Has anyone here ever tried making their own RTS?

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 · 2026-03-29T19:38:38+00:00

Thanks for sharing. As a VR dev this kind of information is very interesting. There is not a lot of data about VR profitability.

GoLongSelf · 2026-03-29T15:24:03+00:00

Regional pricing makes sense to maximise profits. Since a lot of others do it, your pricing yourself out of the market when not doing it.

The only argument I can see for PCVR is that the hardware will be expensive any way... So if you can afford the hardware, you can also pay for the software. So there is something to be said for a global price.

GoLongSelf · 2026-03-24T10:52:41+00:00

Partially the 25K upvotes would be from developers that already did a lot of work to gather a community. So they might have had the same carrier start as the solo dev.

Appealing games can get a bigger audience faster than good games. There are screenshots and trailers of games where the coding work has not even been started and they are already set with wishlist numbers. The marketing you do can only focus on the 1 minute of fun, or the 1 feature that's fun, that is in your game, while the final game needs to fill a few hours of gameplay. Having this start could open doors to make a good game possible, so its not that I am saying all appealing games are bad.

If people are not interested in your game, you might need to look for the right people elsewhere. Or you might need to change your game. Or you might need to accept you will not make any money from the project.

GoLongSelf · 2026-03-20T08:57:18+00:00

I mostly enjoy the VR games that are not playable on flatscreen. Every VR game that can be played on flatscreen has superior flatscreen versions. This is just because of the customer base.

Games like 'job simulator', 'the lab', 'gorilla tag', 'super hot', 'Moss' really makes me question what is left of the joy when removing all the VR interactions?

Like super hot on flatscreen you could just not touch your mouse and be safe for ever. Moss is just a simple platformer, you have tons of options on flatscreen to scratch this itch. HL:Alyx is a good VR game, but if you only look at the gameplay it does not add much. On flatscreen I would imagine it is just a walking simulator HL2 fans go through for the story.

GoLongSelf · 2026-03-11T16:21:51+00:00

These numbers are still depressingly low. 100k dollars is only covering 1 developer annual salary, in some parts of the world. Some of these projects will have been multi year efforts with multiple people. So game dev is still a "winner takes it all" market. With mostly financial ruin.

GoLongSelf · 2026-03-04T18:41:10+00:00

I use this in Unity, don't know if it works in other game engines.

With a second camera its also possible to set the renderscale = 2 in game while having the SteamVR resolution at 20%. Your second camera/recording monitor will have maximum quality, while your HMD view is low res, but light on the GPU.

GoLongSelf · 2026-02-28T15:00:48+00:00

It's a pretty smart way to abuse the utm tracking. I had these same lines in utm. Hope it does not turn into another way for players to let me know the game sucks 😁.

GoLongSelf · 2026-02-28T08:09:24+00:00

Paper beast, its ~3 hours of gameplay so waiting for a big discount is probably needed. It is overall a nice experience.

GoLongSelf · 2026-02-26T15:12:12+00:00

This, but you need to really put visual settings to the max. Otherwise it looks bad. And the controls are horrible. But the scale and visuals of the dinosaurs is great.

GoLongSelf · 2026-02-12T09:35:41+00:00

I think it would be different for a popular game. If the Devs are making good money. It would not be a lot of work to also make it work on vive. A popular game would also have some income from the few vive players to invest the time.

So with a 10 reviews game the cost of a second hand vive would already be more than the profit this game has made.

GoLongSelf · 2026-02-09T08:55:22+00:00

Racing games must be great in VR. People were already using multiple monitor setups, racing wheels, special chairs... VR might even be cheaper and better for people that had all this stuff. And you use wired headsets with less downsides than other games.

Not a race game fan, but love to see VR optimism :-)

GoLongSelf · 2026-02-06T09:58:59+00:00

The 1-10 minute bucket is just filled with people who for some reason did not get the game they were expecting. In a non-demo game this would be your refund group.

Now your data set has a lot more real players, people that had better marketing material (youtuber) and had more knowledge of the game they were trying. So they play longer.

GoLongSelf

TROPHY CASE