If you’ve stumbled across this page, welcome.
Gods Shall Tremble just cleared Steam review and the store page is officially live. Seeing the active page up is an incredible milestone for me personally, because this project represents something that honestly wasn't possible a year ago.
Let’s get the biggest disclosure out of the way first: I’m not a developer.
My background is in Functional Design, UX, and Graphic Design. I know how systems should feel, how UIs should flow, and how the aesthetics should land—but writing pure game code from scratch was an obvious massive barrier.
Enter The Collider Protocol
I've tried to build this game a few times over the years using AI, and failing miserably like every other vibe coder that tries to do more that 2 simple html pages. No matter what I tried, the AI would get confused as soon as the codebase got even moderately complex, and I'd shelve it for another 6 months hoping the technology would catch up to my excessively ambitious ideas.
This year is of course year of the agents though, which changed the game significantly. I found claude code/codex etc were still too "one shot vibe code hope and pray" for what I wanted, so I built my own harness using LangGraph, which I called "The Collider Protocol". And after refining that processes for a few months, I had myself a fully automated dev team, that actually works to build and iterate on massive and complex code bases without losing context or breaking things.
What I'm Not Building
Being a fan of these auto battler fight management sim genre, and playing competitively at the top levels in other games, I of course had my own thoughts on what worked and what could be improved. Things like agility always being the god stat, or the need for games to make a profit restricting how players can enjoy them. So I set out to build a game that took all that strategy, customisation, and community competition, and left all of the meta builds, wallet draining, and gaming the system out of it.
One huge benefit of being able to develop this without the overheads of a development studio, is that i dont have costs, salaries, rent, or shareholders to worry about. This game will have micro transactions like every other free to play of course (someones gotta pay the server costs), but it will never be pay to win, there are no annoying energy mechanics, and no content is gated behind annoying grinds aimed to frustrate you into paying for things. I only built one loot table, so there isnt anything that will be available to purchase, that isnt able to be farmed with no limits in the PvE modes. It's really important to me that free to play players have the exact same experience... and whales can choose to "pay to speed up" if they want to.
What I Am Building
The whole "greed ruined gaming" rant isnt the most positive topic (but i think very important), so lets look at the fun stuff instead...
Things I'm focused on with this game..
Crazy customisation - I'm a big fan of coming up with crazy creative builds and testing them out, trying to break the meta and finding a way to win that hasnt been done before. So I wanted to go deep on just how you can build your fighters... and those 15mil, 67.5mil, and 7.5trillion numbers I threw out in the description are not hype... thats all very real, and will continue to grow.
The Best Fighter Wins - I always get disappointed when"strategy" games are just agility/initative and stat maxing... so i very deliberately designed this game to have no meta, the meta is simply the counter to the players around you on the leaderboards, and every strength has a counter. Even things like the leaderboard scoring is designed to encourage activity so you cant just camp the top of the leaderboard and not fight to protect your lead... The best fighter is the one that dominates, not hides.. and to dominate, you need to use real strategy, not just maxing numbers or equipment.
Fairness - First day players should have the same opportunities as end game players, free to play players should have the same opportunities and whales, and cheats should (and will) find a different game to play. I built a system that you cannot game, cheat, exploit. Its brutal, its honest, and its fair for everyone.
What's Next?
The game is pretty much done in terms of features and functionality, but I'm an 80's kid that grew up in the times before early access and shipping halfassed games was an acceptable way to do it... and I dont plan to release this game until it is ready.
The next few weeks for me will be polishing and balancing to make sure its the highest standard I know how to do. There is a high chance I will get distracted by my own bright ideas and think adding some rediculous new feature would be fun... or my OCD wont ever be satisfied cause a margin is 2px out of place... but I am pretty confident It'll be out around August-ish (note: this is not a legally binding blog post)
I'll be using this Steam community hub to post transparent updates along the way to release and although Im obviously a big fan of talking to myself about myself, I would love to hear from anyone that has any interest, and I'll setup a Discord etc soon... in the meantime, if you made it this far, hitting the Wishlist button would help immensely.
Thanks for checking it out, and I look forward to playing this with you soon.
- uniek