8 More Lives

Coming soon

Luden.io

Planned release: 2026
Platforms
Last updated: 15 Sep 2026, 19:57 GMT

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3 posts

14 Sep 2026Developer post
Update v0.3.44 - Huge bag of fixes
Hey, friends! Thank you to everyone who has joined the 8 More Lives playtest! Your feedback, bug reports, and videos have already been incredibly helpful. Thanks to you, I can see what needs more work—and today, I’m releasing a new patch! What’s New? Gameplay Added Force Projecti
Hey, friends!
Thank you to everyone who has joined the 8 More Lives playtest!
Your feedback, bug reports, and videos have already been incredibly helpful. Thanks to you, I can see what needs more work—and today, I’m releasing a new patch!
What’s New?
Gameplay

Added Force Projection to Arcanist: +1 melee range. Available upgrades grant +3 Intelligence and +5% melee damage.
Added Illusory Mark to Arcanist: unlocks an ability that reduces all defences of enemies in the target area by 0.25% per point of the caster’s Intelligence, lasting until the end of each affected enemy’s turn. Available upgrades grant +3 Intelligence and +20% vision.
Added Freight Golem to Scholars company mastery: +25% inventory capacity and +5% company movement speed.
Added Travel Light to Explorers company mastery: +25% company movement speed and −50% inventory capacity.
The unit landing a killing blow now receives 35% of the defeated enemy’s experience directly, up from 20%. The remaining experience is shared.
Increased Golem base health from 400 to 600 and strengthened Clay Shell.
Status effects now scale from the unit that applied them, while affecting the recipient.
Necromancers now flee when their remaining company consists only of necromancers and fleeing units.
Ghouls now wait for their company to engage before approaching enemies.
Escape tiles inside the battlefield must now directly border an escape tile on the map’s outer edge.
UI and QoL

Added configurable keyboard and mouse bindings, including an AZERTY preset. Control hints now reflect your selected bindings.
Added a confirmation before cancelling a contract. (juicycrab28)
Updated interface fonts, character-sheet artwork, defence bars, and achievement icons.
Improved window layouts, scrolling, and item-comparison alignment.
Ability and status tooltips now show calculated effect values, with formulas available in the expanded view. Rally and Howl also display their morale effects more clearly.
Stat tooltips now group repeated item bonuses, such as Rosary x2, and show their combined calculations.
Improved global-map rendering performance, camera movement, and tile reveals.
Bug fixes

Fixed several causes of event choices becoming unclickable and leaving the game stuck. (Classy Mushroom, Mark10293, GW, oltopetish, Sala2124, OliverAudio, 로그라이커, Just Bullet, MayDay, Kurutsumo, Petitpoils, LittleBelchonok, jaioji3)
Fixed battle-map generation failures that could prevent combat from starting, and improved battlefield connectivity for large units. (Padda)
Restored natural noise-based terrain and feature placement on both maps, fixing bushes and other features appearing in rows.
Improved settlement distribution and initial map reveals.
Fixed camps and enemy companies getting stuck partially faded or restarting their fade after rotating the map. Visible companies near the visibility boundary now correctly respond to hovering.
Fixed loading-screen flickering during deployment and zoom transitions.
Fixed Perfect Defence calculations omitting defensive advantage bonuses, including when a scattered shot hits a covering unit.
Fixed individual item tooltips incorrectly showing bonuses stacked across multiple equipped items, and missing item contributions in stat tooltips.
Fixed the victory inventory briefly resizing after appearing and opening at the wrong scroll position.
Fixed misleading “Stackable” labels on statuses whose effect applies only once, and removed the “Locked:” prefix from unacquired mastery abilities.
Fixed event-start saves and bug-report attachments so reports submitted from an event use the save captured when that event began.
Fixed inventory displays failing to refresh after camping repairs.
Fixed errors affecting settings, inventory input, company-window controls, and global-map visuals.
Fixed finished battles retaining unnecessary data in memory, reducing memory buildup during longer sessions.
Other minor fixes. (Werner, RPG World)
A huge thank-you to everyone helping me improve the game. Keep playing, invite your friends, and please continue sharing your feedback!
See you in the game!
How you can help development

Wishlist the game
Sign up for the playtest
Join our Discord
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Tell your favorite influencer about the game in their comments
Original post
27 Aug 2026Developer post
8 More Lives — Open Playtest on September 10!
Hey, friends! First of all, thank you to everyone reading this and following the development of my game. It means a lot that you’re interested in what I’m making. For those of you discovering the game through this post, here’s a quick introduction to what it’s about: 8 More Lives
Hey, friends!
First of all, thank you to everyone reading this and following the development of my game. It means a lot that you’re interested in what I’m making.
For those of you discovering the game through this post, here’s a quick introduction to what it’s about: 8 More Lives is a hardcore turn-based strategy game where you lead a company of cat mercenaries through a dangerous procedural world, take contracts, fight tactical battles, manage your fighters, and try not to waste all nine of their lives.
And now for the biggest news:
The Open Playtest Starts September 10!
On September 10, we’re launching a big open playtest here on Steam.
If you want to take part, just click Join Playtest on the game’s Steam page. Once the playtest begins, you’ll be able to jump in and play for free.
But what if September 10 feels unbearably far away?
Want to Play Right Now?
If you’re impatient and want to see the game before the open playtest, you can apply for closed playtest

...or join our Discord and ask us for a key there.
There is one small catch.
We’ll ask you to play the game, record your screen while you’re playing, and send the video to us afterward.
I really need your feedback. By watching how real players interact with the game—where things are clear, where they get confused, what works, and what absolutely does not—I hope to polish the game as much as possible before the open playtest begins.
Critical feedback is especially valuable, so please don’t hold back. If something feels confusing, frustrating, broken, or simply not fun, I genuinely want to hear about it.
So if you don’t mind helping us by becoming one of our brave early test subjects, we’d love to have you.
Want to Help the Game Even More?
There are a couple of very simple things you can do that make a surprisingly big difference.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/683390/8_More_Lives/
Wishlist 8 More Lives on Steam.

Wishlists help Steam understand that people are interested in the game and can help more players discover it.
And if you have a favorite streamer or YouTuber who enjoys hardcore tactics, strategy games, Battle Brothers, medieval combat, or cats making questionable career choices as mercenaries—tell them about 8 More Lives!
Maybe they’ll like it too.
Thank you again for following the project, testing our strange ideas, sending feedback, and helping make the game better.
See you in the playtest on September 10!
How you can help development

Wishlist the game
Sign up for the playtest
Join our Discord
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Tell your favorite influencer about the game in their comments
Original post
27 Aug 2026Developer post
8 More Lives - Steam Announcement!
Hello Hey, friends! My name is Ivan - the developer of this game and I’m so happy to finally show it to you here on Steam. Thanks for stopping by. It’s amazing that something brought you here, and it’s an honor to have you! 8 More Lives is a hardcore turn-based strategy game wher
Hello
Hey, friends! My name is Ivan - the developer of this game and I’m so happy to finally show it to you here on Steam. Thanks for stopping by. It’s amazing that something brought you here, and it’s an honor to have you!
8 More Lives is a hardcore turn-based strategy game where you lead a company of cat mercenaries. I made it because I love games with deep, interconnected systems - especially turn-based tactics.

I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do. So grab some tea, or any drink you like, sit around the campfire, and let me tell you how the game was born-and how you can become one of its first playtesters, for free, of course.

Oh, wait. Before that: if you don’t want to miss the free playtest, join our Discord, wishlist the game, and follow it here on Steam.

View game pageAnd now, it’s story time!
A few words about where this project came from
8 More Lives did not begin as one complete design. Its features grew out of several prototypes, experiments, and lessons gathered over more than a decade. Here are some of the ideas that shaped the game you see today.
Turn-based medieval combat
I've tried to make a medieval turn-based game before. The earliest prototype with the same idea appeared back in 2015–2016. It was something like a “medieval XCOM”, and some of the systems in the current game were already present. You fought against demons-the blue placeholder thing here is an imp, and the yellow one is a “bull” demon. I put the prototype together pretty quickly, but it never went anywhere beyond itch.io.
The most important lesson I learned was that medieval formation combat worked poorly with XCOM-style squad control, attack and defense directions, and a square grid. Most of it were discarded. The game was slow and clunky, although ideas like different amounts of Action Points and radial interfaces were already promising.

Around the same time, Battle Brothers came out. The original version without DLC was a little bare-bones, but mechanically it worked exactly as it needed to. The idea of making my own game faded into the background, and I went off to play Battle Brothers because I had basically received the game I was trying to make myself.
Procedural world generation, biomes and map rotation
In 2019, I wanted to create a cool map generator for Civilization V, which my friends and I regularly played together. So, for a while, I worked on procedural world generation. The generator turned out great. It used noise and NASA’s SRTM-30 elevation data, with biomes determined by elevation, latitude, humidity, and wind. Unfortunately, I never managed to get it into Civilization, but I kept the code.
That abandoned experiment later became the foundation of the world map in 8 More Lives.
During COVID, there obviously wasn’t much to do, and right in the middle of lockdown, in May 2020, I had the crazy idea to dig up this old project and see what interesting things I could do with turn-based medieval squad tactics. At the time, the only really “big” game in this space was still Battle Brothers, so the question gradually became: “What can I do that Battle Brothers mods can’t?”

The first answer was map rotation.
Then came biomes, and the game could already generate battle maps from several distinct environments. Originally, there were even more biomes. They’re actually still in the game, just hidden for now. We’ll gradually add them back as the art for them gets finished.
This is how towns were originally planned to look in a paint-over of an early screenshot. Someday, they may actually grow to this size, but that will have to wait until I implement proper urban combat.
A global map connected to tactical battles
What else can I do?
Once upon a time, there was the great (but a bit clunky) Rome: Total War, where battle maps were procedurally generated based on the global campaign map. So why should I be any worse? And I've started to implement forgotten technology from 20 years ago.
And voila - battle maps are now generated 1-to-1, replicating the same biomes and features as in the global map in the same positions.
Large units, small units, and nine lives
What else could the game do? How about large and small units? 1-Hex units aren't enough!
You can already fight large units in the game, while small units will return in the near future.
Somewhere around this stage, the cats appeared too, because nine lives make for a pretty good game mechanic. They give new players a bit of a safety cushion, while letting hardcore players take risks and enter interesting fights sooner. Also, Redwall and Disney’s Robin Hood are both great, so all that remained was to add some grimdark. The fact that our previous two games also had cats as their main characters is absolutely a coincidence. Definitely. One hundred percent. Also, here is my cat.
Strategy-game quality of life
By 2024–2025, the prototype was playable enough that I could focus more on usability and quality-of-life features. I needed to show the rest of our team that this Excel simulator wearing cat skins was actually a game people could play.
I was not working on it full-time. Most of the work happened in the evenings, using placeholders, Paint, and whatever else was available. But this was also when nested tooltips, hyperlinks inside text, and many of the other features I constantly miss in strategy games began to appear-the small things that make complex games much more comfortable to play.
Plausibly historical weapons and layered armor
Another idea we needed to test was the use of plausibly historical weapons and armor-not reenactment-level accuracy, but much closer to reality than in most games. This matters especially because the game has a Layered Armor system.
Personally, I care about these things a lot, but the question was whether enough players cared too. Thankfully, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II came out and became a hit, which eased some of those worries.
From private prototype to public playtest
In October 2025, streamer TheIndomitableSnowman played the prototype. He spent two hours with an absolutely raw, half-broken version of the game and he liked it! The viewers enjoyed it too.
That brings us to February 2026 and the start of full production: a small window between “our build is good enough” and “the whole world will be playing GTA 6” in which we can finally show the game to you.
We’re adding content and mechanics, polishing everything, and bringing the game to Steam-starting with a playtest. So join us! Play the playtest, send us your feedback, and wishlist the game!
How you can help development
Wishlist the game
Sign up for the playtest
Join our Discord
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Tell your favorite influencer about the game in their comments
Original post