We sent the publishers a gameplay video – the same one I shared in that earlier post. Before watching it for the first time, they specifically asked me not to provide any explanations about the rules. They wanted to see the game exactly as a potential backer on Kickstarter might, without any guidance. Later, of course, I gave them a thorough breakdown of the gameplay.
Their feedback was this:
- “The gameplay is too complex for an outside viewer to easily grasp what’s happening on screen.”
- “The game blends too many different mechanics, which risks making some roles feel much more desirable than others.”
Their conclusion: “You could try going to Kickstarter, but there’s a high chance the game won’t be understood.”
That was essentially it. They didn’t give me a flat “No.” Instead, they said, “We can try to work with this, but the odds of success are low.” The final decision was mine to make.
I tried looking at my creation from the outside, and it didn’t take long to realize they were absolutely right. The game had become a mix of several genres – hero combat, resource gathering, and card-table mechanics. Even someone familiar with the MOBA genre would have to absorb a huge amount of new information just to start playing. And for someone who isn’t familiar with MOBAs, understanding the game would be even more daunting.
The roles themselves weren’t truly balanced either. While a team can have any number of champions, the forester must be exactly one – no more, no less. If the forester leaves mid-match, their team is almost guaranteed to lose. Yet playing a forester in a one-on-one duel without champions is far less fun than playing as part of a full team.
In my effort to make the gameplay cohesive, logical, and complete, I had stitched together something like a Frankenstein’s monster of game mechanics. Could it work? I think so – at least for us, the testers, it felt exciting and engaging. But we’d been immersed in it for a long time, gradually learning its systems and strategies. Would a new player find it just as compelling to dive in and master all its intricacies? I honestly didn’t know.
And let’s not forget: for a game like this to succeed, it needs hundreds of active players at all times. It has to hit critical mass right from the start, or it will quickly fade. Sure, it might find a niche audience – but would that niche be large enough to consistently fill two balanced teams from the matchmaking queue?
All of these questions terrified me because I had no clear answers. The risks were undeniably huge. So, I decided I wasn’t ready to take it to Kickstarter – not yet. But I also knew I couldn’t keep pushing the project forward at the same pace. Something radical had to change.
A Team of Foresters Only
The first idea was to remove the champions entirely and leave only the foresters – teams of foresters battling each other. By cutting out the “half” of the game tied to champions, we could make things much clearer for players. The barrier to entry would be much lower, since mastering just a single role would be enough to start playing.
But without champions, the entire current gameplay begins to fall apart. The whole system is built around foresters acting as support. They’re highly dynamic and crucial, yes, but ultimately not the frontline fighters. If you imagine a team as a living organism, the champions are its arms and legs, while the forester is the head. To win, you must defeat your opponent physically – the main work is done by the arms and legs, while the head coordinates everything. It’s the same in our game: victory comes from dealing physical damage to the enemy base, primarily through the champions, while foresters create the right conditions for their teammates to grow stronger. If you remove the arms and legs but add more heads, there’s no one left to fight. That means the very goal of victory and the way to achieve it would have to change.
In other words, cutting out the champion-related half of the game also removes its foundation – its core identity of destroying the opponent’s base through combat skill. A new foundation would need to be built from scratch. But doing that beneath an already-finished “house” seems like a terrible plan.
There was another problem: I had no clear idea how multiple foresters on the same team could even interact with one another. Beyond resource gathering, the game relies heavily on a turn-based rhythm – the “gathering” phase and the “purchasing” phase – which is deeply intertwined with the forester’s actions. If there are multiple foresters, how should turn order work?
Would each player have their own phase that switches independently over time? That would turn the game into chaos. Previously, the alternating phases created a special dynamic between the two opposing foresters – a kind of tag game where first one chases the other, then the roles reverse. But with multiple players, each on their own phase, that interaction breaks down. Some players on Team A would be chasing part of Team B, while others on Team A would be fleeing from the rest of Team B – and the roles would keep swapping unpredictably. It would become a confusing mess.
What if the “purchasing” and “resource gathering” phases switched for the entire team at once? That’s slightly more plausible, but it still raises plenty of issues. To keep gameplay satisfying, we had added various ways to influence turn changes depending on immediate needs. Sometimes, changing turns even served as a punishment (for example, entering combat would cost you your resource-gathering phase). In a team setting, all of these systems would break, and entirely new mechanics would be needed.
I spent some time trying to solve these problems but quickly realized I wasn’t likely to produce anything worthwhile this way.
Hero Defence
The next idea actually came from the publishers themselves. They suggested completely changing the genre and turning the game into a team-based Hero Defence. This is a variation of Tower Defence where waves of monsters periodically march toward your base along fixed paths – but instead of relying on towers you’ve built, you personally control a hero with unique spells and abilities, leveling them up over time.
Up to this point, all my gameplay had been built around the MOBA genre, which itself traces back to a Warcraft III custom map – Dota. If you look at the most popular Warcraft III custom maps of all time (for example here), Dota naturally holds the top spot, but right behind it is Legion TD. So yes, this genre has a proven audience, and there are plenty of similar games on Steam.
Since I was in a creative slump, I decided to take some time and build a small prototype in this genre. My first attempt wasn’t team-based: a single hero had to fend off waves of monsters. But the idea was that it could be expanded into team battles, where each hero defends against their own wave of monsters while all heroes share the same core objective and can assist each other. Players would also be able to send various obstacles and disruptions to the opposing team.
I implemented the basic mechanics, using my existing champions as heroes. But I quickly realized I couldn’t commit to developing a full game in this genre – I was simply too unfamiliar with it and couldn’t get a good feel for it. It’s not enough to just copy an existing game; you need to add unique elements that set your version apart from the competition. And I didn’t know these games well enough to understand the emotions players experience when playing them. So, I decided to abandon the idea. Still, here’s what I managed to put together:
As you can see, things weren’t looking great. Continuing in the original direction was far too risky, and I didn’t have any fresh ideas yet. It sounded like a dead end. But don’t worry – this story has a happy ending. A solution was found, and my team and I have been working on it for quite a while now. In fact, this entire blog series about developing a network-based battle game – starting from that very first post – was written after I had already built a fully playable prototype of the next idea, shown it to the publishers, and received their approval.
So, everything up to this point has just been the backstory. I’ll talk about the new stage of the game’s development in the upcoming posts.
P.S. As for the version with foresters and resource gathering – I won’t throw it away. When I have some free time, I plan to polish it into a full-fledged mod for Force of Nature 2 and release it publicly.
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