Half a Year of Warnament: what worked, what didn't and what's next

Hello, Rulers!

I've been working on Warnament for four years now. It's hard to believe we've been doing this for so long.

If this is your first time seeing Warnament, here's what it is in a nutshell. Warnament is an easy-to-learn turn-based grand strategy sandbox. You start with one country and decide for yourself what happens to the world: declare wars, make peace and alliances, trade, issue ultimatums and rewrite history. You can play alone or with friends, on PC, Android and iOS. You can also make your own maps, scenarios and mods, or play what other players have made. Here's the trailer:

This isn't a patch note. I want to tell you what's happened with the game since March: what worked, what didn't quite, what surprised me and what I'm worried about now.

Since March we've released two story scenarios, ultimatums, the iOS version, new effects, completely redrawn art, mods, Steam Workshop and AI Mod Toolkit. With that, the public roadmap we published back at the start of development is done. All of it, 100%. Now let's go through it in order.

March: two scenarios that are nothing like the usual game

In March we released the Alternative History Pack DLC with two story scenarios. In "Consequences", global warming spirals out of control on a map of Europe in 1926. In "Lost", your spaceship crashes on another planet. You're surrounded by primitive local tribes and aliens, and you need to survive. Both scenarios play quite differently from the regular game. In "Lost", for example, you can't recruit an army at all.

These scenarios actually came from my previous game. It also had global warming and another planet, just in a different form. And players there liked them overall. The warming idea itself came from Frostpunk. There it's a global freeze, and I thought: damn, I wonder what would happen if it were the other way around? Especially since there's so much talk about global warming now. Environmentalists and others love to discuss how we need to cut carbon emissions and all that. By the way, tell me in the comments: have summers in your region gotten hotter in recent years or not? Some people say much hotter, others say nothing has changed.

Alternative history is also a whole genre with its own fans. The Hearts of Iron IV community has the Kaiserreich mod, where Germany won World War I. There are stories where it won World War II, and ones where the USSR didn't collapse. Our community loves this kind of thing too. Players have made maps of completely fictional worlds. For example, there was a tiger map, Tigerland by Chuckcha. In 2023 it took third place among the best community maps. It's a continent shaped like a tiger, with its own stuff going on. There's the Empire of Tigerland, slave owners on the tail and lots of independent states. We ran multiplayer games on this map, and it was really cool, really interesting.

There were some funny bugs, of course. We fixed them quickly, but I still remember a couple.

For a while it was impossible to play as Egypt in "Consequences". It's already hot there, and then the temperature starts rising, so the game ended very quickly for the Egyptians. Now Egypt has a chance: you can move north or build a mega refrigerator.

There was another bug: if you played "Consequences", quit and started a regular historical scenario, you kept the warming technologies. So in World War II and other real-world scenarios people could build mega refrigerators and other strange devices to bring the temperature down. We fixed that too.

In "Lost", the crew starts falling apart as the story goes on, and part of the crew turns into rebels. You, the captain, and the rebels have different views on what to do next. Because of a bug, the rebels stopped fighting the hostile local tribes and became neutral with them. So you had to fight both the locals and your own people. It's funny that the rebels basically managed to make contact with aliens as far removed from them as possible, but not with their own captain.

The Steam reviews were mostly positive. But people complained that the DLC doesn't change the game as much as they'd like: on Steam, people expected a DLC to bring more changes. On phones the scenarios were received well, and I honestly can't remember any negative reviews there.

I think it's about expectations. A lot of players play big games from other big studios, where mechanics are unlocked through purchases. That creates associations, and we even had jokes and references about it. People expect something comparable and don't always look into the details. But for us these were two separate stories, completely unlike the main game, not a piece of the game that we cut out and sell separately.

Ultimatums

Then we added ultimatums. People had been asking for them for a very long time. In fact, there were two things people asked for constantly, under every video and every post: ultimatums and the iPhone version.

The game had ultimatums before, but only from bots to the player. They made demands, and you either met them or not. Players really wanted to be able to make demands of other countries themselves, and in May we added that. Now you can issue an ultimatum both to a bot and to another player. The bot looks at your relations and at how much stronger you are, and decides whether to agree.

Why do ultimatums matter so much? First, they're part of diplomacy, and they were issued often in history. World War I, for example, started because of an ultimatum. Second, it's a handy gameplay option. You want to get something from another country, some advantage, but you don't always want to go to war. An ultimatum is a handy way to apply pressure. And third, it was unfair: bots could throw ultimatums at you, but players couldn't. Damn, why can some random thing give me an ultimatum, but I can't give it one?

Overall, players liked it. They do want even more options in ultimatums, for example demanding spheres of influence. But it went pretty well, and I'm really glad we released them.

iOS: longer than we wanted, and quieter than we expected

The second most wanted thing was iOS. It was the first time we'd made a game for iPhone and iPad, and we had no experience. The release got delayed because of technical problems.

First, iOS has technical restrictions. The system is stricter, and our way of working with files directly is limited on iOS. Because of that, we had to turn off the scenario editor, custom maps and custom scenarios. Mods, when they came out, didn't make it to iOS either. Second, we had to rework shaders: some of them gave slightly different results on iPhone or didn't compile at all. Third, to release on the App Store you need to pass review, and there are lots of fields to fill in and quality requirements. To comply with the App Store's encryption rules, we even had to update the multiplayer server. And separately, there was iPad and the layout, so the game would display correctly there.

I never compared PC and iPad, but I did compare iPhone and iPad. I tested the game on iPhone, then switched to iPad, and it was night and day. When you see the whole world map on an iPad, it looks completely different from a small screen. Mind-blowing. I'm an Android user myself, and I didn't feel like switching to iPhone. But I'll buy myself an iPad someday, because it looks awesome and it's light.

Players were happy. But the big spike we expected didn't happen. A few thousand players came, but no more than on Android or Steam. Honestly, I got a bit sad. Since everyone had been asking for so long and everywhere, I was sure an incredible number of people would come. I built up my own expectations. They say times are tough on mobile platforms right now, and without ads people just don't come to a game on their own. And we don't buy ads. Warnament doesn't earn that much, and it's not our style anyway: we usually build personal relationships with players, not advertising ones. If you know some button in the App Store that gets a game seen by more people, tell us. Maybe we just don't know about it.

But there were thank-yous, thank goodness, both on Discord and on YouTube. And it was a real pleasure to answer yet another "when iOS?" with "Guys, that's it, the game is out." And when other players started answering those people themselves, like yeah, dudes, the game is already out, that felt really good.

New art: every day, for many months

After that the public roadmap was almost finished, and one of the last updates was about visuals. First we updated the particles to make the effects of tanks, artillery, aircraft carriers, chemical and nuclear weapons look better. And then we replaced all the art in the game with art drawn by our artist Sasha Yakimov.

Here's something important to say. All this time, while we were porting the game to iPhone, preparing the DLC, dealing with technical problems and taking part in the summer sale, Sasha sat and drew every day. He redrew absolutely every illustration in the game in the new style. It took many, many months. I don't know if he'll ever be able to draw in this style again. I think he's worn it out so much that he doesn't even want to look at it anymore.

We searched for the style for a long time. We went through a lot of how other games show events. We looked at what styles Sasha could draw in, because every artist has something they do best and fastest. We settled on hatching: you can see it's a drawing, as if it were made with colored pencils or something similar. We thought a lot about the color palette. In a historical strategy game, the picture has to look right. We had comic-like options, for example, but that's not what players would expect to see in a strategy game. And we looked at how everything would fit with the map and with the colors already used in the game. Our interface, for example, has a lot of gray and orange.

Here are some of Sasha's very first tests, for example. That "comic" version:

And here's the same event from the "Lost" DLC: the old illustration on the left, Sasha's on the right.

The reaction was positive, but not exactly wild. On the other hand, there were fewer complaints about AI in the game. Before, if we posted on Steam and there was an AI-made event image in it, not everyone in the comments liked it. Thank goodness, once we redrew everything, that faded away. But I think players took it as the way things should be. Well, yeah, hooray. Sasha, though, got a lot of praise. You can see it under his timelapses on YouTube and on Discord after the update. It turned out people enjoy watching how these illustrations are made, so we posted lots of videos of him drawing.

Mods and Steam Workshop

Then came mods and Steam Workshop. Like iOS, it was the first time in our lives we'd done Workshop.

It was hard, because there was a lot to account for. First, there simply was no Steam SDK for Workshop for our engine, so we had to write it. Second, all of it had to be tested well and everything had to be thought through. Workshop has to support tags and image uploads, and the interface must have a link to the mod upload rules. And all of that is on top of mod support itself, just so Workshop works properly.

As for mod support itself, thank goodness I thought about it at the very start of development. The game's architecture was already built to support mods, and that made things a lot easier. A mod means a player can come in and add 300 new resources or five new tech trees. If you don't design the game for that from the start, you most likely won't be able to do it later at all. We knew in advance we'd make mods, it was on the public roadmap. And it still wasn't easy.

Debugging took a very long time, even after mods came out. In the game you can change technologies, events, political decisions, resources, loading screens and surely something else I can't remember right now. You can change a lot in the game, which means there are a lot of places where the game can break. The game itself is hard to test, there are so many ways to play it, and then any mod goes on top. So we had to add a validator. It's a check: when a player loads a mod, it looks at whether the mod is valid. Even the validator had to be reworked several times. Mods give a lot of freedom, and at the same time a lot of ways to break something.

The nice thing about Workshop is that you can publish your mod right from the game. And to download someone else's, you just press one button, "install", and restart the game. That's it, the mod is yours. Later we added maps and scenarios to Workshop, plus a thing called packs. That's when you upload a mod, a map and a scenario together, or any combination of them. For example, a player makes a mod about the Industrial Revolution. The mod adds coal, the scenario adds Victorian England, and the map adds a more detailed England. So players don't have to install several items at once, it all installs as one.

Players really loved mods, they'd been asking for them for a long time too. People immediately started making their own interesting mods. Some upload them to Steam Workshop, some to our Discord.

What you're doing with mods (and what I never thought of)

I expected people to rework the tech tree: people in the community wrote that they wanted to rearrange it. I haven't seen that as a separate mod anywhere, but in their own mods people did things with technologies, adding and changing them. New World Order, an alternative history after World War II, was remade with mods. People also made maps of Europe and the world with AI Mod Toolkit, as I expected. And in the AI Mod Toolkit post I wrote that I hadn't seen the Napoleonic Wars among your mods yet. Two days later they appeared: the scenario The Napoleonic Wars (Scenario of 1806) by Mars, on the euro4 map. For now it's mostly new events, from the French invasion of Naples to the Treaty of Schönbrunn. But the author keeps working: he wants to make a mod that adjusts technologies and buildings to the era, plus two more scenarios, for 1707–1798 and 1798–1870. He already has more than 80 subscribers on Steam Workshop.

And here's what I didn't expect. Players change the balance of buildings to change the gameplay, and that changes the pace of the game quite a lot. It's not that I missed it and it absolutely needs to be in the game, but I never even thought to look in that direction. They also change the visuals: the color of the water, the color of the coastline, the dotted lines on the map. I thought the water color was cool already, why change it? Nope, for some reason people love changing how things are rendered in mods. And we spent a very long time on the map colors. I made the special palette that countries are painted in together with the artist. And I don't even know how long we spent on the water. It feels like a third of development went into making the map look cool. Well, okay, let them make it better. More power to them.

Someone uploaded a mod where the resource icons are redrawn in a different style. They like the resources, but not the icons. We won't tell Sasha about this. He won't be happy that someone is redrawing his icons.

And there's a mod I really never thought of. In the game, if you become a vassal, meaning you end up subordinate to another country, your color on the map doesn't change. This mod changes the color, so that your diplomatic position matches your color on the map.

In general, we're open to mods and to good things from players making it into the game. The official build already has a map created by players. But it's hard to talk about some abstract mod in advance, you need to look at the specifics.

AI Mod Toolkit and the fear of Workshop drowning in junk

At first we thought mods would only be made by people who can develop things: design systems or program. Then we realized we could let people make mods with ChatGPT, Claude or anything else, so that the AI just helps with the technical part. For us it looked like a super good tool: now anyone can make the mod they've dreamed of, and you don't need to be a programmer for that. That's how AI Mod Toolkit came out in October.

When we announced it, people wrote in the comments that it wasn't a very good idea. Like, now they'll dump a pile of mods into your Steam Workshop, it'll be junky, it'll be noisy, and you'll just ruin everything.

Here's what I think. It's just a tool. It's understandable that people often make low-quality stuff with it, because it lowers the barrier to entry. On the one hand, that's bad: there will inevitably be some number of such maps, AI slop. But at the same time, people who couldn't make maps, scenarios and mods before, because it's hard, now can. I think it's worth it: a person can just create their own map in a conversation and not spend many hours on it. Quality is a separate question.

And one very important thing, because some players for some reason thought otherwise. We didn't add ChatGPT to the game. We didn't add an AI to the game. Nothing like that at all. AI Mod Toolkit is just a set of instructions and scripts that you send to whichever AI you like. In theory you can use it without any AI at all: read the texts, run the scripts, and you'll have all the information you need to create mods. It's a kind of reference guide that you send to an AI, and it makes a mod with you in conversation.

There was a long comment from a player in the discussions that we really liked. The gist: everyone has their favorite tools. Some draw in Photoshop, some in Paint, some edit video in DaVinci Resolve. Same here. Want to make mods by hand, make them by hand. Want to use AI, use AI. Want to do it some other way, do it some other way. There's nothing criminal about it.

Steam Next Fest just ended, and there were a lot of AI-generated games in it. People weren't very happy: to find something interesting, you had to scroll through a pile of other games. I do worry about this, but I worry about quality, not about something being made with AI. If people do it well, I don't see anything wrong with it. If they do it badly, that's sad. There was a time when Unity was one of the first fairly advanced engines you could use for free. And people on Steam complained that a lot of poor-quality Unity games had appeared. Some YouTubers even had a rule: if the Unity logo shows up at launch, the game is crap. I think it'll be something similar. The barrier to entry will get lower, making things will get easier. And then some people will make bad games, and some will make good ones.

What's next for Warnament

We've completed the whole roadmap we promised. We've released fixes for all the critical bugs we've seen. People keep sending new ones, of course, and we read them. All the major updates we planned for Warnament are done, and we're not planning any more big global updates right now. From here on we'll be releasing fixes. Maybe we'll add something new, like a new scenario, if players really ask for it. But nothing super-duper big. Overall the gameplay won't change much.

To some, this probably sounds like "that's it, the game's been abandoned." But why abandoned? We specifically made it so you can finish what we didn't. Mods, Steam Workshop, AI Mod Toolkit, your own servers: you can change anything and play however you like. If something needs to change on our side, we'll change it, of course. Nobody is forgetting anything. We're staying in the same Discord, reading the same reviews and Steam forums. If something breaks or there's a great idea for something to add, we'll do it.

Could Warnament become for strategy games what Garry's Mod became for sandboxes, a game you can turn into anything? I don't think into anything. Our mod support is designed so that there's a certain range of things you can change, not so that you can overhaul all the game's source code. You can change technologies, decisions and events, but not the main menu or the settings menu. Wood, for example, has to be in the game, because a lot depends on that resource, and you can't remove it. But for making mods the range is pretty wide. And could a mod outlive the original game? I think it quite possibly could. I've played games myself where the active players had mostly left the original and played mods instead. Mount & Blade, for example: I loved the Napoleonic Wars mod, and it stayed popular for a very, very long time.

But the main focus now will of course be on the new game. That's how games are made: you can't make many games at once. Usually you make one, then the next.

New game: conspiracy theories are real

I'm now starting a game where conspiracy theories are reality. You play as one of the world's secret organizations. Say, the reptilians. And like any secret organization, you need to take control of the world without getting caught. Distract people, stir up conflicts, ridicule the very idea of conspiracy theories as if it were madness, so people don't start suspecting you. And also compete with other secret societies.

There's already a working prototype that some of our friends have played. I really liked that they liked the idea itself. Conspiracy theories are silly, nobody believes them, it's nonsense. But in the game it's taken seriously and presented as something that's really happening. And it has its own internal logic. When a player gets immersed in the atmosphere, even crazy ideas start to work somehow. We need to build 5G towers? Makes sense.

Here's an example. In some region people start wearing tinfoil hats, and you can no longer influence them. Then you need to bribe the press and scientists to spread the rumor that wearing tinfoil hats is insane. It never works, come on, it's unscientific. People take off their hats, and you can influence them again. At the very first playtests, players pointed out exactly this feeling: you have to ridicule conspiracy theories, because in this world they're all true.

One of the testers, for example, put his base in Iceland right away, because it's the hardest place to capture: that's how he used to play Plague Inc. Meanwhile, intelligent dolphins were grabbing part of China, and he was figuring out how to drive them out. He says it's impossible to stop playing. He also told me that people have been talking about 5G towers and all that since 2020, but nobody has ever made it into a full setting, only short jokes. By the way, influence used to spread across the whole country at once, and it turned into such hell that you couldn't push an enemy off the map when they were everywhere. I reworked it: now influence gradually spreads to neighboring areas, and you can run operations there.

What I'm worried about is the competition between several secret societies. It could shift the focus from the atmosphere where we're secret and the only ones, to a game that's more about competition than about secretly running society. Of course I'm trying to keep the atmosphere from falling apart. For example, you learn about other societies only as you play. It comes to you as clues, quietly. And you find yourself a bit in the role of ordinary people who find out there's someone else. Only you find out that there's someone else working against you.

I'm also a bit afraid of overcomplicating it. I want to keep the feeling that I'm seizing power in a world of conspiracy theories, not sitting in endless statistics that will let me win. I want it to be fun and interesting to play, and I want you to be able to enjoy the humor about conspiracy theories.

I'd like to invite the most loyal players from Discord to test the game sometime in December–January, because in February we'd like to take part in a Steam festival. These are tentative plans for now. The playtest will be PC-only at first. We'll most likely make a mobile version too: Warnament has a lot of players on phones, so we'll plan from the start for the game to work there as well.

• If you're on our Discord, find the A10 channel and sign up there.
• If you don't have Discord, email us at info@luden.io with the subject "PROJECT A10", and we'll invite you to the early playtest.

Why we'll be a bit quieter

For the next few weeks we might be less active on Discord. It's not because we've abandoned Warnament and gone off to make a new game. The last time I had a vacation was in April, so half a year ago. All this time there was finishing work on Warnament, mods, AI Mod Toolkit, the iPhone version. So now I'll rest a little, and then we'll be back with fresh energy.

Thank you to everyone who's been with us all this time. We're really glad to have you. I hope you'll like the new game too, maybe even more than Warnament.

See you on the map, Rulers! Denis

By the way, a little more Warnament

If you'd like more Warnament, these extras are available too:

Alternative History Pack — two single-player story scenarios: "Consequences", about a climate catastrophe, and "Lost", about surviving on an unknown planet, with its own map. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4529310/Warnament_Alternative_History_Pack/

Visuals and Animations Pack — more than 25 visual options and animations for armies, attacks, and interactions with other countries. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856450/Warnament_Visuals_and_Animations_Pack/

Soundtrack — the game's music in MP3 and FLAC, plus four bonus tracks from early versions. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856430/Warnament_Soundtrack/

Art Pack — more than 50 images from development: sketches, unused ideas, loading and victory screens, and event illustrations. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856440/Warnament_Art_Pack/

How to join the development?

Want to help make Warnament better? Here's what you can do:

• Visit the Warnament website.
• Suggest your ideas for the game on our Discord server.
• Create a map in the free standalone map editor.
• Create your own multiplayer server.
• Write a guide for the game.
• Create your own mod.
• Try a mod, map or scenario from other players in Steam Workshop, and upload your own.
• Help translate the game into your native language.
• Play Warnament for free on Android.
• Download Warnament for free from the App Store.
• Subscribe to the YouTube channel for development videos.
• Follow Warnament on Twitter / X.
• Read the development diaries.
• Tell your favourite video creator about the game in their comments.