Why We Killed the Bullet Hell

When we started prototyping Wildmarch, the first playable build felt… familiar. Orcs swarmed the hero, projectiles filled the screen, and survival came down to dodge-rolling on cooldown. Fun for ten minutes — exhausting for an hour.

The aggro experiment

The breakthrough came when we gave soldiers a simple rule: orcs prefer attacking soldiers over the hero. Suddenly the whole game changed. Instead of kiting an orc warband around the map, you position your squad, hold a chokepoint, and pick off priority targets while your front line holds.

What this means for combat design

• Orc damage can be meaningful, because you are not supposed to face-tank everything alone
• Positioning your barracks and towers becomes a combat decision, not just an economic one
• “Where do I stand?” is replaced by “where does my army stand?”

What’s next

We are tuning the aggro weights so that a fully ignored hero does not trivialize boss fights. Bosses will get hero-seeking abilities that punish hiding behind your army forever. More on that in the next post.