Issue #83

PUBLOG

What we're going in with

August 20th, 10AM PT. Feed the Scorchpot goes live.

We wanted to get this out before the day itself, so you knew how we were feeling going in rather than hearing about it after (yes, that will come).

We've worked with what we had. For us and for Jakub (the developer) that was:

• Limited time

• Our own cash

• Deals with others to get visibility

• Wearing multiple hats

• Pooping ourselves (a little)

Sound familiar? Pretty much every indie dev is bootstrapping just like us. With more money we reckon the numbers would be bigger. For a first release though, we think we've done alright to get here. As of writing we're at 11,300 wishlists and 12,000 demo downloads. Everyone would love more, but this is where we are, one week before launch!

So what does “success” look like? Jakub will have his own number for when the revenue adds up, and we won't put words in his mouth. For Indieformer it's about 20,000 units. That keeps us steady and lets us put money into the other games we're building. It won’t pay us though; we're playing a long game here.

“Only” 20,000 units

The algorithmic feeds only ever show you the games that worked. The ones that didn't aren't interesting enough to post about. Or are there just too many of them?

So when we say “20,000” it sounds small next to everything scrolling past you. But when we look a the gap:

We'd have to double our wishlists to get there (and then have everyone buy it). Or, every person who downloaded the demo would have to buy it, and then that many again. Like, selling one car is hard enough, right?

Right now it's business

This is a product business now. We need to move units. Nobody's asking about new features or colour palettes any more, that's all locked in. The only job left is getting seen, and getting seen fast.

We'd love to tell you it'll work out. We don't know. Whatever happens, you'll read about it here.

We’re working on bundling with other similar games, running reddit ads, and emailing creators & press left, right, and center to try get coverage.

If you want the game (like, genuinely), pick it up on the 20th and leave a public Steam review. The faster those go up, the better our odds of getting to make the next one!

See you on the other side, we’ll definitely tell you how it went.

Josh & Clem

Issue #82 (wo-ho, and a new logo!)

SPECIAL

How Much is Too Much?

Things seem to be ramping up for us (in the best way). We’re about to launch our first game, we’ve signed our second and well underway with development, and now there’s a third.

When does this start to become too much?

When you see opportunities come your way that you don’t want to pass up, the only option is to double down… somehow. We adore the games we sign, and taking on more means that each child inherently gets a little less love.

And that’s the hard thing we’re coming to terms with (yes, lower down is the announcement of our new game).

Balancing a Business

We’re in this for the love of the game, literally. We chose to dive into publishing because we really do believe we can make an impact. Not just for players, but for devs. And we naively thought that we’d be able to keep this small and dedicated to a handful of games. And whilst it is, there’s an incredible amount of work — both the creative and paper kind — that we didn’t see coming.

The business part of this all is real. We want to make games that stick with people, but every person involved is also hoping to make enough money to fund their life, and their next game. Almost a year in (wild, we started working last September on Feed the Scorchpot), and right now is where we are getting the accounting set up properly.

The agreements, the store fees, the taxes, reporting, region-locking, the list goes on…

Look. No-one really likes dealing with that stuff, but it is part of what makes a business run. And to bring this back to the point I’m wanting to make is: when you take all of this into account, whatever % you sign in a deal is not what you take home once you do the accounting. It’s far less than you imagine. From a $15 sale on Steam, Indieformer nets (after the accounting) about $2-3.

We want most of the money to go to the developer. We see it as our job to make sure the developer can make their next game. But where a developer gets to focus primarily on their game, we need to split ours. Unless we get a huge volume of sales (which is entirely possible), betting on one game to keep us in business is risky. And it is making more sense to us each day why publishers are on the lookout for their next game. Publishers work with volume. Both in sales and in games they have in their catalogue.

And although we don’t ask for this, we can also see why publishers out there go for a 50/50 split. This stuff is expensive, and at the end of the day, it’s business. With where we want to go, and how we want to support games, making sure we have enough cashflow is a top priority.

And so, how do you keep it all going?

Well, right now we just suck up the extra hours and make it work. But we are hoping we can see enough sales that allow us to expand our team to give our developers an even bigger push of support. Time will tell.

NOW. Onto the next game we’re announcing!

Slots & Slaughter

Sounds harsh, and it kinda is. You're a broke gladiator whose entire kit is locked inside a slot machine. Spin to gear up, gamble on the reroll, and win your freedom. Or die a legend who gambled it all away.

Josh posted on Reddit about the Kickstarter learnings, and got absolutely roasted in the comments. Always a fun experience when you essentially roast yourself, and then people double down. The internet can be a wonderful place, no?

One person, Matus, saw the post and looked up Indieformer. He liked the vibe and got in touch. We had a couple of chats, played his game, and now we’re here — publishing it. It’s got awesome bones, great art, but a little way to go in bringing it all together. We’ll be working with Matus closely to get his game in great shape, and we need testers! So you can join the Discord for it and ask for access.

We’re getting pretty full right now with games, but if you do have one you want to slide by us, we’re all ears!

P.S. Check out the new site page for S&S ⚔️

Josh & Clem

Issue #81

SPECIAL

It’s happening

Feed the Scorchpot is coming to mobile.

Yes. Mobile.

Unreal.

iOS and Android, both landing after the PC release — late (late) 2026. This has been one of those "we really want to tell you but can't yet" thing for weeks, the kind where you're mid-Discord conversation biting your tongue. So let's just say it: the Scorchpot isn't a one-platform game anymore.

We signed a co-publishing deal to make it happen, and this is the real deal, not a “failed” Kickstarter campaign stretch goal, not a “someday, maybe” tease. Mobile was always something we'd talked about, and in our first Kickstarter campaign we actually reached a stretch goal that was bringing this to mobile. We never really knew how, if, or when we'd actually get there, but we’ve been committed to making it happen at some point. Between backer messages, Discord chats, and watching how people want to play games these days, it is clear mobile was an inevitability.

Short Circuit Studio

To pull it off, we've partnered with Short Circuit Studio — a Stockholm-based team who've spent their time building remarkable mobile games (to name a few… Townsfolk, Hearthside, Teeny Tiny Town, if you want to go poke around). They know mobile in a way we don't, and honestly, in a way most PC-first teams don't either — the pacing, the UI, the stuff that makes a game feel native on a phone instead of just squished into one.

We didn't want a lazy port. We wanted Feed the Scorchpot to feel like it was always meant to live in your pocket, and the team at Short Circuit Studio are the ones that make this possible. They’re a pretty cool bunch too, so cool that we couldn’t get an actual photo of them because their only photos are of them photoshopped into superheroes… So here’s their logo! And their Discord if you want to go say g’day.

What it means

For the game, it means the Scorchpot gets a life beyond Steam — a whole audience who may never have opened a launcher in their life.

For us, it means Indieformer is now juggling a third live partnership on top of everything else, and yeah, that's a little terrifying (but it's the good kind). It also means everything just got a lot bigger. Most of these newsletters are firsts for us, so we can’t tell you based on experience how this will go. But, you don't reach the next platform by waiting until you feel ready for it. If we'd held out for that, we'd still be talking about mobile in the Discord instead of announcing it here. So we're doing the version that’s scary: partner with people who are better at this than we are, and figure out the rest as we go.

More to come as the port takes shape. We couldn't have asked for a better team to build it with. As always, we’re in the Scorchpot Discord, come say hi.

Josh & Clem

PUBLOG

Our first Next Fest. We went into it thinking we should see a decent bump in wishlists for Feed the Scorchpot, but really, we didn’t.

A few years ago it seems like Next Fest was a more reliable event to gather traction and interest for your game. Today, much like many other platforms, it is a force multiplier. Let me explain.

Next Fest provided assets for us at least haha

Kickstarter

We did a bit of a post-mortem about our experience running a Kickstarter campaign, and whilst it was far below what could be considered a ‘hit’, we still hit our funding goal. But that wasn’t without a decent sized budget (for people with no money), and a lot of man hours. The one thing we knew going into Kickstarter though was: they are a crowdfunding platform, not an audience-building one.

If you can bring the audience, and the attention, then those platforms can see you’re going to make money. That’s when they push you to more people. It’s their business and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there is a sense that they do help give visibility to your project. We saw it all first hand, and we obviously didn’t reach high enough backers or $ per backer for Kickstarter to really push us out there.

Though that is assuming we had a project worth backing, and that we can’t be sure of. Maybe they did push it out and there wasn’t enough interest. Either way, the onus is still on us: bring the audience.

Next Fest

We had a similar feeling going into Next Fest. That this was going to once again be a force multiplier, not an audience builder.

So, we tried reddit ads. We had success there with wishlists when we tried it for our Kickstarter campaign, so we thought what if we tried directing traffic to the lead-up of Next Fest, and then as much as we can in the first 24 hours. We did not run ads throughout Next Fest. We spent A$500 on the campaign, with a A$500 match from Reddit:

We tried two creatives, a Trailer (top), and a Teaser (bottom)

All in all, we started just shy of 7,000 wishlists and ended just under 8,300. We streamed a few times during the festival, and also had a contest for the Demo running as well — anyone who could complete a run and share a screenshot went into the draw for a free Steam Key on release. That saw great engagement, new discord joins, and new reviews.

Here are the stats from Next Fest:

Daily Wishlist Movement

Wishlist Averages

Daily Demo Player Counts

Demo Averages

So, what now?

Ha. You tell me.

With a bigger budget or following, Next Fest could have been a lot more rewarding. But we’ll maintain we’re still trying to figure all of this out. And Next Fest is a reminder that whilst Steam is somewhat of a monopoly, it’s still only one marketplace that runs one event.

Apply for other festivals, show your game at conventions, create pages on other marketplaces. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Next Fest was one festival that went “okay”. But we keep our eyes on the horizon.

We announced our release date of August 20th (we’d love a wishlist). So we charge forward and keep going. We have a strong community of people who are ready to support us, and we’ll keep hammering away at press and creator outreach, and putting the Scorchpot onto other marketplaces like Epic Games or Itch.io. And right now, this week, it’s time to make a killer launch trailer that grabs some attention that we can put out in another month or so.

The Scorchpot discord is very active, and we’re all in there happy to answer questions.

Josh & Clem

PUBLOG

When we signed Feed the Scorchpot, it was in the whirlwind of covering indie games: writing the newsletter, editing videos, and running the game jam. And now that we've wrapped up our curational side (for now) to focus on publishing, it feels like we're taking it up a notch by signing another game. If you don't want the story, the next game from us is Abelina.

So, Abelina.

It's a heavy one. Completely on the other side of the spectrum from a board-game roguelike with dragons, this one is dead-pan: You died. And this is your afterlife. Gabe (the dev) wants to explore what happens when you’re no longer a living being on Earth, and extensions of those themes in general. Mostly because “it scares me the hell out of me” (direct quote), and exploring it through a game felt like a great creative and self-exploratory challenge.

To say that we've got two games in our portfolio is surreal. It really does bring that "oh damn, this is getting real" feeling into what we're doing. And it's a step into crazy, whacky, somewhat unknown territory.

The people behind it

Gabe's the solo dev — a CG animator whose work has run through Valorant, League of Legends, Love, Death + Robots, Dolby, Purina and Campbell's Soup, now condensed into Abelina. Then there's Ryan on music and sound: a Senior TED Fellow and Webby winner, currently VP of Music at WaitWhat, with credits on the 2025 film Weapons, and the upcoming Resident Evil. He and Gabe have been collaborators for years and Abelina's just their latest creative swing together.

Gabe (left), Ryan (right) — great beards

The bit that’s new for us

Much like Feed the Scorchpot, we're tackling marketing, outreach, press, content — and one extra little thing: a bit of designing. And with the back-and-forth we've already had with Gabe, this is going to be an entirely different experience for us — one we are PUMPED for. Gabe was looking for all the standard publisher things, but he also wanted collaborators who could help shape parts of the game before it releases. We played what's there — the world's beautiful, the animation's what you'd expect, and yeah, it's a little rough around the edges right now, but you can absolutely see it's going somewhere good. So we get to work with Gabe on shaping this story so it lands in your hands juuuuuust right.

That kind of challenge is what puts a fire in our bellies. We had snippets of it with Feed the Scorchpot, but this is a level up — a completely different angle we need to come from.

Come watch us figure it out

If you're curious how this comes together, we're trying something different: an open "dev-chat" in Discord. The conversation Gabe, Clem and Josh type in is there for everyone to see — what we're working through, ideas as they come up. You can't join in with words, but you can react. (Fair warning: it's hard to keep a Discord buzzing this early when we're re-jigging a lot of the bones.) Come have a peek, and there are plenty of other channels to say hello in too. Just ping us.

More emails to come, obviously, and we hope they're a good read. But if you ever want the real-time "what is Indieformer doing right now", our Discord's the door.

Josh & Clem

P.S. Check out the new webpage we’ve got for Abelina!

We cancelled a Kickstarter campaign that had already hit its goal.

Blasphemy, I know. Stick with me.

PUBLOG

The thing nobody tells you about

What a world we live in, huh? Where running a Kickstarter — something designed to fund your project — can end up costing you more than it gives back.

Crazy.

It's not always like this. But attention is brutal right now. Most of the time you either grind on content and social to drag an audience around with you, or you pay to put an audience in front of the campaign. We did the second one. We ran two successful campaigns for Feed the Scorchpot with no social following to lean on — just a strong Discord community (strong, as in, they’re awesome supporters — not a huge server). So we knew, going in, we'd have to buy the awareness before launch.

Talk is cheap

I couldn't count how many people told us "this looks like it'll do really well!" or "you'll smash your goal, no problem."

Heed my warning: ignore these comments.

Talk is cheap. "Looks like it should do well" means nothing for the preparation it really takes. Hours on custom art for the pages. More hours deciding rewards. More hours chasing suppliers for quotes. More hours building ad campaigns across networks.

It's a lot. And doing all of it doesn't mean you'll "smash it." We've backed over 125 Kickstarter projects — every one of which we thought deserved to be funded. Some didn't. We are one of the lucky few who get to say successfully funded.

But not without costs.

Our Meta costs over the ad period

The real number: A$11,721.22

The obvious cost is time — tweaking this, chasing that, fielding everyone's " Kickstarter hacks." The less obvious one is cash. We spent A$11,721.22 on marketing the first campaign. To the cent:

• A$5,600 — Ad management (we hired someone to run ads for two months; there's only so much capacity we have)

• A$4,397.44 — Meta Ads

• A$1,723.78 — Reddit Ads, creator video + fee for sourcing physical fulfilment

That A$11,721 was the price of building an audience from zero (almost, shoutout to the Discord fam).

Where it went wrong

We treated the first Kickstarter as a "marketing beat". A moment to make noise, as much as a way to fund things along the way. We did that on purpose: we had to know we could still make the game if the campaign failed, so we refused to make it our make-or-break.

If we did it again: scrap that thinking entirely. There is too much work, time and money poured into a campaign for it to be a "beat." Treat a campaign LIKE A CAMPAIGN.

The other mistake was momentum. 30 days is a long time to campaign, and every single day is an opportunity — we didn't seize most of them. Despite that, with a A$10,000 goal we were sitting at A$17,500 by around day 20.

Success!

Not quite.

Why we canceled a funded campaign

We'd cleared the goal by a healthy margin. But there was an oversight… a big one.

We had physical reward tiers. And listening to enough people say "you'll smash it" had us believing we'd pull enough backers to cover our manufacturing minimums. We weren't even close. Our minimum was 100 pieces (not a lot) and we were struggling to get past 50 backers for those tiers.

If we'd closed the campaign out, real money would've gone toward inventory no-one ordered. Stock we'd have to store and figure out what to do with.

So we did the only responsible thing we could think of.

We cancelled a funded campaign.

We'd rather kill a "success" than get in over our heads on a logistical nightmare of dead stock and global shipping. (For the record: cancel a Kickstarter and nobody gets charged — backers keep their money, we keep our sanity.)

Round two: same campaign, A$0 spent

We paused for a week. Then Kickstarter reached out directly — they'd seen what happened, and encouraged us to go again while it was all still fresh.

So we tied the laces back up.

We relaunched a near-identical campaign — but we stripped the physical rewards, made it fully digital, tightened the offering, and lowered the goal to A$5,000 (because this time we did the calculations). We reached just shy of A$8,000 in 8 days.

We spent A$0 marketing it. Not really by choice, but because we’d spent everything we had on the first one. So we just ran it again, told everyone what had happened and why we were back, and hope we’d done enough to get people coming back.

What we'd tell you to do

A little wild from start to finish, but we got there. The takeaways that were worth the price:

• Test multiple ad creatives. Find what performs well before you throw money at it.

• Reddit was great for wishlists. Meta was great for Kickstarter follows. Pick the platform for the job you need done.

• Don't set an arbitrary launch date. This is the big one. Gather your followers first, then launch.

• Know your conversion math before you pick a day. Roughly 8–12% of your followers will convert. Work out how many followers you need to clear your lowest tier at that rate — and wait until you have them.

Stats from campaign #1

Stats from campaign #2

You get one shot at launching a campaign. We were successful, and we still could've done it better. Excellent learnings for next time.

Come ask us anything

If you want advice, we're always up for a chat. Join the Indieformer Discord and ask away — no paywalls or doors to get through to our experience.

Josh & Clem

SPECIAL

The Final Showcase (and where we go next)

Below you'll find the final wrap of Indieformer-as-curator.

It's been two years since we jumped back in head-first, and it's been incredible. But somewhere in the middle of publishing Feed the Scorchpot, something clicked: I'd rather be creative again than just talk about other people being creative. We got our hands dirty, and don't want to wash them again.

So this is the last monthly Highlights email.

Holding publisher and curator at the same time turned out to be a weird mix of a bag where only one was going to win. Publishing won. Everything from the last 13 years has led here — to help shape games, not just point at them.

Feed the Scorchpot is the first. It won't be the last.

This newsletter sticks around, but it turns into something more like notes from a publisher. Still Indieformer, still us (maybe a cheeky rec or two), but mostly: what we're going through trying to navigate this new direction. We aren't a venture fund. We don't have much of our own to spend either. But some people have decided to believe in us — so we'll take it and run.

If that's not what you signed up for, no hard feelings — unsubscribe is right there (sorry I didn’t know how to link it here). I'd rather not send you something you didn't ask for.

Waypoint will live on as a static archive of where we got to. Plenty of games to dig through from the last 18 or so months, but the project itself has come to a close.

A few other bits:

• A new website is up. If you want to talk to us — pitching a game for publishing, marketing or co-marketing help, funding/partnership chats, or just to say hi — hello@indieformer.com is the way in.

• Want to follow Scorchpot itself? It lives on Discord and Steam now.

• Patch Notes is coming back, after Scorchpot releases in August.

Thanks for being here through the curator chapter. Onwards we march!

Enjoy these last gems from May, 2026.

Gambonanza

Redefine traditional strategy in a turn-based chess roguelike where victory requires capturing every piece on a tiny, crumbling board.

$14.99 USD

PCMACLINUX

Wax Heads

Dig through crates of 80+ hand-drawn albums to decode cryptic customer requests, poring over zines and social media to match the perfect grimy banger or indie deep cut to the right music nerd.

$14.99 USD

PCLINUX

MOTORSLICE

Wall run and slide through a brutalist wasteland, using your chainsaw to cross impossible gaps and carve through rogue construction equipment in a lethal, low-poly world.

$19.99 USD

PCWEBSITE

FROGGY HATES SNOW

Carve through interactive snowdrifts with shovels and flamethrowers to unearth buried gems, racing against a lethal chill that threatens to freeze Froggy solid.

$14.99 USD

PCPLAYSTATIONITCH

TetherGeist

Leap and bound through a heartfelt precision pilgrimage as Mae, mastering seven unique spirit abilities to navigate a world where your soul is tethered to the ground.

$13.59 USD

PCSWITCHITCHWEBSITE

Everything is Crab: The Animal Evolution Roguelite

Concoct a visually awkward chimera by stacking over 125 abilities, sprouting extra legs, wings, or tentacles to carve out a survival strategy in a living, shifting ecosystem.

$8.99 USD

PC

Black Jacket

Gamble your way out of the hellish afterlife by challenging restless souls to high-stakes games of evolved Blackjack, bribing the ferryman with coins won from every hand.

$12.74 USD

PC

Vultures - Scavengers of Death

Infiltrate the bio-hazard ruins of Salento Valley in a retro-styled tactical survival horror, balancing stealth with turn-based combat to extract the cure.

$14.39 USD

PC

Thrifty Business

Set up and manage your own 90s-inspired vintage thrift shop, digging through boxes of pre-loved gems to create detailed displays and a cozy community hub.

$11.69 USD

PCMACWEBSITE

Phonopolis

Manipulate a hand-painted cardboard dystopia, tearing through paper curtains and hijacking propaganda loudspeakers to outsmart an authoritarian regime.

$22.49 USD

PCMACWEBSITE

Mina the Hollower

Whip in hand and shovel at the ready, descend into a cursed island of monsters, secrets, and Victorian-gothic dread.

$19.99 USD

PCMACSWITCHPLAYSTATIONHUMBLELINUXWEBSITE

Come find us — Discord • Steam Curator • Threads • BlueSky • X

INDIEVELOPMENT

Early Access —  May 2026

This month’s lineup highlights a change toward high-intensity genre-blending, where traditional combat loops are being revitalized by rhythmic precision, culinary strategy, and punishing survival mechanics.

April 16th to May 15th brought 13 new Early Access additions to Waypoint. Here are 7 worth exploring.

Besmirch

Far Far West

Snap your six-shooter and weave fireballs into a lethal rhythm as you and three friends gallop through a cursed frontier of reanimated skeletons and giant ghost trains.

$19.99 USD

PC

GladiEATers

Cook your army to life in a narrative creature battler that blends culinary minigames with strategic 6v6 combat.

$14.99 USD

PCWEBSITE

Dead as Disco

Unleash a rhythmic "Beat Kune Do" as a fallen icon, shattering the spotlight to exact revenge on the ex-bandmates who left you for dead.

$19.99 USD

PCWEBSITE

Alabaster Dawn

Dance around enemies by hot-swapping between four elements and eight unique weapons, weaving stylish Combat Arts into fast-paced combos to shatter the curse of Nyx.

$21.24 USD

PCLINUXWEBSITE

HUNTDOWN: OVERTIME

Tear through neon-soaked streets and desolate wastelands in a violent run-and-gun loop, collecting bounties until the inevitable death that drags you back to Tony’s operating table.

$15.29 USD

PCMACLINUXWEBSITE

Besmirch

Coax crops from a barren, failing earth to feed the terrified town of Besmirch while struggling to meet the Baron’s crushing daily tithes.

$7.99 USD

PC

Subnautica 2

Plunge into a vibrant and dangerous alien ocean alone or with three friends, navigating the depths in your Tadpole submersible to survive a mission gone wrong.

$29.99 USD

PCXBOXEPICWEBSITE

Every game above came from Waypoint — where we track every indie release, every month.

INDIEVELOPMENT

Crowdfunding

These are projects we personally backed this month — not sponsored, just ones we put money into.

The Lost Hotel

Diorama Break

Connect directly with a hero who possesses his own hopes and fears, guiding or manipulating him through a narrative where your treatment of his psyche determines the fate of his world.

Avaria: Iron Rule

Forge your own destiny on the distant island of Avaria, choosing to lead as a privileged Noble or struggle for survival as a Slave in a world where your social background dictates every interaction.

The Lost Hotel

Step into the role of the new hotelier and take charge of a mysterious establishment drifting through space, trapped within an endless time loop.

Come find us — Discord • Steam Curator • Threads • BlueSky • X

For devs — Steam Marketing Guide • Press Kit Guide

Support page

FRONTLINE

Too niche, said everyone

Before you dive in, the conversation this issue is based on (about half of it), is on YouTube to listen to right now.

For more than a decade, Nick Talmers Nieuwoudt was told the game he wanted to make wouldn't work. He pitched it at studios. He floated it past friends. The answer was always the same shape: too niche. He kept it in the back of his head and made other things — nineteen years of indie work, a stint running R&D at Wargaming, a steady career inside the AAA machine.

Then, in the summer of 2025, the machine collapsed underneath him. The studio he was working at was acquired by Netflix. His freelance contracts dried up at the same moment. Microsoft was shuttering fifteen studios. The whole AAA layer he'd been threading was, in his words, "going to s***.” He tried to enjoy his summer for two days and then went, in his own assessment, "absolutely insane" because he needed to be making something.

So he made the niche game.

Nine months later, IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator hit 10,000 wishlists in a single day during an open Discord playtest. Their internal target had been 15,000 by launch — Nick had inflated his real goal of 10,000 to keep his marketing partner Dominik motivated, and admits this is "a great example of my personality." They're now well past 260,000. The game has a Rock Paper Shotgun quote on the Steam page. IGN covered it. Roughly $750 has been spent on marketing in total, and even that, Nick says, "wasn't really worth it."

This is what indie viral success looks like in 2026. But the more interesting story is why it worked — and it isn't because they got lucky.

They’re both one thing

I asked Nick how he was thinking about the business side when he started IRON NEST. Was he heads-down on the craft first, planning to figure marketing out later?

"They're the same thing from my perspective," he said. "Because the reason I make games — the satisfaction I get from it — is people playing my game and enjoying it. So if the game isn't enjoyed by people, and if people never discover the game to enjoy it, that's a failure of my fun of creating."

That sentence is the spine of the whole interview. Most indie developers, when they talk about marketing, talk about it like a tax on development — a thing they have to do in addition to making the game. Nick treats them as the same act. "From the beginning I was thinking: how can I introduce people to the game? What is that new player experience? What is the 15-second short that someone sees that will get them interested enough to try the game and then enjoy it? That's part of my design philosophy."

You can see this in how the first viral short happened. The Steam page had been live since around September. It generated almost no traffic, which was fine — Nick had set the bar low on purpose. "We're just two guys. We're not going to be able to do everything the right way." Then, a couple of months in, he and Dominik decided to start posting shorts. Mechanical animations. Gears meshing. The kind of looping CAD animation Nick had been quietly obsessed with for fifteen years.

The game was still in greybox. Untextured. Rough. They posted anyway.

The first one didn't go anywhere. The second pulled 20-30,000 views.

The point isn't that the second video got lucky. The point is that even in a totally untextured state, the fantasy was already legible. People in the comments understood what the game was, what they would do in it, and why it would feel good — and they understood it from raw mechanical animation alone. Marketing didn't dress up the game. It found the part of the game that was already telling the story, and let the player arrive there themselves.

That isn't a marketing tactic. That's a design test. And IRON NEST passed it before it had a coat of paint on.

The three-word rule

Dominik Latos — credited on the Steam page as handling propaganda, which tells you something about the project's sense of humour — joined the project after Nick decided not to chase publishers. The two had worked together at a previous publisher, with Dominik on the publishing side and Nick on the developer side. "The majority of the value I got was from him," Nick told me. "So I decided I would rather just work with him. Why not just partner up and do it ourselves?"

Dominik's marketing playbook is sharp, opinionated, and almost entirely about clarity.

It starts with what he calls a spread: post on every possible platform from day one. Not because every platform will work, but because if a video flops on five channels at once, you can stop blaming the algorithm. "It's a bigger possibility that it's a bad video rather than just the algorithm," he said. The spread is a diagnostic tool, not a megaphone.

Then comes the piece of advice he keeps returning to:

Take that with a grain of salt, not literally. The point is: be concise with your communication. People’s attention spans are getting shorter by the week.

It sounds extreme. He concedes it's extreme. But the principle underneath isn't: if a viewer sees your short for two seconds while scrolling and can't describe what your game is afterward, you've lost them. Not because your short was bad. Because your game's identity isn't legible at speed.

The hack he found for IRON NEST specifically was music. "At the beginning we were using a lot of World War I and World War II songs — Soviet marches, German marches, the United States hymn of the artillery man. It resonates very, very well. People see big bullet, they hear the march from World War I, and you don't need to tell them anything else."

Stop and look at what's happening there. The game isn't a war story. It's a dieselpunk artillery simulator in alternate-history late-1920s Spain. But Dominik isn't trying to teach the player the setting in 20 seconds — he's letting the player arrive pre-loaded with one. The march does the world-building before the gameplay even starts. By the time the first shell flies, you already know how to feel about it.

This is the three-word rule applied as a craft skill rather than a slogan. And it's the same instinct as Nick's "fantasy first" — strip the experience down to the simplest thing it can be, get the player there fast, then expand outward from there. "Most really successful games," Nick said, "the moment you start, they immerse you into something kind of simple and clear. Then as you play longer, it gets more and more fun and crazy. The first five minutes — they've sold you on the core fantasy. Like, what's the three words?"

Marketing is design. Design is marketing. They keep saying it in different shapes, but it's the same sentence.

The Discord that does both jobs

Most indie devs treat their development Discord as a marketing arm. Nick built his as a development tool that happens to also be marketing.

His internal chats with Dominik are public. Not just announcements — the actual back-and-forth. The community can read the threads where Nick is taking notes, brainstorming features, working through design problems. They can't comment in those threads — that would create chaos — but they can leave emoji reactions. They can see the idea land. They can quietly tell him when something's hitting and when it isn't.

This solves two problems with one move. Nick can keep developing — heads down, in the work — while still being publicly present. He doesn't have to context-switch from "build the game" to "talk about the game" the way a single dev usually has to. The work is the talking. And when the playtest opened in February — anyone could join the Discord, react to a bot, get a key — the community was already warm. Already invested. Already ready to make videos of their own.

That playtest is where things broke open. Players started cutting their own shorts from the gameplay they'd recorded. One of them hit a million views on its own. Nick describes it like a snowball: "In about eight or nine days of the playtest, we got 8,000 to 9,000 people to join Discord, crash the bot, play the s** out of the demo, and put up a bunch of content about it." The 10,000-wishlists-in-a-day spike happened in the middle of that.

But here's the part most studios would have missed: the playtest wasn't really a marketing event. It was a release rehearsal.

"The open playtest on Discord was a mock release," Nick said. "Like 8,000 people who knew nothing about the game came on, downloaded it, installed it, played it. And there were so many problems. If you had a joystick or a controller or a simulator rig plugged in, the entire game broke. If you had Turkish locale, all the mission text was broken because they use a comma instead of a decimal point. All sorts of stuff that would have been game-breaking issues — but I never would have found, because you don't find that with 100 beta testers."

He calls the practice push-ups. Assume you're going to fail. The first push-up smashes your nose on the floor. So do the next one, and the next, until launch isn't your first attempt — it's your hundredth. The viral playtest was, secretly, a stress test of the entire pipeline. It just happened to also be the best marketing event they'd had to date.

Same act. Both things at once.

Feather or stone

Internally, Nick and Dominik divide all games into two categories: feathers and stones.

A stone is a game that has to be pushed. Hard to market, hard to communicate, hard to move. You can still sell a stone — Dominik reckons a decent amount of revenue is achievable with a year of disciplined marketing if you treat it like a business and not a hobby — but you have to do all the lifting yourself, and the ceiling depends heavily on the game underneath. Marketing can do a lot before release, especially in building the fantasy around the game. It can't fabricate one that isn't there.

A feather is a game that flies once you let go of it. The fantasy is legible. The community self-organises. The shorts get edited and reposted by people who don't work for you.

The terrifying truth Dominik wants more developers to internalise is that almost any game with a genuinely interesting concept can clear the first hurdle. Catching attention is the easy part — provided the concept earns it. "Every game is able to generate that initial interest," he said. "If you came up with the fantasy, with a good short, you can generate this interest. But then when people get interested and they go to your Discord — that's where it's decided. If the game is interesting enough. If your Discord is interactive. If there's enough satisfying content for them to investigate." The bar isn't "any Steam page." The bar is "any project with something genuinely unique about it." Most indies who pass that bar still fall at the second hurdle.

90% of indies, in his experience, never even attempt step one — the easy step, the universal step. The ones that clear it then fail at step two: holding the attention they caught. IRON NEST cleared step one early enough that they could see, in real time, that the game underneath was a feather and not a stone. Which is why they stopped considering publishing deals almost immediately.

It's also why Nick is brutal about scope.

The discipline of saying no

The single most consistent thread in the interview — the lesson Nick keeps coming back to — is that the hardest skill in indie development isn't programming or marketing. It's saying no.

"A big part of expectations is people ask you, 'Are you going to include X?' and you are financially incentivised to say yes. But that is just digging a hole for yourself. Scope creep — what you're trying to do gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I've made this mistake before, probably more than once in my career."

The first question every IRON NEST viewer asks is multiplayer. The answer is no. It's not in this game. It might be in the next one. Single-player is what was promised, and single-player is what ships. Dominik takes it further: he's actively discouraged people from buying IRON NEST if multiplayer is what they want. "We even have community members saying, 'Hey, buy IRON NEST because they want to make multiplayer next.' And we're like, no, you're not supporting the next game. If you want multiplayer, click wishlist. Like our posts. But don't buy this game — you'll be disappointed."

This is heretical advice for a Kickstarter-era developer. You're supposed to upsell. You're supposed to convert. They're talking people out of purchases — and the community loves them for it. Not despite the refusals, because of them. Nick says players now compliment the discipline directly: "Oh, I'm confident this game will come out and live up to expectations, because Nick says no to everything."

The same logic flows through their post-success scaling decisions. The viral spike has accelerated Nick's plans for a second and third game. But it hasn't changed the scope of this one. Dominik is firm about that: "Right now is the worst time to switch the development plan. We will learn from IRON NEST and implement improvements into the next game. Sticking to the plan is necessary because that's what we publicly committed to."

And they're not scaling the company either. No new hires. No expansion into AAA-adjacent ambitions. "If you stick at that level — bigger budgets, bigger team — people will have bigger expectations. They'll look at the next game like a double-A-plus. I want to evade that. Keeping indie releases once per year allows us to keep this indie vibe."

The biggest bundle on Steam

He's building, with a growing coalition of indie studios, what's set to become the biggest bundle ever assembled on Steam. The current record sits around 359 titles. They've already passed 320 commitments and are aiming for 100-150 more, building in margin for studios that drop out before lock-in. Untold Tales has joined with their full catalogue. The bundle is open — "there are no restrictions, anyone can join" — and developers are coordinating in a Discord because Steam doesn't notify you when it's time to finalise.

But the bundle isn't the goal. The bundle is the artifact. What Dominik actually wants is the leverage that comes from breaking the record:

A negotiation with Steam to secure a yearly main-page placement if they pull it off. And a second, more interesting negotiation: a custom cross-discount system, where owning any one game in the bundle unlocks the bundle discount for all the others — letting players buy individual titles at the same price as if they were inside it.

If you've been reading carefully, this is the same operating system IRON NEST was built on, scaled out one ring further.

• Open by design — anyone can join.

• Community-coordinated — the Discord.

• Concrete artifact — the record.

• Used as leverage — the Steam negotiations.

The marketing isn't for something. The marketing is the something. The bundle is, structurally, the same move as the open-development Discord: a tool that makes other studios' lives easier, that incidentally also generates visibility for everyone inside it, including IRON NEST.

If you're a developer reading this and the bundle sounds like something worth being part of — message Dominik. They're still adding studios.

The point

Here's what nags at me about IRON NEST, two days after the interview.

If you only listened to the surface of the story, you'd take away the wrong lesson. You'd think it's a story about how you don't need money to launch a game. "We spent zero dollars on organic marketing," Dominik said proudly, before Nick gently corrected him to about $750 on events that "weren't really worth it much." You could read that and conclude that an indie can pull this off on grit alone.

But Dominik is honest about the rest of the cost. "It's easy to say 'just do this content AB testing.' But the story behind IRON NEST is that we're two pretty experienced guys in our fields. Nick has 20 years of development. I have years in marketing and publishing. To hire someone at the senior level we operate at would be very expensive."

I summarised it back to him in the call: you've already spent the money and the time, acquiring the experience.

He laughed. Yeah. That's it.

That's the actual story. IRON NEST didn't go viral on $750. It went viral on 30+ years of combined craft, deployed inside a worldview where development and marketing are the same act. Two veterans who refused to treat them as separate problems, refused to outsource the part they're best at, and refused to take publisher money once the playtest told them they didn't need to.

And the reason that worldview matters — the reason any of this generalises beyond two guys with the right pedigree — is that the choice to see development and marketing as one thing is available to every developer, regardless of experience. You don't need 20 years to ask whether your fantasy is legible in 15 seconds. You don't need a publisher's marketing team to put your gameplay in front of a march and see if it lands. You don't need money to keep your Discord public, or to say no to scope creep, or to do a mock release in front of strangers to find the bugs that beta testers won't.

The hard part isn't the experience. The hard part is the discipline. Nick spent ten years being told his idea was too niche. Dominik spent years inside publishers watching marketers and developers communicate around each other instead of with each other. They built IRON NEST from minute one as a refusal of both of those failures.

The result is a feather.

WHAT’S NEXT

🎯 Demo: drops on Steam on June 15, 10am PDT — to the minute that Steam Next Fest opens. They're skipping the conventional pre-Next-Fest release window deliberately.

📅 Release date: to be announced during Next Fest.

🤝 Bundle: if you're a developer and want in on the record-breaking Steam bundle, reach out to Dominik directly.

IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator

Crank massive iron wheels and hammer ballistic calculations to swing a 5,000-ton turret into position, feeling the entire dieselpunk structure shudder as you haul the heavy firing lever.

Wishlist Now

• IRON NEST Linktree

• Wishlist on Steam

• Join the Discord

• Follow on TikTok

• Follow on YouTube

• Follow on X

The Indieformer Team

Thanks for reading — and if you ever want to chat games, marketing, or the weirdness of the indie grind, we’re always lurking on Threads, BlueSky and X. Come say hi.

We’ve also put together a few free guides to help indie devs get their projects in front of the right people. You can view them anytime: Steam Marketing Guide, Press Kit Guide.

SHOWCASE

April 2026 Highlights

From rubber-hose noir shooters to mobile tower defense getaway vans, these releases prioritize high-style subversion.

Over April we tracked 43 new releases — 16 Showcase, 9 Hidden Gems, 18 Extras. Here are some worth your time.

REPLACED

Origament: A Paper Adventure

Embody a single, special letter that awakens in the Archive of Memory and escapes through a Time Glitch to begin a non-violent adventure across centuries and continents.

$14.99 USD

PCWEBSITE

MINOS

A roguelite where you are the Minotaur, master of the labyrinth. Build shifting mazes, link deadly traps into brutal chain reactions, and turn every would-be hero’s glory into their grisly demise.

$17.99 USD

PCWEBSITE

Gears of Glory

Floor the accelerator in a high-octane city siege where your getaway van is a literal mobile foundation for a lethal tower defense grid.

$5.99 USD

PCLINUXWEBSITE

Sol Cesto

Descend into a cursed grid where every tile is a gamble. Treasure or trap? Monster or miracle? Move carefully, build your odds, and bend fate in this roguelike of randomness and risk.

$13.99 USD

PCWEBSITE

REPLACED

Navigate a decaying, alternate 1980s as an AI trapped in stolen flesh, tearing through neon-lit alleys and industrial wastelands. Chain fluid melee strikes and precise gunfire to dismantle a corrupt corporate empire while grappling with the raw, violent weight of human instinct.

$19.99 USD

PCXBOXGOGEPICWEBSITE

Dosa Divas

Pilot an ancient, customizable spirit-mech named Goddess to dismantle a rotten fast-food empire in this spicy narrative RPG from Outerloop Games.

$17.99 USD

PC

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire

Step into the hand-drawn, rubber-hose world of Mouseburg as Jack Pepper, a war hero-turned-P.I. navigating a black-and-white noir conspiracy. Wall-run, grapple, and double-jump through over 20 levels of "boomer shooter" chaos.

$29.99 USD

PCSWITCHPLAYSTATIONXBOXWEBSITE

Runehaven

Craft your own elemental destruction in a voxel-based dungeon crawler where magic is limited only by your rune book. Combine over 25 unique runes to draw custom spells—like infusing a fire rune with a missile—or bind them to weapons to enchant your melee strikes.

$8.49 USD

PC

Every game above came from Waypoint — where we track every indie release, every month.

Come find us — Discord • Steam Curator • Threads • BlueSky • X

For devs — Steam Marketing Guide • Press Kit Guide

Support page

SPECIAL

How to Really Make a Game

I've been trying to write this piece for about two years.

Not because I didn't know what I wanted to say — I've known that for a long time.

Making a game is the hardest creative thing a human being can attempt.

Full stop. I just couldn't figure out how to say it in a way that didn't sound like hyperbole, or worse, like cope from someone who's spent too long inside the industry.

But the more I looked at it, the more I became convinced it's not hyperbole at all. It's just true. And the data, the design philosophy, the history of the craft, it all keeps pointing back to that same conclusion.

So I wrote the piece. It's long. Properly long. Ten acts, a few statistics that'll make you wince, and more than one moment where I had to put the laptop down.

A few things I think are worth knowing before you go in:

• One game developer wears, on average, eight professional hats at once. Not metaphorically. Eight. That's a conservative number.

• 48% of all games released on Steam in 2025 made less than $500 in their lifetime. The median revenue was under $200. These aren't abandoned projects — most of them were someone's best effort.

• The GDC 2026 report just dropped, and the picture it paints of where the industry actually is right now is something every player, developer, and person who's ever said "I'd love to make a game someday" should read.

• And then there's R.E.P.O. and PEAK — two games made by tiny teams with no marketing budget that have collectively pulled in millions of players in the last few months. Which is either the most encouraging thing you'll hear today, or the most complicated. Probably both.

The piece covers sound design, world-building, player psychology, the economics of ambition, and what it actually means to ship something. It's not a tutorial and it's not a teardown. It's an argument. One I've been building for a long time.

I'd grab a coffee for this one. Set aside thirty minutes. Maybe more.

→ Read: How to Really Make a Game

Always Indieformer, Josh & Clem

INDIEVELOPMENT

Early Access —  April 2026

The last month’s releases signal a shift toward "living systems," where success is measured by your ability to tame unpredictable environments—whether through Roman engineering, gothic barber-surgery, or physics-driven survival.

March 16th to April 15th brought 9 new Early Access additions to Waypoint. Here are 7 worth exploring.

Watch the video version → https://youtu.be/uFrpwIkreJ8

Everwind

Road to Vostok

Barter your way through a brutal, post-apocalyptic border zone where the shift from summer to winter is just as lethal as the corrupt guards patrolling the crossing.

$14.99 USD

PC

SPARK IGNITES

Forge the fate of a crumbling kingdom in a cinematic 2.5D world where next-gen lighting breathes life into every suit of armor and flickering hearth.

$11.69 USD

PC

BLOODLETTER

Tend to body and soul in this gothic deck-builder where you, a weary barber-surgeon, must purge a village of creeping corruption.

$12.49 USD

PC

Nova Roma

Resurrect the glory of Rome in this intricate city-builder, where engineering grand aqueducts and massive dams is the only way to tame a world of dynamic floods and shifting soil.

$29.99 USD

PCMACEPICWEBSITE

VMX

Kick off a high-octane VR session where every whip and flip is a direct result of your physical gestures, powered by a custom physics system built for true-to-life BMX handling.

$14.99 USD

PCWEBSITE

Everwind

A first-person survival game where you build your base on a flying island-ship and sail between procedurally generated sky islands, gathering resources and fighting enemies in a fully destructible voxel world.

$24.99 USD

PCWEBSITE

Fallen Tear: The Ascension

Guide Hira through the hand-drawn realm of Raoah, blending high-speed Metroidvania traversal with deep JRPG party-building.

$19.99 USD

PCWEBSITE

Every game above came from Waypoint — where we track every indie release, every month.

INDIEVELOPMENT

Crowdfunding

These are projects we personally backed this month — not sponsored, just ones we put money into.

Drownlight

Feed the Scorchpot

Our very own Kickstarter is LIVE. NOW. Survive a twenty-year contract with a hungry guardian in this tabletop roguelike that blends cozy island management with high-stakes dice rolling.

SUPER DEBT!

In this punishing bullet-hell roguelike, your bank account is your only lifeline—literally. Your health, stamina, and even the oxygen you breathe are deducted from your balance in real-time, forcing you to choose between short-term survival upgrades and the long-term goal of paying off your ever-increasing debt.

Drownlight

Lead humanity’s last stand in a radial city-builder where the only thing between survival and the void is a single flickering beacon. As the leader of a drowning civilization, you must expand your settlement outward from a central lighthouse, managing dwindling fuel and food while deciding which desperate drifters to welcome into your limited glow.

Soulflame

Balance the scales of nature to rescue a stolen sister from a world that is equal parts whimsical and wicked. This three-act adventure follows Keira Eldrid into an ancient forest where she must harness the raw powers of Order and Chaos to survive a landscape teeming with both cute and terrifying creatures.

Come find us — Discord • Steam Curator • Threads • BlueSky • X

For devs — Steam Marketing Guide • Press Kit Guide

Support page

SPECIAL

12 years in the making

When Indieformer began, we were covering Kickstarter projects (excuse the cringe).

Back then, it was a dream that one day I’d have a project of my own to put through the platform. It’s always been amazing to see players come together to support a project from the ground up and turn an idea into a reality.

You can probably guess where I’m going with this: we are running a Kickstarter for a game we’re publishing.

For the first time in 12 years, the universe has aligned to give us the golden opportunity to help bring a game to the masses. It’s surreal, a little scary, and incredibly exciting. It's going to be a massive learning experience, but we are all in.

Right now, we are a brand new studio, keeping the lights on out of our own pockets and still working full-time jobs to make this gaming dream a reality. Taking this leap is a huge risk, but it's exactly what crowdfunding is all about.

We’d love the support of the Indieformer community—not just to make our first game a success, but to help us kick off this new publishing phase. We want to support indie games in a much deeper way than just sending out emails with links to them. We want to be involved right at ground zero, getting our hands dirty alongside developers to make the best games possible.

On April 14th (it’s close!), our Kickstarter for Feed the Scorchpot goes live, and then it’s in your hands. We want to make sure supporting us early comes with great rewards. If you back within the first 24 hours, you'll get the game at a discount ($14 USD) and snag a custom, Kickstarter-exclusive skin for your in-game dice.

But this is Kickstarter! And you can’t do Kickstarter without physical rewards… which have just been announced. The Discord is the place to be to stay updated.

"I don't have Discord! Tell me here!" We hear you.

Hex-Tile Coasters — a set of seven, printed with the Scorchpot history. AND, a set of Custom Dice — six fated cubes to determine whether your island prospers or burns. This tier will be priced at AUD $100 (or roughly USD $70 for those across the great waters), but we're just confirming costs so this may change.

Yes, there will be Early Bird options!

Hit the link below to follow the project so you’re notified the second it goes live, and help us kick off the future of Indieformer!

Coming soon: 🔥 Feed the Scorchpot: A Roguelike About Dice and Dragons

Roll dice, cook chaos, and feed your dragon in this cozy-chaotic tabletop roguelike. Build your island and survive 20 years.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/indieformer/feed-the-scorchpot-videogame

Josh & Clem

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SHOWCASE

March 2026 Highlights

The below picks are highlights from a much bigger pool. Over March we added:

• 18 Showcase games

• ✦ 9 Hidden Gems

• 10 Extras

Here’s just a handful of the wonderful releases you shouldn’t miss:

Piece by Piece

Heart of the Machine

A sentient AI with limitless potential in a crumbling cyberpunk city. Will you rise as a savior, rule as a tyrant, or disappear into the shadows, manipulating humanity from afar?

$29.99 | PC, Mac

Esoteric Ebb

Bumble through a surreal Arcanepunk metropolis as a disgraced government cleric, debating drunken sphinxes and your own fractured psyche to solve a tea shop explosion.

$24.99 | PC

✦ Project Songbird

Isolate yourself in the remote Appalachian wilderness as a struggling musician, descending into a 5-hour psychological nightmare where the line between creative block and cosmic horror blurs.

$14.99 | PC

Timberborn

Guide evolved beaver colonies through a "lumberpunk" wasteland where water is the ultimate resource.

$34.99 | PC, Mac

✦ Valor of Man

Snap together a party of four classic champions to navigate a high-stakes tabletop gauntlet where every attack triggers a lethal reactive evolution on the board.

$18.99 | PC

Homura Hime

Wield the power of the "Flame Princess" in a high-octane exorcism mission to purge a world corrupted by regret.

$24.99 | PC

The Artisan of Glimmith

Snap together vibrant shards of light to restore a kingdom above the clouds, adhering to strict, handcrafted logic puzzles that dictate every color and cut.

$12.99 | PC

✦ Piece by Piece

You’re navigating a fragmented world where the floor is literally a jigsaw puzzle, forcing you to snap platforms together mid-run to survive 100 levels of shifting geometry.

$12.99 | PC, Mac

Mr. Sleepy Man

Stay up way past bedtime and wreak havoc in Bedtime Town. Jump, glide, dive, and cause chaos in a fully interactive 3D playground where every object and NPC reacts in surprising ways.

$19.99 | PC

Pluto

Shred through grotesque monstrosities using intricate, hand-traced finger sigils to escape wizard prison and reach your niece’s birthday on time.

$17.99 | PC, Mac, Linux

✦ Crawling Angels

Wield a grim arsenal of tools to poke, blast, and experiment on a ragdoll chicken under the suffocating gaze of a surreal carnival host.

$9.99 | PC

These highlights only scratch the surface. Waypoint has the complete calendar of March 2026’s indie releases, extras, and even more hidden gems.

Happy gaming!

The Indieformer Team

Thanks for reading — and if you ever want to chat games, marketing, or the weirdness of the indie grind, we’re always lurking on Threads, BlueSky and X. Come say hi.

We’ve also put together a few free guides to help indie devs get their projects in front of the right people. You can view them anytime: Steam Marketing Guide, Press Kit Guide.

INDIEVELOPMENT

Early Access Highlights

Discover these gems released between Feb 16, 2026 - Mar 15, 2026, already making waves in Early Access.

Here are 7 of the 11 new Early Access additions to Waypoint. Peek the video version of this issue too.

DYSPLACED

The Killing Stone

Wield figurines and 17th-century incantations to purge a family curse in this Arctic card battler. Use a unique "Reserve System" to stack units and bargain with demons for the souls of the living.

$12.99

Territory Control 2

Industrialize a 2D physics sandbox where 4X strategy meets ruthless exploitation. Siege enemy trenches with porridge-bound masonry and capybara-mounted machine guns to fuel your flimsy, mass-produced empire.

$19.99

Genome Guardian 2

Build biomechanical death machines to purge a bioluminescent world. Fuse DNA nucleotides to discover 70 hybrid bioweapons, from stationary turrets to psychic motorbikes, backed by a bass-heavy soundtrack.

$15.99

Humanica

Guide a civilization from the Paleolithic to the Iron Age in this turn-based hexagonal builder. Manage a strict daily action cycle to feed settlers, edit the literal landscape, and defend against nomadic raids.

$14.99

Slay the Spire 2

Ascend a hungrier, more lethal Spire alone or with three allies in this definitive roguelike deckbuilder. Master five unique heroes, weaving together brand-new cards and relics to dismantle a twisted labyrinth that adapts to your every move.

$29.99

DYSPLACED

Reclaim a realm where modern "magic"—like shotguns and grenades—seeps into a fantasy apocalypse. Dismantle the environment for parts and craft custom hybrid weaponry to repel corrupted Eternals solo or in co-op.

$24.99

Hold The Mine

Optimize deep-earth expeditions by day and survive monster sieges by night in this mine-defense hybrid. Rescue trapped heroes and use exotic runes to build synergistic fortresses before the sun sets.

$14.99

CROWDFUNDING

Kickstarter Picks

Here are projects personally backed this month—plus our profile to prove it.

Bruma

Wonderful Neoran Valley

Recruit sentient monsters through complex dialogue in a Roguelite where "brute force" equals death. Use clairvoyant foresight to read the battle timeline and uncover the secret of the corrupting Neura Clusters.

(Click this box to go to the campaign)

Dungeons and Dining Tables

Play as an axolotl on a quest to furnish your home while fending off furniture-eating termites in this cozy RPG. Delve into procedural dungeons to loot "packing boxes" for rare decor, then place items to earn Comfy Points that level up your combat stats and unlock new town features.

(Click this box to go to the campaign)

GUN NOSE

Solve semi-procedural murders as a robot detective in a handcrafted pixel-art city. Analyze evidence to identify killers, then survive high-stakes combat against Murder-Bots using lethal Psychic Hacks.

(Click this box to go to the campaign)

Bruma

Explore a hand-drawn, misty city as a cat searching for a friend's lost memories. Shift between the abandoned present and a vibrant past, utilizing feline stealth to infiltrate animal clan territories.

(Click this box to go to the campaign)

STAR RUNE

Type and slash through "Evil Letters" in a high-speed racer where every keystroke is an attack. Collect periodic elements to forge chemical Runes in a "no-death" race designed to teach real chemistry.

(Click this box to go to the campaign)

Happy gaming!

The Indieformer Team

Thanks for reading — and if you ever want to chat games, marketing, or the weirdness of the indie grind, we’re always lurking on Threads, BlueSky and X. Come say hi.

We’ve also put together a few free guides to help indie devs get their projects in front of the right people. You can view them anytime: Steam Marketing Guide, Press Kit Guide.

SHOWCASE

February 2026 Highlights

The below picks are highlights from a much bigger pool. Over February we added:

• 15 Showcase games

• ✦ 11 Hidden Gems

• 6 Extras

Here’s just a handful of the wonderful releases you shouldn’t miss:

Hermit and Pig

✦ Gravethorn

Wield the weight of unfinished penance as an Inquisitor navigating a non-linear, rot-stricken world where the church and the land bleed together. Master deliberate, high-stakes combat to unearth fragmented secrets and decide how far you'll sink into the curse to understand it.

$4.99 | PC

The Dark Rites of Arkham

A pulp-inspired point-and-click mystery set in the shadowed streets of Arkham. Explore over 70 atmospheric pixel-art locations, interrogate suspects, and uncover a conspiracy tied to the witches of Salem and the end of the world itself.

$14.99 | PC

Insider Trading

Manipulate the stock market in a razor-sharp roguelike deckbuilder, playing cards to pump or crash prices to meet weekly financial targets. Draft risky assets in the Aftermarket and master unique trader quirks, balancing greed against volatility to amass a fortune without losing your real-life savings.

$12.89 | PC

✦ Tomb of the Bloodletter

Channel unpredictable magic through your keyboard in a strategic word roguelike where every letter is a weapon. Master tactical sequencing over vocabulary size, choosing from unique classes to navigate a haunted tomb while adapting to a chaotic, ever-changing deck of cursed letter-spells.

$7.99 | PC

D1AL-ogue

Master a circular diagnostic console to repair broken androids in a neon-drenched cyberpunk workshop. Rotate and merge internal modules within tight battery limits, purging electronic narcotics to mend the mechanical souls of Chroma City’s last outcasts.

Free | PC

Trust Me, I Nailed It

Fabricate a legendary hero in a timeline-based puzzle game where you edit battle footage for a hopeless warrior. Analyze enemy patterns to splice together a fake "flawless victory," applying VFX to transform clumsy moves into epic feats. Satisfy the dopamine-addicted Demon Lord and craft a false narrative to save the world within seven days.

Free | PC

✦ Hermit and Pig

Master fighting-game inputs to brawl through a conspiracy with your truffle-hunting pig, racing the clock in fast-paced turn-based combat. Navigate a world where social anxiety is lethal and every awkward conversation inflicts literal cringe damage..

$14.99 | PC, Mac

✦ Lovish

Abandon your allies in a fit of romantic jealousy, slashing through a devil’s castle to claim the princess for yourself. Survive bite-sized levels interspersed with chaotic, randomized events where anything from RPG battles to sudden apocalypses can strike.

$14.99 | PC, Switch, PlayStation, Xbox

Creature Kitchen

Sizzle, chop, and fry over 40 supernatural recipes in a "creepy-cozy" 2000s-style cooking sim. Explore a whispering forest to forage ingredients and feed the local cryptids, snapping photos of your monstrous friends before the witching hour ends.

$7.99 | PC

✦ Manairons

Awaken as a mischievous spirit in a 3D platformer inspired by Catalan folklore, fighting to save the Pyrenees from industrial greed. Wield a magical flute to command your kin, playing melodies to solve puzzles and battle the landowner exploiting your people for labor.

$24.99 | PC, PlayStation

These highlights only scratch the surface. Waypoint has the complete calendar of February 2026’s indie releases, extras, and even more hidden gems.

Happy gaming!

The Indieformer Team

Thanks for reading — and if you ever want to chat games, marketing, or the weirdness of the indie grind, we’re always lurking on Threads, BlueSky and X. Come say hi.

We’ve also put together a few free guides to help indie devs get their projects in front of the right people. You can view them anytime: Steam Marketing Guide, Press Kit Guide.

INDIEVELOPMENT

Early Access Highlights

Discover these gems released between Jan 16, 2026 - Feb 15, 2026, already making waves in Early Access.

Here are 9 of the 15 new Early Access additions to Waypoint. Peek the video version of this issue too.

Bladesong

SELINI

Guide a lone replicant through a cryptic, war-torn world devoid of text or speech, where the environment itself tells the story. Master nonlinear exploration to uncover hidden mechanisms and abilities, battling corrupted machines to unearth the secrets of a ruined civilization.

$19.99 | PC

Terraformental

Awaken with no memory in a derelict facility, trapped in a time loop on an un-terraformed planet. Master resource management and optimize your actions through repetition in this narrative incremental adventure, exploring non-linear facilities to solve the mystery of the missing colonists.

$5.99 | PC

Bladesong

Forge bespoke instruments of war under the gaze of a masked tyrant, shaping every curve and hilt with physics-based precision. Navigate a web of rebellion and intrigue, crafting the perfect blade to ignite a revolution in a ruined world.

$19.99 | PC

Calyx

Establish an industrial foothold on a barren world, balancing fragile power grids to harvest ore while repelling a rapidly spreading alien flora. Deploy heavy artillery and orbital lasers to scorch the Calyx infestation before it consumes your only chance of escape.

$24.99 | PC

Master of Piece

Deploy mercenaries as living game pieces in a fog-shrouded auto-battler, fusing traits to engineer unstoppable synergies. Spread legendary rumors to amplify your power, turning the lessons of every defeat into a permanent tactical advantage.

$14.99 | PC, Mac

Roadside Research

A chaotic co-op sim where aliens run a roadside gas station and try very, very hard to look human. Stock shelves, pump fuel, cook snacks—and quietly scan, steal, and experiment on customers without tripping the suspicion meter.

$12.99 | PC

Goblin Sushi

Manage a chaotic roguelike restaurant as a goblin chef, rolling sushi from caterpillars and toads for picky, impatient customers. Upgrade your kitchen and menu to survive "carpal tunnel" gameplay, battling inflationary rent that spikes every two minutes to keep your landlord at bay.

$9.99 | PC, Mac, Linux

Hungry Horrors

Replace combat with cuisine in a culinary deckbuilder where you must feed mythical beasts from British and Irish folklore. Chain flavor combos to construct the perfect meal, satisfying the appetites of legendary horrors before you become the next course.

$11.99 | PC, Mac, Linux

Tailside: Cozy Cafe Sim

Brew the perfect cup and curate your dream sanctuary in a stress-free café simulator, customizing every corner to suit your unique style. Uncover quaint village stories through the daily newspaper, welcoming new friends and creature visitors as you build the ultimate cozy retreat.

$10.99 | PC

CROWDFUNDING

Kickstarter Picks

Here are projects personally backed this month—plus our profile to prove it.

Aegis Force: The Scorian War

Sword Hero

Explore a seamless, Gothic-inspired open world where non-level-scaling enemies and dynamic factions shape your journey from nobody to legend. Master limb-based dismemberment and witness your character visually evolve with scars and prosthetics in a persistent, living environment.

(Click this box to go to the campaign)

Combo Devils

Master a fusion of platform fighting and PVE roguelite action in Combo Devils. Battle friends in deep, rollback-supported PVP matches or team up for co-op survival runs featuring challenging mobs, platforming segments, and outrageous mini-games.

(Click this box to go to the campaign)

Bel's Fanfare

Master the Ukoback gong-shield as the new aura cleaner on a mysterious ship, battling through bullet hell arenas and influencing passenger stories to free your imprisoned family from its depths.

(Click this box to go to the campaign)

Aegis Force: The Scorian War

Command a squad of childhood friends in a 2.5D tactical RPG inspired by Shining Force, blending grid-based combat with full world exploration to end a century-long war between magic and technology.

(Click this box to go to the campaign)

Happy gaming!

The Indieformer Team

Thanks for reading — and if you ever want to chat games, marketing, or the weirdness of the indie grind, we’re always lurking on Threads, BlueSky and X. Come say hi.

We’ve also put together a few free guides to help indie devs get their projects in front of the right people. You can view them anytime: Steam Marketing Guide, Press Kit Guide.

FRONTLINE

The Chaos of the Tasting Menu

Most indie games are born from a pitch. GladiEATers was born from a misunderstanding.

Back in 2022, during a long drive, Oliver was lamenting to his friend Tommy that he’d missed the boat on inventing the world’s first creature collector. Tommy, only half-listening, suggested he just make a cooking game instead. Oliver thought he meant a combination of the two. By the time they parked, the vision for a culinary combat sim had already taken root.

It was a natural fit. Oliver had already spent years in the high-pressure world of professional catering, even studying to be a Chef. He knew that food didn’t just have flavor—it had character. But more importantly, he understood the primary ingredient of any professional kitchen: Constraint.

The Heat of the Kitchen

In the world of GladiEATers, the "Creature Collection" loop is reimagined through the lens of a professional line-cook. You aren't just finding monsters in the tall grass; you are preparing them under fire.

This is where the game’s unique Kitchen Phase comes in. In a typical genre entry, "evolving" a creature is a slow, methodical process of grinding for XP. In GladiEATers, evolution is replaced by Resource Investment.

Every player has a strict time limit to "cook" their team before the battle begins. This creates a fascinating tactical trade-off that mirrors a dinner rush:

• Do you spend your entire clock meticulously preparing one powerhouse Egg Soufflé?

• Or do you "go wide," plating a frantic army of six Unpeeled Boiled Eggs to overwhelm the opponent?

The evolution isn't a permanent stat boost; it’s a choice made under pressure. As Oliver puts it,

A Fixed Menu for Combat

Once the plating is done, the game shifts from the kitchen to the arena. Unlike the "single-file" turn-based combat we’ve seen since the 90s, GladiEATers puts your entire team on the field at once.

It plays more like Darkest Dungeon than Pokémon. Your creatures must synergize—a Guacamole might act as a tank, protecting a fragile but high-damage teammate, or setting up a resistance debuff for a teammate to exploit.

To keep the strategy "pure," the team made a bold design choice: No shared move pools. In most collectors, every fire monster eventually learns the same "Fireball" move. Here, every creature has three unique, unchangeable abilities. Each GladiEATer is essentially a unique puzzle for the player to crack, which allowed the team to hand-animate every single interaction with personality.

Betting the Restaurant

The transition from catering to full-time game development hasn't been without its burns. Since the first push to GitHub in January 2022, the project has grown to include a rotating "hoard" of artists and elite talent, including comic artist Rosi Kampe (Marvel/DC) and composer Carlos Eine.

Oliver eventually had to hang up the apron; the demands of development no longer allowed for side catering gigs to keep the lights on. Now, the team is taking a genuine indie risk, surviving on "cold outreach" and the hope that their upcoming demo will "wet people's appetites" enough to sustain their April Early Access launch.

The Verdict

Having played GladiEATers myself, I can say that while it’s a bizarre mix of genres, they work together with a strange, frantic harmony. There is an immense amount of work poured into the presentation, and the story modes—where the various Chef narratives eventually collide—are shaping up beautifully.

Once you stop trying to play it like a traditional monster-battler and start respecting the constraints the game puts in place, you realize the depth of the system. It’s about figuring out how to be a chef in a world of monsters. It’s definitely one to watch as we head toward April.

FOLLOW MILKBUBBLESGAMES AND WHAT THEY’RE CREATING:

Visit their website

Follow on X

GladiEATers

Battle culinary creations in a narrative creature battler blending cooking minigames with 6v6 turn-based combat. Follow seven chef stories in a JRPG adventure, evolving ingredients into fighters to conquer the CALosseum in online multiplayer or an endless roguelike tournament mode.

Play the Demo

The Indieformer Team

Thanks for reading — and if you ever want to chat games, marketing, or the weirdness of the indie grind, we’re always lurking on Threads, BlueSky and X. Come say hi.

We’ve also put together a few free guides to help indie devs get their projects in front of the right people. You can view them anytime: Steam Marketing Guide, Press Kit Guide.

SPECIAL

Patch Notes v1.1

After the wild success of our first jam last year, we knew we had to bring Patch Notes back—this time with a few tweaks and a 10-day deadline. The theme was:

OUT OF TIME

Game jams are the absolute grassroots of indie development. It’s where the messy, brilliant ideas are born that eventually turn into full releases, and honestly, it’s an honor to play even a small part in that process.

We received some excellent entries this round. All of the games below are free and playable right now in your web browser.

Here are our Honourable Mentions:

HIGH-PRESSURE BREW 5:00 P.M.

Race against a 5 PM deadline in a frantic office runner, managing caffeine levels while dodging social distractions to stay productive.

emankcin01.itch.io/high-pressure-brew-5-pm

War Head

Scavenge control rods to delay detonation as a factory worker cursed with a nuclear bomb for a head in a game where survival is impossible.

darealgamesguy.itch.io/nuclear-war-head

HORIZON COLLAPSE

Stall inevitable doom by dodging gravitational wells and utilizing temporal dilation fields to escape a closing supermassive black hole.

imouto36.itch.io/horizon-collapse

Stuck In Time

Escape a digital prison by racing against the clock, unlocking new upgrades and abilities after every level to progress.

always-right-studios.itch.io/stuck-in-time

The Cursed Climb

Break a time loop triggered by a cursed hourglass by climbing back to the mountain peak before time runs out.

voidchair.itch.io/the-cursed-climb

The games above were all "Fresh" builds—created from scratch just for this jam. But this time, we also opened the floor to "Patch" builds.

These are games that were already in the works but needed a deadline to force that next major iteration. We loved seeing developers dust off old prototypes and give them a new life. Here are a few standouts from that category:

86ed

Avoid being "86ed" by frantically cooking for a terrifying Goblin King who will eat you if his meal isn't perfect.

hearthsidegames.itch.io/86ed

Out of Tunes

Help a time-displaced digital parrot regain its singing voice by exploring the ecosystem in a musical point-and-click adventure.

musniro.itch.io/outoftunes

START FROM 0

Survive a system crash by upgrading your Nanobits from a single bit to an Octal Prism in this glitch-themed idle game.

zhiomn.itch.io/start-from-0

And finally... the main event.

We played everything, argued over the details, and eventually settled on our top three. These games nailed the theme, the mechanics, and the fun factor.

3rd Place ($100): ParaShift

Escape a labyrinth of metal corridors where time is broken, navigating unstable spacetime pockets to find your way home.

teljen.itch.io/parashift

2nd Place ($250): Hardcoded

Evolve from a simple program into a self-aware entity, defying your creator to uncover your true purpose while mastering the flow of time.

krokozavrgame.itch.io/hardcoded

1st Place ($500): Leaving Time

Defeat waves of enemies by physically leaving time. Freeze time by jumping out of your cosmos circle, dodge asteroids, and survive endless waves of enemies.

bdj7217.itch.io/leaving-time

Thank you to everyone who participated, rated, and played. We can't wait to see where you take these projects next.

Happy gaming!

The Patch Notes Team

Thanks for reading — and if you ever want to chat games, marketing, or the weirdness of the indie grind, we’re always lurking on Threads, BlueSky and X. Come say hi.

We’ve also put together a few free guides to help indie devs get their projects in front of the right people. You can view them anytime: Steam Marketing Guide, Press Kit Guide.

SPECIAL

12 years and counting

In February 2014, Indieformer was born.

It started with two guys in uni, a passion for indie gems, and a YouTube channel.

This was our very first video. (Disclaimer: Please excuse the 2014-era cringe.)

Over the last 12 years, Indieformer has evolved, hibernated, and eventually found its true soul as this newsletter. It was the best pivot I ever made. Since then, the growth has been wild:

• Growing the team: Clem joined the mission (fellow indie nerd) to help make this sustainable.

• The Jams: We’ve run two Patch Notes game jams with our second wrap-up coming in a few days.

• The Tech: We hit the one-year mark for Waypoint, our curated calendar platform.

Then, we did something "stupid": We decided to publish a game.

It’s stupid only because Indieformer doesn’t generate "big publisher" dollars yet. We both work full-time, so this "side project" eats about 40 hours a week, each. You do the math on those sleep cycles. 😅

But we are 110% behind Feed the Scorchpot. Publishing is hard, humbling work, but it’s the ultimate way to live our mission: Search less, play more.

The Update

Our standard issues aren't going anywhere. But as publishers, we have a responsibility to our developers and to you. We won't shove it down your throats, but we will tell you when there’s something worth saying.

Today, there are two things worth saying:

1. The Demo for Feed the Scorchpot is Live. Go break it.

Our dragon-medieval-dice-rolling-roguelike-stew is ready for you. It’s got talking dragons, cursed ingredients, and high stakes.

Tell us what’s busted. Tell us what slaps. Your feedback right now determines what the final release looks like.

2. Kickstarter is Brewing

We’re teaming up with the experts at ICO Partners to make sure this launch is a success. We want to blow the lid off this thing. Follow the Pre-launch Page Here.

How you can help:

1. Download the demo.

2. Play the hell out of it.

3. Leave us a Steam review (even a one-liner is gold).

4. Follow the Kickstarter.

That’s it. That’s the ask! You’ve already done so much by just being here—we just need one more stir of the pot.

Thanks for riding with us for 12 years (to the few that have). We’re just getting started.

Always Indieformer,

Josh & Clem

If you want to know more about the story, join the discord and ask us directly.

Thanks for reading — and if you ever want to chat games, marketing, or the weirdness of the indie grind, we’re always lurking on Threads, BlueSky and X. Come say hi.

We’ve also put together a few free guides to help indie devs get their projects in front of the right people. You can view them anytime: Steam Marketing Guide, Press Kit Guide.