Make a Competitive Strategy Game Survive

0:00 Intro 0:43 Jonas on Mechabellum; how it was made? 1:13 Two-person start in 2017; Mahjong/poker prototypes 4:53 No moving units, Go’s influence, fixing Round 1 snowball 8:36 Avoiding RTS snowball: equal income and reborn units 11:36 Unity choice; simple, low-latency networking design 16:04 Should you make a competitive auto-battler? (Don’t) 19:26 Live service pain and the death spiral 22:16 One bad update can kill an indie PvP game 25:02 Balancing philosophy: define goals, fun over variety 27:45 Double red/green: when to nerf (win rate vs pick rate) 31:10 Unit design with spreadsheets; emergent counters & guidelines 37:16 Counters without tags; armor experiments and why they failed 41:27 Tech design, tradeoffs, complexity vs fun; balancing techs 46:56 If you insist on PvP auto-battlers: know your goals 49:50 Technical constraints and scoping to your team 52:03 Monetization and positioning competitive strategy games 58:00 External shocks; start with PvE; Bazaar-style offline PvP 1:00:15 Fewer players and shorter matches to reduce concurrency 1:03:37 Marketing, Early Access pitfalls, Battle Aces; co-op PvP prototype 1:08:08 Managing community negativity and inevitable mistakes 1:12:56 Balancing PvE: ensure tool use; buff enemies, not players 1:17:00 Keeping old versions via Steam branches 1:19:23 PvE/co-op opportunities; Thronefall co-op and saying no 1:25:51 Scoping, minimal art, and fast content pipelines 1:26:52 Meta shifts as side effects 1:28:54 Team size; Out of Hand; art style and marketing lessons 1:33:07 Mechabellum roadmap; armor hopes; expanding the universe 1:36:37 Business reality: support what earns; risk vs reward 1:38:07 Randomness vs determinism: upsets, styles, and info gaps 1:45:01 Designing perceived fairness: RPS illusion and football 1:50:23 Jonas’ next game; staying small; freelancers vs growth 1:54:17 Endless Mode learnings and map persistence idea 1:58:10 Wrap-up