Survivor-like bias

I spent a lot of time last week looking at Vampire Survivors and other Survivor Likes. Mainly just 3. This type of autobattler is popular amoung the indie game community as a way to "make money" by playing the "steam meta" 

I did get deeper into VS and started playing differently - upgrading weapons instead of getting new ones right away - and paring them with other items to get a top-level evolution of them. Eventually you become a ball of death cutting through enemies like a weed whacker. It's kind of fun, it's mostly mindless. I don't feel compelled to play it longer than one session at a time and usually while something else is going on - like a discord call or a podcast off on the side. 

The only other game I tried was Ikki Unite, this is a....reimagining of the Sunsoft Famicom game Ikki which was infamous enough to create the term "Kusoge". It's a game about leading a peasant rebellion in feudal Japan. You fight bugs mostly, and boars, and bears. You have a time limit to defeat each boss. Instead of different powerups you get another character to follow you around, so by midgame you're like 4-5 little guys running around doing attacks. Instead of the XP climb that other games have it's much less - you have to keep moving in order to keep progressing in the game. Ikki Unite has a similar jank to it's Famicom ancestor, and feels a like more like a game than VS or Megabonk do. I think that comes down to it's setting and characters being more than "generic high fantasy" which gives it a bit of charm. 

At the end of all this I decided I didn't want to actually make a Survivors-like game unless it was closer to Ikki Unite. I highly reccomend that you do NOT read blogs about how to market an indie game because it's filled with bad advice you end up investigating. 

It's probably not good for the culture that the entire PC games space is dominated mainly by Steam, and what is dominated on Steam is a reflection of the hosting software and how the store surfaces games to new users, so you have a lot of games doing the exact same thing in an attempt to get a whiff of the firehose of attention getting featured applies. And now games are $5-15 permanantly. I do think there's still room to do something unique because that is the only way you stand out. But it really feels like there's only one way to do it.

I also finished Old School Rally. Despite a lack of progression or challenge, it's still fun to just roll around in a car, turns out. That's going to inform a few games I wanna make in the future.