Post by redonihunter in Curious what strategy players think - Help pls!

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from people who actually enjoy these kinds of games.

You should not make a game you yourself do not enjoy. It's not paid work and success for indie games is volatile. If you make something catering for other people, but do not understand what would make the game tick, that might negatively affect many aspects of the game.

Maybe I misinterpret the statement. But you mentioned a lot of keywords and I am not sure, if you know what those keywords mean. What do you think, a strategy roguelite is? Because I do not know what that is supposed to be.

I tried looking at https://itch.io/games/genre-strategy/tag-roguelite but for the games I know there, I would disagree about those tags.

A game is not a strategy game, just because you plan ahead. And a game is not a roguelite just because you have a "run" and unlocks. Playing the campaign of a strategy game is technically a roguelite. You have runs, you unlock more troops and buildings each subsequent run.

What usually makes you bounce off strategy roguelites early on

You said that, as if those type of games were a thing. Maybe it helps, if you cite examples of known games that would be adjacent to the game you plan.

Especially since you ask about core ideas, but use terms that are very vague and often used for games that are not those things at core.

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Herestes8 days ago

Hi! The other partner here :) First of all thanks for the review. I cannot put enough how these replies mean for me and for us...

I'm experimentally developing the game via help of claude. I have no domain expertise besides the almost 30 years of gamer experience of mine. So as you can guess, I want to produce games not only consume anymore because I cannot find a niche for my taste first of all :) So you can be sure that my priority is what is fun for me on development. (By the way I love paradox interactive games but they have too much learning cost...)

Even though our goal to publish the beta in itch our end goal is to get to early-access stage in Steam so we are tying to think ahead with those key-words, tags for our game. So I guess you are right with the vagueness of the key-words but we want to hit those tags before beta.

Anyways, my vision/loop for the game something like this:

*You will have a team/arm of (5 units) units with a champion (acts as king in chess, you must protect it!),
*You enter to tactical RPG like combat (resembles chess/checkers) with them on 5x5 grid board,
*From the battles you acquire resources (only golds for now),
*You retain the damages and losses of your team after a battle and enter your camp,
*In your camp you can heal, replace, and upgrade your army,
*To do those you must buy and/or upgrade your camp buildings,
*Repeat until you complete the campaign,

With these I'm not sure if this fits rougelite tag but I want some unlockable content from the runs.
PS: Currently I'm completing the units archetypes and overall game/chess engine for combat AI.

Thanks for the reply again. I would love to hear from you again :)
OG

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redonihunter7 days ago

Paradox is a publisher, not a developer. You would need to be more specific.

You can't chose your Steam tags, like you can on Itch. The players will decide. And the most popular ones will appear on top. One can even see how some tags change over the years in relevancy to a topic. And one can see that certain tags are often applied wrong. If enough people do it, the meaning even changes.

Your described game loop sounds like Darkest Dungeon - without the eldritch horror bits. Darkest Dungeon is not a rogue-like, nor is it a strategy game. It's not a rogue-like, because the central game loop is not the "run", but the campaign around the runs. You can still say, it has rogue-like elements. But it's not at core a rogue-like. They made Darkest Dungeon 2 a rogue-lite. There is no campaign, only runs. And you need to unlock everything, by failing. And yeah, it is as bad as it sounds. DD1 is a masterpiece. DD2 is ... not. And it's an insult to all fans of DD1. But at core that game is a rogue-lite. And it's lite and not like, because failing and unlocking things to be better next time is by design. You can play DD1 without ever restarting. Infact, restarting does not give you anything iirc. People do not use those words strictly, but by definition a rogue-like is not a rogue-lite and vice versa, yet many games have both those tags.

The loop is basically a party rpg. Hire people, improve, go on missions, rinse repeat. Technically, it is two loops. An inner and an outer loop. One can think about the inner loop as rogue-like. And the outer loop as a rpg with a bit of base building. And if you are unsure, if I was talking about Darkest Dungeon or your game, well, ... ;-)

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redonihunter7 days ago

A bit closer to your King type mechanic might be Vambrace: Cold Soul. An underrated game. The inner loop is the rogue-like elements of Darkest Dungeon. But you do have a hero character. And the outer loop is rpg adventure style. Both games have more going on than their mechanics. For Darkest Dungeon it's the atmosphere and eldrith horror theme. For Vambrace it's the story.

So what your game's tags will be, will also largely depend on the surroundings. People tag more than the game mechanic.

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