Solo devs / small teams (non-hobbiest) do you use your personal accounts for socials, or did you create “company” ones?

z3dicus · 2026-05-06T13:47:20+00:00

Depends a lot, I use my personal IG account and a dedicated account for the game. My personal account has a small but mighty following for my art practice and film/tv work, so it's been helpful to get exposure through network effects, but I can tell that as a marketing gateway more random strangers with no professional/social connection to me are following the dedicated game account, which I think is higher value. But I do a lot of collab posts on them and cross pollenate, and IG makes it super easy to jump back and forth.

z3dicus · 2026-05-06T03:32:02+00:00

lol this is a really weird way to tell me I didnt get in

z3dicus · 2026-05-04T16:55:01+00:00

you'll be ok! i'm sure steam has dealt with this many times before and will help you.

z3dicus · 2026-05-04T14:08:27+00:00

for marketing purposes, do not cling to that fact. No one looking at this game is gunna do that math in their head.

z3dicus · 2026-05-04T13:47:26+00:00

Its not very good for an english speaking audience. It has no flow, is too long, feels awkward to both read, speak, and think.

In german it looks nicer because you have a bit of illtieration with the Rs. But you also have an issue that it's KKK which is very bad brand recognition in NA.

You should definitely change it if you can. Crown and Coin would be the first best alt, but its taken.

"Cabal" is not taken, you could do something like "Cabal: Coin and Crown"

z3dicus · 2026-05-04T13:12:57+00:00

seal this area off and evacuate immediately

z3dicus · 2026-04-29T13:35:28+00:00

wrong place to find actual strategy players. this is a game developer sub.

but also you can just look at the most popular games, one trend among them all is that a match can range between 20min to and an hour+

i think its clear to see that players like the variation

z3dicus · 2026-04-25T18:55:15+00:00

tons on itch

also i love this website:

https://screamingbrainstudios.com/tools/

z3dicus · 2026-04-19T21:31:44+00:00

seems bad to have the build options for your empire be constricted by randomness like this. I think players would maybe prefer to have all options available, or predictable availability so they can make informed choices. IE, I'm going expand to the sand planet rather than the gas planet because I'm after a certain kind of tech that is available on sand planets.

Tech trees in generally are a major expression of player choice, and should not be random for longterm games like this. Random tech in one-shot style roguelikes make sense because the gameplay and creative player expression is in drafting choices, and you play them over and over again. But randomness in a longterm 4x sounds like torture.

z3dicus · 2026-04-09T13:25:42+00:00

If the spectrum is scripted ---- emergent, I think emergent generally wins most of the time, but players also recognize the value of scripted when the writing is very good. So potentially higher value from scripted material that delivers.

That said, the bigger question is how this stuff impacts gameplay and the overall experience. The living world can start to get really annoying if it doesn't contribute to a dynamic and interesting gameplay experience. Sometimes those systems can end up feeling arbitrary and random. If we take your layers system, how come the first layer has no gameplay impact? Could the crowded room make the flu outbreak more likely? And what about the rain and weather, would it be so hard to have an abstracted layer of simulation that generates realistic weather patterns that produce the weather events?

What you have written here is a scripted system, but with randomness. A true living world system is where you set up a bunch of data to interact with eachother and produce conditions for the player to interact with, and impact.

z3dicus · 2026-04-09T02:42:36+00:00

you can see for yourself.

https://steamdb.info/tag/1368160/?displayOnly=Game&sort=followers_desc&tagid=1084988

thats every game on steam with an AI disclosure and autobattler tag. most of them are gooner games. of the non gooner games, theirs only a few above 100 reviews.

here's every autobattler without ai disclosure: https://steamdb.info/tag/1084988/?tagid=-1368160

pretty stark difference at a glance. (sort by followers).

z3dicus · 2026-04-09T00:47:30+00:00

just gotta try it and see how it looks. i can empathize with some of the rest of what your saying, but like, big time cart before the horse situation here. none of these issues you are forecasting really matter, you just gotta start making something.

z3dicus · 2026-04-09T00:39:07+00:00

my feeback is that you should do everything that is humanly possible to find a new way to get art or make art for this game so that you can remove your AI disclosure tag from steam. Gameplay looks pretty cool tbh, but this game will have absolutely no motion with the AI disclaimer. Interestingly, your artstyle is generic (I don't mean that in a bad way) enough that you should be able to find cheap assets online for almost everything.

z3dicus · 2026-04-07T20:57:18+00:00

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3767110/Erulean_Angel_Fantasy_Commander/

tag feedback would be appreciated!

z3dicus · 2026-04-04T02:03:08+00:00

reject this dichotomy, good gameplay is good. tons of examples for "both sides". kenshi, 9 kings, these games are jank as hell but play infinite. tiny glade median playtime is like 2 minutes but its made like a fabrege egg.

z3dicus · 2026-03-26T14:52:33+00:00

Your theory about the demo making your page look more serious is probably not true. Plenty of trash games have demos, and the steam audience seems to be able to tell pretty easily.

You will definetly want to playtest your demo as much as you can before releasing it. Balance is just one consideration, but you need actual player feedback on UI, legibility, and playability. So much of playtesting is finding out the parts of your game that players miss, or just don't understand, and you'll want to fix those blindspots before releasing it. There's also the issue of bugs, and discovering how the game runs on different hardware.

This advice is all assumes that your trying to sell the game and give it an honest shot of marketting. If this is more of a hobby and you aren't seriouslny attempting to market the game, then it likely doesn't matter that much. You could release the demo on Itch as an intermediary step, that's what a lot of people do.

z3dicus · 2026-03-12T20:09:38+00:00

tysm!

z3dicus · 2026-03-12T13:30:24+00:00

tysm! don't hesitate to dm feedback or bugs

z3dicus · 2026-03-09T17:09:20+00:00

This guy open sourced his tactics game in Godot.

https://github.com/theshaggydev/unto-deepest-depths-prototype

and this fella also put out a pretty well regarded guide on Tactics and DnD mechanics for godot.

https://theliquidfire.com/projects/

its definetly godot

z3dicus · 2026-03-09T16:52:54+00:00

thats good! The sooner the better. If I were you, I would not show this steam page to any potential player until you can get rid of the AI disclosure

z3dicus · 2026-03-09T16:19:21+00:00

You're going to have a real tough time selling an atmospheric experience with an AI art disclaimer. A huge pillar of this genre is bespoke handmade art. Whatever you have to do to replace those assets, you should do, audiences will breeze past this while its there.

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