u/IgorKas316

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a small indie project in my free time — a post-apocalyptic text-based RPG called Dustline.

It’s not a huge game — around ~20 minutes to reach the final location — but I wanted to actually finish something and ship it instead of endlessly prototyping.

I’m building it with C# and WPF (yeah, not a typical gamedev stack 😅), which was an interesting challenge on its own.

Here are a few things I learned along the way:

• Scope matters more than ideas I had multiple prototypes before this (web, console, different versions), but nothing was finished. Cutting scope to something small finally worked.
• UI is harder than logic Since it’s a text RPG, everything depends on how readable and responsive the UI feels. WPF helped, but also forced me to think a lot about layout and flow.
• Balancing progression is tricky even in simple games I added 10 locations, enemy scaling, items, and a final boss — and it still took a lot of tweaking to make it feel somewhat fair.
• Finishing feels very different from starting This is probably the biggest one. Even a small completed project feels better than 5 unfinished ones.

Right now I’m at the stage where I’m deciding what to do next:

• polish and expand this game further
• or move on and make a bigger second project with what I learned

Also curious what you think:

👉 Does a short (~20 min) text-based RPG even make sense as a paid game on Steam?

LInk: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4626470/Dustline/

I’d really appreciate any thoughts or feedback 🙏