Hey, friends! My name is Ivan - the developer of this game and I’m so happy to finally show it to you here on Steam. Thanks for stopping by. It’s amazing that something brought you here, and it’s an honor to have you!
8 More Lives is a hardcore turn-based strategy game where you lead a company of cat mercenaries. I made it because I love games with deep, interconnected systems - especially turn-based tactics. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do. So grab some tea, or any drink you like, sit around the campfire, and let me tell you how the game was born-and how you can become one of its first playtesters, for free, of course. Oh, wait. Before that: if you don’t want to miss the free playtest, join our Discord, wishlist the game, and follow it here on Steam. And now, it’s story time!
8 More Lives did not begin as one complete design. Its features grew out of several prototypes, experiments, and lessons gathered over more than a decade. Here are some of the ideas that shaped the game you see today.
I've tried to make a medieval turn-based game before. The earliest prototype with the same idea appeared back in 2015–2016. It was something like a “medieval XCOM”, and some of the systems in the current game were already present. You fought against demons-the blue placeholder thing here is an imp, and the yellow one is a “bull” demon. I put the prototype together pretty quickly, but it never went anywhere beyond itch.io.
The most important lesson I learned was that medieval formation combat worked poorly with XCOM-style squad control, attack and defense directions, and a square grid. Most of it were discarded. The game was slow and clunky, although ideas like different amounts of Action Points and radial interfaces were already promising. Around the same time, Battle Brothers came out. The original version without DLC was a little bare-bones, but mechanically it worked exactly as it needed to. The idea of making my own game faded into the background, and I went off to play Battle Brothers because I had basically received the game I was trying to make myself.
In 2019, I wanted to create a cool map generator for Civilization V, which my friends and I regularly played together. So, for a while, I worked on procedural world generation. The generator turned out great. It used noise and NASA’s SRTM-30 elevation data, with biomes determined by elevation, latitude, humidity, and wind. Unfortunately, I never managed to get it into Civilization, but I kept the code.
That abandoned experiment later became the foundation of the world map in 8 More Lives.
During COVID, there obviously wasn’t much to do, and right in the middle of lockdown, in May 2020, I had the crazy idea to dig up this old project and see what interesting things I could do with turn-based medieval squad tactics. At the time, the only really “big” game in this space was still Battle Brothers, so the question gradually became: “What can I do that Battle Brothers mods can’t?” The first answer was map rotation.
Then came biomes, and the game could already generate battle maps from several distinct environments. Originally, there were even more biomes. They’re actually still in the game, just hidden for now. We’ll gradually add them back as the art for them gets finished.
This is how towns were originally planned to look in a paint-over of an early screenshot. Someday, they may actually grow to this size, but that will have to wait until I implement proper urban combat.
What else can I do?
Once upon a time, there was the great (but a bit clunky) Rome: Total War, where battle maps were procedurally generated based on the global campaign map. So why should I be any worse? And I've started to implement forgotten technology from 20 years ago.
And voila - battle maps are now generated 1-to-1, replicating the same biomes and features as in the global map in the same positions.
What else could the game do? How about large and small units? 1-Hex units aren't enough!
You can already fight large units in the game, while small units will return in the near future.
Somewhere around this stage, the cats appeared too, because nine lives make for a pretty good game mechanic. They give new players a bit of a safety cushion, while letting hardcore players take risks and enter interesting fights sooner. Also, Redwall and Disney’s Robin Hood are both great, so all that remained was to add some grimdark. The fact that our previous two games also had cats as their main characters is absolutely a coincidence. Definitely. One hundred percent. Also, here is my cat.
By 2024–2025, the prototype was playable enough that I could focus more on usability and quality-of-life features. I needed to show the rest of our team that this Excel simulator wearing cat skins was actually a game people could play.
I was not working on it full-time. Most of the work happened in the evenings, using placeholders, Paint, and whatever else was available. But this was also when nested tooltips, hyperlinks inside text, and many of the other features I constantly miss in strategy games began to appear-the small things that make complex games much more comfortable to play.
Another idea we needed to test was the use of plausibly historical weapons and armor-not reenactment-level accuracy, but much closer to reality than in most games. This matters especially because the game has a Layered Armor system.
Personally, I care about these things a lot, but the question was whether enough players cared too. Thankfully, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II came out and became a hit, which eased some of those worries.
In October 2025, streamer TheIndomitableSnowman played the prototype. He spent two hours with an absolutely raw, half-broken version of the game and he liked it! The viewers enjoyed it too.
That brings us to February 2026 and the start of full production: a small window between “our build is good enough” and “the whole world will be playing GTA 6” in which we can finally show the game to you.
We’re adding content and mechanics, polishing everything, and bringing the game to Steam-starting with a playtest. So join us! Play the playtest, send us your feedback, and wishlist the game!