[dgb23]

Niche and indie video gaming is exciting these days.

Just an example are strategy/survival/simulation mashups, like They are Billions, Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, Frostpunk.

There are quite a bunch of innovative hardcore puzzle games out there. Fresh approaches to single player RPGs. Beautiful and varied click and point adventures. The list goes on.

Whenever people complain about the dullness and cash grabbing of video gaming I feel like they miss a huge entire category of games that are made by people who care deeply about them.

[kkukshtel]

FWIW I'm an indie strategy game dev (https://store.steampowered.com/app/690370/Cantata/) and am well aware of the full scope of the space of games (used to also be a game journo, and actively do a games podcast where we play most everything https://www.badendpodcast.com).

I want to be clear that my post isn't trying to be a Gamer and complain about "mOnEy gRUbbIng pUBLisheRs!!!!!!" — it's trying to look at the economic reality of making games in 2022 and how that steers design towards conservative decisions. I'm not on some moral high horse about design (and also think that game design itself doesn't sell, sort of like a notable DP in film doesn't get butts in seats).

That said, an addendum to this post is that I do think strategy games are where some of the best design IS happening (with games from devs like 11bit and Klei, like you mentioned), and perhaps not incidentally I think a lot of the best design work is happening boardgames right now. Strategy is a weird genre because it enjoyed dominance in the early days of PC gaming, but with the limelight off of it I think it's forcing developers and publishers to get more creative about what they are making. For boardgames, the economics just make way more sense — things like GMT's P500 idea act as pre-validators for design + thematic pairings in a way you can't really do for videogames (and Kickstarter similarly).

[dgb23]

I had a quick look at your game and it is the type of thing I'm interested in. Also I like the aesthetics of it. Thank you for sharing!

I also think it is perfectly OK to have strong opinions about games. It is incredibly subjective and a matter of taste and art.

For example strategy games are my "first love" so to speak, think old Maxis games, WC1/2, StarCraft, Myth, Creatures, Startopia, NetStorm, Caesar2, Alpha Centauri, Black and White to name a few that I played as a kid.

They must be incredibly hard to design, because they very much hinge on well structured feature complexity and balance. Games that don't do this part well turn me off. It's hard to find a good canonical example that isn't also to some degree minimalist like StarCraft. There the features were so extreme and orthogonal that the game almost balanced itself over decades, with minimal input from the devs.

Also most of the good stuff seems to come out of small studios. Modern AAA strategy games tend to follow fads, add superficial fluff, dumb down the gameplay and have terrible runtime performance. A game that does this really well is Factorio, it's so incredibly well designed and engineered that it allows you to build hugely complex systems out of very simple core components. And it just keeps running smoothly.

More than anything I love these types of games because they create their own little worlds with their own rules. They enable you to be both creative or scientific in figuring out what you can do and how you can do them in various ways. But I think there has to be some challenges to guide the player so to speak, meaning I quickly get bored with games that are entirely sandboxes with no failure modes or external pressure.

[kkukshtel]

As I've gotten older I definitely gravitated towards strategy games because they are often fundamentally about "player creativity". You aren't so much churning through content all the time and instead are making lots of small decisions that affect larger outcomes.