The buildings were never buildings

A few blunt messages on Discord sent me down a rabbit hole this month, and I want to write about it, because it made me face a problem that had been sitting in plain sight since the first prototype. Not a bug. Something worse: a part of my game's foundation I had simply never thought through.

An inheritance I never questioned

Bloodlust & Harmony started life heavily inspired by Castle Fight and the other greats of the genre. The skeleton came with the inspiration: you place buildings, the buildings spawn units on a timer, the units march out on their own, last castle standing wins. I took that skeleton and ran, because there was a mountain of other things to build — five factions, ninety-odd abilities, an elemental damage system, a poker mode.

What I never stopped to ask was the question underneath: what is a "building" actually for in my game?

In practice, a building here is not really a building. It is a standing order. Placing a barracks doesn't give you a barracks; it means a footman joins every wave you send from now on. The building is a unit card wearing an architecture costume. I knew that. The game knew that. But nothing on screen said it, so new players read a barracks as… a barracks. They placed buildings, watched soldiers appear somewhere else entirely, and had to reverse-engineer the core loop of my game on their own.

The invisible formation system

It gets better. The game has always had a formation system. Every unit carries a class — infantry, ranged, caster, cavalry, siege, and so on — and when a wave spawns, those classes assemble into ranks: infantry in front, archers behind them, casters behind those, siege at the rear. There is real tactical logic in there, and it has been quietly shaping every fight since the beginning.

And I never told anyone. There was no way to see it, no way to influence it, not a single word of it communicated in-game. A system I had built to add depth was functionally decorative, because depth you can't see and can't touch isn't depth. It's trivia.

That is what the Discord feedback made me finally sit with. I had looked past it for months because everything worked — the waves spawned, the ranks formed, the fights resolved. But "works" and "makes sense to a human being encountering it for the first time" are very different bars, and I had only been clearing the first one.

The fork in the road

The obvious fix was terrifying: rip it out and redesign how buildings and spawning work from scratch. But this system isn't a module sitting off to the side. Those class tags feed unit targeting. They feed the wave assembler. They feed how the draft mode classifies its pick pool. The spawner buildings are wired into the economy, the upgrade chains, the AI opponents, the tooltips, the preloader. Reinventing the foundation meant re-pouring concrete under a house I'm actively living in.

The other option was to ship it as-is and keep looking past it. That one stopped being available the moment I actually read the feedback honestly.

So I went looking for the middle path: keep the model, and make the game finally communicate it. Don't replace the system — give it a face, and then hand the player the controls. Some creative elbow grease instead of a demolition crew.

Your buildings are now your units

The first half of the answer: if a building is really a unit card, it should look like one.

Nearly two hundred spawner buildings no longer render as architecture. Place one and the actual unit stands there in your build zone — the real model, at real scale, in your colors, on a stone display slab, facing the battlefield. Place a footman spawner and a footman stands on the plinth. Upgrade it and the figure on the slab changes to what you upgraded into. Towers and castles are still proper buildings, because they actually are buildings.

The names followed. The thing that gives you a footman every wave is now just called "Footman," not some barracks name you have to decode. Its tooltip tells you everything the unit's own tooltip would — stats, role, abilities — and upgrade tooltips now describe the unit you're upgrading into with that same detail, instead of leaving you to guess what a gold cost buys.

Then, the part I've wanted for a long time: the Muster Ground. Your team's next wave now stands at your spawn point as a ghost army — every unit that will march, arranged exactly as it will actually spawn, each teammate's contribution tinted in their color. The loop the game never explained is now literally standing on the field: these buildings, this army, this formation, every wave.

Marching orders

The second half: the invisible formation system became a visible, controllable one.

Press F and the Formation Panel opens. Those class ranks that always existed are now rows you can see — and rearrange. Drag a unit into a different rank and it fights there: put your bruiser cavalry in the front line as a meat wall, or tuck a fragile caster into the back row. Reorder the ranks themselves — ranged-first alpha strike, cavalry vanguard, a turtled double front line. Set each rank to hold the left, center, or right of your line. A live preview shows exactly how the next wave will stand, at true footprint and spacing, because it runs on the very same layout code the spawn does.

There are presets for the classic arrangements, plus slots to save your own. And it isn't cosmetic: armies now march in their ranks and hold them all the way to contact, so the formation you designed is the formation that actually hits the enemy line.

None of this replaced anything. The tags, the wave assembler, the targeting, the AI — all still there, all untouched at the core. Every mode that never opens the panel plays exactly as before. What changed is that the system finally speaks, and finally listens.

What it taught me

The uncomfortable lesson: when you build inside a genre you love, you inherit answers to questions you never consciously asked. Some of those inherited answers are load-bearing wisdom. Some are just habits wearing wisdom's clothes. I couldn't tell the difference until strangers on Discord bounced off my game in exactly the place I'd stopped looking.

And the happier lesson: the middle path was better than the demolition would have been. Forced to work with what I had, I ended up somewhere the genre classics never went — most of them don't let you shape your army's formation at all. What began as "make this less confusing" came out the other side as one of the deepest new layers in the game.

So: to the people who told me, bluntly, that my buildings didn't make sense — thank you. That kind of feedback stings for about an hour and then pays off for months. The Discord is open, and I am very much still listening.