I’ve been playing games for as long as I can remember, so making them always seemed like a cool career! When I took my first couple of programming classes in high school, I started developing my own simple games as side projects, and I found that I loved it. Throughout college, I kept making games and studying for a career in the industry. I got a few internships working on the Fallout and God of War games, but I eventually decided to go indie and try to make a living off my own games. So far, that’s been going pretty well!I tend to make minimalistic, gameplay-focused games. I’m a “progressive formalist” game designer, which means I’m interested in games as systems of rules, and I want to use that mode of thinking to make interesting, innovative stuff. I think that works really well for an indie game designer: I can’t compete with AAA games on art or technology, but I can afford to make interesting gameplay! As for my VR work, my games both feature a sci-fi setting, which I think fits really well with the medium. VR is pretty sci-fi itself, after all.My strategy as a developer is “punch above your weight”. Think hard about what you’re good at, and try to put yourself into a situation where you can take full advantage of it, while sidestepping or minimizing the stuff that gives you more trouble. Beyond that, I think the best advice is to just make a lot of stuff. And listen to the wisdom of Ira Glass:Tactera is a virtual tabletop Real-Time Strategy game. The whole game takes place on a holographic miniature battlefield. You command tiny tanks, gunships, buggies, zeppelins, and other units, and you must use them to tactically outmaneuver and overwhelm the enemy. It’s fun! You should play it!I don’t know how the idea first came to me, but I loved the idea of a tabletop RTS for a long while. I made a little prototype in late 2014 to try out the tabletop perspective, and it was immediately clear that this was something worth pursuing. When the Mobile VR Jam came along, I decided that it was time to give it a real shot. That version had a lot of limitations, but it also got a lot of praise and was named as a finalist in the contest, so I decided to make it my next big VR project. I had originally hoped to have the whole game finished by December, but that was way too optimistic, so I ended up deciding to release a public demo instead. I used the feedback from the demo to decide upon the final features for the game, and the full version of Tactera was finally launched two days ago. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s going to stop evolving. I already have a big list of post-launch improvements that I want to complete and push out in an update!From the start, I was afraid that the game would be overwhelming, with too many choices and too much information being presented at once. As I designed the game, I kept that in mind, and I made sure to limit the number of things that might distract the player at any given time. Sometimes that meant hiding information until the player needed it, sometimes it meant using alternative feedback like audio cues, and sometimes it meant actually simplifying the mechanics of the game. It’s possible that this could have led to a hollowed-out RTS with too few interesting choices, but instead I think it helped me to focus and improve the remaining mechanics. Constraints are always the best fuel for creativity.Yes! Tactera was designed for VR from day one. That had a lot of implications. For one thing, it limited the player input, which helped shape the basic mechanics and helped emphasize simplicity. VR also affected the scale of the game. I didn’t want players to have to deal with camera movement, so I tried to include the entire battlefield within easy viewing distance. Game objects can only be so small before they start to become unidentifiable and illegible, so that meant I had to keep the game area pretty small. Lastly, designing for VR meant that I had to be careful about performance. I love the feeling of controlling a big swarm of units in an RTS game, but that’s not something that’s easy to do in VR. I had to get pretty creative to keep the frame rate high! I’ll be sharing the details on that process later.I grew up on a bunch of classic RTS games, like Starcraft and Age of Empires, but the biggest spiritual inspiration for Tactera was the original Command & Conquer (and its spin-off Red Alert). I loved the feeling of being the tactical mastermind of an agile and powerful near-future army. I also have to give some credit to the Total War series, since I loved the idea of a turn-based campaign mode dynamically generating real-time battles.I think my favorite is a defensive strategy centered around the orbital strike, perhaps with anti-aircraft and heavy tanks. The orbital strike is a kind of superweapon; it takes a very long time to charge up, but when it’s ready, it can wipe out the enemy in one hit. The problem is that it’s taking up one of your bases, so you start out with a disadvantage, and your goal is to just hold out until the orbital strike is ready. Put that against an aggressive swarming strategy (maybe fighters / buggies / gunships) and you might get a match that’s very energetic and extremely tense at the same time.Usually, there’s a clear beginning phase when both players are trying to capture the neutral bases closest to them and pick which units they’ll be producing. After that, the armies start to clash, and both sides try to push the other back and capture more bases. Sometimes, one side wins, and it’s as simple as that. But in the best matches, there can be an intense back-and-forth with each player gaining and losing the upper hand several times. I’ve even seen matches where the players have each captured the other’s starting bases, so it’s almost like they’ve switched sides!1. The simplest effective strategy is pure aggression. Send out new troops early and often!2. Don’t pick units at random. Either have a strategy in mind, or else pick a balanced set of units (usually one heavy-hitter, one versatile unit that can attack air, and one direct attack).3. Boosting and upgrading bases are two extremely powerful tools. Use them!