Fourty Years Full Circle

I wrote a bit in Elegy For Lonely Fun about building a sim-like, game-like thing. Here it is a few months later, and I have done a bit of that, and I have thoughts.

Some history. Arguably, the entire arc of my career is the result of wanting to make computer games. I graduated college in 1990, and what I wanted was a job doing Game Design, and I had hoped to get such a job in the nascent Boston-area computer game community of companies and startups. This was not to be. I had zero tech skills, could not code, and didn’t understand much of anything about computers. My degree was undergraduate math - and the abstract variety, so not stats, nothing like that. It wasn’t looking good. I pivoted and decided I would find work on the lowest rung of the ladder in the tech world - software testing.

That landed.

I clawed my way into being a coder. (Thanks Art Mellor and Peter Schmidt!)

Then, for a hot minute, my first boss at AOL said I would be making computer games. Huzzah!

Except then when I arrived on the job, no. Not games. “Hook AOL up to the internet.” So I did that.

A few years (and one AOL Instant Messenger later) I got another shot at making games when I left AOL and took a job in Charlottesville, VA for Kesmai, who were ahead of the curve (briefly) on MMOs. Alas, the leadership there didn’t know (or appreciate) who I was and gave me the worst sort of low-level “fix bugs in this game no one plays anymore” work. I lasted less than 90 days at Kesmai.

Since that day to this, I have not had my shot at making computer games.

(I have, however, written a decent number of TTRPGs. See Iron Brothers Games.)

Truth be told, I stopped even playing computer games awhile ago. Kids, divorce, life. I mean not totally. Yes, Dwarf Fortress, yes, Minecraft, yes a dash of Red Dead Redemption, even a schmear of Skyrim. But not much.

So, we can throw some shade at the age of AI coding assistants, but their arrival on the scene has enabled me to finally realize my lifelong half-pursued-quest of “I make computer games.”

Turns out, 45 years of being the Forever GM™ has given me some opinions. I have Things To Say™.

Some of those things:

  • Proper design starts with understanding player expectations and genre tropes/conventions. But it does not end there.
  • Design is an expression of values.
  • Design should be highly opinionated. It is better to create one rabid evangelist than to pander to the fickle masses.
  • Sid Meier is right about meaningful choice. Really, really right.
  • The work has more than one constituency. Players are one. I am another. In TTRPG land, we say the GM’s fun also matters. True here as well.

(Ok fine all of this is GDC milquetoast, fine, fine.)

Some of this is at play (hah see what I did there? games? play?) in my Perilous Delve project. Download the game, try it out.

Perilous Delve is a top-down lo-fi RPG. But that’s just the surface. It won’t do well in a Steam carousel because it’s built on CC0 art assets, and it reads like a thousand “asset flip” games that clog discovery on the platform. (See my Distribution Is Dead essay, it applies equally here too.)

But underneath that veneer is the sim. The lesson of decades of playing OSR games. “This world turns without you.”

And that enables the true conceit of the game: YOU are the dangerous neighbor.

By design, the viewport is claustrophobic because it mirrors the focus. The village is a handful of named NPCs with real jobs, opinions, who remember your actions, and have their own reactions. The overworld is infinite, but its social surface is a haiku. Your village is watching you. They need you, but you also make their life difficult and complicated. There’s tension.

The hens lay eggs without you. The farmer tills his field. The mason breaks stone. All in the liminal edge of civilization, the border of the strange. Tern and Yala, Bongo the kleptomaniac. They are just living their best sim lives.

What about you? You delve into dungeons. Formulaic, right?

So it would seem. But I add a few more “rules”:

  • Diegetic beats a counter. If something happened that matters, someone in the world should be able to say it. A HUD is a confession that the world could not. Skill trees are meh. Finding something in the game world that makes you more badass? Yes, please.
  • Lore is dry. People (NPCs) are not. Players don’t want to read lore dumps. But everybody remembers what the barkeep said about them.
  • Everyone is mortal by design. The villagers, the monsters, you.
  • There is no wrong way to play. Steal, farm, hide, burn the village down. The world still spins. That’s the game.

One thing I have come to appreciate over 40 years of GMing is being surprised by my own world, my creation. This is why random tables and oracles matter in these kinds of games. As much as my players get a delightful sense of discovering some other place with its own reality, its own rules, I would like that feeling, even as my hand authors said world. In a CRPG, that’s what everyone likes to call emergent behavior, and to me, it’s chef’s kiss. Praise to the procgen gods.

I give the NPCs their own drives and needs, and there are places and things that can satisfy those drives. But of course, the player comes along like the chaos monkey they are and stirs it all up. Then things happen. Things I didn’t expect, even though I wound the gears for this clockwork world. That’s just so damn fun.

For me it was this moment, in my own game, Perilous Delve. My little avatar had survived another foray into the monster-infested dungeon, and was back in the Overworld, at the little village. I had built a pen for the chickens, and felt rather proud. Then I got some notification from some app or my phone or something, and was distracted for a bit. Suddenly, from the game, the sounds of drawn steel and my avatar getting beat up. I flipped back to the game and damnit it was 4am, the dead of night, and a goblin raider had shown up, chewed a hole in the fence and murdered my hens.

What in the actual hello?

That. That’s the moment.

Yep. After fourty years, I finally got to make a game. A game I wanted. And I discovered that decades of GMing had taught me that a world capable of surprising its maker is a world worth making.

You can download the game here.


Colin Steele writes about things he has no business writing about at colinsteele.org. He published his first TTRPG in 1989. He hopes you try out his game.