Modding my favorite strategy game… 30 years after its release

Better late than never

One of my earliest experiences with videos games came from playing through a compilation of demos on a Galaxy of Games CD on a hand-me-down laptop. It didn’t bother me that only the first few levels of the games were included or that the Shareware demon blocked my progress after a certain point. The games were casual and fun and easy to get lost in for a little while after school.

Some games appealed to me more than others and I found myself gravitating toward them over time. Favorites like Exile: Escape from the Pit, Gravity Well, and Critical Mass kept me entertained for hours and filled my young imagination, inspiring drawings and short stories of my own.

One game stood out above the rest. Whether due to its puzzle-solving strategy, the timeless pixel graphics, or simply nostalgia, something drew me back to this game even as an adult. It’s a game called Slay.

Slay

Created by Sean O’Connor in 1989 on an Atari ST, the original title was Battle Hex. It went through several iterations, being renamed to Empire and then finally Slay for its release on PC in 1995, but the core mechanics of the game were there from the start.

A turn-based strategy game, the goal of Slay is to conquer an island by defeating enemy units and capturing land. The game uses a hexagon (the best-a-gon) grid system with territories formed by adjoining hexagons of the same color. Capitals of territories collect money and create units, which the player moves to capture land, defeat weaker units, or chop down the ever encroaching trees. Each turn involves managing an economy to maintain units, making strategic military decisions, and forestry (seriously, the trees are the real threat).

My demo version when I was a kid came with one island, but that was more than enough to hook me. The game’s replayability meant that I could try conquering that island over and over again, with no two sessions unfolding quite the same.

Later, as an adult wanting to relive a childhood memory, I found the full version still for sale on Sean O’Connor’s website. That was when I discovered that the game had an option for custom theming.

Theming

The standard medieval theme is a good fit for the game’s setting: lots of small territories vying for supremacy with units that follow a rigid hierarchy. I’ll always be enamored with the charming, original sprites, but I couldn’t resist the urge to try my hand at creating pixel art for one of my all-time favorite games.

I wanted my custom theme to stay true to the game’s scenario of competing for dominance with an ordered class system of units, so I went with another time and region of the world: feudal Japan. It’s such a unique and fascinating part of history, plus I thought it would be fun to design a pixel art samurai (it was).

The process to create a custom theme was simple. I made a copy of the original theme files and opened the sprite bitmap in Aseprite to draw my own pixel art. I collected references from Pinterest and even used Chat GPT to generate concept images, all of which proved useful while drawing my own sprites.

Once the pixel art was done, all that was left was to edit a config file and then add the new theme folder to the game files. There were options to customize the colors used for the hexagons and to add music files for the sound effects, but I stuck with the defaults for those. I named the theme “Shogunate” and tried it out using the game’s Japan map. Before long I was leading my pixel army to victory.

I’ve played through several islands with my custom theme now and—while I’ll always have a soft spot for the original theme—I don’t see myself switching back any time soon. It’s been a rewarding way to revisit this classic game and enjoy it anew.

For anyone else looking to play Slay, updated versions are available on the App Store and Steam, but my preference will always be the version I first played on that demo disk years and years ago. Sean O’Connor’s website also includes a page with Slay themes that other people made back in the day, but if you want to give my Shogunate theme a try, I’ve made it available for download here. Enjoy!