ARB: Alien Races Battle · build 24882858 · published
I think anyone who makes a game eventually reaches the point where they have to decide whether something is actually finished or whether they’ve simply gotten used to its problems. I had reached that point with ARB. There were parts of the game I genuinely loved, and I knew the core idea worked, but there were also too many places where I knew it could be better. So instead of moving on, I kept working.
Over the last several months, I’ve gone back through almost every part of ARB: performance, factions, abilities, balance, UI, readability, unit information, quality of life, and the basic experience of actually sitting down and playing a match. Some of the changes are immediately obvious and others are buried deep enough that nobody playing the game should ever notice them. Taken together, though, they’ve changed ARB far more than I expected when I started.
The biggest surprise for me is pretty simple: I’m having a f***ing blast playing it now. I’m the person who has stared at this game for an unreasonable number of hours, so that’s probably the most meaningful benchmark I have.
ARB was always designed around battles that can grow completely out of control. Units persist, armies accumulate, and if two good teams keep countering each other instead of breaking, I don’t want the game deciding that they’ve had enough. I want that war to keep escalating until the battlefield becomes something ridiculous.
The problem was performance. A system that works perfectly with 200 units can become a disaster when the same calculations are happening thousands of times, so I ended up spending an absurd amount of development time on optimization. I went after unit updates, targeting, movement, interactions, effects, battlefield calculations, and all of the little things that don’t sound expensive until they’re happening several thousand times at once.
Eventually I gave myself a deliberately stupid target: I wanted ARB to be able to survive a 30-minute match with roughly 10,000 units on the battlefield. That forced me to stop thinking about optimization as polishing and start treating it as a core feature of the game. The result is that ARB runs dramatically smoother now, but more importantly, I no longer have to be nearly as afraid of letting the game become as big as it naturally wants to become.
If six players are good enough to keep a war alive for half an hour, I want to see what happens. I want the armies to keep growing, the counters to keep changing, and the middle of the battlefield to become completely unreasonable. ARB is finally much closer to being able to deliver that.
The Civilians are now the sixth playable faction in ARB, and I didn’t want to add them just so I could say the game had another race. They needed their own reason to exist, which meant their own units, mechanics, strengths, weaknesses, and ways of influencing the battlefield. Building them ended up being much more interesting than simply filling another roster with units.
More importantly, the Civilians made me reconsider how different every faction in ARB should actually be. I’ve always wanted race selection to change more than the units available to you, but I don’t think I had pushed that idea nearly far enough. If I’m going to ask someone to learn six factions, those factions should reward them with six genuinely different ways of thinking about the game.
That has led to a much larger push toward faction-specific mechanics. The Unseen are becoming considerably stranger and more unpredictable, because fighting something called the Unseen probably shouldn’t feel like fighting a normal army with different artwork. The Reptilians now have things like Death From Below, because giant subterranean reptiles shouldn’t always have the courtesy to approach your army from the direction you’re looking.
I’m trying to bring that same philosophy to every race. I want each faction to have mechanics that initially make the opponent think, “What the fuck was that?” and then eventually make them think, “Okay, I know exactly what they’re trying to do, and I know what I’m going to do about it.” To me, that transition from confusion to understanding to counterplay is where a strategy game starts becoming really fun.
ARB is a six-player game, and there are now six playable factions, which means a full match can have every player controlling something completely different. That sounds like a small numerical coincidence, but in practice it creates exactly the kind of battlefield I originally imagined for this game. Six different sets of units, mechanics, abilities, doctrines, strengths, and weaknesses can now be interacting on the same lane at the same time.
The combinations get weird very quickly, and that’s becoming one of my favorite things about ARB. One player can build something that looks completely unstoppable until another faction introduces the exact mechanic that makes it fall apart. Someone can discover a combination I never anticipated, force everyone else to respond to it, and suddenly the entire shape of the match changes.
I don’t want to personally prescribe how every ARB match is supposed to be played. I want to create enough systems, counters, and strange interactions that eventually the players start showing me things I didn’t know were possible. With six increasingly distinct factions sharing the battlefield, I’m finally seeing much more of that.
ARB now has a lot going on. There are dozens of units, abilities, doctrines, upgrades, resistances, faction mechanics, counters, and interactions, and during a big match there can eventually be thousands of individual units trying to murder each other. Adding more depth is meaningless if understanding that depth becomes work.
So I’ve spent a lot of time improving the UI and the way information is presented. The game looks substantially better, but the more important change is that it feels easier to use. Information is closer to where you expect it to be, the battlefield is easier to read, and a lot of the small annoyances that used to stand between seeing something happen and understanding why it happened have been removed.
One of my favorite additions is one-click unit comparison. If an enemy unit is absolutely destroying something you’ve built, you can click and immediately compare the two instead of digging through menus or trying to remember numbers from the Codex. You should be able to understand why you’re losing while you’re losing, because figuring out what to do about it is supposed to be the fun part.
That’s becoming one of my main design rules for ARB: the strategy can be complicated, but interacting with the game shouldn’t be. I want there to be an absurd amount to discover for someone who plays for 100 hours without requiring someone playing their first match to study for an exam.
For the immediate future, I’m actually trying to resist the temptation to simply dump more content into the game. There are six factions now, there are already a huge number of units and abilities, and the underlying game is finally feeling much stronger. I want to keep polishing that foundation, keep pushing performance, keep improving balance, make each faction even more distinct, and continue removing anything that makes the game harder to understand than it needs to be.
After that, I want to deepen the decisions available inside each match. That means more meaningful doctrines, more faction-specific mechanics, more interactions between units, more counters, and more situations where the same six factions can produce completely different wars because of the choices the players made. I also want the Codex and onboarding experience to become genuinely excellent, because the stranger ARB gets, the better I need to become at explaining it.
Then I can start making the universe bigger again. There are more units I want to build, more doctrines, more planets, more lore, more sightings, and a nearly endless supply of bizarre material from UFO history, mythology, conspiracy, and science fiction that fits naturally into ARB. There are also some larger ideas I want to explore eventually, but I’ve learned enough from making this game that I’m not putting things on a roadmap until I’m confident I can actually build them well.
The basic roadmap is therefore much simpler than a giant feature checklist: make what exists great, make every faction deeper, and then make the universe bigger. I think ARB has a much better foundation for doing all three of those things than it did even a few months ago.
ARB is normally $10, but on August 25 it will be 90% off and cost $1. There’s no complicated strategy behind that decision. I’ve spent the last several months working obsessively on this game, I think it has become substantially better, and at this point I’d rather have people actually experience what I’ve built than spend my time trying to convince them that they should.
If you played ARB earlier and haven’t touched it in a while, I’d genuinely love for you to come back. I’m not going to pretend it’s suddenly a completely different genre, but I do think you’ll immediately feel how much has changed. It’s smoother, easier to understand, substantially deeper, and much closer to the giant, strange 3v3 alien war I originally had in my head.
If you’ve had ARB sitting on your wishlist, August 25 is probably a pretty good time to find out whether this weird thing is for you. For a dollar, you can grab some friends, put six different factions onto one battlefield, and see what happens when nobody manages to kill each other before the armies start numbering in the thousands.
And if you’ve already been playing, testing, breaking things, sending me feedback, discovering ridiculous strategies, or simply watching this project evolve, thank you. ARB is still growing and there is still plenty I want to improve, but for the first time in a while I’ve found myself occasionally stopping development, starting a match just to test something, and then realizing 30 minutes later that I forgot I was supposed to be working.
That’s probably the best update I can give you.
Peace & Love
Raybies