I put a game on Steam last year called Hold the Keep. It sold five copies.
That is the whole sales report. Five people paid for it, nobody wrote a review, and to this day I have not received a single line of written feedback. What I do have is the playtime that Steam quietly records, and that number said something more useful than the silence did. The people who bought it actually played, in real sessions, more than once. Five strangers thought the loop was worth an evening, and I happen to agree with them. So instead of delisting it and moving on, I spent the last few months rebuilding it.
The result is bigger, fairer, and now playable with friends, and it is getting a new name to match: Yours Truly, The Warlord. You can play the current build free in your browser today, and the paid desktop version still lives on its original Hold the Keep Steam page while the rebrand catches up.
The game it always wanted to be
The honest origin of this game is a custom scenario in Age of Empires 2 called Art of Defense. If you never played it, the shape is simple. You and a few allies hold a fixed base while waves of enemies escalate on a timer. You spend the quiet minutes building an economy and stacking defenses, and one of the smartest plays available to you is running trade caravans between your markets to pay for the next tier of walls.
The first version of my game borrowed the silhouette of that idea. This rebuild borrows the actual structure. Under the hood the waves now behave the way Art of Defense behaves. The game keeps a standing army topped up in the field and rotates its composition on a schedule, tightening the screws as the clock runs, rather than counting out a tidy "here comes wave seven." I pulled the real trigger timings out of the original scenario and used them as the reference while I tuned mine, so the rhythm of pressure and relief should feel familiar to anyone who spent evenings holding that map.
Fixing the difficulty
This is the part that most needed the work, and it is where I learned the most.
When I recorded full scripted playthroughs of the opening map, the problem jumped out. Almost nothing happened for the first fifteen minutes, and then the final ninety seconds decided the entire match. A sensible mid-skill plan lost on the easiest setting. On Hard I handed a scripted expert an extra twenty thousand gold and it still died, with eleven thousand of that gold sitting unspent, because one wave near the twenty-minute mark was flatly unbeatable no matter how much you had banked.
So I rebalanced the whole arc. The opening got gentler, with more starting gold, softer early monsters, and enough breathing room to form a plan before anything punishes you. The ending got harder and, just as importantly, more honest about being hard. A FINAL NOTICE letter now warns you at 17:20, on every difficulty, that the real siege is about to land. On Hard the enemy army pulls back and regroups around the twenty-minute mark, which turns the finale into a readable set piece rather than a solid wall of health bars. After the pass, a first-timer playing naturally can win the opening map on Easy, an expert on Normal fights all the way to a 25-minute victory, and Hard stays genuinely punishing without turning into a coin flip.
You do not have to hold the line alone
The headline new feature is online co-op. You can start a session, hand a friend an invite code, and have them drop straight into your defense from anywhere. The host runs the authoritative simulation and everyone else mirrors it, so the game stays in sync even when the field is full of enemies.
Getting three players to agree on the same world state over a flaky connection was the hardest engineering on the whole project. If you want the byte-level version of how that works, I wrote a separate post about the co-op netcode.
Trade routes, straight from Age of Empires
Co-op unlocked my favorite mechanic to port over. Build two or more markets, spend 300 gold to open a trade route, and a caravan begins looping between them, generating gold on every trip and delivering it to the market owner. Longer routes pay more, so spreading your markets across the map with a partner is worth real income. It rewards the exact kind of quiet coordination that made trade in Age of Empires satisfying: while one of you holds the wall, the other lays out a route that funds the castles you both need.
Trade routes are co-op only for now, because a caravan running between two of your own bases is a lot more interesting when one of those bases belongs to someone else.
A new name and a villain to go with it
All of this deserved a story that fits, so the game is becoming Yours Truly, The Warlord. There is a Warlord now, and he wants your land. The letters that arrive between waves are his, the siege is his doing, and the whole campaign is you refusing to hand over what is yours. Defend your land. The name change from Hold the Keep is part of that reframing, and the Steam page will follow once the new build is ready to ship there.
The horse got a promotion
I also gave the art a pass, and the mounted units got the most attention. They are built from simple procedural shapes rather than sculpted models, which keeps the whole game light enough to run in a browser tab, and the earlier versions had a horse that read as a vaguely brown blob from the side. The reworked rigs have a proper barrel, neck, and haunches, so a scout, a lance-carrying knight, and a mounted archer now look like three distinct riders instead of three brown smudges.
The look is still deliberately low-poly. I would rather the game load instantly on a cheap laptop than chase detail nobody needs while defending a wall.
Coming to phones
The last piece in progress is an Android port. The browser build already handles touch input, so the game is playable on a phone screen today, and a proper native Android version is the next thing on my bench. When it lands you will be able to hold the line from the bus.
Give it a go
If any of that sounds like your kind of evening, play Yours Truly, The Warlord free in your browser, grab the desktop build on its Hold the Keep Steam page, and come tell me about your run on Discord. I still have not read a single piece of feedback on this game, and I would genuinely love to change that.