Hello from the North
I am Mathias, a developer from northern Germany, and I am building my first game of my own: HoldStrong: The Last Tower.
This devlog is about two things: game development in general, and where my own build actually stands. It is explicitly not meant to be a marketing blog. Think of it more as a workshop notebook that happens to be lying around in public.
What I am building
HoldStrong is a roguelite tower defense set in the far north. One last tower stands before the Eternal Ice, the waves never stop, and death does not throw you back to the beginning. You fall, you are carried to Valhalla, and you come back out stronger the next morning.
There is no win state. That is not a feature I still owe you, it is the whole idea: you do not beat the Fimbulwinter, the great winter before the end of the world. You outlast it.
On the game page you will find the trailer, the gods who stand at your side, and the countdown to the public demo.
Why I am doing this in public
Because a game gets better when it does not only exist inside my head.
I want to make it clear how my decisions come about, and I want you to be able to push back on them. So I will ask for feedback at the points where it can still change something, rather than once everything has been locked down anyway. If you think a mechanic is boring, now is the useful moment to say so. At release it is too late for that.
Getting involved
Most of the talking happens on Discord. That is where questions, work-in-progress and the feedback rounds land before anything gets locked. Do come join if that sounds interesting.
And I have one very concrete request as well: I am looking for volunteer playtesters. If you want to play the game early and tell me what does not work about it, sign up here. A single person who plays it and then dislikes it helps me far more than ten people who like the description.
The plan: weekly
One post a week is my goal.
The hard part is not the writing, it is the rhythm. The weeks where little got finished are exactly the weeks you would rather say nothing at all, and that is where devlogs start going quiet. I am going to try anyway, because a thin week is information too, and an honest “this one did not go well” is worth more than silence.
So I will write down what got built, what did not work, and what I learned along the way. Including the parts where I was wrong.
I am looking forward to it. Let’s start.
Added later: the posts this one was holding things back for are up now. There is the story behind HoldStrong and what comes walking out of the Eternal Ice.