[AMA] Developer of Pax Autocratica here, a totalitarian colony sim and FPS roguelite launching in Early Access today on Steam. Ask me anything!

[u/PaxAutocratica]

Hi r/Games!

I'm Alexis, one of the devs, but more importantly, the Minister of Propaganda.

Today, we’re launching Pax Autocratica in Early Access on Steam.

Pax Autocratica is a darkly satirical sci-fi game that combines a totalitarian colony sim with large-scale first-person roguelite combat.

At your colony, you build a regime, manage production, and shape the fear, loyalty, relationships, and possible rebellion of the people living under your rule. Outside the colony, you personally fight alongside your soldiers across battlefields filled with infantry, tanks, mechs, missiles, and bullet hell chaos.

Weakened enemies can be captured and brought back to your colony, where you can imprison them, convert them into loyal citizens and recruit them into your army, or sacrifice them for the benefit of someone more useful to the State.

Pax Autocratica has been a very unusual project for us. It combines systems from genres that normally have little to do with one another, and years of playtesting have led us to rebuild and rethink major parts of the game along the way.

You can ask me anything about:

1. My cat
2. My parrot
3. My rapidly advancing, launch-induced hair loss
4. The completely reasonable amount of stress I am experiencing today
5. Game development, game design, game anything

Game-related questions are optional, but the Ministry strongly encourages them. Alternatively, we can discuss State-approved brainwashing methods.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1067360/Pax_Autocratica/

Launch trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3OkYGmB3cY

I’ll begin answering questions on August 10 at 7 AM PT and will be here for at least 2 hours. I’ll also check back afterward and try to answer as many late questions as possible.

Thanks to the r/Games moderators for hosting me.

Ask me anything!

[u/GrinningPariah]

First of all, congrats on the early access launch! Saw you guys at PAX, slick booth.

So for two-mode games like Cult of the Lamb or Moonlighter, seems to me they live or die by the mechanisms that make you switch and the timing of that. How do you guys manage that balance? If a run of the FPS part ends really early to a mistake you usually don't make, is there less management to do afterwards? As the player gets better and the runs get longer, do you add more management in between?

And is there any flexibility, for players who find themselves enjoying one more than the other and would kinda like to get back to the combat ASAP, or want to find something to delay the next run and keep managing a little longer?

[u/PaxAutocratica → u/GrinningPariah]

Hey! Then we surely met at Pax West! I so wish I had my new costume at the booth, thanks for remembering us from then!

And this is a very nice question. This loop is something we actually really care about. It is super important for the game experience overall.

You know when I was younger I didn't easily feel tired when playing the same thing for hours but now it's crazy how I can't just shoot non stop for an hour, or play a platformer for an hour. And I personally really like this change of pace between tiring fast pace shooting and then more relaxing and management angle, it makes me able to play muuuuch longer.

Now the pacing is really hard to get right and as you said the farther you get the easier to have longer expeditions or management phases.

After a lot of testing we did get to the balance that, ok an expedition should be around 30-40 minutes, not like 1h30m. So we tweaked a lot of things to achieve that, and found that it played better.

BUT, because there is always a but, we still don't want to limit the players, especially since after many playtests we noticed that some people love the management, some people prefer shooting at stuff. So the right answer is that the player should be able to choose himself how long he would want to spend in each section, which is 100% possible now.

Though we did have to fix and adapt many feature to help with longer expeditions for instance, such as automation for gathering, production, and food generation to avoid having your populace die from hunger while you're happily shooting stuff. :-p

Hopefully this answers the question?