I met a lot of great folks at the 2025 Winter Indy Indie Showcase a few weeks ago. I had originally debated whether to do the event, but I'm really glad I did. There seemed to be about 20 dev teams participating, lots of great ideas on display. Some groups were very professional with marketing, banners and the lot, while others were more like me, just a laptop and a controller for people to sample the wares on offer. Just about everything I saw had an element or two I had not seen before like a vibrant design or a new twist on a time-tested game mechanic.
"So, what's this running on?" was the first question out of everyone's mouths for a couple of reasons: 1) it's genuinely a good question, and 2) it happens to be a great ice breaker when talking to game devs you don't know. Funnily enough, every game I saw was built with Godot, which may be a good indication of where the indie community is headed after Unity's disastrous licensing and pricing kerfuffle from a few years back.
I was showing my current unfinished project Teeny Quests but most people were playing the space shooter I built a few years ago and recently updated on Steam, Star Squadron: Student Driver. Having to explain a silly game over and over really helps you refine your pitch: "It's a survival space shooter where your only weapon shoots ping pong balls; a ship-within-a-ship vibe, like Descent but worse." The dismissive explainer was a useful tool in setting expectations. The game, like most things I make, is meant to be enjoyed for a short time then ignored for years at a time. I came up making Flash games, simple games with no barrier to entry, just load it up on the browser and go, and if you get bored in five minutes, that's still a win. People clocked that Flash-like vibe fairly quickly, and that helped a lot.
At the height of the event, we had far more people in the library's community room than I had expected. I would be talking with someone then turn around and find kids in a polite line waiting to play it. If you've ever seen your work being played by people in the wild, it's enormously gratifying. Folks seem to pick up on the notoriously slippery controls right away, especially kids.
I got a few ideas from attendees and made note of them. The mom of one of the kids playing the game noted a spelling error. I spent a while trying to find it in the text that comes up on the terminal between levels - only to find that it was the "Star Squadron" logo that appears on that screen. Apparently, it needs a "q" to be legit. That fix went out a week or so later.
Someone else requested a feature to let you know how many checkpoints are left in a level when you pick one up, a great idea. The burst effect that occurs when the player hits a checkpoint now contains an "X remain" message displaying how many checkpoints are left.
My favorite idea came from a young person who caught on to the humor of the game and suggested that we add a "weapon upgrade" that does nothing. A truly devious idea, and I had to do it. When the player collects 20 coins, they get 30 seconds of a weapon "upgrade" that changes the ping pong balls to various colors. It packs a slightly bigger punch but the downside is that enemies are no longer stunned by it, so it's not much of an upgrade after all. That went out with last weekend's v1.1.0 release.
The game is free on Steam, and Teeny Quests is nearing the completion of the MVP, moving on to more complex features like events and conditions so we can have different level end conditions and more flexibility for level designers.