Solo-developed Sengoku-era castle town-building strategy game Jyoka coming to Steam November 16

Japanese solo indie developer sfvsoft has officially announced Jyoka, coming to Steam on November 16. 

Jyoka is a strategy game centered on building and managing a castle town. It’s set in 16th-century Japan during the Sengoku (Warring States) period, when numerous regional lords vied for control of the country. Players take on the role of a minor local lord known as a kunishu, tasked with developing a wasteland devastated by bandit attacks from zero. However, various threats stand in your way, including rival lords and powerful daimyo (high-ranking feudal lords) who control the surrounding regions. You’re tasked with fending off these threats while striving to unify all of Japan. 

Gameplay is divided into three phases: castle town building, defensive battles, and castle sieges. In the town-building phase, you can construct more than 190 types of buildings to develop your settlements. Available structures cover a wide range of categories, including agricultural, tourism, commercial, and religious facilities. You gradually unlock new structures as you progress in the game. 

The most important resource for managing your castle town is rice. Developing paddy fields and increasing rice production allows you to feed your residents, while rice can also be used to pay your vassals’ stipends. Players can also change the domain’s laws, adjusting six types of tax rates as well as the rate at which residents are mobilized for forced labor. Raising taxes increases public dissatisfaction, while lowering them improves residents’ satisfaction. More people will migrate to domains with high satisfaction levels, meaning you’ll need to strike a balance between tax revenue and population when deciding on policies. 

The game’s vassal system, modeled after the real-life master-vassal relationships of the Sengoku period, lets players recruit aspiring retainers or promote ordinary soldiers to the rank of Infantry Leader to expand their ranks. Vassals are granted paddy fields as their stipends, and their obligations to perform labor and military service are determined by the estimated rice-producing capacity of the fields they receive. In other words, expanding paddy fields and distributing them among vassals directly serves to strengthen your military forces.  

Meanwhile, in the defensive battle phase, you must prepare for attacks from bandits, neighboring lords, and powerful daimyo seeking to invade your territory. Defensive structures include fences, moats, stone walls, turrets, and keep structures, which can be combined to construct formidable fortifications. You can also order your vassals to deploy, train, and change their equipment. There are six types of military equipment and unit classes available: swords, spears, long pikes, bows, cavalry, and matchlock guns. You’ll need to make use of these different troop types to repel enemy attacks. 

Once your domain has grown sufficiently powerful, you can move on to the castle siege phase and launch invasions of your own. For each siege, you choose a target from 73 enemy castles modeled after real historical fortresses, then select a commander-in-chief, participating vassals, weapons, and armor before setting out. In-game screenshots show soldiers clashing in a battle at Kiyosu Castle, a real fortress once located in what is now Kiyosu City, Aichi Prefecture, with part of the castle complex engulfed in flames. The game also allows players to adjust factors such as enemy aggressiveness through its difficulty settings. Those who prefer to avoid combat altogether can focus exclusively on building their castle town. 

Jyoka is being built in UE5 by sfvsoft, a solo development studio run by Yuto. According to the dev, the project began from a desire to create “a Japanese-made game set in Japan.” The initial concept took shape around five years ago, and it has been in active development for about three years. Yuto’s X account has been sharing progress on the castle town-building game since around 2020.  

Jyoka is scheduled to launch for PC (Steam) on November 16.