Wen You Ge, also known as Bearlike, leads the team working on Mechabellum, the premier 1v1 autobattler. These games give you NO control over the battle. It's all about setting up your troops beforehand, with smart positioning and synergies, and watching it play out.

Autobattlers were catapulted to fame with Autochess, and its variants, such as DOTA Underlords, Teamfight Tactics. These games were compelling, but flawed. An overreliance on randomness meant sometimes you'd face the exact same opponent multiple times, with the exact same boards, but with different winners, due to the roll of a die. 

Mechabellum takes autobattlers in a more deterministic direction. It's balanced, skill-based, and competition-worthy. But that type of thing doesn't just happen. So today Bearlike talks about the interesting design problems they had to solve to move the genre forward, and one big problem they haven't solved.

00:00 - Intro 
01:22 - Mahjong, Poker influences
08:30 - RnG in autobattlers
15:57 - Positional play vs numerical modifiers
17:10 - Add a ball
19:45 - The moment when it all came together
23:45 - Agency vs randomness
31:04 - How unit techs solved multiple problems
36:00 - Mechabellum's unsolved problem
42:30 - The purpose of buildings in Mechabellum
47:40 - How different elo levels respond to changes
50:09 - Battle Aces' big bet on micro
56:03 - Bearlike's music review

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#gaming #mechabellum #bearlike