Dev ➤ Test ➤ Repeat | August 2026
If you just wanna see the games showcased at this event, click here.
This was a publicly accessible event and as such if you find yourself in these pictures and would like to be blurred out, please reach out to me via email or social media (Check my About page)
I live in Denmark in the Copenhagen Area. In Copenhagen we have this volunteer run bi-monthly event going called Dev ➤ Test ➤ Repeat (click the link to join their Discord server!) which more or less is what it sounds like on the tin. You develop some kind of game (usually), you come to this event, you test it with people and then you take that feedback with you home to do some more development, rinse and repeat.
For those of you who don't know what this is it's primarily run by two fine people named Alexander Birke and Kristian Hedeholm and has been going for a while now. But now I'm also an organiser! And this was my first organised DTR. The event is completely free of charge. I'm a regular attendee for this event as I think it's an important community event that we should keep alive. This time we were at the Flashbulb Games offices in Copenhagen.
We also get free Pizza with every event!
The Showcase
At this DTR we had a lot of repeat developers which is lovely to see because it means the event is working! Quite a few of the games had been shown off at DTR before and had changed a little and a lot since last time. This sort of thing happens in waves and it's always cool to see how far games have progressed since last time we saw them. It's always nice to come around for the showcase whether you never tried it before or not. Today we were around 70 people, which meant the rooms were buzzing with activity, nerdy talk and playtesting.
Ass in the Woods
This is either exactly what you think it is, or it's exactly not what you think it is. This game was made in Twine and as such is a text adventure. The game featured a background of a forest in the night and the text appears saying I can hear laughter in one direction, and yelling in another. But there is also a third option. A woman talking to herself. Following that path I was presented with a monologue about a jester, how she felt annoyed by the jester's pranks and...well I was interrupting her and so she reset my memory, having me wake up in the forest again, with her nowhere to be found. I decided to go towards the yelling and as I played a strange series of events played out involving a troupe looking for their "Star Bottom", a talking half-man, half-ass beast and a fae-like audience demanding a performance. Alice makes clever use of Twine's functionality here to make choices alter your perception of the world, rather than just taking you to "The next page". This game's story is based on the famous William Shakespeare comedy "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and was solo-written by Alice, the developer and writer. The choices you make throughout this story will affect how the characters in it feel about themselves as Alice really wanted to dive into the complex feelings you get when going from failure to success or success to failure. Something the original play doesn't concern itself with. Through my choices I never actually got to see the play that was happening in the direction of the people laughing. But I did get to see and reason with a half-man, half-ass fae beast.
The scope for now is to put this game up for a writer's competition and after the competition is done the game will go up on her Itch. So be sure to keep an eye out for that!
- Creator: Alice Vartevanian
- Platforms: PC
- Check Them Out: Website
TeknoRat
While I cannot spell the name of the person who showed it to me to save my life (although I hope he reaches out to let me know!), I did get to play this ITU student game about a cyborg rat that has to kill "The Hedgehog" but everything isn't as it seems when you reach the target. It's a dystopian world of anthropomorphic animal characters with a class system, slums, sci-fi tech, poverty and violence. You can sneak around by hiding in trash cans, let out bait robots to distract enemies and take out unsuspecting foes later in the game. The game features a cute and simple aesthetic of layered 2D art while it's still under development. It's unsure whether this game will reach a release state but the person currently working on it would like to at least take it to the finish line and then we'll see! (coincidentally, Alice Vartevanian also did the writing for this game!)
Terminus
I noticed some striking monolith structures in a soft-lit 3D world covered in what appeared to be an endless ocean. Jumping into the game without knowing what to expect, I'm presented with a hilarious but cute set of crude drawings made with pencils to illustrate what an intro sequence will end up looking like. Just a slide show of these drawings with subtitles. This is something I really appreciate because it truly shows that, while you are working on the foundation of your game, you can easily get away with making very simple assets just to get the point of what you are doing across until you can replace it with something amazing. This is truly something I really love in any game I test at DTR. "The jank" so to speak. The story of this water covered world is a bit vague, however what I could piece together is that you are a participant in a "game" for entertainment purposes. If you win? You could "ascend" and make it up into high class society! Does this sound familiar? If so, you might be thinking of The Hunger Games and other similar stories which this game seems to use for inspiration. I was left at a dock being told "get to work and entertain us!" and as I set out to sea in my starter dingy I saw what appeared to be an endless ocean with monolith statues, half-sunken broken buildings of old and supplies dropping from the monoliths themselves where high society was sitting high above. Even in this early demo stage the game really nailed the aesthetic and after talking at length with one of the developers I got the sense that a lot of care had gone into the world's visual identity and they still had work to do on the core mechanics and their crafting system. Something I also noticed is that their ocean is not just a shader manipulating a plane. The ocean actually has physics so if you are sailing against the waves, the boat will do much worse than if you sail with the waves. I rarely see that in most games about sailing.
The developers say that the game is PC first and then possibly coming to consoles later.
- Developers: Bird Island
- Platforms: PC, Consoles Later
- Check Them Out: Website
Repeats
As mentioned earlier there were quite a lot of repeats this time, but some of them have definitely moved a lot since last time and some of them a bit less. But that's okay, some times the improvements are not new and shiny features but improvements and reworks which still need to be tested based on previous feedback!
Because I've covered some of these games quite a bit in past blog posts, I'll list the ones I saw below so you can go check them out. Next time I see them, I'll definitely cover them in more detail:
- Sea of Rifts: https://www.seaofrifts.com/
- Second Dealing: https://aaaaatlas.itch.io/second-dealing
- Tectonicus: https://gamucatex.itch.io/tectonicus
- Thug Arena: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4844900/Thug_Arena/?l=danish
- Hemlock: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2851550/Hemlock/
- Transit: https://www.fable.systems/
- Rivers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theguywholovespurple/
Join in
There were some other newcomers I didn't get to and some of them that were not at a stage to report on yet! See some pictures below. If you are in Denmark and around the Copenhagen Area you should definitely come by! Just join the Discord Server and look out for the next event announcement: Dev ➤ Test ➤ Repeat. Even if you don't have a game to show, come be a tester. Someone's gotta do it right? It's not just a testing event, it's also an amazing opportunity to network with other fellow developers. Most of the people who showed up today are indie developers part of a caring and close knit community. Even if what you have isn't much, still bring it and have some people test it! That's how you can figure out if you are going in the right direction with your idea, or if you need to tweak and redesign some things.
Test a lot, and test often. Especially with strangers who will give you the honest truth!
Hope to see you there. If you see me, please don't hesitate to come and say hello! You are also welcome to hit me up on BlueSky any time!
(psst! The event is free, there's free drinks and pizza and industry people show up too!)
