Kolena Studio

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We are thrilled to officially host this week’s #TurnBasedThursday! 🎉

🛠️ #GameDev / #IndieDev - drop your turn-based games below and use the hashtag!

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RPGs, tactics, strategy, all welcome!

Early pre-final-art build of our tactical roguelike deckbuilding autobattler (phew 😅). With North African sci-fi inspo!

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So we've pivoted, but we feel that we've kept the fun core of the game: deploying enemies and building a powerful deck. 2026 has us heads down and working on content on top of our new design.

➡️ *Moves per turn* ~ You no longer have influence (mana/energy). You instead get three moves per turn every turn.
➡️ *No commerce* ~ You don't need to buy cards anymore. To build your deck, you draft three cards at the end of each combat, selecting one to add to your deck.

We also simplified across the board:

➡️ *Defeat all waves* ~ Your win condition now is defeating all enemies in a combat encounter.
➡️ *One lifewell* ~ Your loss condition is having your lifewell (left of the screen) killed.

So we ate some humble pie and pivoted to a traditional combat-draft structure. You now play smaller combats, and draft cards to build your deck in between these combats. We hope this will make it easier to design enemies with unique identities.

This made enemy design very "flat". We couldn't give unique identities to enemies or enemy groups, since any enemy that spawned had to work with any other enemy.

This is how our game was in 2025. Your entire run was one long combat. Enemies streamed onto the combat board throughout the run.

Hey 👋 It's been a while. Wanted to update you on our North-African sci-fi tactical roguelike deckbuilder. We're still cooking. In fact we made a big design pivot in 2025. Here's what we've been working on 🧵👇

Colour studies by our amazingly talented artist Simon as we lock in the art direction for our tactical roguelike deckbuilder.

Sneak peak of some Simon's concepts as we close out the art bible for our tactical roguelike deckbuilder.

Hope you had a nice winter holiday, fellow game devs :) We're back to work and working on closing art direction as well as adding cards to our tactical roguelike deckbuilder.

Project Sala - oct 24 - mix 01 A mix of one of the tracking going in the demo of our tactical roguelike deckbuilder.

While we're refactoring and working on the art bible of our tactical roguelike deckbuilder, our sound designer Lars has been mixing some saucy tunes. I think this one works well for a boss fight.

soundcloud.com/user-5340974...

#sounddesign

Project Sala Audio Vertical Slice - 2025 Nov - Track 01 A

Our talented sound designer, Lars, has gotten into a groove. This is one of his recent "audio vertical slices" which tests the soundscape of the game in combat.

#gameaudio #sounddesign

on.soundcloud.com/QHZ0FfEezEud...

While this is not our final art style, it's so cool to see how far our talented artist, Simon, has come.

One of the biggest hearts in game dev, and a master of game feel, @tricko.bsky.social is one of those devs I'm constantly learning from. He just released his first commercial game. Go check it out.

#ff #followfriday

Simon, our talented artist, has been working on rendering and art pipeline. This piece is of a Banumarin. Inspired by the North African Amazigh, the Banumarin are a noble, agile faction who know the desert like the back of their hand.

Now we need to clean up our dirty, dirty prototype code and take on the next big design problem: board size? Too big? Too complex. Follow us to find out 😊

So we're going with a traditional combat-draft-combat-draft design and a traditional hand system within combat. It might seem "safe" but we feel we can innovate *within* this structure and still do some cool stuff with the tactical RLDB space.

So we A/B tested:

🅰️ The reserves
🅱️ Traditional RLDB hand

Ultimately we realized that 🅱️ a traditional RLDB hand was more intuitive, gave us better card cycling, and simplified the design overall.

However, with a traditional combat-draft-combat-draft design, the reserve didn't make sense anymore. It was just kind of "there", bloating the game screen.

So, in the original design when one of your units died, it went back to a reserve queue. The reserve queue moved by one each round until it eventually ended up in your hand to play again.

Unit healing and reserves were a solution to: what the heck happens to your units when they die in a single, long combat run? We needed your units to stay around during the long run, but we needed a cost for their death.

We dove head-first into the pivot, but we realized that two parts of the game no longer made much sense with the new design: unit healing and the reserves queue.

So we pivoted to a more traditional combat-draft-combat-draft structure. It's tried and true, and we could still lean into what was thematically unique about our game: North African sci-fi and hit & and run tactics.

We originally had a design where your run was a single, long combat. Enemies and purchasable cards would stream in, and you would go on fighting until you beat the run boss or died.

We felt it was innovative, but it made designing enemies difficult, since the board state was infinitely complex.

After struggling with designing enemies for our tactical roguelike deckbuilder, we landed on a design space that makes our lives easier. Read on 🧵👇

Oh wow, this art is going so hard! Kudos.