Documenting one mage's journey to follow his dream and die trying
TomeSpire 05/07 Sprint Retrospective
Inscribed on
This is the part of the post where I extol you, EXTOL YOU, to have some soup. Do you? Do you have some soup? Or do you hurt me with your cold, soupless eyes. Do you rebuke the calming warmth of the avgolemono? How could you? Monster.
Hey. Guess what. We’re a company now! Like. For realsie reals. I mean, technically we were already a company. You can be a company too, today, if you decide real hard and operate as “Yourself, Inc.” You can just do things.
But no, I mean, we’re a company in the “registered with the state” and “lots of paperwork” senses. TomeSpire Games LLC. All official-like. It was approximately more paperwork than getting a driver’s license, and less paperwork than buying a house. I’m not entirely certain that comforts me. Either starting a company is too little paperwork, or buying a house is too much. Your call.
So anyway, just in case any of the grade school teachers who thought I wouldn’t amount to anything are reading this: guess what. Small business owner. Who’s laughing now? (It is me. (I am the one who laughs. (The laughsatz haderach, if you’re nasty.)))
Okay So What Did We Actually Get Done?
Can I interest you in a fine selection of visually distinct areas with their own unique flavor? Yes? No? Yes.
First of all, look at this little guy. LOOK AT HIM.
I don’t think I’m allowed to unilaterally decide that we have a mascot. And if I did, it’d probably be a moth of some kind. But man. Protoghost (for Prototype 1 ghost) would be in the running. Protoghost.
There’s five distinct areas with five distinct visual aesthetics.
There’s a minimap for navigating between them. Originally we had buttons at the screen edges for this, but the minimap works so much better.
Unlocking new plots on a map works for all such plots on all such maps, which is important because it’s basically the core game loop.
The plots know what kind of plot they are, which is important because planting a fish in the farming map is not a very effective “create more fish” strategy.
Fishing is a thing you can do now, which is important because the answer to “Fish?” is now “Fish!”
So there used to be this twitter account I followed. Man. Y’all remember twitter? 2016, those halcyon days of yore. Anywho. There was this twitter account I followed that was just git commit messages from the video game industry. It was wildly unhinged and extremely my bullshit. “Arms no longer rotate backwards into Hell and release the Possum Army ahead of schedule”-type shit.
I hope someday people look back on these sprint retros and they think, “yup, that tracks,” about whatever my life trajectory ends up being.
The Broth, or The Foundation of Things, or What Would I Want To Have Known Before This Sprint If I Could Have Known Them
Just go ahead and start the LLC. Do not try to operate as a sole prop unless you plan to remain a sole prop. There’s nothing wrong with being a sole prop. But we always knew we would be an LLC, and the time I spent trying to “avoid the headache” of doing the needful just created more work for future-me.
Do the refactor. It always feels like now isn’t the right time. We spent last sprint doing a refactor that let us get a bunch of stuff right this sprint. Probably there will be more refactors in the future. It will always feel like we’re not making progress and it’s pretty much always the right thing to do regardless.
The Bread, or The Accoutrements, or Other Things That Go On The Side And Are Also Good Maybe But Aren’t Really A Meal On Their Own
The minimap took, like, an hour to make? Or something? Like it’s not always the thing you spend all week trying to get right that really ends up winning the day. Sometimes it’s noticing where the grain of sand was causing friction and taking a moment to sweep it out of the way.
Visual variety makes things feel “alive.” It’s weird the extent to which having a couple different flavors of “unlock the next plot” adds visual interest. We added two or three variants to each map region for unlockable plots and it was a night-and-day difference.
The Bacon… Bits? They’re a Topping. This is Almost Soup Adjacent, or The Things Coming Next, or That Which I Naively Believe We Might Actually Be Talking About Next Time
We’ve been promising the Tome Menu for a long time. And you know what? We’re going to keep promising it. Promises will continue until the Tome Menu improves, or something like that.
XP. Probably. Maybe. Look, we know it’s coming eventually. I think we’re still trying to figure out what XP will do, actually, by which I mean how the unlock and progression system will work, and until we know that it’s more of a placeholder for an idea of a concept.
I’ve tried making avgolemono soup like. At least three times. And it’s never worked for me. I’m not sure if I’m doing it wrong or I’m just not meant to enjoy a soup with that much egg in it? I like soup. I like egg. Unclear. The thing is, I keep trying. There’s a metaphor there, I think. Maybe all soup is a metaphor? I’m gonna have to sit with that one for a minute.
Famished! You look positively famished! Sit down right now, it’s soup time. Cream of Bisque. No that’s not just a fancy name for “I put all my leftover soups in the same bowl,” why do you ask?
There’s two big threads to pull, which makes sense, when your company is exactly two people wide. As much as I love juggling plates (fun fact, I never did learn how to juggle), there’s only so many I can keep spinning in the air.
On the business development side of the house, we’re running along full-steam towards the LLC. If everything had worked out according to plan, I had intended to open this retro with a triumphant “we done did it! We did the thing!” A fanfare of trumpets. Children weeping in the streets. Ticker-tape parade. That whole thing.
Unfortunately, both banks and the government move at their own pace, and there’s very little control I can exert there. I’ll tell you that the due diligence phase is basically done. I know what paperwork I need to file, I know who I need to file it with, and I’ve figured out the corporate partners who can help me get it done. Literally the only roadblock is money landing in the game studio’s bank account so that I can click the buttons that launch the ship. Tomorrow maybe? Hopefully?
On the technology side of the house, we basically tore the game to pieces and then reassembled it. It was horrifying. Like imagine a scene from Hellraiser where someone opens the Lament Configuration and then the Cenobites show up and spend nine days methodically disassembling their moist flesh only to put it all back together in terrifying new ways. Like that. But the game code.
It’s good. The new shape is beautiful. But there was some pain along the way.
Okay So What Did We Actually Get Done?
Prototype 1, Sprint 3
Okay so the headline here is the game is running again. At the start of the sprint it was not running. It was not even walking. One might, if they were being charitable, argue that perhaps they had once seen it crawl.
We got maps. The maps got areas. You can move smoothly between them.
We got plots. The plots got states. And the tools know.
This is only 30% as horrifying as it probably sounds. Sentient tools aren’t currently on the roadmap. But it does mean you don’t have to constantly pick the right tool for the current plot-state.
We got mana. The mana got an orb. It is very cool and we’re quite proud of it.
Why water crops with water when you can water them with mana?
Mana: it’s what plants crave.
There were a couple more hidden delights, but you know what? I’m keeping them secret. I’m not telling and you can’t make me.
The Broth, or The Foundation of Things, or What Would I Want To Have Known Before This Sprint If I Could Have Known Them
Start the bank transfer about seven weeks before you could possibly anticipate needing it. You know what, you should probably just go start a bank transfer right now. Get it going just in case. It’s like putting a potato in the oven. You may not want a baked potato right now, but what about you in seven hours?
Sometimes it’s okay to break the build in service of putting the parts together in a better order.
The Bread, or The Accoutrements, or Other Things That Go On The Side And Are Also Good Maybe But Aren’t Really A Meal On Their Own
Not switching the tools is a good affordance to the design of an incremental game. It’s okay to switch and manage tools in a farming game, because the pace is different, the loop is different. In an incremental where you’re managing several tens of crops across multiple different map screens, it gets frustrating.
The Bourbon … Alcohol’s A Food, Right?, or The Things Coming Next, or That Which I Naively Believe We Might Actually Be Talking About Next Time
We’d like to get the Tome Menu working. A book can be a menu. Who says a book can’t be a menu?
Reworking how the player purchases plots. Current design is functional but not great.
More kinds of plots, maybe? Sort of a stretch goal, but definitely on the horizon.
Who said you couldn’t grow a fish? Not with that attitude.
If you can plant it, you can grow it, and the whole world looks like a shovel.
If broccoli-cheddar implies that cheese sauce can be a broth, and minestrone implies that pasta noodles can be an ingredient, then I think we can clearly demonstrate that macaroni and cheese is a soup.
Listen folks, it only gets more unhinged from here. Hope you’re ready.
Good morning. You look hungry. Can I interest you in a bowl of breakfast soup? Cream of Apple. No it’s quite different from apple sauce, why do you ask?
Remember how last post I was talking about getting an address for TomeSpire that wasn’t my own? Because CAN-SPAM? No?
Okay so here’s the short version: if you want to send a newsletter to people the CAN-SPAM act requires you to put a physical address somewhere in the email. Presumably so that when people get annoyed at my moth jokes they can mail me subpar canned soup in protest.
I do want to be able to send people email (if they want to receive it), and I do not want them to know my home address (I have enough soup), so TomeSpire needs its own address.
Originally, I thought, (FORESHADOWING), that I would be able to get away with just a P.O. Box. That seems simple, right? After all, it’s almost certainly never going to receive any mail. What a fool I was. A FOOL!
There’s a whole cascade of research that took up the entire sprint’s Operations capacity, and basically comes down to “if you want an address you need a D/B/A, if you want a D/B/A without your real human name and address on it, you need an LLC.” At least in my locality. This almost certainly differs depending on where you are.
Why do I care about it not having my real human name and address on it? Aside from generalized privacy concerns? Because sometimes the internet decides to get upset about stuff. Even stuff that was totally fine a few years ago. And I don’t need someone sending the cops to my house because they think I’ve unfairly characterized birds in a video game.
So I guess we’re founding the LLC?
Okay So What Did We Actually Get Done?
Prototype 1, Sprint 2
We’ve decided to lean more into the magical themes we had started exploring last sprint. “Stardew + Incremental” leaves a lot of options on the table, and who said you couldn’t be a wizard? Nobody said. They don’t get to make the rules. It’s our orb and we’re going home.
So we dropped some systems that weren’t quite working the way we hoped, and picked up some systems that seemed interesting to explore.
Now you can earn money. Yay capitalism!
Now you can spend money. Boo capitalism!
Unlock more plots with money! More plots means more crops means more capitalism. Yay plots!
You can see your crops and seeds in an inventory.
You can sell your crops for money to buy seeds to grow crops to sell for more money.
Watering cans are so last sprint. Y’all got any of them Mana Cans?
We dropped the trowel tool, crop rotting system, and the watering can chore loop. They don’t really work in an incremental, and we didn’t want to be friends with them anyway.
Tools are now plot-state-aware. If it needs to be watered, it gets watered. If it needs to be harvested it gets harvested. This works a lot better in a game that wants you to click a lot.
TomeSpire’s got a business plan. It’s many pages long. It says things like “but what if we tried to Do Art and also make a living?” and “we’re going to keep trying until we figure out what works or go insane. Probably both.” (It doesn’t say either of these things, technically, but it says the Boring Legalese versions of them).
The Broth, or The Foundation of Things, or What Would I Want To Have Known Before This Sprint If I Could Have Known Them
Some states make it real hard to start a business and protect your privacy. This is probably intentional, and probably coming from a good place (fraud protection, not making it easy to do illegal things, etc) but I think actually probably just hurts the people that don’t have the time or money to figure it out.
Buy some assets. No really. Ash has been leveling up his pixel art skills in lots of ways, including re-coloring some of the pixel art assets we bought off the shelf. Don’t think you have to do it all yourself, because almost nobody does.
The Bread, or The Accoutrements, or Other Things That Go On The Side And Are Also Good Maybe But Aren’t Really A Meal On Their Own
Sometimes ideas explode. Don’t feel bad about it. It happens to everyone and it’s very natural. Just take all the shattered pieces of the idea you thought you had and place them gently on a shelf for later. (This might be a metaphor about one failed idea spawning 20 new good ones and not letting it derail your sprint. Maybe.)
The Broccoli-Cheddar … Wait, That’s The Broth Again, or The Things Coming Next, or That Which I Naively Believe We Might Actually Be Talking About Next Time
We’re starting this sprint in cleanup mode. Probably not from the aforementioned idea explosion that probably definitely didn’t happen.
We’re thinkin’ ‘bout menus, and how you navigate between the various areas of the map.
And about XP, when you can gain it, how we track it, and what it does.
It is entirely possible that I’ll get the LLC filed. Perfect world? Yes definitely. Real world? There’s some complications, so we’ll see.
Fish?
Look breakfast soup is totally a thing and I’ll brook no dissent here. Soup, like life, is happening at all times in all places and is meant to be enjoyed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go fill my bowl.
Hi. Welcome. Hungry? You look hungry. Have some soup. This might be a long one.
You know how sometimes people be like, “I wish I could do a thing,” and then they spend their whole life doing anything but that?
I regret to inform you that’s extremely not my vibe. I do the whole thing. With my entire chest. All the time.
So I founded a game studio. Did you know you can just do things? You can totally just do things. But what does “found a studio” even mean? Technically I could file a couple bucks worth of paperwork and “found” just about anything. Ask the guy who “ran” a “restaurant” out of his back yard that sold frozen pizzas.
In The Beginning… Actually no, I’m not doing this joke again. I’ve done this joke too many times.
TomeSpire Games is two people, me and my fiancé (who we will call Ash). I’m doing 80% of the business development and 20% of the game design. He’s doing 80% of the game development and 20% of the game design. My hope is eventually that shifts and I’m more like 50/50. But for now, we do what needs must.
I’d figured out the name about a year ago. Indeed, the domain registration renewed during our first sprint. Email had been working for a while, just for me, hanging off my existing Fastmail subscription. I needed it to work when I registered for GDC2026. The website followed only shortly before GDC.
Just enough of a web presence that if someone googled me after a round of Speed Networking, it would look like there was an actual (if small) studio, and not just a wizard who is actually three moths in a trench coat.
But we actually started working on it in earnest around January or February. Ash was working a low-paid dead-end IT job for a state university, and came home after a particularly frustrating day with a simple request. He wanted to quit. At the time, I thought, well okay no obviously that can’t happen. Then I started to think, okay, but what if…? The money he was bringing home mostly paid for his gas to get there, the lunches he bought, and some fun money for him. In addition to that (and everything else we do), he runs a successful online card shop for Magic: The Gathering.
All of which is to say, I started to think, maybe we could consolidate a few things and make the economics work. And since this isn’t really a post about our family design, I’ll skip how we pulled that off and simply get to the good part. That’s what we did, and so as a result Ash now works from home as the studio’s unpaid intern.
On The Clicking of Buttons
In case you ever decide to start a company and don’t already know this, here are a few important notes:
Get the company its own bank account. Transfer in some money from yourself. Treat that as the company’s from that point forward. This is important and future-you-trying-to-do-taxes will thank now-you for it.
Make new accounts for the company. There may be stuff you started before you formally created a company. For example, I had been sitting on the TomeSpire domains, but I needed to get those out of my personal registrar account and into one owned by the company.
Figure out your marketing pipeline early. Lots of good stuff gets made that nobody ever finds out about. We’ve decided to use Itch as our top-of-funnel discovery platform and a one-two punch of Email and Discord as our notification vehicles. No social media, because I don’t think it works and I’m not good at it. If we’re ever fortunate to hire someone who is good at it, then they can revisit that stance.
Prototype 1
If you’ll allow me a brief aside. You will? Thank you. Have some more soup.
There’s a trap that lots of first-time game creators fall into, which is they decide their First Game is going to be their Forever Game.
Don’t do this. It almost never works. And the two or three people it has worked for are Survivorship Bias. We don’t tell the stories of the hundreds or thousands who never shipped, because we’ve never heard of them.
So we’re starting with a series of prototypes. The goal is roughly one per quarter for probably the next two years. Because we want to get our name out there as a maker of Weird Stuff, and because we have a lot to learn, and because it increases our surface area of luck.
If one happens to really “click,” then we’ll look into developing it into a full game. But, weirdly, that’s not actually the goal. Prototypes now. Game later.
We kicked around probably 10-20 ideas for what our first prototype could be. Almost all of them are sitting in the idea bank for future development. I still like the idea of a haunted mainframe that wants to steal your soul. I also like the one that’s a puzzle game where you’re trying to break out of a dungeon instead of in. Also did I ever tell you about my game idea where the internet is Pokemon? The internet is Pokemon.
The winner for this cycle could best be described as “what if Stardew Valley was an incremental game?”
Incrementals are interesting, but they’re also good candidates because they’re often not graphically or technically complex. It’s more about the interaction of systems and the loop you can build out of that, than trying to push graphical fidelity. A good incremental says a lot more about the developer’s ability to execute on an idea than their technical fundamentals. In short, it’s a perfect candidate for learning a new technology stack. Which we are.
The last time I worked in video games we were building on the Wolf3d engine. This is Ash’s first game.
Okay So What Did We Actually Get Done?
Prototype 1, Sprint 1
This is going to be a bit of a punch list:
We got our dirty paws on some assets. Ash is a good pixel artist, but having to do all the art from scratch, plus build the game, plus everything else is a lot for one person. Buying some baseline assets (with the company card!) allows us to execute faster on the vision.
We made crops grow. This might seem silly, but if you’re going to have crops, figuring out how to get them to grow over time, how to get the right image to display when they do? These are the pieces from which a game system is built.
We made tools. Let there be a watering can, and let it sprinkle, and we saw that it was good.
We made a tiled plot system, so that you could plant crops in specific places, and then we made it so that they could be unlocked. One of the key game loops in most incremental games is getting resource to unlock more thing so that you can get more resource to unlock more thing and so on and so forth.
We made it rain. Both literally and figuratively. From the watering can and the sky, with effects on how the crops grow.
We made it look a little prettier. For the screenshot. We probably shouldn’t have, but it’s our first screenshot and we’re proud of it.
Not bad for like, nine days, right?
In a traditional sprint retro usually we’d talk about three things. What went well, what didn’t, and what we might want to change next time. Sometimes this is called “start, stop, keep.” But we’re an extremely nontraditional company run by an extremely nontraditional internet soup wizard.
We will instead be doing stuff we wish we’d known, notes to future us, and what we think is coming next.
The Broth, or The Foundation of Things, or What Would I Want To Have Known Before This Sprint If I Could Have Known Them
We’re using YouTrack as our planning tool. I like JetBrains. It’s pretty good. But it’s also very Not Jira. Coming from a mostly-Jira background, I’ve had to rapidly learn and adapt to a surprisingly different take on how a tool like this should work.
Did you know the CAN-SPAM act requires the sender of the email to put a physical mailing address in the email? Me either, but I do now. If I had known I was going to need an address for the studio that wasn’t my address, I would have started the process of getting one earlier. (To be fair, I knew we’d need this eventually, but wanted to put it off as long as possible).
The Bread, or The Accoutrements, or Other Things That Go On The Side And Are Also Good Maybe But Aren’t Really A Meal On Their Own
Having good idea capture hygiene is really important in a creative company. This is a pipeline I’m still working on, and probably will be forever, but lots of good ideas pop up that aren’t right for this prototype but may be for the next.
The … Look I Couldn’t Find A B-Food-Word That Worked Here, or The Things Coming Next, or That Which I Naively Believe We Might Actually Be Talking About Next Time
We have honest-to-goodness research tickets in the next sprint covering basic engine functionality. Stuff we’ve realized we just plain need to understand better if we want to be able to use it. Making games is hard y’all.
Starting in on the currency system. There needs to be a thing you can sell crops for, and a thing you can use to buy upgrades, and we need a currency to be able to test that.
On July 2nd at 10:33 Bruce Straley, director of Uncharted 2 and The Last of Us, received an email.
Subject: RE: Notice of Termination
Chapter 1
I went to GDC 2026 last week. This is notable for many reasons, not least of which: I am not currently a game developer. And in fact have not been for roughly 20 years.
Oh, sure. I’ve got a pile of hobby games deep enough that the cats sometimes get lost in it. I’ve written a MUD in just about every language it’s possible to do that in. And also some where it isn’t.
But nothing that’s ever seen commercial release. Most of them haven’t even been played by other people.
So like, why spend the cost of a Disney World vacation to go to a trade show for an industry I’m not involved in?
Because, dear reader, I was trying to figure out if maybe I shouldn’t be. I was looking for my tribe. I wanted to know if I would belong.
But if I’m being honest, by the time I boarded the plane to GDC, I already knew. I wasn’t at GDC to figure out if I should make games. I was at GDC because I can’t not.
Chapter 2
One of the interesting things about attending GDC as a relative outsider trying to find their place is that there’s no “obvious” set of sessions to attend. If I were showing up as a technical artist, then great, attend all the sessions on technical art. Looking for a publisher? Talk to lots of publishers.
GDC does a great job of providing paved paths where paths make sense.
But I was there for the tasting platter. The smorgasbord. I went to every session that seemed even remotely interesting or relevant.
I listened to Owlcat Games talk about their Etudes system for highly-branched narrative design.
I listened to Outersloth talk about indie game funding.
I listened as developers big and small talked about the tiny games they made in their free time when they weren’t making bigger games. Because they, too, have a spleen demon that compels them to create.
The only thread that tied it all together is that each and every session was interesting. And in almost every case I had traded off one if not two other equally-enticing sessions to be in the room.
Chapter 3
Here’s the thing. I never once heard anyone say it was easy. Quite the opposite. There was broad agreement that making games is hard. This is a field no sane person would ever enter. Except we feel compelled to do it for reasons beyond even our own understanding.
To abuse a line an old professor of mine once tossed out: if you want an easy job that pays well, go into finance. Everyone else has to work for a living.
I’ve spent the last 20+ years trying to run away from video games, because my first professional experience was wildly negative, and I was young, and I didn’t understand that one bad job is just a bad job, and that it wouldn’t change what I was passionate about.
When I booked my tickets to GDC it was because I wanted to prove out the idea of a pivot to Video Games. I’m middle aged! By traditional wisdom it’s getting kind of late to start a new career!
What I found was room after room of people that would sagely nod that they had unwisely chosen to do this difficult, impossible thing. And would do it again. Every time.
Towards the end of the week I ended up at a talk titled: From a Naughty Dog to a Wildflower: The Fears, Failures, and Freedoms Found because I was interested in the founding-an-indie-studio part. Boy was I in for a surprise.
Chapter 4
Bruce Straley spent 18 years at Naughty Dog, making severalhighlyacclaimed video games. You may even have heard of them.
He left in 2017 because he felt like he’d done what he needed to do. Said what he needed to say. The challenges no longer felt challenging.
And then his spleen demon (my words, not his) rose up and said, “Hey. Buddy. You didn’t really think you were going to retire did ya?” (In my head his spleen demon, as is traditional, has a vaguely unplaceable but roughly New Jersey-esque accent.)
So he started Wildflower Interactive. There’s much about that journey I’m not qualified to tell, and I’m just roughly paraphrasing what he said during his GDC talk on his career journey from Naughty Dog to Wildflower. But things did not entirely go as he had hoped.
Wildflower’s publisher required milestone deliverables every three months. In practice, that meant roughly a week and a half shoring up the deliverables and a week and a half postmortem after. Basically one month out of every three spent not trying to find the fun. A quarter of the year not making the game.
Eventually, disputes over the staggering of releases would lead to a strained relationship with the publisher. Every milestone was a showdown. Deliver, or give the publisher their chance to cancel.
Eventually, they canceled anyway.
Subject: RE: Notice of Termination
But Wildflower’s legal team had been smart. Cancellation for convenience meant that the publisher needed to pay out. And that meant Wildflower had runway. And a new problem.
Straley had three choices:
Keep the full team and fix the game.
Reduce the team and rescope the game.
Close the studio.
The problem with option #1 is that runway only lasts so long, and he didn’t think they had enough runway to deliver the game as they originally imagined it.
The problem with option #3 is Straley seems like a genuinely good guy. He could have taken the money and run. It would have been completely legal to throw in the towel.
So he made the hard choice. He picked option #2. They laid some staff off, they reimagined what that game could be, and they soldiered on.
Chapter 5
Wildflower’s remaining staff had a rough road ahead. If you’ve ever had to take ownership for someone else’s code, you know how hard it can be to figure out what they were trying to do.
Hell is someone else’s implementation.
They cut away the parts of the game that weren’t working, while worrying whether the studio was even going to make it.
Three months into rebuilding the game, Straley asked if a problem was solvable. He expected resistance. He expected no.
“That’s just a knob. I’ll tweak a variable.”
The team had survived the trial by fire, turned the corner, and were capable of moving forward.
All of this led Straley to a line that will live rent free in my head for the rest of my life. I might even get it tattooed.
“Stick your chest out and go like — fuck it. Let’s try." - Bruce Straley, GDC 2026
The whole reason I was at GDC in the first place was to answer a question. Should I found an indie game studio?
I don’t know that it got as much traction as it probably deserved, but Sam Seer asked us to talk about three games that were important to us, and I thought. Yes. Yes I think I will.
A Tale in the Desert
I am not physically capable of being reasonable about A Tale in the Desert. This is my ur-game. This is the game that I literally cannot be allowed to play, because it would consume me whole.
It would take me into its bosom and I would be unmade.
My first encounter with ATITD was through the IRC channel of another game (for another time). A friend said, “hey, this sounds like your jam.” And it was. It extremely was.
This was back during their open beta, but the way an ATITD beta worked was that they’d reset the game and make it available to play for a weekend. Dear reader, I would orient my entire life around maximizing that weekend. I would do nothing else. It was my everything.
Eventually they launched into “Tale 1.” If you didn’t read the Wikipedia link (no judgement,) it’s important to know that ATITD operated in “tales.” Each tale would begin with a fresh world, with slightly modified systems, and progress through to a complete ending, before starting anew.
Originally, these tales were designed to last a year. Most of them have ran significantly longer.
The first tale I was able to play, as a paying customer, was Tale 3. I participated in the beta for Tale 2, and I think I played in Tale 4 as well. But that was around the time I went back to college as an adult, and realized that I simply couldn’t be allowed to continue playing.
So I shut the door and have never allowed myself to turn the key. Because I know that on the other side are all the horror stories of someone who couldn’t disconnect from an MMO until there was nothing left.
That would be me, and I know it with my entire self.
Exalted (1e)
I didn’t have a lot of access to TTRPG sourcebooks as a youth. Some time in middle school I got my filthy paws on a copy of AD&D, and that lead to no end of trouble at home for bringing the “devil magic” into our home.
Fast forward a few years to high school, and I had a small amount of money burning a hole in my pocket which I had decided to spend on either Cyberpunk or Shadowrun. I can’t remember which. But I had been eyeing it at my local Borders for some time.
Except when I got there, it was gone. But what I saw in its place, which would go on to inform most of my own tastes and opinions about RPGs far in excess of anything D&D achieved, was Exalted.
The original first edition solars book. Which probably had only just come out.
It was entirely unlike anything I had encountered before. A wildly imaginative wuxia-inspired TTRPG setting with godlike powers, grand destinies, evocative mysteries, and enough ideas to fill every campaign world I would ever go on to write.
Something I didn’t know at the time but now deeply appreciate is that each of the Exalted 1e core rulebooks has an unreliable narrator. The history of the world, how they got where they are, who is to blame, is always written from the perspective of the faction whose book you are reading.
And so, over the course of roughly eight of them, it’s possible to figure out what really happened. Which set an example for world building that I aspire to live up to.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I managed to organically collect almost every book that came out for first edition. I would later have to sell them all to make ends meet, but one of the first things I did once I was financially stable was track down and complete the collection, and the entire run of Exalted 1e has place of pride on my bookshelf to this day.
Earthdawn
For everything that Exalted is, Earthdawn probably should have been. It is the first TTRPG I ever encountered in the wild. Before I found D&D, a friend let me borrow their copy of the Earthdawn core rulebook.
I think if I had found it slightly later, or in a position where I could have purchased more of its materials, it might have taken off more in my imagination. As it stands, this is the book that gave me a fascination with airships. And its particular rendition of “blood magic” (trading permanent stat debuffs for ongoing magical effects.)
Many years later I would come to find out that much as Exalted was intended to be the “backstory” for the World of Darkness, Earthdawn is meant to be the “backstory” for Shadowrun.
Exalted quickly grew into something very much its own, and in no way ties into the rest of the WoD. You can still find evidence that this was the original plan, including in the advertising copy on Amazon.com.
You’ve Heard the Rumors.
Before the Impergium before the Mythic Ages before the Sundering before there was a World of Darkness there was something else. And now it is revealed, at last. Come adventure in the Second Age of the World, the fantastic world of the Exalted.
Now Play the Game.
Though thematically related to the modern-day World of Darkness, Exalted begins a whole new line of fantasy products from White Wolf. This hardcover rulebook invites you to become one of the Exalted, an heir to an Age of Heroes. Created to be saviors and Prometheans to humanity, the first Exalted were corrupted and slain by their own brethren. But now, new Exalted are being reborn into the Second Age of the World. Can you survive in a world that needs you yet reviles you? The fate of this new world is in your hands.
Though as far as I understand, Earthdawn is still nominally the background explanation for the world that would eventually become Shadowrun. Both games are somewhat famously considered “unplayable” by modern standards. At least in their original editions. There’s a great deal of interesting concepts in them, but mechanically they didn’t work.
And, so…
One of the through lines for all three of these games is that they are the origin story for concepts that continue to repeat in every creative endeavor I’ve undertaken since. I’ve built MUDs that are basically ATITD. I’ve written campaign worlds that are basically Exalted. My friends and I dreamed through most of high school of making an MMO about airships that had Earthdawn as its beating heart.
Over time I’ve continued to refine the parts of these ideas I like the most, adapt them into something new. My campaign worlds look a lot less like Exalted with the serial numbers filed off. But if you know where to look, you can still find the marks they left on the person I would someday become.
Half-tempted to write a massively distributed roll-and-write wargame to be played by All of PAX.
Insane? Yes, absolutely.
When has that stopped me before?
PAX Unplugged 2025 - PAX Metro: The Underground Expedition
Inscribed on
For those of you who were at PAX Unplugged you may have encountered the Line Entertainment team. And if you found us at night, you may have been presented with the opportunity to participate in the Grand Campaign - a distributed adventure narrative told over the course of the weekend.
As each story beat progressed attendees were presented with the current situation and a variety of options, each with a custom Difficulty Check (DC) attached. Rolling on the giant inflatable d20 and passing the DC added a vote to the attendee’s preferred narrative path. The accumulation of votes determined the path the story took.
Presented below is the narrative we created. More details will be forthcoming in a later Postmortem post.
The Descent
Your expedition team stands at the entrance to Service Tunnel 404, deep beneath PAX Metro. The air is thick with moisture and strange, chittering sounds echo from below. Your guide points to three possible routes deeper into the metro system, each leading into darkness.
🔹 Follow the Main Service Rails
It’s the official route, but also where the missing crews were last seen. 1 vote
🔹 Wade Through the Flooded Lower Level
Knee-deep water glows faintly with bioluminescent algae. It’s a shortcut, but you’ll be walking blind through an unknown ecosystem. 3 votes — CHOSEN
🔹 Climb Through the Ventilation System
The metal grating overhead leads to the air ducts. Risky and noisy, but you’ll see everything below before committing. 1 vote
Bioluminescent Gardens
The flooded tunnels have become an underwater forest. Glowing algae creates an ethereal blue-green light, schools of translucent fish dart between submerged platforms, and the water hums with life. But larger shapes move in the deeper channels ahead.
🔹 Follow the Water Source
Trace the clean, flowing current upstream to see what’s feeding this thriving ecosystem. 5 votes
🔹 Investigate the Far Tunnel
Head toward a side passage where the bioluminescence seems brightest and most concentrated. 15 votes — CHOSEN
🔹 Approach the Large Shapes
Wade toward the massive forms moving in the deeper water - they could be debris, vehicles, or something alive. 13 votes
The Hidden Passage
Behind concealed maintenance doors marked with symbols that predate the metro, you’ve found passages that lead to the true heart of this underground world. The architecture here is older, more purposeful - this was built to be hidden.
🔹 Commit to the Hidden World
Cross the threshold into whatever lies beyond. There may be no going back to the surface world as you knew it. 10 votes — CHOSEN
Guardians of the Deep
You’ve become protectors of the underground ecosystem, working alongside the enhanced wildlife to maintain the delicate balance between the surface metro and the hidden world below. The creatures accept you as allies, and you’ve found a new purpose in bridging two worlds that were always meant to coexist.
You may notice The Hidden Passage had only one way through. This is a design mistake that I’ll talk more about when I follow up with the LimeTools Postmortem.
Part 1: How Stella Got Her Groove Back, or, When The Worm Lost its Teeth
Okay, so. Uh. I’m still playing Dune: Awakening.
Yeah, I also think that’s weird.
I’ve never spent so many words explaining why I don’t recommend something only to go on and keep engaging with it. Usually I’d call it good and walk away. But there’s something here in the dark heart of Arakkis that keeps me engaged, and now I’m going to spend the next however many thousand words trying to find it.
The first time I got eaten by the worm, it took everything I had. The next five to ten hours of game time was rebuilding lost ground. There’s equipment I had that I never replaced. It sucked. And I think it sucked even more because the game really wants you to make exactly the series of mistakes I made. It doesn’t tell you that you have to, but it definitely encourages it.
But the thing is, once you’ve got a base established in the second area (whose name I never remember. Let’s call it The Gap.) Once you’ve got a base established in The Gap, it’s actually super easy to get back and forth between the first area (hereafter called The Basin) and The Gap.
Run to the nearest outpost, spend a small amount of in-game currency, fly on down. Which meant I could also head back to the now-simpler enemies of the Basin and grind for resources, for recipes. Things that had been hard to come by in hour 10 had become trivial.
Somewhere around hour 30 I realized that I no longer feared the worm, because the limit of the damage it can cause me is what I happen to be carrying at any given time, and that’s a passing fraction of what I’ve stockpiled in my base. It’s slowly transformed from a catastrophic “lose everything” event to a mild inconvenience where I’d have to spend 15 minutes recrafting some gear. All the resources I need are in chests at home.
Slowly, I was beginning to master desert power.
Part 2: Shop Smart. Shop S-Mart.
This is not my original observation, but I forget where I saw it first: Dune: Awakening is a game of eras. Foot power, buggy power, and sky power.
This is my original observation: It’s actually worse than that. Every region of the desert is its own S-Curve.
This is an S-Curve:
It takes a while to get going, then suddenly it goes up a lot, then it stalls out at the top.
You start the game with nothing and are quickly taught to make scavenged weapons and tissue paper armor. It takes most players 10-20 hours to get out of the Basin, over which you upgrade to your first real weapons and armor. The enemies go from being able to nearly instantly kill you to pretty easy to overcome.
Then, you head to the next area and the really cool gear you arrived with SUCKS! You’re back at the bottom of a new S-Curve! And the cycle repeats, once again climbing the local regional violence economy.
But that also means every new area is a transition from feeling competent, of having mastery, to once again being at the bottom of the food chain. The ideal game usually has a much smoother difficulty curve, where you feel like you’re getting better the entire time you play. In Dune: Awakening, you’re continually being kicked back to the bottom of the curve.
As I master the area I’m in, it becomes easy and fun. It’s even more fun to go back to a previous area and absolutely wreck it. But there’s no way to carry that into the next area. No matter how good I’ve gotten, I’m limited by resource access to the current tier of gear and weapons, which won’t prepare me for what comes next.
Part 3: Hostile Teaching Methods and Other Pedagogy
Over time what I’ve realized is that the core problem is one of communication. The game fails repeatedly to communicate.
Case in point: there are basically two kinds of enemies in Dune. Shooters and stabbers. Shooters hang back and try to gun at you. Stabbers try to get close and poke you with their sharp pokers.
In the tutorial the game introduces the concept of a “dash.” Press alt, assuming you’re using the default keyboard map, and you’ll dash in the direction of your movement keys. Do it three times to prove you can. Never mentions it again.
Dash is the single most important thing the tutorial ever teaches you, and it spends about 30 seconds on it.
Dash is the thing that lets you escape when the AI gangs up on you. Dash is the thing that lets you not get stabbed to death by shield-wearing raiders. Dash is fundamental, critical, life-giving. For being so fundamental to the balance and design of combat, it sure is a shame that you never need to dash away from any of the enemies in the Basin.
You see, the game teaches you the basic combat inputs under pressure. You’ve got the classic tutorial unkillable enemy that just keeps coming at you until you correctly input the dash command three times. But then it sets you loose in The Basin, an easier-than-the-rest-of-the-game semi-tutorial where the AI is tuned down to make worse decisions and be easier to kill, and does not in any way reflect the complexity of future AI combat decisions.
So it’s real easy to forget about dash. Or think you don’t need it. Because you won’t, for about the next 20 hours. Better hope you remember how to do that when you get to The Gap and it becomes the only way to survive.
Better design here would have looked like enemies in The Basin using the full capabilities of the AI, who behaved like future enemies, but with downtuned damage and HP. Better to have an enemy you still need to dash away from who mostly isn’t that dangerous when you get it wrong than an enemy that stands there and lets you murder them until the difficulty ranks up.
Part 4: Games Should Be Fun The Entire Time You’re Playing Them
Dune: Awakening is a game about taking risks. Also about the planet trying to kill you. Also worms. (Which are trying to kill you.)
I’m a conservative and loss-avoidant player.
These shouldn’t mix. And mostly don’t.
Here’s the thing, I have aggressive goals in life which mean, among many other things, that I get to play maybe two or three hours of video games a week, on average. Often less. Which also means I do not have the luxury of being able to start over.
Starting over is catastrophic. Starting over means you’re now competing for my heart and mind with starting fresh. The opportunity cost of playing the same hour of a game twice is an hour of another game I’ll never get to play. It’s a high bar under the best of circumstances.
What this means is that I generally play games in a way that minimizes my downside risk. If you make me choose between doing the same one-hour task twice, with a 50% chance of success, or doing a two-hour grind once, with a 100% chance of success, I will always do the two-hour grind. As long as I enjoy the process of the grind.
Some designers would call this “optimizing the fun out of the game.” Because they have decided that fun means playing it a certain way. And that’s cool, I guess, that they know me so well that they can describe with authority whether or not I’m having fun.
At a certain point if players aren’t playing the way you intended, you need to consider that they’re rational agents making decisions under pressure. Maybe it’s not as fun as you think it is.
Part 5: Nobody Wants PvP, Funcom
Dune wants to be EVE: Online so bad. Like so, so bad. By which I mean the “drain” in this sink-and-drain economy was clearly meant to be end-game PvP. Everything is in service of end-game PvP. Every little system, every weird decision, it’s all there to support the Deep Desert and the War of Assassins between Harkonnen and Atreides.
Except nobody wants it.
How do I know that?
Evidence the One - Faction demographics. There are two factions you can choose, and in fact you are forced to pick between. Atreides or Harkonnen. The Atreides faction gets buffs to building stuff and working together. The Harkonnen faction gets buffs to PvP.
Atreides outnumbers Harkonnen 14:1. (I really wish I could find my source on this. You’ll have to take my word for it. At least as of the time of writing it’s pretty easy to find threads of people complaining about the clear faction disparity but many of them are unlinkable for a variety of “people being awful to each other on the internet” reasons. So, your Google may vary.)
Evidence the Two - Dune launched with an all-PvP endgame, which the first two content patches immediately reversed.
I suspect they did this primarily because they really wanted Dune to be a Live Service game. If you have a Live Service hit, you have a license to print money.
Notably, not because the game is better this way.
In fact, I’d argue it would have been a lot better as a single player experience.
The clear antagonist of Dune is the desert itself. A harsh, unforgiving desert, with giant sandstorms and hostile fauna. A single-player Dune game could have told a deeply compelling story about learning to survive and ultimately thrive in the hostile environment.
But compelling stories have narrative conclusions and conclusions don’t convince you to spend money in the cash shop.
Part 6: Okay, So Why Am I Still Playing?
Now that I’ve spent another, what, 20,000 words anti-recommending a game, you might rightly ask why I’m still playing it. That’s a fair question.
For all of my critiques above, and please, consider them critiques not complaints, there is the core of something really compelling at the heart of Dune: Awakening. The “ghost of a better game” as Claude so aptly put it.
I love that they took a chance on an alternate-world history where Paul Atreides was never born, where we can explore what might have been without the weight of knowing how the story was meant to go.
I love exploring the backstory of the Fremen.
I love mastering the unforgiving environment, surviving in a place that is not meant for me to thrive.
The world feels like Dune through and through, even though the game sometimes feels like rubbing my knuckles on a cheese grater.
Part 7: The Dune That Could Have Been
Dune is a deeply flawed game, that I think wasted some of its best potential in pursuit of a live service model that never should have been.
If I had been in charge I think I would have leaned into a narrative-heavy single player survival crafter experience.
Imagine instead that the game opens with you stranded on Arakkis, alone, with none of the tools you need to survive. Similar to the scene where Paul and the Lady Jessica have nothing but a single tent and a Stilsuit each, provided by Dr Yueh as compensation for his betrayal.
You find your way to a lone outpost in the desert, where rough-and-tumble locals trade you the basics you need to survive through a series of tutorial quests that also teach you the basics of the game. How to find water in the desert, which you use as a currency. How to scavenge for food or small bits of technology.
Eventually, you are presented with the opportunity to join up with a band of raiders who take you under their wing, just long enough to grow attached, before the cruel desert takes them from you and leaves you stranded once again. But this time with your wits and knowledge, and an opportunity. To sign up with the Atreides or the Harkonnen. A war of assassins is brewing and they’ll each take any competent fighter willing to sign.
Choose the Atreides, and you’ll master the desert through community and collaboration. Choose the Harkonnen and you’ll master the desert through cruelty and the swift application of superior technology.
Or, an unspoken third path. Find your own way, to the Fremen, who will teach you to live in harmony with nature. Reclaim the planet for its native people, evicting Atreides and Harkonnen both. Write a story wholly unlike the one the game tried to set out for you, in a true narrative sandbox.
I dunno man, that sounds like a pretty good game to me.
While I’m at it? Get rid of guns entirely and lean into the knives-and-shields combat that’s a hallmark of the Dune universe. I don’t know this to be true objectively, but I suspect the reason Dune: Awakening leans so heavily into guns are in service of the PvP model. A knives-only combat system probably didn’t work well, and all the various models of guns got added to balance the PvP that nobody even wants anyway.
I can see so clearly the game that Dune: Awakening could have been, if not for the economic realities at the dark heart of the games industry. It’s expensive to make a game as big as Dune tries to be.
Over the next six to twelve months I suspect they’ll roll back a lot of the PvP, though not all of it. For one thing, the sunk cost fallacy comes for all of us. For another, it’s clearly core to the design they built and it’d cost a fortune to rebuild a launched game from the ground up. They really only need it to be “good enough” that players keep playing when the inevitable cash shop launches.
It’s hard to know exactly how long I’ll keep playing Dune. Probably long enough to get another blog post out of it. Eventually I’d like to talk about some of the things I think they did pretty well. For all of my critiques, they’ve done an incredibly job of making the desert feel true to the Dune universe.
But I opened this essay with a question: why have I spent 40 hours on a game I don’t recommend? I’ve offered a lot of examples that I think point at an answer, but nothing concrete. I’ve talked about what I might have done differently, but not why I stay.
Frustratingly, I still don’t know. Even after exploring both the world of Dune: Awakening and my thoughts in this essay, there’s something ineffable about the experience of living on Arakkis. About testing myself against the harshest environment known to Sci-Fi, and finding it wanting.
Maybe that points at it more than anything else. Because the desert tested me, and I survived.
