Those Who Rule

I'm so grateful that I get to announce this today - Those Who Rule 2! A big thank you to all of you who supported the first game for allowing me to continue the series.❤️ You can wishlist Those Who Rule 2 on Steam to follow development! store.steampowered.com/app/4299520/Th…

@Look_behindyou @WickedNightGame Congrats this is a huge step! This game grabbed me from the first time I saw it hope it surpasses your expectations. 🤘

🚨 After years of hard work, I’m incredibly proud to announce that our Kickstarter campaign is now live! ⚔️ To celebrate the launch, here’s a brand new trailer for Soverain, our retro-inspired Tactical RPG where your choices shape the story, relationships, and future battles. If you love strategy games, story-driven worlds, and classic Fire Emblem vibes, this one’s for you. 💙

Gotta say, even a year after launch, I still get nervous watching people play the game. Really appreciate the energy you brought to voicing the characters in your playthrough @kormakrtv! Always fun seeing what voices people choose for the characters.

@GreyAlien Awesome to see. Really hyped to see you have a game with this level of momentum after watching all your talks over the years. Best of luck!

LAUNCH ANNOUNCEMENT Forbidden Solitaire is out now! We are immensely proud to release this awesome game made by two veteran indie studios and we hope you really like it. Steam: tinyurl.com/ywj43ptj GOG: tinyurl.com/2s3sv45j Itch: tinyurl.com/3k4bjt8m Plz share, thx!

@UBadler @songsofsilence_ Looks fantastic. Stands out really well on it's own from your previous environment.

@songsofsilence_ Hello @songsofsilence_ and thanks for hosting this week's #TurnBasedThursday! 🍻🫡 The blood, sweat, and tears this artwork represents. It might not look as much for you, but for me, it is a milestone, personal reassurance, and a catalyst to keep me going. #gamedev

It's our turn! Songs of Silence is officially hosting this week's #TurnBasedThursday ⚔️ Fellow indie devs: drop your turn-based games in the replies. Fans: like, repost, and wishlist the ones that catch your eye. Let's celebrate our genre together 👍🔁💖

@songsofsilence_ Thanks for hosting @songsofsilence_! Happy #TurnBasedThursday everyone.❤️ No new updates this week on TWR2 as I work out more of the new UIs, but I have been having some fun with short form content! youtube.com/shorts/O5oBZEV…

@NinoTekamachi Haha thank you I’m glad you enjoyed it! Working on #2 as we speak. 😁

@ThoseWhoRule I have defeated your game . I now require more!!!!!! Was fun I look forward to your new game ^_^

Playable wolf-dog for #ScreenShotSaturday!

@bigal_227 Necromancers Tale on Steam is great! @psychicsoftware

Where are all the necromancer or summoner games? I’m trying to raise an undead army

@GarrettPetersen It’s a tough balance. Might even still change my hexagon style or add border lines when they’re highlighted

I think this game reads better than my hex-based tactics game because the hexes are a little larger relative to the characters. It's going to be realllly annoying to change it, but I gotta do it.

@SiestaGamesSL @the_atomgame Aiming for q3 2027 but you know how estimating this far in advance goes 😅

@ThoseWhoRule @the_atomgame Thanks! I was precisely checking the other replies and WL yours :) love the old school strategy feel. When you're releasing the second part?

Really stoked to host this week's official #TurnBasedThursday on X If you're a #GameDev #IndieDev use the hashtag above and share what you're working on down below! #Gamers welcome to check out what's shared in this thread and reply to your favs! Let's GOOOOO!

@SiestaGamesSL @the_atomgame Fantastic effects. Will have to add this to my list of demos to try.

@the_atomgame Thanks for hosting! Adding our Tactical Roguelike to the list 💪 Demo live on steam!

@psychicsoftware @the_atomgame Progress coming along quickly! I admire how different you make your games.

@the_atomgame Hey @the_atomgame thanks for hosting #TurnBasedThursday! We've been working on recording and playback for our turn-based car combat game. This will also be the basis for multiplayer (which relies on precise, agreed-on, reproducible physics.) store.steampowered.com/app/3768750/Wa…

@the_atomgame Thanks for hosting @the_atomgame! Swordhaven: Iron Conspiracy looks great glad to see it found its audience.💪 This week I Showcased the new wolf-dog unit type in Those Who Rule 2! x.com/ThoseWhoRule/s…

@reddRockman Appreciate you! Hope you enjoy your time with it. 🤘

@ThoseWhoRule Just bought this after seeing an ad for it. Looks great! Thanks for all your hard work.

@David_S_Dowling Love to hear it, appreciate your support! Let me know what you think. :)

@ThoseWhoRule I saw an ad for this game with the blurb about Fire Emblem and literally just purchased the game on the spot

@NinoTekamachi Algorithm OP. Appreciate the support would love to know your thoughts when you get the time to jump in 🫡

@ThoseWhoRule Oh hello, yall randomly appeared on my timeline and glad you did. Shall be buying the series

@TitaniumLegman Anyone making the map look like this on veteran + permadeath has my respect 🫡

Need more SRPGs with battlefields that look like this after the map's nearly done. Satisfying and brutal. (Game is @ThoseWhoRule)

@jogamedev @indiegamebiz Thank you! Appreciate all the lessons you’ve shared.

@ThoseWhoRule @indiegamebiz I love it! Very well done for a first short!

My first indie game was highly reviewed on Steam but sales were declining. A whole 3 years after launch, I committed to a marketing strategy that netted me 10+ Million Views on social media and new 40,000 sales. However, the exact same strategy is failing to produce good results for my second game, and I think I know why... My first game, Spellmasons, is about spellcrafting, similar to Noita, but turn-based and multiplayer. It's rather unique to the point where Steam's "More like this" panel on my store page doesn't really make any sense. Over 18 months, I learned a ton about video editing, script writing, pacing, scene composition, etc which lead to several viral shorts on the big 3 social media platforms and all those sales I mentioned earlier. When I was ready to market my second game, "Some of You May Die": a roguelike autobattler, I applied the same strategy to my videos. But the average views for my content are ~20,000 as opposed to the millions I got with Spellmasons. 20k is nothing to be ungrateful for of course, but I was shocked to see the exact same strategy perform so much worse on a game with the same art style. So here's what I've learned and what I'm going to do next: Every game has an "edge" - something special about it that becomes it's selling point and the primary motivation for customers to check it out. For Spellmasons, that edge is spellcrafting, which is very visual and satisfying. You get to see the spell being built and then see it trigger as the effects pass through the chain of linked spells. For Some of You May Die, it's an intricate autobattler with a deep synergy system but these synergies are not very visual. Sure I can show how my hero has wicked fast attack speed or is contaminating all nearby enemies with poison but it doesn't really carry the viewer along. There's no visual build up and payoff and this makes it really hard to make compelling short form content. Also, the Autobattler genre, by it's nature, is rather chaotic and inconsistent. My scenes are a bunch of heroes fighting in various configurations. It's hard for the viewer to focus in on one thing that's happening even if I reduce the number of heroes on screen. So I have to try something radically different. I've learned that content being legible is super important (viewers have to be able to know - at a glace - what is happening) and it's also extremely important for scenes to pull viewers along as they watch something unfold. Watching a spell play out does this. Watching a frantic battle with 8 heroes does not. These two aspects of good content are kind of elusive. It's not as simple as balancing audio or having good framing. You have to get creative with it. So here's an example of this principle in action: my most successful "Some of You May Die" shortform video earned 143,644 views while the others do ~20,000 views. That's a 7x outlier. I believe the reason is legibility and action that pulls the viewer along. In that short, I explain how the Summoner is a unique hero that creates units the whole time he's alive and if you protect him long enough he can create a massive army that snowballs. This is a process and viewers get to watch that unfold as the army grows larger and larger. Each game has a different angle, even if they seem similar on the surface. What works for one may totally fail for another. Find your angle and then figure out how to frame it so that it is clear (legible) to those watching and so that it carries viewers along. I plan to implement this in future content and so we'll see if I'm right. I talk a lot about game dev marketing so if this post has been useful to you, you can follow me here for more.