Indie Game Development is a very tough industry, success is hard to come by, so here is a nice positive story!

One developer had been working on his Tower Defense game for 4 years now, released it last week and since then the game has already made over $500k!

There is a YouTube channel with some devlogs and importantly some livestreams. He checked the Steam stats live and it made for a nice happy moment. It's pretty emotional to spend 4 years just barely scraping by, and suddenly you know you won't have to worry about "how to pay rent" anytime soon.

During yesterday's Private Livestream that I do every Saturday we were actually talking about this story and trying to figure out how this game was so successful. Personally I was pretty surprised because it's a Tower Defense game which isn't usually a very good genre on Steam, there are lots of players that like it but it's also oversaturated and it's really hard to stand out.

So I was surprised to see this game find so much success, then I figured it found success during the recent Next Fest but upon looking at the Wishlist graph that is not the case, it had only about 3k wishlists after Next Fest and then suddenly gained 40k wishlists in one week! This was a pretty big mystery but on the stream we finally figured out the source, there was a Tower Defense Fest where this game managed to get to the top of the charts (by being extremely good) which gave it an insane amount of wishlists, and launching right after made the game really successful.

I guess the main takeaway here is do not neglect the non-Next Fest festivals because these more niche/themed ones can still give you a ton of success!

It’s been quite a while since Synty did a HumbleBundle, but here it is!

Nice pack with Sci-fi assets, some UI, animations, prototyping assets and even a pack in their new style: Sidekick.

Absolutely perfect pack if you’re making something Sci-fi, or great if you want to try out their Sidekick character creator.

It’s a great discount 95% OFF so if you like their style (like I do) then go and get it!

The Publisher of the Week this time is Tiny Giant Studio, publisher with some tools and 2D icons.

Get the FREE Better Mesh which is a nice tool to analyze and visualize stats about your meshes inside Unity.

Get it HERE and use coupon TINYGIANTSTUDIO at checkout to get it for FREE!

Yet another awesome HumbleBundle this week is this one all about Realistic Assets!

It includes a ton of awesome stuff from some excellent publishers. You can find Vehicles, FPS Devices, Environments, Characters, Tanks, Zombies and more.

All in a super high quality high resolution realistic style.

Get it HERE!

DLSS, Deep Learning Super Sampling, is a genuinely impressive piece of technology. It allows your game to render at a lower resolution (which gives you tons of FPS) and then using specialized hardware in the GPU it upscales the image without losing much fidelity.

The tech has always been pretty great (personally I'm always a fan of FPS over fidelity so anything that gives me extra FPS is a good thing), for many gamers it's the only way to play games in 4k without a $5k GPU, and on every iteration it seems to get better, but this time they pushed it over the edge.

The concept of "fake frames" is always a bit contentious because if you fake it too much then it suddenly becomes a negative, and NVIDIA just found out where that edge is. DLSS 5 got a very negative response from almost everyone because they pushed it too far. The demos they showcased look like they're applying an AI filter to every single image.

Characters that are supposed to look normal, all of a sudden look like they have a ton of make up on them. Scenes that should be intentionally desaturated suddenly become super bright as if the game was Fortnite.

Basically they just pushed the frame generation so far that it eliminates the artistic vision of the developers. There's no art direction any more, it turns every game into a generic AI-filter-looking game.

The good news is how the tech is adaptable with lots of parameters, all they have to do is tone it down a bit and it goes back to being the generally positive DLSS that people have come to know.

Another positive story this week!

Imagine this scenario: You have been working on your game for years, you have made lots of progress, it's close to release, you have a Steam page and everything works correctly. Then you suddenly realize the name you used for your game is already in use! That can be a nightmare scenario! Do you have to rename? Will they sue you? Are you vulnerable to a lawsuit and losing a ton of money? Will you have to hire a lawyer? When all you want to do is just make games!

That horrendous nightmare is what is likely to happen if you choose a name that matches a AAA game (have you heard about "Scrolls"?) but thankfully in this particular case this story is all about 2 indie devs that ended up with the exact same name, Piece by Piece, therefore instead of antagonizing each other and getting lawyers involved they just worked together!

Piece by Piece is a Puzzle Platformer where each level is segmented into pieces, you drag them around to make the levels, nice fun game!

Piece by Piece is a Shop Keeper Simulation game where you manage your family's repair shop and get busy fixing stuff for all the forest folks.

Like I said they just decided to work together, they made the Piece by Piece Double Bundle that contains both games. They describe it as "Two games. One name. Welcome to the Piece by Piece Bundle. This bundle brings both interpretations of the name together — a cozy, repair shopkeeping sim and a mind-bending puzzle platformer — united by both the name and a shared love of puzzles."

Looking on SteamDB the charts are so similar that it's quite funny. Both games were announced in April 2025, both games had a smooth increase in wishlists without spikes until they both launched just days apart.

Nice fun story of indies working together!