Research and Engineering for a Strategy Game
Before changing the battle turn system, I checked how players rated each option in comparable games.
The project
Since August 2026 I've worked on an in-development historical strategy game planned for commercial release. My part covers two things: the player and market research behind design decisions, and directing the AI coding agents that do the engineering. The game's details stay private until launch, so this page covers the methods.
Should the battle turn system change?
Strategy games resolve battles in three main ways. Each side takes a full turn, units alternate one at a time, or both sides plan at once and resolve together. I wanted to know how players rated each approach before committing to one, and I asked for a matched comparison.
Research agents gathered Steam review scores, SteamSpy owner estimates, SteamDB peak players, and BoardGameGeek ratings for 31 games. The raw medians favored alternating activation at 88.1% positive, against 84.7% for full side turns and 82.0% for simultaneous turns. A few blockbusters drove that gap.
So I limited the comparison to games with 2,000 to 14,000 reviews. Alternating still led at 87.6%, with simultaneous turns at 83.2% and side turns at 81.0%. Widening the band to 35,000 reviews kept the same order. With three or four games per group, genre and turn system can't be fully separated, so I read the gap as a direction. About 185 player comments, coded into praise and complaint by theme, filled in why.
The decision: drop simultaneous turns, since their appeal depends on a human opponent, and build a prototype of alternating activation so play can settle it.
The Steam market study later rechecked these numbers from the API. Steam's positive share matched this desk study within 1.0 point for all 22 turn-based titles.
What gets a Reddit post noticed
I studied about 45 posts from three solo developers of historical strategy games to see which ones gained traction.
- A question in the title drew 24 comments.
- Naming a game people already know drew 89 upvotes.
- Leading with what the viewer sees beat a brand-first title, 69 upvotes to 40.
- The same clip drew 69 upvotes framed as a small story and 2 framed as a feature note.
- About one post a week per subreddit worked best.
Forty-five posts is a small sample, and the write-up says so. I treat these as working rules to test.
Directing the engineering
AI agents write the game's code. I designed the workflow they run under, set the direction, and step in when they go wrong. The project reached 593 commits between August 19 and September 26, 2026.
The workflow. Work is classed by uncertainty, blast radius, and reversibility. Separate agents research, plan, build, and review. No more than four run at once, and each piece of work gets at most two review passes. Progress ledgers survive context compaction, and MCP integrations connect the agents to the game editor, Blender, and a map composer I conceived. I told the lead agent to "decide as CTO, record decisions," and it logged about 288 numbered decisions between September 2 and 13.
Fixing slow pathfinding. I caught the agents' pathfinding searching the entire route graph on every query. More threads wouldn't fix it, and I told them why: "Thread count cannot fix 140 queries at 1.3 s each." The agents replaced per-pair shortest paths with one bounded breadth-first search per army and added pruning. A 23-query benchmark fell from 39,338 ms to 7,628 ms, about 81% faster, and capital selection dropped from 10.72 s to 2.09 s.
Cutting slow tests. On September 6 I challenged the long test runs: "do we need these long probes?" The gates moved to targeted test suites with a 600-second watchdog. A process review a week earlier had found that 18 of 22 tactical AI test fixtures passed without exercising the behavior they claimed to test.
A fair test for generated art. For the 2D art, I set a blinded protocol: a brief frozen before launch, A/B review with a sealed answer key, ties going to the current best, and stop rules fixed in advance. Across 17 waves and 21 art slots, only 2 challengers beat the incumbent.