As a quick aside: I love Slipways. Amazing job, very interesting little game :)
On topic, I'm working in the same vein as you currently (without the indie hit) - I like building worlds that I want to see the light of day. I've found itch.io to be an amazing community and resource as a part-time games developer. It makes it stupid easy to get a game to the web and similarly easy to use sophisticated tools like Unity to make games for other platforms.
Itch.io is great and has single-handedly made it much easier to get an early audience for a freeware game. It's been a great help for me as well. It's harder to actually earn money there (at least in my case, it's orders of magnitude less money than eg. Steam), but you can't beat it for ease of publishing something and seeing what people think of it.
On topic, I'm working in the same vein as you currently (without the indie hit) - I like building worlds that I want to see the light of day. I've found itch.io to be an amazing community and resource as a part-time games developer. It makes it stupid easy to get a game to the web and similarly easy to use sophisticated tools like Unity to make games for other platforms.