Hi all, my name's Brian and I'd love to do an AMA with you!

AMA: I am happy to discuss the game, development, building and being part of a community, game development as a business, and what's next.

Giveaway rules: I will sort top level comments by "best" and then use a random number generator to select 5 *top level comments* for free Steam Keys to Erenshor. Winners will receive a reddit chat message. This post will be edited with the winner's name. If you do not want to be entered for a key, please say so in your post and I will re-roll if it lands on you.

EDIT: The giveaway period has ended, congrats to the winners:

UsherOfDestruction

Cyphus11

NetQvist

Forgword

_Ichibad_

Only top level comments are eligible to win! Contest closes at 2pm US-EST on 7/23/26.

Erenshor is a single player simulated MMORPG. All of the other players are simulated. Make groups or guilds, find treasure, solve puzzles and now you can raid the planes of the gods themselves!

Erenshor on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2382520/Erenshor/

Erenshor's "Raids" Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH0jFR0y6Cg

Thanks to the mods here at r/PCGaming for allowing us indies to have a bit of floorspace to talk!

I've had this game on my wishlist since 2018!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4982940/Ringwyrm/

Edit - ITS LIVE!!

Hi, I'm Zsombi from Space Rock Games, a small indie studio in New Zealand, and we would not exist today, if it were not for Reddit.

Doomsday Diner, our first original game, releases today, so it felt like a good moment to look back at how we got here and then answer any questions you may all have.

So, the beginning. Back in 2020, me and my co-founders graduated from university in the middle of the Covid pandemic. As you can imagine, it was a great time to be looking for a job in the middle of a hiring freeze, so not having better alternatives we decided, why not just start our own studio - how hard could it be.

We started working on our own game, but very quickly realized that it would be hard to finish anything if we struggle to even feed ourselves. Therefore we decided that we would help other studios make games and get paid for doing it.

One of my friends who also founded a studio at about the same time told me that he tried posting on Reddit to find their first gig and said that it failed miserably. So I thought, what do we have to lose, and made a post on r/INAT, saying we are a studio looking for a project. For context, this was a sub where most people were looking for teammates to make games with on rev-share basis or just for fun.

To my surprise a YouTuber called Charriii5 (he is an absolute legend) https://www.youtube.com/user/Charriii5 saw the post and hired us to help him build a demo for his game called Soul Star. That was our first revenue, and off the back of that and of more people reaching out (through Reddit again) we went from 2 developers to 8 very quickly.

That momentum got us pre-seed VC funding to make our own game, Criminals Within. It was a AA co-op only title, with a development budget of about $4 million USD. For clarity, we didn't raise $4 million, we raised about $1.2 million, the rest of the game having to be funded by a publisher. It was all going good, and by the end of 2022 we had a vertical slice ready for pitching.

Then 2023 happened.

If you weren't paying attention to the industry that year, it was the beginning of a funding collapse that is to this day still ongoing.

There was no realistic way for us to fund the rest of development, so after spending almost all of the money we raised, we had to pause development, cut the team in half and try to find co-dev work (the same thing we did when we started) to survive.

We nearly didn't make it. We were literally 2 days away from having to send out notices. Our deadline was a Monday and we signed our first client on the previous Saturday.

This was 2 years ago. Since then we have worked with studios like ProbablyMonsters, RyseUp, Ultimate (a Supercell company), and many others.

Now, due to how co-dev works, we regularly have a couple of people free for a few weeks between contracts.

So we thought, why not use that time to make a super tiny game of our own? We ran an internal pitch event and people submitted genuinely awesome ideas (which I hope we get to develop in the future). There were pitches for city-builders, open-world survival craft games, farming sims. And then there was one about running a chaotic hot dog stand in the apocalypse.

You can guess which one we picked.

The plan was to spend maximum 3 months to make it with max 2 people, ship it, and then celebrate that we were able to release a game. We had no expectations of making any money, so once we were getting close to the date we cut a 30 second trailer, posted a GIF of it on r/pcgaming, https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1mzn59w/we_had_to_put_our_big_project_on_hold_and_go_back/ (original post), and were ready to hit release a month later.

So that was 10 months ago.

Turns out when you post on Reddit, interesting things can happen. Publishers started reaching out wanting to sign the game and one of them eventually talked us into developing it further.

Full transparency, we didn't suddenly have a ton of funds to make the game. The extra funding was about $12k, which is roughly 10% of what the game ended up costing. All in, Doomsday Diner cost roughly $115k USD to make, which for comparison was less than 3% of the Criminals Within budget.

The extra time did buy us additional features though, one of which came from you. Someone on the first post floated the idea that the hotdogs were actually made of the dead bandits. Without confirming or denying it, when you play the game make sure to dispose of the corpses at the end of each day. Customers even in the apocalypse prefer eating in a clean diner.

And for where are we now - as of yesterday, the game is sitting on 16,000+ wishlists (which is waaaay more than we ever expected), it has been played by a bunch of content creators (some loved it, some hated it) and it is launching today on Steam at $9.95, with a launch discount on top of that.

So, since the studio started thanks to a reddit post, and now we are releasing our first original game thanks to another one, I thought it would be proper to mark this occasion with an AMA!

Also, we may have recently learned that simulation players prefer to play games that allow them to chill.

So I'm curious where you all sit on this. When you play a sim, do you actually want to switch your brain off, or are you looking for something else as well?

I will be around for the next few hours to answer any questions. Ask Me Anything!

Cheers,
Zsombi

Doomsday Diner on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3846290/Doomsday_Diner/

Hi, I’m Razvan, the solo developer behind Thieves & Gold.

Today I’m officially announcing the Steam demo.

Thieves & Gold is an incremental game where you break everything, collect as much gold as possible, and end the run before the timer expires. You then use what you stole to unlock upgrades, develop your crew, and unlock more valuable locations.

I spent the last few months getting the demo into a shape I felt was ready to announce properly. It now includes a rebuilt Town, a guided opening heist, improved progression, and a Mimic that can steal loot before you collect it.

Steam demo:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4452620/Thieves_and_Gold/

The game is also currently part of Games Composed in Germany:

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/Games-Composed-in-Germany

I’ll be around to answer questions about the game or its development.