I'm glad Suda51 is still making new IPs, but I'm kinda over his gameplay? It needs to evolve somehow… like, melee here looks a lot like Killer Is Dead, which was serviceable, but not great.
Of course, everything else is captivating, as it always is, but I'll need more from the gameplay to get invested in this.
I just want to say that you folk are exactly what I love about indie games. Games with a really cool premise/concept that combine probably overly complicated systems in ways that range from kinda janky to ridiculously janky but lead to genuinely amazing and unique experiences.
And while that might sound like it wasn’t a compliment: Give me something held together with shoestring but interesting over something polished and boring any day of the week.
I still need to set aside some time to learn CK but I am genuinely kind of concerned by how many hours I have put into Star Traders over the years.
Hahaha, thank you. We love games with good depth and make them for people who love the same. That discovery of how different pieces work together is a big part of the fun, and to us way more important than everything being instantly understandable or excellently illustrated. Gameplay > graphics.
We do keep trying to polish and level up the presentation of our games of course. The great thing about indie games is if you support the developers whose ideas you like, you keep getting more of those games at higher and higher production value.
Star Traders is perhaps too obvious of an example, from a basically text-UI mobile game that wasn’t pretty but became an early Android hit for its depth, to a decently-illustrated 2D space sim that Rock Paper Shotgun said was one of the best PC Games of the Decade. 😄
Now Cyber Knights is a huge step up from Star Traders: Frontiers, or more directly our previous squad-based tactics games, Templar Battleforce and Heroes of Steel. I can’t tell you how many people have talked crap about our early games’ hand-drawn art over the years, but we’d never be here without the folks who looked past some awkward faces and supported the cool RPG / tactics games beneath.
If this launch keeps going well I’m excited to see how we’re able to level up from here. Thanks for giving me an excuse to reflect on the journey a bit, and for being part of it!
Now that it’s launched, might you be interested in a GOG version? I’ve got this game on my radar, but I won’t be able to get around to it at least until I finish a few other long games I’m working through.
It’s tough to say; we’re a small studio so every extra platform we support adds a lot of extra overhead to our process. We’ve looked at GOG a few times in the past for our previous games but couldn’t justify it. We’ll look again for Cyber Knights when we have the bandwidth to consider it, but for now we’re just focused on Steam (Windows/Mac/Linux), our planned mobile ports, and potential console ports.
Boom shoot publishers like Apogee seem to be leaning into the free demo trend. It’s really nice. This doesnt look like it fits that genre, but what’s good for the goose i guess.
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