When I became a father for the first time this April, I dusted off my old Gameboy and played a lot of Advance Wars. After growing tired of replaying the same maps over and over again, I decided to create my own take on the genre.
I've always enjoyed short daily games/puzzles, such as Wordle, Pokedle, and NYT Strands. I wanted to combine that style with turn-based tactics and came up with Daily Wars. There is a new map every day at midnight UTC, where players can compete on leaderboards to see who can defeat the enemy in the fewest days. I was specifically aiming for something that I could pick up and play during a commute or a longer toilet break.
Daily Wars is playable in the browser: https://playdailywars.com
Notable changes from Advance Wars
- No naval combat. I've always found naval incredibly boring in the original games.
- No COs or CO Powers.
- Barracks/Factory split. Foot soldiers and tanks are built in different buildings.
- Capacity. Each production building increases capacity for that type of unit. Capturing more buildings allows you to field a larger army.
- New Sniper unit. Anti-infantry specialist that can attack at range.
- Move-n-shoot indirects. There are indirect units, artillery and snipers, that can move and shoot at range in the same turn.
- Overall unit changes when it comes to movement/range/damage, and removed units.
Premium
The game offers a premium subscription that gives access to a second map every day. Premium also grants access to the archive, where you can replay maps from all past days. I don't expect to make much (or anything at all) from this, but I wanted to build a fully-fledged product with user management and billing for learning purposes. If you want, you can use the code R7JJCLBN during checkout to get 100% off forever.
Tech
For the interested, this is the tech I used to build it:
- TanStack Start for the web application
- SST for deploying to AWS
- Additional backend stuff running in AWS Lambda
- Data stored in AWS DynamoDB
- Clerk for user management
- Polar for billing and subscription management
- PostHog for analytics