What kind of game is it?
Gate Project is a squad/party-based, single-player, sci-fi action-adventure. You could say it mixes genre elements and is a “lite” variant of an RPG, RTS, …
Why “lite”?
Just like Rogue-lites have some elements of Rogue games, so does this game has some elements of different genres. For example, this game plans to feature some classic strategy RTS mechanics like diplomacy, and RTS combat, but reduces focus on (real-time) base-building, unit training and resource management. Latter gameplay parts happen out-of-combat in the HQ, which is in-between missions.
How to compare it to other games?
Since it is a genre-mix, probably the best is to try draw partial parallels to other games. The RTS combat may be somewhat comparable to games like Company of Heroes, the RPG incorporation maybe to Baldur’s Gate 3, the X-Com games, and the military scifi setting to Stargate or the isekai anime GATE.
There are Real-Time-Tactics (RTT) games with stealth & sneak elements, or mixed RPG/RTS like Spellforce… is it something like that?
No, however these are somewhat good “counter” examples. Stealth and sneaking is not a thing in Gate Project. Sure, you still may gain a minor advantage through a good combat initiation, something X-Com 2 also had for a combat starts, but you would not call it a stealthy game because of that. Spellforce had those hard cuts between RPG and RTS, where you had a rather complete RTS with base-building etc., or classical RPG, but only one at a time. I feel it massively slowed down the (story/RPG) game-flow, which is not the idea for Gate Project. It’s supposed to have a rather fluent RPG adventure experience – like in Mass Effect or Baldur’s Gate 3.
Sounds massive in scope, many indie games with way smaller ambitions fail in development… How is this one different?
Many game projects fail not because of the raw development skills of the team (and solodevs), but rather because they don’t want to deal with “Product/Project Management”. They perceive it as boring, unnecessary and something not needed for small projects. I attribute that feeling to a lack of experience and/or skills to drive projects as a whole from start to finish. My past product/project management experiences come here into play, where I take a step back on daily basis and wear a lot of hats to see and pursue bigger picture goals. This way, waste work is reduced and the pure development part gets smaller.
Effort and work can’t be just “planned” away, right?
Yes, that is, where the “lite” approach comes from. The Pareto principle (aka 80/20 rule) helps to form a healthy mindset here. Upfront planning helps a lot to not work mindlessly on features, ideas, … which do not add significant value to the higher level project. One idea I follow is to preserve a big portion of interesting & fun (genre) game mechanics, and at the same time limit the (work) scope and time investment regarding implementation. And finally, a true agile/scrum development helps to keep the necessary flexibility.
How do you know, which games and mechanics are fun – that sounds like a lot of required upfront research work?
I play video games across space, time, platforms and genres since I can remember my first Commodore Amiga. Nowadays, my Steam library is quite full (like from most of us), though I do play many of them for 10s, 100s, sometimes 1.000s of hours. And yes, what is fun for me, might not be fun for others, but that applies to all games and their development, always… For whatever reason, I especially like games with higher sales numbers and overwhelmingly positive reviews. That might hint, that I’m not too far off to judge a decent game feeling & mechanics.
Others play a lot and develop their games, too – why did they fail…?
There is no 1 answer to that, I’ve done lots of research regarding that and have seen many failure reasons: Either going overboard with the scope (feature creep), or lacking common understanding of a genre/lore, or using (rather boring) game mechanics already tried & failed by other games, or trying only to make a quick buck with low-complexity-games, or doing the opposite of what interested players kept asking for, or lacking motivation and time, or … there are countless more problems, which I’ve seen… Knowing what can go wrong, I hope to have solid strategies to work around these challenges…
So, you figured it out?
No, certainly not… I believe I know my strengths like approaching things with a planned, logical and rational mindset, but even more importantly I embrace my weaknesses. Especially the latter part is vital to grasp in order to mitigate risks and problems before they come up… Simply: I focus on solving problems across all fields and topics, incl. my own ones like lack of skills in certain areas.
What about the funding and dev costs? Developing games is not for free…
It is another one of many reasons, why some (larger) game developments fail and have to cancel development. Regarding Gate Project, the funding for a small indie game is secured and at the moment only a matter of motivation and most importantly, personal health. If in the future additional funds/resources get available, that would certainly speed up development, improve quality, add features etc… but additional funds are not a bottleneck to finish the basic game.