviews keep climbing.
For indie developers, this may also be a useful case study in how to decide the scope and length of a project. If you are curious, first check the official announcements to see the status of Japanese support.
Source: Dengeki Famitsu Gamer
On indienova, the writer ThirtyThree shared a travel log of his week in Poland this summer, touring with peers from China. For anyone making indie games there are several details worth noticing, so here are the highlights.
The first stop was MeetUp65 in Warsaw. Organized by the Polish Centre for Innovative Industries, it puts Chinese game media and content platforms in front of Polish independent studios and developers, with hundreds of one-on-one meetings packed into a single day. The author had about 31 mini-meetings of ten minutes each, and staff would warn at the eight-minute mark that two minutes were left. He often heard two things: “I'm an indie developer, so I don't have a business card,” and “Our game has built up a decent wishlist, and China is our second-largest source.”
The second stop was GIC Sprint Katowice, a game industry conference with a “Go to China Pitch” and bookable one-on-one meetings. The author also met several independent developers who were currently unaffiliated and treated the event as a chance to find work.
What struck me most was Poland's policy track: around 2016 NCBR launched the GameINN program, in 2023 an electronic games support program, at the end of 2025 a games industry roundtable, an early-2026 report, and this October the first Polish Video Game Day. The author argues that, judging by how much the government values the games industry, Poland may rank among the very top.
The second half covers city impressions like Warsaw's rebuilt Old Town and the red-brick buildings of the Nikoszowiec district. The most valuable part, to me, is how it shows the publishing and wishlist side of things actually working for a small team going abroad.
Source: indienova
Amanita Design, a beloved studio in the indie game world, has officially announced Machinarium 2 and shared a trailer. According to a report on Oyungezer, the first game came out seventeen years ago, so the announcement is quite a happy one.
The story begins as Josef and Berta, who have finally found each other again and are looking for a new home, discover a hidden valley where two robot tribes live while their electricity slowly runs out. This time you control both Josef and Berta, switching between them at will and using their unique abilities to solve puzzles that cannot be solved alone.
What caught my eye in the report is that Amanita Design has never made a sequel for any game other than Samorost. Breaking that tradition with Machinarium 2 is a pleasant surprise, a small studio bending its own rules. There is no release date yet, but it is worth adding to your watchlist.
For independent developers, this is also an interesting example: we will watch how a studio that has kept the same identity for years returns to the world of its first game.
Source: Oyungezer
Most small studios I read about are busy reacting: to a publisher's deadline, to a platform change, to the next layoff headline. This week's installment of GamesIndustry.biz's series on running an indie studio, written by business coach Martijn van Zwieten, is about the opposite habit: deciding where you want the studio to be and letting that decide the rest.
The tool he borrows is Jim Collins' "Big Hairy Audacious Goal", or BHAG, from the 1994 book Built to Last. Whenever the team faces a big call, such as what the next game should be, whether to self-publish or how large the team should get, you check it against one question: does this get us closer to where we want to go, or not?
The exercise for finding it is simple and I like it. Pick a date in the future (Collins suggests 10 to 25 years, but van Zwieten finds 5 to 10 works better for studios). Then everyone on the team writes a short article that will be published on that date, with specifics such as where it appears and what milestone made it worth writing. Read them aloud, see where you agree, and pick the achievement that is ambitious, specific and resonant enough that everyone in the room feels it.
Two rules of thumb stood out to me. The goal should be measurable and, crucially, only 50 to 70 percent doable, so that it stretches you. And the yearly goals that carry you toward it should number five to seven: fewer and the bar is too low, more and your effort is spread too thin. As he puts it, you are not done until you have cut something that turned out to be a nice-to-have.
Purpose says why the studio exists, the BHAG says where it is going, and the yearly goals say what you finish this year. It is a modest framework, but for a small team it may be more useful than any new tool. Next week's part moves on to surfacing the problems that block progress, and I will be reading it.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
Czech studio Amanita Design has confirmed development of Machinarium 2, first announced during the Triple-i Initiative. The game targets PC and Mac, with a planned Steam release in 2027 but no exact date yet. It is the kind of news that makes you happy if you like small teams with strong artistic choices.
The story picks up right after the city of Machinarium is abandoned. The robots Josef and Berta crash into an arid zone and discover a valley where two mechanical tribes live: the Elektrona monastery, perched on the cliffs, and the city of Oilton below. A lack of energy affects both factions and drives the narrative.
In terms of design, the new thing is solo co-op: you can switch between Josef and Berta at any time to combine their abilities and solve puzzles. The studio keeps the formula of the first game, with no text on screen, and dialogue handled through animated speech bubbles, symbols and gestures. The game is built for a controller, with the robots moved directly, while mouse controls remain available.
The environments are still hand-drawn, with Renaissance landscape painting cited as an inspiration, and the music is again by Tomáš Dvořák (Floex). Studio head Jakub Dvorský explains the return pragmatically: we are not getting younger, so if a Machinarium 2 is ever going to happen, now is the right time. That candor resonates with me, and I am curious to see how a small team evolves such a singular formula.
Source: Gamekult
Thekla, the studio of Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), has released Order of the Sinking Star after roughly ten years of development. Ahmet Iscitürk of Eurogamer.de played for five hours and says plainly that he is not writing a review but an impression. His finding is that the game is surprisingly fun, even though it keeps confronting him with his own limits.
At its center is a large, nonlinear overworld, from which you explore different areas with their own characters, stories and puzzle mechanics. The game contains more than 1,000 handcrafted puzzles, and the studio says it offers over 500 hours of play for dedicated puzzle fans. The studio calls the concept a “game design supercollider.” Its foundation is four existing puzzle games by Alan Hazelden, Sean Barrett and Jonah Ostroff.
What I find interesting is its attitude toward reward. There is no level-up confetti and no progress bar; the reward is having understood something. In keeping with that, the game quickly sets ideas aside instead of varying a single mechanic endlessly.
Whether the sheer scale will hold up, even the author cannot say after five hours. That is an honest reservation. For indie developers, the game is in any case an interesting example: a small team that spent a decade on a single vision.
The game was released on October 8, 2026 for PC via Steam, as well as on PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2. On Steam and the Nintendo eShop it costs €30.49.
Source: Eurogamer.de
Two veterans of the games industry have recently spoken about why original projects are so hard to turn into successes, and both conversations show well the problem facing smaller teams. The reports come from GRYOnline.pl.
Shawn Layden, former head of PlayStation in America, told The Expansion Pass that many creators try to predict what will become a hit instead of working on ideas they are truly passionate about. Rising budgets make publishers and developers afraid of risk, so unusual concepts give way to projects with better commercial prospects. Layden does not argue for complete creative freedom, though: in his view, an artistic vision still needs guidance so that the end result makes sense.
Peter Molyneux, in an interview with PCGamesN, focused on visibility on Steam. He pointed to two problems: there are too many titles for players to get through, and a large group of people sticks to one favorite game and never explores the platform. As an example of a good game that got lost in the crowd, he cited Shroom and Gloom. He admitted he does not know how to solve this, and felt that a game would have to be exceptional to break through.
What caught my attention? Both are really talking about two sides of the same phenomenon: on one side, risky ideas are rejected; on the other, even the ones that do get made disappear in a flood of releases. For indie developers this is an uncomfortable conclusion, because it means a good idea alone is not enough, and promotion and visibility have to be planned from the start of the work.
Source: GRYOnline.pl
I read a report on Habr by developer Andrey Apanasik (Suvitruf) about the first week of his game's Steam page, and what I liked most was how candid the numbers are. The game is called Pocket Cat Desktop: a pixel cat lives on your desktop, wanders between windows, asks for food and attention, and keeps a diary of its adventures.
The author expected at least a hundred wishlists. He has two Telegram channels (over 11,000 and over 3,600 subscribers) and a Twitter account with almost 10,000 readers, but Western gaming media did not answer his emails. From September 27 to October 3, the net gain was almost 800 wishlists, or 791 in the regional report. The daily average was 113, and the median was 87.
UTM tags show where people came from. Of 842 tracked visits, 269 became wishlists. Telegram brought 141, Twitter 64, DTF 28, and Pikabu 22. Interestingly, Pikabu had the highest conversion at 59.5 percent, though it sent only 77 visits. Those four sources accounted for nearly 95 percent of the attributed additions. A separate spike came on October 2, when two large Telegram channels wrote about the game on their own and for free, and that day brought 289 additions. The author estimates the free effect at roughly 200 wishlists and notes that the conversion was very low.
By country, almost everything is predictable: Russia 52 percent, Kazakhstan 23, Ukraine 6.7, together about 82 percent. There was little interest from East Asia, even though the page is localized. The author also writes about Reddit: posts in r/cozygames and r/SoloDevelopment worked, but a post in r/Games during Indie Sunday was removed, and he advises reading each subreddit's rules carefully.
His conclusions are sober. Your own audience helps at the start, but after that everything depends on the developer. Count real reach, not subscribers. Marketing is part of development. From his experience, paid promotion of posts on Twitter ends up going to bots. What I found especially close to my heart is his caveat about data: the wishlist report and the UTM report use different attribution rules, so honest "organic" traffic cannot be calculated by simple subtraction. For anyone preparing a Steam page, material like this is more useful than a dozen general tips.
Source: Habr
