Wargroove’s Classic Strategy Sandbox Coming Soon to Xbox One

Wargroove is a light turn-based tactics game inspired by classics of the genre but updated with modern features and drawn in a charming, light-hearted pixel art style.

Soon after Starbound came out of Early Access on PC and had its official 1.0 release, Chucklefish started an internal pitch process where everyone in the office brought forward their ideas for what games we should start working on next.

Everyone in the office was a big fan of light tactical games like Advance Wars, Shining Force, and Battle for Wesnoth, but we found that there hadn’t been many games in that genre in several years. We really wanted to play a modern game like that, so we decided to make it ourselves! Thus, Wargroove was pitched and I joined Chucklefish soon after as the sole programmer for the project.

Wargroove’s development has been incredibly fun since then. A lesson that we learned from Starbound was that user-generated content was very important to our community. Early on we knew we wanted to give as much creative power to our players as we could. To accomplish that, we decided to work on a map editor and a campaign editor for the game. This was one of the most fun features to work in, but let me tell you, writing a scriptable map editor UI for a gamepad was a very interesting challenge! It was all worth it, though, as we ended up with a set of tools powerful enough that we’re making the official game missions in it, while being able to ship it with the game to let users make and share their own content.

While working on this game, we made several changes to the formula of games on this setting. We knew early on that we wanted commanders as playable units on the field, in addition to the units that you can recruit from barracks, but we were somewhat surprised by how much more dynamic that game made. We often describe the commanders as both the queen and king in chess – they are incredibly powerful units, however, losing them will cause you to lose the match. Each one has their own incredibly powerful unique moves, called “grooves,” which can completely swing the balance of battle. Use your commander carefully! Keep them too far back and you’ll be at a big disadvantage on the front, but if you over-stretch, they can be trapped and cost you the game! We have watched many playtests, and this dynamic always ensures unique surprises, even for veterans.

We’re overall very happy with the direction Wargroove has taken. Even after nearly two years of development, we still have a lot of fun every time we play the game. We hope that you enjoy it as much as we do!