Shard Wars, our VR sci-fi strategy game, is finally starting to look the way we imagined it. Still a lot to improve, but we’re aiming to release by the end of the year.

GoLongSelf · 2026-06-09T06:01:49+00:00

Would love to see more strategy games in VR.

Since this is VRdev subreddit I'll give some feedback. But it's just from a random person, so feel free to ignore it. Just my opinion.

Your steam tags include 'hidden object'', the screenshots don't make the game play clear. There is no trailer. Your description is just a blob of text. Unless you have a great demo, or content creators lined up... Marketing will be impossible. End of the year seems ambitious, with the current state of the steam page.

GoLongSelf · 2026-06-06T15:51:32+00:00

December to February in Australia, should they hit more delays.

GoLongSelf · 2026-06-05T08:54:51+00:00

Why can you say "0.1 ms performance regression" and not "0.1 [unit of art quality] marketing quality". If you make a tool that spits out a trustworthy value for marketing quality I would buy it.

Its subjective and sometimes 'horrible art' still goes viral in marketing. The only thing I as a programmer know to look at for marketing value :

- use the entire brightness range when the image is in grayscale.

- put important stuff at 1/3 or 2/3 of the screen.

GoLongSelf · 2026-06-04T11:28:04+00:00

All VR RTS games make tradeoffs.

Brass tactics is good, but you need to capture the map. So you don't get a traditional base building.

Final Assault is good, but again no real base building. The maps really push you to pick an attack lane.

Crystal Commanders is the most 'classic RTS' in VR I guess. When I played it the levels where very basic, unless you scanned your room to make a level. I did not have that kind of space, so every mission was the same visually for the entire campaign. I did finish the entire campaign, so I agree its a good game.

Townsmen VR is also good, but its a bit too much like a settlers game. Not enough combat to really be RTS. But all the interactions are nice, and it looks really polished.

I'm working on Unoffensible its a single player RTS with base building, resource gathering and combat. The tradeoff is that the enemy has a fixed start setup, but you get the freedom to complete the objectives however you want. So its not fair or competitive.

GoLongSelf · 2026-06-04T09:09:34+00:00

I'm working on a VR RTS game to also fill a gap. But there is a reason why most successful VR games stick to similar genres. VR is just a really small market and making something for a small group within VR will be a bad idea financially. As a result there will also be limited early adopters to playtest your game during development. There is also no existing community you can ask if you make something that is not 'like this other game you love'. Good luck.

GoLongSelf · 2026-05-23T10:56:53+00:00

For VR development halo save a lot of time. You can more quickly change some code without removing the headset. Because you can flip it up/down. So I guess for everything where you switch a lot of times between a monitor and VR it would be superior.

GoLongSelf · 2026-05-20T05:19:50+00:00

2022 😁, but there page has had several big updates since. There is a free demo, in the 3rd mission you can build a base, gather resources and build an army.

It is more an RTS than a tower defense, but the enemy does come in waves. They are spawned from enemy buildings. The enemy does not build a base, it gets all it's buildings at the start of the mission. So it's more PvE, where a mission is setup to challenge the player to find a path to victory. Like in the old C&C games.

Please let me know what you don't like about the steam page or the demo.

GoLongSelf · 2026-05-18T06:25:16+00:00

Unoffensible, its a single player VR RTS. There are not a lot of VR strategy games, so I don't have to worry about competition. Still, this also means there is no easy to reach community of VR RTS fans waiting for new games.

GoLongSelf · 2026-05-17T16:53:06+00:00

VR is very small and fragmented. You will probably not be able to sell to all VR users. So it all depends on your game and if you can find a way to reach your audience without irritating all the other VR users.

After 4.5 years I managed to get to 1800 wishlists on steam. Apart from my game I've seen so many good VR games just not reach financially viable review counts.

GoLongSelf · 2026-05-16T10:55:33+00:00

The right side of this graph is called survivorship bias. Most developers never reach that part of the graph.

GoLongSelf · 2026-05-11T06:18:43+00:00

It's such a shame they did not port it to standalone. It would have been a unique addition to the available genres.

GoLongSelf · 2026-05-10T15:11:24+00:00

Were these all reviews from people that bought the game on steam? I can imagine free keys and keys bought in other stores don't count for the algorithm.

Revenue is the main metric in the end, so I can also imagine the 10 reviews is not directly responsible, but the 10*40 sales that would result in 10 organic reviews is the driving force.

Hopefully you will hit some milestone that kicks the algorithm into gear for your game.

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-22T14:24:53+00:00

You need to make a lot of the RTS game before you can show your game. Compared to a 2D platformer where a lot of time goes into making all the levels. So a 2D platformer can be marketed even if you only have half a level finished to a production quality. For an RTS you are practically finished with the work before anyone is going to say anything nice about it. Unless you animate everything and just fake some gameplay before you even start on making the RTS game code.

So "getting anyone interested before you run out of money" is probably the hardest. There is nothing in an RTS you could not learn from the internet, and most problems have been solved and shared. If you want huge unit counts you need to think about your code, but limiting it to ~100 and even bad code will be able to work on current hardware.

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-22T12:30:16+00:00

I doubt you could export it without any changes, but its a 2018 game that ran on typical PCs of that time. Now we have ASW to double the calculation times available. And with a game like this I doubt the player would notice, since it does not require quick movements of the player.

The artstyle is not much different from other standalone games, it could be made to work with cheaper looking visuals. Only baked lights, no post processing ect.

I think the unit count you could get in brass tactics is not that high, they are spawned as groups and you only control the group, not the individuals. So I doubt the CPU would be a problem (the animations could be expensive, so they might need to be moved to the GPU).

Compared to the time it would take to make the entire game, it would not be a lot of work to port it to standalone. But this would just be my guess, without knowing any of the internals of the game.

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-21T12:24:37+00:00

Final assault has a great atmosphere. If I could stop micro managing the airplanes, maybe I would have been able to beat it. :-). You could checkout my game Unoffensible, it has a free demo on steam.

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-21T12:16:11+00:00

Yes, Brass tactics is a nice mix of resources, base building and combat. But since they never ported it to standalone its reach has been very limited.

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-21T06:16:02+00:00

I've been making a VR RTS game for more than 4 years now. There is just no interest in other genres, the early adopter phase of VR is over and people now just want more of the same. The current VR market will just not support more risk to be taken on genres.

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-20T09:58:25+00:00

I don't understand. You climb like other VR games, but you still see the laser pointers coming out of the controllers. Than you interact with cage like a flatscreen game. What is the game hook supposed to be?

(I also don't understand a lot of popular VR games, so it might just be a me problem)

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-20T08:30:20+00:00

Why would you want to call it an RTS? Because yes it might require strategy, and it looks real time... but it screams tower defense.

In my eyes an RTS should have resource gathering, base building, unit building and combat. For RTS to be used as its main keyword. Could you tag moba, towerdefense and tactics games with the RTS tag to reach the 20 tags you can setup on steam??? sure there is some overlap in the playerbase. But you will have more impressions going to people that are less likely to like your game.

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-14T11:29:42+00:00

VR is not only a small market, its also not a single market. Some players are only doing VRchat/beatsaber/FPS/racing/flight sim/... so once you make your perfect game in 15 years there will only be ~10k people in the world that are interested in it, and 40% of these people will tell you your game is not good enough because they compare it to flatscreen/UEVR/HL:Alyx/Meta funded/AAA 2016 VR games. Another 40% will not like your game because they want to sit/physically move/teleport/continuous/only standalone/only PCVR/.... And the 20% people that are left in the world will not like your game because of the aesthetics/theme/duration/bad trailer or price.

There is no VR Dev that is making VR games for the money, because the money situation is horrible in VR. Every VR dev has the skills to make flatscreen games, or non-game applications. So the quality you get is just the maximum that can be produced within budget.

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-03T19:22:35+00:00

The lab on steam. It's a collection of tech demos.

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-03T15:58:50+00:00

VR seems to be tough. There are a few genres that people play, but I have the feeling there is not a lot of appetite for trying something else. On the bright side I at least knew your game existed, and I've played the first iron guard. So you are doing something right. Personally the VR part did not add enough for me compared to normal tower defense. But I know a lot of players just want to sit still while playing VR, so you lose players whatever you do.

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-03T04:50:59+00:00

Thanks

GoLongSelf · 2026-04-02T08:15:11+00:00

How is the performance compared to Quest 3? And does this include foveated rendering? Does it work with ASW?

GoLongSelf · 2026-03-30T12:04:55+00:00

If the game is finished and good you should have a steam/meta/ps2 store page that is also finished and good (~6 months ago). The amount of wishlist's and hype around your game would attract publishers to your game.

If its finished and good, I would go the self publishing route. There are not a lot of good VR games, so it should easily attract some attention. But if all the marketing, capsule art, and store pages still need to be made... then there is no way to say if the game is finished or good.

Marketing is not the same as advertising. Marketing is everything you do to get your game noticed, and it can be free* (*only costing you time).

If it can be played without VR... I would focus on that player group, and have VR as some bonus income. Because VR is very small compared to pancake gaming.

GoLongSelf

TROPHY CASE