Few multiplayer roles carry as much responsibility or intimidation as the tank. Responsible for positioning enemies, protecting teammates, controlling encounters, and leading groups through increasingly complex content, tanking has long been considered one of the most mechanically and socially demanding roles in MMORPGs. Yet despite its importance, its core systems have rarely been explored outside of multiplayer games.

Don't Lose Aggro asks a deceptively simple question: what if tanking itself became the game? Instead of treating aggro management as an invisible support mechanic, the solo-developed roguelite rebuilds the entire experience around positioning, protecting AI companions, controlling enemy attention, and translating decades of MMO design into a readable single-player experience. Along the way, invisible systems like threat are reimagined through new visual feedback, encounter design, and progression systems built specifically for solo play. 

We spoke with the game's solo indie developer, Oren Koren, about distilling MMO tanking into its essential mechanics, redesigning threat for readability, building companion AI that recreates the feel of party dynamics, creating encounters around positioning instead of damage, and the lessons learned from developing such a niche concept in Early Access.

Don’t Lose Aggro takes one of the most specific roles in MMO raiding (the tank) and turns it into the center of a single-player roguelite. Where did that idea come from, and when did you realize tanking could carry an entire game by itself?

Oren Koren, Solo Indie Developer: I've been an MMORPG gamer my whole life, more than 20 years now. But as I got older, it became harder and harder to keep up with gear and content updates; life just got in the way.

As a tank main, this hit even harder (pun intended) because the tank is on a soft contract with their raid party to be the most geared, the most knowledgeable. It is apparent in raid boss mechanics, and dungeon runs all the same. The tank leads the way, everyone follows, and leadership has become a constant side effect of picking the tank role.

For me, this became a problem that I was eager to solve. How do I lower the barrier to entry for tanking both for myself and others? Why do so few people choose to play tank? In Final Fantasy communities, there’s a term being used called “tankxiety” because it’s the fear of tanking, not because of the mechanical difficulty but because of the responsibility it often carries socially.

Messing up as a tank is a true fear of players (myself included), which further mitigates the approachability of the role.

These observations eventually turned into a game idea: What if tanking could be a small, approachable experience where players can try the role if they haven’t before without fear of blame, or provide an outlet for veteran tanks who don’t have time to invest anymore?

I think the amount of hours I spent playing the tank role alone made me realize that tanking is incredibly deep, tactical, and thoughtful when put in the right context. The role itself has elements of tower defense, action RPG, and tactical strategy combined into one.

It made me realize that if I could distill the essence of what it means to be the tank, it could be a game on its own. Protect your team, use strategic positioning and spatial awareness to achieve victory.

Most games make tanking a team role, but Don’t Lose Aggro asks players to protect an AI-controlled party. How did you approach translating the social dynamics of MMO dungeons and raids into a solo experience?

Oren Koren: I think this has been one of the most fun challenges I tackled when designing the game. How will the game imitate popular interactions you see in a raid party?

The answer is companion personalities. Each NPC in the group has their own behaviors reacting to game events: the healer might complain when you lose aggro and the ranger might go and pull some mobs from across the room when you weren’t ready (which turned out to not actually be fun, more on that later) - these scripted behaviors are the thing that makes DLA unique, where actual party-based gameplay imitates social interactions that could happen in an MMO. I want the players to truly develop relationships with their companions even if they aren’t real.

Aggro is usually an invisible or semi-visible system in MMOs. How did you design threat, enemy targeting, player feedback, UI, and encounter readability so players can understand when they are succeeding or losing control?

Oren Koren: This question really hits the hardest part about designing a game around tanking, and it was and remains my biggest challenge.

Tanking is a context-based idea, meaning if I show you a screenshot of the game and ask what it’s about, you likely won’t be able to tell it's about being the tank.

Setting up the stage for tanking means the player needs to understand why they are in the tank's shoes, what will happen if they fail, and none of it is immediate feedback oriented, so my goal is to make it one.

I am trying to reinvent tanking in this game to be very visible, where it's very clear when you are doing a good job, and threat isn’t invisible, but it's reactive. Every time you grab an enemy aggro, I want the player to feel like they are doing something meaningful because this often gets lost in MMOs where tanking is just a necessity of the team while the real heroes do the work.

Every update, I add more to this: the screen shakes when a companion takes damage, the enemies grow bigger when they are not targeting you, the boss mechanics are based on aggro states, and the end goal of this is to make every single piece of feedback the game throws at the player derive from the tanking fantasy.

To solve this, I decided to combine health with threat as the main system of the game, and I’m expanding on that in the last question.

The Steam page emphasizes protecting your team by forcing enemies to attack you. How do you make defensive actions, positioning, crowd control, and mitigation feel as satisfying as dealing damage?

Oren Koren: I think this is about setting the player's expectations in the first hour of play.

Players by default will look to do the most damage, even when tanking. The game has to reward other signals to offset the expectation towards a more strategic approach, so in DLA your own damage is very low and it's ineffective to play as a DPS, but when you use crowd control or other support capabilities the game rewards you.

The main mission of early access is understanding where players who never played tank feel like it's not rewarding enough and pumping those areas up.

Can you walk us through the design of the companion party? How do healers, damage dealers, and other NPC allies behave, and how much control or unpredictability did you want players to have over them?

Oren Koren: At first, I thought it would be cool to have the party be unpredictable; for example, the ranger teleporting around and going into melee range taking damage, in my mind that’s one of the most classical moments of tanking where your group actually makes your life harder.

This does not really translate to a single player environment, where players know it's scripted; the authenticity of these situations does not carry over to players without prior context of tanking.

Throughout development, I have to make choices where some companion behaviors align with the “true experience” of tanking but are simply not fun for new players who want to get into it, and ultimately, and unfortunately, a new player does not view the party trolling you as funny.

Don’t Lose Aggro combines MMO raid mechanics with roguelite builds, talents, and run-based progression. How did you decide which MMO systems to preserve, which to simplify, and which to rework for a faster single-player loop?

Oren Koren: This is an ongoing process with the community, figuring out exactly where the game will stand between its roguelite aspects versus MMO systems.

The fun part is that both genres are great for progression systems, and progression is something I’m putting a lot of emphasis on for the development roadmap.

I would say the choice always comes down to the biggest design pillar—does it support the tanking fantasy?—and the feelings systems and features invoke for the player. I try to make the systems aligned with the vision of becoming a master in tanking.

For example, I kept aggro but removed threat, because threat was invisible and unreadable in the new format. The number of abilities had to be simplified and contained both for a replayability aspect and console compatibility; this game cannot have 4 action bars filled with abilities.

Open world had to be removed due to scope naturally, and compensating for it with a city hub that resembles an MMO hub did wonders.

What does encounter design look like for a game built around tanking? How do you create bosses, enemy packs, telegraphs, hazards, and pressure points that test awareness without overwhelming solo players?

Oren Koren: There are two approaches to this, because I think dungeon tanking and boss tanking are vastly different.

When you’re pushing a dungeon, you tank masses of enemies, with focus on pull size and efficiency; these encounters should present a moderate challenge, but the focus is on smart positioning and routing.

The boss fights are more interesting to design in a tanking game, especially when there's no off-tank to taunt off of (yet).

Introducing mechanics that bring out the tanking challenge specifically would look like facing the boss away from the party, running away from your companions or stacking with them, standing between the boss and them to soak a big directional hit, and more.

The game is developed in Unity and is currently in Early Access. What does your production pipeline look like as a solo developer, and which tools or workflows have been most important for building and iterating quickly?

Oren Koren: This is a fairly bootstrapped project with a (very) limited budget so the emphasis is always on the next feature that will have the most impact, I try to be as data driven as I can and I’m very quick to code things due to my experience as a software engineer but ultimately I think outsourcing art efficiently is the most important workflow to have, as I don’t make the art myself and rely on contractors helping with the assets I need a way to effectively integrate those.

Plus, most of my tooling is focused on things like collision detection tools, bugs with LODs, and tools to improve GPU performance. I think one of the cooler tools I’ve built so far is a spawn visualizer for the dungeon, which, filtered by difficulty level, shows me all the spawns and allows me to modify them easily. This survives the scale of the dungeon, which has around 50 spawns, and I needed a way to responsibly manage.

You have been open about wanting to capture the fun of MMO tanking without the time commitment, guild coordination, or social pressure that often comes with online raiding. How has that philosophy shaped the game’s pacing, difficulty, and onboarding?

Oren Koren: Since the game is on Steam, it has two fairly different audiences, one that comes externally to Steam and from MMO communities and one that finds the game on the platform and tries it out of curiosity.

Early access started as a game for the latter, but I’m building it to become more appealing to the former, and onboarding is the biggest challenge for players without prior context to what tanking is.

I think the philosophy started from “making a game for tank veterans” and is slowly turning to “making tanking approachable and fun” because of how incredibly niche the first one is.

This new philosophy changes the game’s pacing drastically because now I’m looking at difficulty curves and drilling deep into how new players view tanking and learn the concepts, with onboarding as a great focus on how to teach basic things like targeting & positioning.

Releasing the game on Steam has taught me that tanking is actually a very hard thing to grasp (not to mention master), and it could take a new player a lot of attempts to get right; it's my job to make sure that the learning is fun and not frustrating.

For 80 Level’s developer audience, what has been the hardest part of making a niche role like tanking feel readable, exciting, and complete as a standalone game, and what lessons have you learned from Early Access feedback so far?

Oren Koren: The understanding that the role uses an invisible feature called “Threat” in its core design across the whole genre and choosing to change it has been the hardest part by far.

Stripping it down and changing it to become readable is risky for both new and old audiences because I’m risking appealing to no one, where tank veterans can state “this is nothing like WOW, where is my threat meter?” while new players will not be able to get a hold of the new system I'm introducing for readable threat.

In Don’t Lose Aggro, I chose to combine health with threat where an enemy’s target is defined by their relative health; for example, an enemy targets your companions until it reaches 50% health  (or is taunted) and then is scripted to turn to you until slain.

This new system I introduced replaces the concept of threat as you know it needs to be convincing enough to both new and informed players, and without it being readable with exciting feedback, the game would struggle to find an audience.

Oren Koren, Solo Indie Developer for Don't Lose Aggro