This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 14, April 2025

Disclaimer: Sebastian Galvez, the creative director of Back Alley Games, is the artist and marketing manager behind SolarFlare.

In my experience, all indie gamers love pixel art and hate corporations and the way they’ve changed the world. SolarFlare, an upcoming co-op, roguelike hero builder includes both evil corporate executives and a beautiful pixel art grid, making it an ideal experience for indie gamers.

The three-person team behind SolarFlare call themselves Swarmforge, and they hope to have a demo out by the end of 2025. Simon Lepkin, the project’s programmer, writer, and wearer of many other unspecified hats wrote to us to talk about the development process and the inspirations behind his project.

The game is set in space and asks teams of players to take down a corporate overlord that has forced their employees to fight for them.

About the game’s overall premise, Lepkin said, “Players make an insane build, support their teammates, take down the Executive – the jerk in charge – and either free or hire their former staff.”

If the villain’s name being “the Executive” didn’t tip you off, this game is not shy about critiquing corporations. That can be felt in their inspirations, which include Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over The Age, 2022), a game where the titular character has been abandoned by a corporation whose technology keeps them alive, and “The Murderbot Diaries,” a book series about a robot that escapes from the corporation enslaving it.

Lepkin said he’s drawn to this genre of corporate dystopia because it “admits the flaws of humanity but is tempered by hope. Not blind hope, but hope.”

Dystopia can be grim, but the ones that inspired SolarFlare are more focused on the heroes’ ability to band together and create something better. According to Lepkin, you won’t find any of the misery from worlds like Cyberpunk or Shadowrun in his world. Instead, his characters have good intent behind their actions.

“SolarFlare is not a narrative game,” Lepkin said. “The setting is important to me, but you might not see it unless you look closely.”

While it might not be a project full of lore and deep character dialogue, the team have taken their inspirations and worked them directly into its roguelike gameplay.

Many roguelikes are beloved for their ability to make failure seem like progress, and SolarFlare is no different. Its gameplay loop begins as a standard turn-based tactics game set on a hex grid, but once you have the system down pat, it turns into an auto-battler focused more on your hero’s build than precise strategy.

Lepkin said he chose this loop because of his own personal tastes.

He loves co-op games for their ability to soften inconveniences and missteps. Co-op roguelikes may not be common, but the ethos behind SolarFlare is that the presence of friends to commiserate with when a setback happens can make a defeat feel sweeter.

“In Spirit Island, when Sweden is double blighting every land and you’ve flipped the blight card twice, it’s good to hear that your friends have lost half their Presence, too,” Lepkin said.

Hero-building is another favorite genre of Lepkin’s because it gives exciting, tangible rewards that create a sense of progress. He said the puzzle-like nature of pairing attacks with equipment with abilities to create combos that eradicate enemies is one of the most satisfying feelings in gaming.

He also thinks that looking up solutions in these kinds of games is sacrilegious.

“Imagine a puzzle game in which you’re racing someone else to solve the exact same puzzle and you can see them as they make their incomplete solution,” Lepkin said. “I can see how some people might be excited by that idea. But I’m repulsed by it.”

The turn-based and single-character structure of SolarFlare is also based directly on Lepkin’s preference. He said he’s bad at acting in real time, but also that the time it takes to play out turn-based combat allows a player to sit in the consequences of their actions.

Most turn-based tactics games set on a grid include groups of characters that a single player controls, but Lepkin has never liked that model.

“I like playing a single character because I am only one person,” he said. “Some people imagine themselves as some sort of commander when they’re controlling a party, but that illusion never really holds for me.”

The game is a commercial project, but Lepkin said selling it isn’t the primary goal.

“Our goal is to make a game that we like, but that lots of other people also like,” he said. “Not everyone will like it. But the more people like it, the more validating it will be.”

SolarFlare has a preview available on itch.io, with a full demo planned for December 2025. https://swarmforge.itch.io/solarflare-preview