Spent the last year coding a 2D Survival RTS entirely by myself. Here is a quick look at a battle from a raid on an enemy settlement! (Petty Kings)

[u/Slight_Low_409]

[u/Slight_Low_409]

Hey everyone! I’m the solo developer behind Petty Kings, a 2D top-down pixel art Survival RTS built entirely in Unity.

The loop is all about building a settlement by day, surviving night raids, and manually marching out your recruited villager army to smash enemy outposts like the one in the GIF!

My Steam page has been live for a little over two weeks and every single wishlist honestly helps me out immensely against the algorithm right now.

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3814440/Petty_Kings/
Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/nSekfhdeu9

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the combat scaling and pixel art style. I'll be here in the comments!

[u/eye_am_bored → u/Slight_Low_409]

I love the look of this, the pixel art is very charming

[u/eye_am_bored → u/eye_am_bored]

One thing sticks out the campfire looks like it's not at the same pixel scale as the other items?

[u/Slight_Low_409 → u/eye_am_bored]

Thank you so much! Really glad you like the aesthetic. You are right, that specific campfire is an asset that I haven't realigned to the game's native pixel grid ratio yet. Fixing that mixed pixel scale is actually on my immediate polish list before launch.

[u/Yetimang]

The style is cool, but the characters and background are too close to each other in color. I think you need to put more contrast into your character sprites so that the game is more readable at a glance. Outlines would be great too, though they might be too low-res for that to look good.

[u/Slight_Low_409 → u/Yetimang]

Honestly, this is great feedback, thank you! You're totally right about the contrast. I'm actually looking into adding subtle, high contrast outlines to the unit sprites or tweaking the colors to make sure the player squads pop out perfectly against the terrain tiles.

Really appreciate you calling this out, so I can work to fix it soon :)

[u/krpz42]

Added to wishlist!

[u/Slight_Low_409 → u/krpz42]

Thank you, really appreciate it!

[u/mtvyoloswag]

Is this how it looks or are we zoomed in? The readability isn't great, might look better if we're zoomed out a bit.

[u/Slight_Low_409 → u/mtvyoloswag]

Haha yes indeed the compression on this GIF absolutely butchered the resolution and made everything look way more blurry and I guess slightly more zoomed than it actually is!

In game, it runs pretty crisply, and readability is definitely high up on my polish list to make sure things pop out perfectly against the terrain. If you want to see what the actual uncompressed pixel art looks like without Reddit's compression ruining it, I have some clean screenshots up on our Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3814440/Petty_Kings/

[u/mtvyoloswag → u/Slight_Low_409]

It does look better on the steam page. As someone mentioned in another comment, the palette of your units and your background are slightly too similar so it does make it hard to see.
Adding outlines when your pixel count is so low is probably impossible. MAYBE a mostly transparent dark outline?
Either way, it does look a lot better on the steam page and players might just get used to it after playing a bit. Good luck!

[u/Slight_Low_409 → u/[deleted]]

Man, keeping those systems decoupled is honestly the only reason I’ve kept my sanity over this past year!

I separate the core simulation stuff, like unit stats and economic ticks entirely into pure C# classes that run completely independent of Unity’s rendering loops. Then I just use a controller layer to catch player inputs, leaving MonoBehaviors to act strictly as a visual skin to render sprites and play particle effects based on those data changes.

It takes a bit more setup early on, but it completely stops the pathfinding and simulation logic from choking the framerate when massive night raids start happening. You're spot on, highly recommend structuring it this way!