I'm putting out some blatant marketing feelers today because one thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is the type of games I want to focus on making the most but more importantly what type of games do I actually play the most? The thing that smacked me in the face a lot was how much I enjoy grand strategy type games.
The problem with that is of course, there aren't that many of them out there that I haven't played to death and the ones that do exist are created by companies that are trying to wring their playerbase dry as much as possible like Paradox Interactive and Creative Assembly.
So with that in mind I've been wondering about the type of grand strategy game people would want that doesn't have the DLC garbage spammed everywhere. What sort of features would you want to see? As for the setting, I'm kind of thinking of having a fantasy setting but allow you to control Romans as part of the main story.
Sort of like the anime GATE but in the reverse and I'd have it where Rome ends up invading a fantasy world which would be hilarious I think but also somewhat interesting. There are also frequently used features in grand strategy that I find very annoying which I would probably remove or fix somehow like diplomacy spam for example. I do know that Age of Wonders exists, don't get me wrong but boy did that game need to be optimised, don't know if they've fixed the issues yet.
Don't worry, believe it or not I'm actually being quite the professional now, my 'official' work is by the gods but I'm looking for a nice little side project to work on which I should be able to churn out faster. I probably need to do a more detailed checklist/development roadmap for what I have planned so there's plenty of transparency.
I'm a research guy these days and I'm doing a lot of long term planning because I want to make this work. Now that I've been to Dankula's comedy event I'm going to hunker down and get on with debugging again and I also want to practice character sculpting. I think I'll do an ARPG as an extra side thing and that's where the character sculpting will become relevant. The other blender cycles stuff is purely for fun when I find myself a bit fatigued and want to do something different. Shiny graphics are a great way to hook in the normies and Rumble will probably be great for that.
As for details on any kind of grand strategy it's purely something I'm throwing out there, haven't written up any lore or anything. I'd almost be tempted to have Rome become equal through tech maybe or have them be able to enslave/recruit spellcasters. Depending on how involved the project gets you could have a faction split in the empire as a result of disagreement on what to do about the new world which I think would be interesting.
I have so many pathways right now RL I'm looking at, it's all about picking one and sticking with it. I do think for the sake of my sanity I should have a proper small side project I can churn out relatively quickly and be strict about that while I debug by the gods which I'm playtesting now.