Indie dev (WoollyOne Games). Built Game Market Atlas to help you see where your game idea fits on Steam with data. 🇻🇦 Matthew 28:20
North Carolina, USA
Joined August 2016
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Here’s the hard truth:
There is no known meta for indie game dev with the rise of AI. Nobody knows what will end up being the smart play. Everyone’s experimenting.
I, for one, find that incredibly exciting. So, these are my personal guiding principles going into 2027. 👇
Instead of making a 2D platformer, make a... "Hidden Cats" game?
Absolutely insane demand in this niche!
I mapped every single #indiegame and the results are fascinating.
Every blue dot is a game with <10 reviews. A bunch of blue/green dots in a single region means devs keep making attempts in this genre with no success. Can you guess what genre is in this circle?
Interesting trend revealed by my tool Game Market Atlas. When a game defines a genre and has a strong style, copycat games are mostly similar by core loop, fantasy, and hook.
They avoid copying the art style, which I suppose makes sense.
I wish I'd had Game Market Atlas when I released my game Smiglee's Statues. Instead, I just dropped it on Steam without marketing and it flopped.
If you want a quiet niche that is ripe for the taking, consider narrative atmospheric horror!
I checked in on ToonSouls Maker, the subject of lots of viral marketing, using my new tool Game Market Atlas.
The game's less-than-stellar performance is surprising (56 reviews after all that viral marketing), until you look at the numbers. Competition was very rough on Steam.
Introducing my humble model, QURSE-1-0.2b!
QURSE is a classifier head paired with the Qwen3-ASR-0.6b audio encoder. It catches stumbles and repetitions in tongue twisters 99.57% of the time on just 1.8GB of RAM, trained locally. Details in🧵
Weights are available on HF. huggingface.co/woollyone/QUR…
Play the tongue twister game here: woolly.one/qurse-demo
Performance: In my testing, Qwen and QURSE achieved 99.57% accuracy in detecting the stumbles while not falsely flagging valid speech variance.
Crucially, it also runs on roughly 1.8GB of RAM, and thanks to the ONNYX architecture, relatively platform-independent (the WebGPU demo ran on my M2 Pro Mac and my NVIDIA RTX 5080 Windows rig. This is important because I wanted it to run on as low of a footprint as possible on most players' platforms.
Caveats and notes:
- My use-case was narrow, so I chose to synthetically generate all my training data. I found pre-existing datasets to be insufficient. For instance, the stuttering dataset SEP-28k had mislabels, multiple speakers, and incomplete sentences. The tradeoff is I don't have great authentic human speech evals (yet).
- The model runs locally I haven't tested it on a wide variety of architectures.
- Weights are open, but non-commercial for now. When I release my full game, I will de-restrict the license. However, I'm not making any guarantees this will work for many other use cases. Like I said, it's a proof of concept!
I did my best to get some traction on my flying roguelike demo. I reached out to content creators, promoted on socials…
…and I’m sitting around 38 plays, 0 ratings and 0 comments. Safe to say it’s not getting the market validation I need to bring it to Steam, so that likely brings us to the end of this game’s story.
Hopshot: Arenas is a "hare-raising" arena roguelike.
- Zip and chain hits as a flying bunny
- Upgrade stats and purchase absurd ranged weapons to keep up with the increasing madness
- Fight a snake boss at in arena 10
#godot #indiegame #roguelike
It’s sad to see so many people in this industry losing their heads over this. This sloppery slope assumes AI will autonomously make all the games for people in the future with no soul.
Either the human soul has some intrinsic value in art or it doesn’t; can’t have it both ways.
AI “vibe coding” is starting to create a serious problem for the video game industry.
The release of Claude Opus 5.5 has made it much easier to decompile and recompile games, leading to a wave of unofficial ports, mods and game clones. Publishers are already filing DMCA takedowns over some of this activity. Kotaku
Former Take-Two AI chief Luke Dicken says developers and publishers need to take the trend seriously:
“This new wave of decompile-and-port is definitely something that developers and publishers need to take seriously.”
“More invasive DRM, platform-level solutions, and probably more of a push towards streaming solutions.”
Godot executive director Emilio Coppola puts more responsibility on platforms such as Steam, arguing that developers have very few ways to protect themselves while bad actors can profit from selling AI-made clones:
“The burden should fall onto the platforms who are enabling this sort of behavior.”
There’s also a growing concern among indie developers about showing unfinished games publicly. Coppola says he has heard from developers who are now:
“Worried and anxious to even share early access versions of their games”
This is my first time using Gemini 3.8 Flash and it has a lot of those “H1 LLM” smells. The GPT-5.5 “oh wait is that what you wanted me to do?” cluelessness and lack of alignment.
I’m sure 4 Flash will fix that but it’s weird to see now; it’s like a relic from a bygone era.
