Orbyss is a marble-rolling puzzle game with excellent abstract sci-fi visuals!

For @thinkygames.com's #ThinkyCon jam, I made The Daily Spell, a daily puzzle with an ongoing narrative. ✨ My goal was to combine satisfying word puzzling with a story you'll be excited to see unfold. Try it and let me know what you think! #gamedev #puzzlegames jamwitch.itch.io/the-daily-sp...

40 games were submitted to the ThinkyCon jam! There's word games, sokobans, rule-discovery games, and a bunch more which you can find here! itch.io/jam/thinkyco...

Once Glorious Artahk releases on November 18, 2025! Explore the ruins of an ancient city, solve puzzles to unlock forgotten lore, and use what you learn to find a way to restore light to a starless sky. Wishlist now on Steam!: store.steampowered.com/app/3390310?... #indiegame #solodev #gaming

In case you missed it, check out our article on this creative puzzle game with a Windows 2000-inspired interface!

Joe has an existential orb crisis!

Halloween might be over, but that doesn't mean we're done playing the excellent pathfinding game Spooky Express!

this was a pretty good talk. focused on a novel design framework to evaluate and iterate games

Animal Fest is running on Steam for another 3 days, so here’s a roundup of some of our favorite puzzly critter-filled games! store.steampowered.c... 1/14

🧠 The FormIO Program – An immersive first-person sci-fi puzzle thriller built with Unreal Engine 5. 🌌 Wishlist now on Steam → store.steampowered.com/app/3881910/... 💬 Join the Program → discord.gg/TYxpuu4jgv #TheFormIOProgram #IndieGame #UE5 #SciFi #PuzzleGame #Mystery

MotionRec is a playful, snappy puzzle game with a movement recording mechanic that has a lot of potential!

The Darkest Files is a compelling detective game about prosecutor Fritz Bauer’s attempts to bring war criminals to justice.

The temperature is getting colder here in London, so this is an excellent time to remind you that every hour, the monster goes out to the weather station in London to check the temperature and sets the price for A Good Snowman is Hard to Build to match the weather. draknek.itch.io/a-good-snowman

TRACE: Definitive Edition is officially AVAILABLE on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/3448760/... We're running a 10% discount for launch week! We hope you enjoy!! :D #steam #escaperoom

All of the talks from ThinkyCon 2025 are now on YouTube! If you missed them or if you want inspiration for the jam happening right now, you can find them here!

Instead of our usual podcast this week, check out our #ThinkyCon talk about how your players can’t Read, Count, or Listen - and what to do about it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEvW... #gamedev #indiedev #gamedesign @videogameworkshop.com @thinkygames.com @charlie.videogameworkshop.com

Thanks so much for having us!

This was one of my favourite talks of the con. Charlotte brought the happy vibes in this one.

Anno 117: Pax Romana is now out! Expand the Roman Empire from the Latium heartland to the Celtic territories.

How do you test a game like Blue Prince that goes so deep and refuses to be predictable? Tonda Ros talks about finding playtesters and watching over 2,000 hours of playtest footage! @blueprincegame.bsky.social

Borb gives us a look inside the fantasy console EMUUROM is being developed in! Steam's first ever TIC-80 demo is for this upcoming metroidbrainia! @borbware.itch.io

How do you keep your player from stumbling into a solution? Jackson Nagy shares insights from developing Starhopper and Bilattice!

Follow along on Google Slides in this workshop by Charlotte Pang about making adorable, quick 2D animations!

In just a few minutes, we'll be streaming A Case of Fraud, The Apothecary of Trubiz, Rhombus, and The Farmer Was Replaced! Come take a look! twitch.tv/thinkygames

This talk is superb - useful and fun to watch. It's not exactly how we make stuff, but there are tons of interesting parallels and diagonals.

Thank you for having me, I had a lot of fun prepping this talk 😊

Adam Saltsman just gave the best talk about the process of game design that I’ve ever seen. Bravo. Incredible investigation of the journey an idea goes through, and smart breakdown of the intrinsic and extrinsic forces tugging on the project. A must watch.

How can puzzle developers playtest their own games when they already know all the answers? Terry DuBois offers a solution to this problem: random number generation! @terrythetriangle.bsky.social

Even adult puzzle game players don't want to count, read, or listen! So, Dennis Ramirez & Charlie Mackin gave us some useful design tricks to help them out! @dennis.videogameworkshop.com @charlie.videogameworkshop.com

Are real languages too complex to design a game around? Daria Jerjomina talks about the challenges involved in designing The Land Forgotten!

Developer of Bee Magic and N Step Steve, Ethan Clark, gave a multipurpose talk about making multipurpose puzzles! @ethanclark.bsky.social

Listen to some of the beautiful music in Chants of Sennaar and hear Thomas Brunet tell the story of how it was composed to blend in with the vibrant world! @thomasbrunet.fr

What can Hungarian mathematicians teach us about game development? Levente Bodnár and Zsombor Fehér answer this question and provide a few puzzles for the audience to solve as well!

In an age of AI and short-form content, how do we promote curiosity and thinking skills? Nick Chen's solution to this is playing more puzzle games!

Dom Camus' talk on how space changes the design of grid-based puzzle games was originally going to be a Discord comment, but we have the character limit to thank for it turning into this fascinating talk!

How can we make players less intimidated by puzzles? Sylvia Aguiñaga explains that the cute art and rewards in Star Stuff made the game more approachable!

Cerise Talis, 3D artist and designer for 0player, is here to convince game devs to not give up on their puzzle game projects!

Andrew Plotkin's interactive fiction games are known for their mind-expanding metapuzzling. Appropriate, then, that his talk about designing them was equally mind-expanding!

Perplexed by Blue Prince's parlour puzzles? Alastair shares how to solve them and other similar puzzles with code, and how doing so can help with puzzle design.

Matt MacLean gave an insightful talk explaining how thinky gameplay is set up well for accessibility!

The Picto Kickstarter is Now Live! www.kickstarter.com/projects/pic... #IndieGameDev #indiedev #indiegame #indiegames #mobilegame #mobilegames #androidgame #iosgame #mixedreality #mixedmedia

The puzzle-packed Confounding Calendar returns soon!

Daniel King, the director of games at The Boston Globe, gave a fascinating talk that dives into the history of the newspaper puzzle!

Puzzles made of puzzles! We love a good metapuzzle, and in this talk, Aspeon explores the concept through both puzzle hunts and video games.

How do you design puzzles where the player is their own enemy? dietzribi joins us to share the approach he used for his upcoming claymation puzzle platformer, UvsU! @dietzribi.bsky.social

Nicolas Cage and puzzle games might seem like an unlikely pairing, but Ludipe showed us that we can learn a lot from the actor's weird indie movie picks! @ludipe.bsky.social

Dan Wiseman gave a talk about how The Detective Society blends tabletop and digital puzzles…and may have left a puzzle for you all to solve in the talk itself!

What's the hardest puzzle in Puzzle Depot's story levels? Tough to say, but Electroroach is a toughie that's gotten some attention. 🪳⚡📦 Check out Puzzle Depot on Steam during the launch period and get 10% off! store.steampowered.com/app/3108190/... #puzzledepot #indiegame #indiedev #gamedev

We are in the process of adding all the ThinkyCon 2025 talks as individual videos to YouTube! You can check this playlist to find them all as they get published: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Thanks to all the wonderful speakers for joining us!

Very excited to have Ivan back with a sequel to his Mathematics in Puzzles talk! This time, topology! @chaoticiak.bsky.social