In my last post, I narrowed the genre down to "cute auto-battler." That was really where two things overlapped — a genre I love, and something I wanted to build. It sits where taste meets feasibility, so that's where I landed. But a genre doesn't make a game. "Cute auto-battler" is an empty bowl; without a world and characters, the units are just meaningless names like "bear, rabbit."
This time I'm deciding what goes in the bowl. The goal was one thing — build a world core solid enough that I actually want to make this. Not every detail, just the heart that would move me.
Turns out I'm someone who needs the world to stand first
At first I got the advice "just build a prototype and see if it's fun." An auto-battler can be tested on paper with only rules, so that's fair. But it didn't work for me.
Trying to run fights calling units A, B, C, my hands wouldn't move. Why is this yokai strong, why do these two have synergy — that has to come from the world, and with the world empty, everything felt arbitrary. That's when I realized: I'm someone for whom the world has to be solid before anything else appears. Some people lock the systems first and paint a world on top; I'm the opposite. The world is the power plant, and units, story, and concept all grow out of it.
So I flipped the order. World first. With one rule: a solid world isn't about volume, it's about a firm core axis. Not fifty pages of lore, but one heart — "what is this world, and why is this happening" — standing without a wobble. The rest can grow while I build. Break that rule and you spend months only planning, too exhausted to make the game.
The stage: I started with somewhere familiar
When building the world, I didn't start grand. I started with the place I know best — a modern city. Inventing a strange other-world or a fantasy continent is harder to picture; a familiar modern city is easy to imagine and the details come readily. I just made it a fictional modern metropolis rather than a real one — borrowing the texture of real Seoul but inventing the name. That keeps the "wait, isn't this Seoul?" real-world chill while dropping the burden of being wrong about facts. Start from the familiar and twist just one step — that was the safest, fastest start.
And I decided to mix East and West yokai. At first I thought "keep it all Eastern," but then it hit me: a modern city already mixes everything. Just as Seoul holds cultures from all over, yokai living mixed in isn't weird at all. If anything, "why are they mixed?" became the seed of the mystery.
The cataclysm and the mystery — setting the core axis
Chose the cataclysm by elimination. First I thought of eco-collapse / redevelopment. But that's a cataclysm whose cause is already known — no mystery. "Humans bulldozed the city" is fine as commentary, but there's nothing to dig into. I considered a broken seal, but it was too much of a cliche. I ended up at "an unknown entity." "Something came, and we don't know what it is" — that itself is a giant question mark, so the whole game becomes a chase for its identity. The dread of the incomprehensible is far more immersive than a disaster you fully understand.
Then I tied the core mystery to the East-West mix. This is the heart of the world right now. Digging into "what answer best pays off the choice to mix East and West?" produced this: every yokai in every mythology split off from one single origin. As that origin (= the unknown entity) stirs awake in the city, its scattered children (East & West yokai) are drawn to gather. Now the answer to "why is everything mixed?" is "because they share one root," and that ties straight into the mystery's solution.
Only after building this far did I finally think "I want to make this." That was the goal of this stage — a core axis strong enough to move me.
And once the world stood this far, the core actions started having reasons too. Why tame yokai (to them, the hero looks like a shard of the origin, so they're drawn in); why combat is automatic (the hero is a human who can't fight directly, so they only place and direct). Because the systems grow from the world, story and gameplay stop drifting apart.
But a lot is still deliberately blank. How the affinity system works, how unit rarity and growth are defined — left undecided on purpose. The core axis only just came together, and if I nail down system rules now, the smallest shift in the world later would force me to redo everything. For now I keep only the direction ("systems like these could grow from the world") and fill in concrete rules once the world is fully set.
A game I'd quit years ago came back to me
While building the world, an old memory surfaced. There was a game I'd played years ago and dropped partway because it got tiring on a systems level — Vivid Knight. "Wait, isn't that a lot like what I'm building now?" So I looked it up again. I didn't stumble onto a new competitor; it was a reference summoned from my own experience.
Digging back in, it overlapped a lot: cute characters + synergy combos + roguelike auto-battler. And it even had a sequel (Vivid World). That told me two things at once.
One is validation. The fact that I once "quit because it got tiring" means, flipped around, that the base was fun enough that I'd have kept going if not for that one thing. And a sequel existing is proof the genre sells. Confirmation that my chosen direction works in the market.
The other is that why I quit is exactly my homework. That tired-on-a-systems-level feeling — that's precisely what I have to improve. Repeat the same mistake and I'll wear players out the same way. Knowing "why I, as a player, left" is a rare asset for a developer.
I also looked coldly at the auto-battler market
My own experience isn't enough, so I checked the whole market too — I picked this for fit, not taste, so I had to see if it sells. The picture was clear.
The genre is booming, and therefore crowded. Auto-battlers and roguelikes are pouring onto Steam and itch.io. I had to accept that "making an auto-battler" is, on its own, not special at all. And one stinging fact — quality alone gets buried. I saw an analysis of a proven developer, whose past games netted over $1M, whose new title's Steam launch was "a colossal failure" despite positive reviews — only ~700 units in the first week. The cause was discoverability: with too many games, if you don't stand out, "getting buried is the default." That reconfirmed the "discovery decides revenue" point from my first post.
So what works? The successes that weren't buried share one thing — a twist you can grasp in a single line. Balatro is poker; one is blackjack; one flips chess pieces. A familiar frame plus one strong twist. That's what creates discoverability. There was reassurance too — async PvP (battling teams others built, at your own pace) and the tank/DPS/healer/buffer role setup are already proven genre grammar, so my choices were safe.
Where things stand, and what's next
What I did this stage is clear — I set a world core solid enough to make me want to build it. The stage (starting from a familiar modern city), the cataclysm (an unknown entity), the core mystery (East & West yokai split from one origin). System rules (affinity, rarity, growth) I left blank until the world is fully set.
And I checked the direction on two fronts. Inward, I mined "why I left" from a game I'd once quit; outward, I learned from the market that "quality alone gets buried, you need one twist." Both point the same way — the next task is to find, inside this world, my own one twist that answers "what kind of auto-battler is this?"
Looking back, this time what moved me came first. Whether it'll sell, and how to build it, come after. Now that a core axis I want to build stands, I just have to put flesh on it.
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