The Stack

So, yeah, I’ve dropped into a months-long silence once again. There is a reason for this: I have been making a game. An indie puzzle game, but one that I intend to fill out to the point where I can in good conscience ask people to give me money for it. I’ll have more to say about it later, when it’s closer to complete, but the title is Runecaster and the elevator pitch is “DROD with spellcasting”.

I’m well aware that this is not likely to be a profitable endeavor — the average indie game, to a very strong first approximation, sells zero copies. But I’ve committed to spending a year developing it anyway, because (A) I can afford to, and (B) it beats looking for work in the current job market. Moreover, this is a game that I’ve been thinking of making for many years — decades, even. The initial inspiration came not from DROD, but from an obscure 90s action-RPG called Four Crystals of Trazere (or simply Legend in its European release). Four Crystals had this magic system where you constructed spells from runes, each of which had a specific and deterministic effect, forming a sort of miniature programming language. There were a handful of points in the game where it made puzzles out of this, like a sealed chamber that can only be opened by a lever inside the chamber, so that you have to figure out a way to press the lever with magic. But it wasn’t the game’s focus, and I always felt like the idea could be taken a lot farther.

Over the years, I’ve made a few previous attempts at implementing my ideas — once in Unity, once in Javascript — but this current attempt, using Godot, is the first time I’ve gotten far enough to think I’m going to finish it. And I’ve contemplated repurposing this blog as a dev diary. But the unfortunate fact is: Blogging and working on this game seem to tax exactly the same mental resources. On any given day, I am capable of working on the game, or blogging, but not both. And development has taken priority. I’m going to try to establish a schedule of game development on weekdays, blogging on weekends. We’ll see how that goes.

But in all honesty, although this has been the thing occupying my attention for most of the last few months, it hasn’t been the thing occupying my attention for the last two weeks. Something else took me over pretty thoroughly, and is only just now letting up somewhat. I’ll describe that in my next post.