SomaSim games figured out something early on in the lifecycle of Steam — PC gamers love strategy games.

While consoles have proven out a market for your run of the mill platformer, action game, or FPS, the allure of sitting in a room and just thinking about stuff on a screen, poking a little simulation, remains untouched by those who prefer an analog stick.

And the companies that give people new and different little ant farms tend to be the ones primed to reap major rewards. Games like Rimworld (one of the top selling games of all time on Steam), Prison Architect, Planet Coaster — these are games that provide people not only a fantasy of “control”, but truly deliver on the premise of a videogame as an interactive way to tell stories.

SomaSim, similarily, has been in the business of making little ant farms for gamers on Steam, and has been doing it now for nearly a decade.

Debuting long before Steam Greenlight was even a thing, their forst foray into the space was the Impressions-inspired city building game 1849, all about prospecting during a gold rush.

Following that up a few years later, they pulled on similar nostalgia (and dear to my heart) inspiration with their SimTower inspired game Project Highrise. The game is an absolute love letter to SimTower, and plays like you remember SimTower playing, but then goes above and beyond.

Follow that up a few years later with their combo social simulation/city simulation game City of Gangsters, and you can see there is a trend here. SomaSim knows a thing or two about simulation.

So obviously I wanted to talk to them here, and what better opporunity than on the eve of the launch of their new title, Rise of Industry 2 — a game all about putting together logistics pipelines and buildings to actually do some real “city building” in a city builder (instead of just plopping down buildings and zones).

Across a fair number of successful games of a similar genre, I knew there had to be some secret sauce to how they did things. Or at least some stories. And I’m happy to report that with this episode I did indeed unconver some interesting parts about how SomaSim makes games (custom data language, anyone?) that I think all you who enjoy Game Data will similarily enjoy.

So sit back, relax, and get ready to do a deep dive on programming simulation and strategy games (really, what else could you want?)

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Path of Achra, by looks, could easily be mistaken for some long-lost DOS game. Its lo-fi and charmingly amateurish aesthetic though belies a design sensibility that is fiercely modern, informed by greater movements in game design over the past decade.

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It is, ostensibly, a roguelike — a game where you build up your skills over the course of a run that, once ended by your death of victory, reset. Roguelikes are often notoriously lethal, willing to kill the player at the drop of a hat.

In roguelikes, it is on the player to push past the odds and craft some version of themselves that can, against all odds, turn the tide in their favor.

It’s this final moment of euphoric “ascendance” in a roguelike that makes the slog worth it. You’ve got the perfect weapon to complement a perfectly manicured set of abilities and passives. They all activate off of each other, and nothing can stop you.

However, this moment, as spectacular as it is, never arrives for most players. Repeated runs ending in death after an encounter with even the most innocuous of enemies means that most players will quit out of frustration, not willing to continually die over and over for only marginal benefit and progress.

Path of Achra realizes this and instead inverts the typical arc of “buildcrafting” in roguelikes. Instead of working over the course of a whole run to make a worthwhile build, Achra gives you the tools from the start, based on a mixture of your race, class, and god you worship (!), to immediately start cooking with gasoline.

From round one, you get that feeling of having created a “broken build”. Enemies fall immediately at your feet as you watch your carefully chosen abilities mount in their power and combo with each other.

And it only gets more crazy from there. New abilities and skills, all chosen by you, complement and augment your current skillset. Equipment teases out and enhances your runs, helping you to double down on your own decisions. The game also gets harder, throwing larger and stronger swarms of enemies at you.

To be clear, you will still die. Roughly on the same timeline that you would die in a more “traditional” roguelike. However, in that same equivalent timeframe, you will have done significantly more killing in Path of Achra.

What Path of Achra finds is that, if you can watch chain lighting bounce between twenty enemies at once and turn them into zombies on turn 1, you’ll endure a lot of hardship along the way because play itself is, immediately, so damn fun and creative.

Rounds pass and you will have created ten incredible builds before you die. And once you die you’ll go immediatly back in, willing to try out some new permutation you came up with that will only take a few minutes to get setup and cooking.

These combinations of abilities and passives and gear, all pinging and activating off of each other, is also no small technical feat. It requires a deep consideration for rules resolution and action triggering, implying a system that behaves more like a game like Magic or Hearthstone than your run-of-the-mill Action RPG.

It’s for this reason that I knew I wanted to talk with Ulfsire, Path of Achra’s creator. Behind all those skills, equipment, gods, races, classes, etc., is data. I wanted to know how he managed it all, how he authored them, how they all come together to create such a fun videogame.

Enjoy!

The continued critical accolades of his subsequent releases (Oath, Arcs, Pax Pamir, and John Company) have shown that Root’s success wasn’t some fluke, but that Cole’s design prowess can, consistently, balance key goals of game creation that are (often simulataneously) opposed to each other: personal design ambition, player experience, and commercial viability.

This is, in my mind, because Cole has carved out something of a mythic position for himself in the industry. Unlike most designers who moonlight on their creations but work at otherwise unrelated professions during the day, Cole has the ability, through Leder games and Root’s success, to work eight hours (or more!), every day, on game design.

The space afforded by Root’s success has allowed Cole to expand and hone an intense, meditative design practice that is both wildly open and exploratory while also being fiercely pragmatic and focused. As he puts it, he can workshop designs for months only to throw them out when he realizes they don’t work. Successful designs can take years. Things are given the time they need, and all avenues of possibility are, if not directly explored, are at least considered.

I know this in part due to another unique quality of Cole — he is a prolific writer and documenter of his own process, evident through the in-depth design diaries he posts on (boardgame journal of record) BoardGameGeek leading up to the release of his own games. Each entry is a goldmine of design thinking and instruction, seeing Cole work through the possibilities implied by a games rules throughtly and effectively. That he is able to cogently meditate on his own practice such that he can produce artifacts of it for others to read is astounding, matched only by someone like Price of Persia’s Jordan Mechner.

It’s in these design diaries that I discovered another interesting dimension of Cole’s work — he deeply thinks about “data” in his games. The “stuff” of a game is less disjointed parts that come together, but given the procedural, systemic nature to his games, they are a tapestry that must meld together to produce some desired experience of play.

This approach makes sense, as boardgames are, in some ways, purely data — data, and rules about how that data interacts. Card art, text, iconography, etc. are all assembled and effectively “compiled” into cardboard. Cole knows this, and as such has built up his own tooling and workflows to manage it all. He creates “icon fonts” for card art so data merging works in Adobe Illustrator. He simulates dice outcomes to balance odds for different game actions. He writes python programs to game out game states to bend towards a desired thematic evocation.

It’s this considered and holistic approach to design and data that attracted me to Cole in the first place. The fact he so clearly is just thinking about what he is doing when designing games. It seems like such a simple thing — to think through a design, to think through its implications — but in fact it is hard work. Tunneling through your own maze of rules and exceptions, all while having to surface for air to think of the player and how big your box will now need to be on a shelf.

Talking to Cole then was a no brainer. We dive deep into the all of the above and more, talking about combat odds, rules design, balancing, etc. We get into the data behind his large thematic, player-driven strategy games and trace the lineage of John Company from a postdoc historical exploration to one of the great modern wargames.

It’s a great, nearly career spanning conversation and the longest Game Data episode to date. And in perfect time for spring as well. Start the podcast, put on some shoes, and go for a long walk, listening to Cole and I muse on games and the creative process.

Enjoy!

Every year, the event lands somewhere between house party and a gallery show and the raucousness implied by that intersection is often mirrored in the games themselves. “No Quarter” obviously referencing the idea of an arcade — the games on show are often strange, silly affairs that act as a conduit to get people to gather shoulder to shoulder around a screen and just Have A Good Time Playing Some Damn Videogames.

Traditionally, these games lean into the idea of the arcade — they are often multiplayer, raucous affairs that feature many people crowded around a screen laughing, smiling, etc. The kinds of games that produce really great stock photos of “people playing video games”-core.

This is not to undercut the accomplishments of the games from No Quarter (many who have gone on to release successfully elsewhere!) but more to say they are often of a Type.

This year’s event was no different, packed with lots of games of the aforementioned type that beckoned you play them and engage with their (often hilatious) eccentricities. The laughter and halo light around the backs of heads from people cramed shoulder to shoulder looking at screen beckons you — “What could be so fun with a controller and some buttons??”

However, there was one game that wasn’t this. Something quieter, unassming. Projected large against a screen in the back of the main room (and behind a giant tower made of old keyboards), was “Dreamscape Explorer” by Izzy Kestrel.

Dreamscape Explorer looks like a sort of standard top down RPG. It lacks what have become the unspoken tenets of other No Quarter games. There is no funny controller, there is little to no onscreen action, and there is no local multiplayer component. It’s played by one person, holding a normal controller, sitting on a chair in front of a single player game.

But that’s obviously not all there is. Look closer at the above picture: “Look for the Pink QR”.

As Rob Dubbin (another showcasing dev from the event and co-host of the wonderful Eggplant podcast) put it, Izzy “understood the assignment”. Scattered around the venue itself were QR codes, that, when scanned would show one of a variety of different micro-experiences (all made in different engines!) that fed into the functioning of Dreamscape Explorer being played on the “main” screen. Far from just a rote singleplayer experience, Izzy turned the whole venue into part of the game.

People would scan the QR codes and play the (fun in their own right) microgames, and change the state of the “main” game, with either party being either absolutely clueless or completely aware of what was happening. The whole of No Quarter (or at least those who scanned the QR codes) were playing Izzy’s game together.

It’s a perfect showcasing of the type of experimental work No Quarter aims to platform, and as such I was excited to get to talk with Izzy all about this project. How do you plan out such a thing? How do you get disparate web-based engines to all talk with each other? How do you account for the venue itself? How do you even make it all work?

Izzy and I talk about all this and more in the latest episode of Game Data. It’s a great conversation about pushing the boundaries of what we expect our tools to be able to do and how to just voraciously Try Things to get at something new and different. Enjoy!

However, Armello’s creators, League of Geeks, didn’t stop making games. Instead, they took what they learned from Armello and applied it to something surprising — a remaster of a nearly forgotten niche PC strategy game, Solium Infernum.

The effort of one man, Vic Davis, Solium held the credit of being Distinctly Weird but also Strangely Compelling. Its turn structure, its theme, and its general player-driven drama (as opposed to the mechanics-y interactions of a game like Civilization) made it feel much more like the modern iterations of the aforementioned “digital boardgames” than its 4X peers at the time.

Solium Infernum was only available directly through Vic’s site (foregoing Steam — this was pre-Greenlight/EA/etc.), which meant that, when his site went down a number of years ago, so too did access to Solium, the game fading into the annals of history.

Until…

Woooh buddy! We got ourselves a glow up on our hands!

League of Geeks took their expertise, honed from working on Armello, and applied it to a harder and more demanding assignment — remaster an ahead-of-its-time esoteric niche strategy game and make it appealing to a wide audience — and absolutely knocked it out of the park.

Solium is a gamer’s game, and LoG’s version even more so. It’s got a depth of strategy and tactics that reveal themselves only over hours of play, through wheels within wheels of schemes and tactics, feints and double-crossed deals.

To make all this work is not only a hard task, but something that is typically reserved for teams 10x the size of League of Geeks. That they were able to produce such a cogent, confident, and frankly wildly ambitious strategy game that is able to absolutely sing at all turns is astounding.

Which makes me more all the more grateful I was able to sit down with two major forces of the project, William Dyce and Peter “Macky” McIntosh, and talk about how you even go about approaching something like this (from a Game Data angle). Nobody sits down and tries to build Civilization from scratch. Nobody except League of Geeks, it seems.

Even more unprecedented was that the path they chose wasn’t the one of least resistance. Instead, they deliberately chose a way of doing things that required a steeper-than-average upfront cost, but was ultimately a technical investment that allowed them to be able to do the game at all.

In talking with Will and Peter, I came away absolutely floored at the technical feats they had accomplished with Solium, seeming to have actually done The Things I think many people envision for making this type of game, but rarely have the resources or necessary political sway to make it happen.

The game itself also shines in this regard — not only is it incredibly fun to play, but it just feels solid in a way that is hard to describe. Every action feels definitive, but the game’s ability to flex with you as a player (rolling back actions, working with niche scenarios, etc.) speaks to an underlying system and technical team that is in absolute control of their tools.

Which is also makes it more bittersweet that, mid last year, League of Geeks trimmed its workforce largely to just the three original founders, unable to secure funding for their also incredible looking game Jumplight Odyssey and Solium not being a big enough hit to float the studio.

Solium is a swan song then, not unlike Mimimi’s Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew — the (potentially) final game from a developer operating at the peak of its ability, firing on all cylinders to deliver above and beyond what a player expects and making a mark on the genre in the process.

So now enjoy my conversation with Will and Peter as we dive into Hell and see off Solium into the sunset, and long live League of Geek’s legacy of making great strategy games.

Popular physical games will sometimes get their own standalone adaptations (Gloomhaven, Dune: Imperium, Root, Wingspan, etc.), but these are generally quite rare, in part due to the high cost associated with their production and the ambiguous able to forecast revenue against that (physical fans may just play the physical game). Fan-created standalone digital adaptations fill in the market gaps here where there is digital “will” but no delivered “way”, with games like the One Piece TCG simulator app or the War of the Ring client.

Most rare of all though are digital games that “play” like physical boardgames but have no actual physical counterpart. These games, at best, embrace the affordances of videogames to enhance and expand on the “sense” of playing something that could plausibly be physical, but don’t directly owe some indexical truth back to a physical source. Armello is by far the most notable here, but besides that there are surprisingly few others (Antihero is another).

As a fan of games like Armello (and boardgames more broadly), it’s something I wish was explored more. The design space that circles around both structured, rule-based play and the “limitless” potential of videogames is, I think, more fertile territory for moving games “forward” rather than micro-iterating on progression trees in “first person shooters” or “character action adventure” games.

This is to say that, when I got the first glimpse of Nic Tringali’s The Banished Vault, I was well primed to receive its many gifts. As the full vision of The Banished Vault came into focus over the years, every new detail prompted in me a reflexive “Hell Yeah”.

Gothic, Grimdark Sci-fi? Hell Yeah.
Harsh, D&D 2E Black and White Illustrations? Hell Yeah.
An all consuming void of nothingness? Hell yeah.
Worker placement mechanics? Hell Yeah.
Rougelike-y Survival Mechanics? Hell Yeah.

The list (and “Hell Yeahs”) goes on.

Tringali’s game also holds a special place in my heart beyond my own affinity for it. Development on The Banished Vault roughly started, and ran parallel to, the development of my own weirdo strategy game Cantata.

From across the void of the internet, seeing someone else on the path, attempting something equally strange made the whole endeavor feel less lonely. No matter what happened, we had each other, stellar bodies locked in orbit amongst the cloud of overlapping steam tags.

I met Nic in person for the first time this past year at GDC, and immediately gave them a big hug. It felt appropriate — two fellow travelers come together after a long journey apart.

Talking with Nic for Game Data felt like a bit of a retrospective for both The Banished Vault and Cantata, both of us sharing what got us through the projects, talking through the details and similarities/differences.

It’s a conversation I’m happy to bring you all, and hope you enjoy hearing Nic and I talk about all the intricacies of building strategy games trying to do things that are both new (digital boardgames!) and old (boardgames!) at the same time. Enjoy!

Also! Shortly before this episode was published, Nic announced their new game Amberspire that seems to continue the exploration of the design space Tringali opened with The Banished Vault! Give it a wishlist!

The latter best represents his output from the past few years, with spectacular releases like the push-your-luck dice game Spots and the 1v1 “lane battler” card game Air, Land, and Sea (a personal favorite of mine) that, though he denies that it "stole" anything from him, was clearly a major inspiration for the mega-hit Marvel Snap.

Other games like Time Barons (designed in conjunction with Derek Yu), arriving near the advent of modern tabletop hobby gaming, seemed to anticipate a lot of its larger motions before they had become fully absorbed and disseminated into what “modern design” means.

All this to say, Jon Perry gets design. He knows how to make games that sing.

So it’s exciting to see him once again flexing his muscle in the digital sphere (and unsurprisingly crushing it) as he and a group of other prominent indie game developers came together to put out the now audacious (and commercial hit!) game UFO50.

UFO 50 is a collection of 50 single and multiplayer games that span a variety of genres, from platformers and shoot 'em ups to puzzle games, roguelites, and RPGs. Our goal is to combine a familiar 8-bit aesthetic with new ideas and modern game design.

The previously-stated pedigree of the game is quite large, with the major contributors coming from the people behind Spelunky, Catacomb Kids, Downwell, as well as Perry himself (credited on nearly 20(!) of the 50 games).

UFO50, nearly 8 years in the making, is a herculean effort of herculean effort. Making a single game is hard. Making 50 seems near impossible. Add on top of that multiple creators and designers and self-imposed limitations to keep with the whole spirit of the project, and you’ve got quite the task on hand.

So for UFO50 to not only have delivered, but for it to deliver and be, by all accounts, VERY GOOD, is incredible.

Which is why I wanted to sit down and talk with Jon on Game Data to figure out how they got it done. Enjoy!

For the inaugural episode of GAME DATA I’m pleased to have gotten to interview none other than mobile game legend Arnold Rauers.

Arnold’s games label Tinytouchtales has consistently put out some of the most interesting games available on mobile year after year for more than a decade. His commitment to game design, technical expertise, and visual polish has made his games consistently stand out among the crowd. When a new Tinytouchtales game comes out, I play it immediately.

At the time of recording, his card-drafting game GEO GODS had just released on mobile, and with it he posted a really interesting Deep Dive video of his own that I highly recommend checking out (not least because we reference it in the episode!)

Arnold has, since recording the episode, already released another new game onto the app store, the weird western game GUNCHO:

Find Guncho, Geo Gods, (my personal fav) Card Crawl, and all of Tinytouchtales’ other games on both major app stores.

Apple App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/arnold-rauers/id538013421?see-all=i-phonei-pad-apps

Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Arnold+Rauers

Additionally, Arnold has released some of his games for desktop through Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/arnoldrauers

Enjoy!

Hello and welcome to Game Data!

I’m Kyle Kukshtel, the developer behind the tactical strategy game Cantata, the game data editing tool Depot, and the 2D C# game engine Zinc!

Through working on Cantata, I started to get interested in data management techniques in games. Cantata is a large-scale strategy game and as such has a lot of data to wrangle. When I started to look into how people normally handled this type of thing, I found what seemed like a lot of bad answers in addition to a lot of people with horror stories about how not to do things.

I went to develop Depot to explicitly solve a lot of these issues, but also started to grow more interested in the field generally. Why weren’t there great data tools out there? In fact, why did there seem to be a lack of specifics about the programming of specific games themselves?

When listening to other game development focused podcasts, I started to feel like developers like myself were missing out on deep, sustained technical dives into games and how they work. There are plenty of shows about the general craft of games, but I wanted something that went below the surface and wasn’t afraid to get into the weeds to help me get better at my own craft.

Instead of continuing to wait around, I decided to make the podcast I wanted to listen to and use it as an excuse to get to talk with the creators behind lots of interesting games.

Even with just the first few episodes recorded, I can assure you you’re in for a treat. If you identify with any of the above and want to hear how game creators actually get work done in games, subscribe and start listening. I’m sure you’ll learn something new just as I have as part of all the discussions so far!

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