Happy Birthday, Kaiserpunk!
[p]Hi everyone, [/p][p]Today marks a special day for us - it's been a whole year since Kaiserpunk was released! It feels like everything happened in a flash, and somehow over a lifetime at the same time. Much has happened since then, and while we’re still working on the game, we want to mark the occasion by looking back at how Kaiserpunk came to be and evolved along the way.
Watch Anniversary Video [/p][h3]Before Kaiserpunk[/h3][p]Before we dive deeper into Kaiserpunk, a bit of backstory. We’re Overseer Games, a small indie team based in Zagreb, Croatia. With four founders running the team, where three of us are actually brothers, we started working together back in 2006.
Over the years, we’ve worked on a variety of games, but we’ve always been especially drawn to strategy and city builders. Our first city builder was Patron, a medieval survival city builder inspired by classics like Banished and The Settlers. After Patron, our appetite for colony-style city builders led us to Aquatico, a survival city builder set in the depths of the ocean, built around the unique challenges of that environment.
[/p][h3]Kaiserpunk as a Concept[/h3][p]![]()
[/p][p]After Aquatico, we were still interested in a city builder at heart, but wanted to push into territory we hadn't explored before. The direction came quickly: let's set the game in the interbellum era, that chaotic, fascinating stretch between the two World Wars. It's a period that offers everything a game designer could want - a turbulent beginning, a deeply dynamic middle, and an ending that everyone knows is coming, but hits hard regardless.
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[/p][p]Interestingly, Kaiserpunk didn't start with warfare as a core pillar. Early in the design phase, the concept leaned heavily into management: the player as a weapons manufacturer and trader, operating from the sidelines - producing, supplying, profiting. The geopolitical backdrop was the same, but the player's role was more detached. Over time, though, we kept gravitating toward direct involvement, toward conflict, toward consequence. The game gradually evolved itself into what it is today, almost by its own gravity.[/p][p]![]()
[/p][h3]Early Development[/h3][p]Coming into production, we carried everything we'd learned from Patron and Aquatico - but the biggest challenge was still ahead of us. After a decade and a half, we made the decision to leave our proprietary engine behind and build Kaiserpunk in Unity. Developing and maintaining your own engine is a point of pride, but it's also enormously costly, and Kaiserpunk was simply too ambitious for us to carry that weight at the same time.
Learning a near-entirely new engine while building one of our most complex games yet was equal parts exhilarating and nerve-wracking. But there was a moment - when we hit alpha - where the city and the world map finally came together as one living thing. That was the moment we knew this could be something special.
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[/p][h3]Announcement and Bringing Players into Kaiserpunk[/h3][p]In November 2023, we officially announced Kaiserpunk to the public. It was a moment we had been looking forward to for a long time - equal parts excitement and nerves. Would city builder fans care? Would strategy players see themselves in it?
The response answered that quickly: interest was stronger than we'd dared hope, even accounting for the faith we had in the project. Influencers and media picked it up and ran with it, and perhaps the best thing we heard during that period came from a player who said: "Until I saw the teaser, I didn't even know this was a game I wanted to play." That kind of reaction is what you build toward.[/p][p]
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[/p][p]But it wasn't all smooth sailing. Communicating exactly what Kaiserpunk is - the layers of it, what you actually do in it - turned out to be harder than anticipated. A game this layered doesn't fit neatly into a sentence, and we felt that friction early. Our answer was to lean into demos and playtests, letting players experience it rather than trying to describe it. Those were a scramble to get ready in time, and the results were mixed - but what came out of that period was invaluable: an overwhelming flood of feedback that just kept coming and kept shaping the game.
As the game was coming together, at least in terms of features and most content, we felt we needed more input from people outside of the team to see if what we were making vibed with others the same way it vibed with us.
That question kicked off a period of structured public testing, starting with Next Fest in the summer of 2024. We weren't trying to document every session in detail, but the cumulative value of letting people in early was enormous. The big win was simple and irreplaceable: real feedback on what worked and what didn't, from people who had no stake in our feelings about it. [/p][p]Some of it confirmed what we suspected. Some of it caught us off guard - in the best way. The warfare layer, for instance, was repeatedly flagged as feeling too light - too simple for a game that had built up so much strategic weight around it. We heard it, we agreed with it, and we amplified it. That's exactly the kind of feedback you can't generate internally. If anything, we wish we’d had the chance to get even more of it. [/p][p][/p][p]![]()
[/p][h3]Release and the Journey Onwards[/h3][p]After almost four years of development, Kaiserpunk was released on March 21st, 2025. By then, we had partnered with Elda Entertainment, focused on city building and strategy games, to help launch the game, alongside support from our community and content creators. And with that, our long-term journey as a live game began.
What we felt compelled to say shortly after release still holds true today: we’re proud of Kaiserpunk and the work we’ve done, but we’re not fully satisfied yet. We continue to comb through feedback and roll out updates. We love Kaiserpunk, and that’s why our work continues, shaping it into the game it deserves to be, and one we hope you’ll continue to enjoy for years to come.[/p][p]
We’ll never stop being grateful for the support we’ve received. It’s been a big boost for us and continues to drive our efforts forward.
[/p][p]And if you missed it, we deployed a new update earlier this week with fresh content, gameplay improvements and features, and quality-of-life enhancements to celebrate the occasion. You can read more about it here. [/p][p]![]()
[/p][p]Watch our Anniversary Video, highlighting the update, you, and some of the influencers who have supported us over the past year. [/p][p][/p][p]Here’s to many more anniversaries to come! [/p][p]- The Overseer Team
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Watch Anniversary Video [/p][h3]Before Kaiserpunk[/h3][p]Before we dive deeper into Kaiserpunk, a bit of backstory. We’re Overseer Games, a small indie team based in Zagreb, Croatia. With four founders running the team, where three of us are actually brothers, we started working together back in 2006.
Over the years, we’ve worked on a variety of games, but we’ve always been especially drawn to strategy and city builders. Our first city builder was Patron, a medieval survival city builder inspired by classics like Banished and The Settlers. After Patron, our appetite for colony-style city builders led us to Aquatico, a survival city builder set in the depths of the ocean, built around the unique challenges of that environment.
[/p][h3]Kaiserpunk as a Concept[/h3][p]
Learning a near-entirely new engine while building one of our most complex games yet was equal parts exhilarating and nerve-wracking. But there was a moment - when we hit alpha - where the city and the world map finally came together as one living thing. That was the moment we knew this could be something special.
The response answered that quickly: interest was stronger than we'd dared hope, even accounting for the faith we had in the project. Influencers and media picked it up and ran with it, and perhaps the best thing we heard during that period came from a player who said: "Until I saw the teaser, I didn't even know this was a game I wanted to play." That kind of reaction is what you build toward.[/p][p]
As the game was coming together, at least in terms of features and most content, we felt we needed more input from people outside of the team to see if what we were making vibed with others the same way it vibed with us.
That question kicked off a period of structured public testing, starting with Next Fest in the summer of 2024. We weren't trying to document every session in detail, but the cumulative value of letting people in early was enormous. The big win was simple and irreplaceable: real feedback on what worked and what didn't, from people who had no stake in our feelings about it. [/p][p]Some of it confirmed what we suspected. Some of it caught us off guard - in the best way. The warfare layer, for instance, was repeatedly flagged as feeling too light - too simple for a game that had built up so much strategic weight around it. We heard it, we agreed with it, and we amplified it. That's exactly the kind of feedback you can't generate internally. If anything, we wish we’d had the chance to get even more of it. [/p][p][/p][p]
What we felt compelled to say shortly after release still holds true today: we’re proud of Kaiserpunk and the work we’ve done, but we’re not fully satisfied yet. We continue to comb through feedback and roll out updates. We love Kaiserpunk, and that’s why our work continues, shaping it into the game it deserves to be, and one we hope you’ll continue to enjoy for years to come.[/p][p]
We’ll never stop being grateful for the support we’ve received. It’s been a big boost for us and continues to drive our efforts forward.
[/p][p]And if you missed it, we deployed a new update earlier this week with fresh content, gameplay improvements and features, and quality-of-life enhancements to celebrate the occasion. You can read more about it here. [/p][p]
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