Avoiding falling into old patterns

My first impulse was to just start building. After all, that’s what this is all about. And, to be honest, that’s how I approached all my previous projects so far. With a vague concept in mind and all ready to go, I already had some neat architecture ideas that I wanted to share.

So there I was, happily setting up the project and all the familiar thoughts started popping into my head. “Uh, am I going to need this?” “But what if I’ll want to have that later?”. And then it hit me. I was acting like my own agent, just vibing away with no clear goal in sight. Overengineering, and bikeshedding with myself. Building features no one asked for or ever needed. And I specifically pointed that out in the last post. Don’t let the thing run off without supervision because it does not know where the journey goes. Well, here I was, not knowing it either.

So I did the hard thing, the right thing. I sat down, slowed down, and actually tried to think it through. Half a midlife crisis later because “What am I even doing, this does not work at all!”, I think I came up with a neat concept. It feels cohesive to me, gives me something to aim towards, and really excites me. Turns out this week was not about building fast and breaking things. It was about thinking hard. And breaking patterns.

Writing it down exposed all kinds of problems

Initially, I had some re-imagination of Black & White in mind. It sounded great in my head. And the hard part, designing the core systems, was already done, right? I can just add my own spin on it, right? But as soon as I started to write things down I noticed all the fuzzy details I had been hand-waving away. Actually thinking them through and putting them to paper forced me to look at those parts instead of skipping over them.

I was thinking about systems, and about how to pull mechanics from more modern games and merge them into those. But all of this missed the point. The ideas and solutions I came up with just did not seem fun to me. Or even exciting. So I tried to understand what I loved about Black & White in the first place. And it certainly was not that there was some deep and hidden simulation under the hood. I didn’t care about that as a kid. I was a lot more busy yeeting villagers over mountains, yeeting villagers into the ocean, or yeeting trees into nearby villages. Sometimes after setting them on fire first. Sounds a bit concerning, now that I think about it, but I turned out fine, I promise.

And then I found it. The thing I loved was being a presence in the world and having a visible impact on it.

So that’s something I want to work on. A game that allows you to be a presence in the world. A game with characters around that react to you, that you (can) care about, and that maybe hold up a mirror, letting you know what they think of you.

What just did not work

Simply taking Black & White and gluing some borrowed paint mechanics from Foundation on there, and then calling it a day obviously does not work. And the ideas I came up with while iterating on it turned out too vague and too broad. Or simply too big.

A pure god game is too vague. If you were to scale a colony sim to the size of Black & White, then yes, you definitely have an impact on the world, but you are losing a lot of personal investment. You can work around this by introducing characters, quests, and cutscenes and stuff. But that’s not where I want to go. And I don’t want to end up having built a screensaver.

I want some “Greg the ever peckish, stole my food, so I am setting this carpet on fire.” and not “The faction X did Y to Z so… heresy? I guess?”. The first one feels a lot more personal, the second more abstract and harder to care about. And even harder to convey. How would that even render visually in the game?

What I am looking for is agency, both as a player and as an entity inside the game, meaningful minions, maybe some slight automation through them, and direct impact when it matters.

Borrow from all the places

I started shopping around in all the games that I enjoy, looking for parts that feel the closest to what I’m after. If Black & White gives me the presence, the feeling of being part of the world, then RimWorld and its spiritual granddaddy Dwarf Fortress give me the minions, or pawns, or dwarves that matter and that you have to care for.

The thing that I was always missing in those types of games was direct control. I don’t want to just babysit a bunch of depressed settlers that are slacking off and hope some indirect measures will get them out of their slump. I want to smack them, pick them up and send them back to work!

So now I had found the feel I was looking for and the mechanics with which to convey them. What I still needed was a way to package those up in a way that makes sense. And for that I turned to Royal Road. The LitRPG space is filled with protagonists kicking the bucket and coming back to life as something else. Stories like “Dungeon Engineer” and “There Is No Epic Loot Here, Only Puns” take those exact constraints—physical presence but no real body or movement, influence over immediate space and minions—and make them feel natural. And with that, I found the narrative thread that ties all of this together.

And I do appreciate realizing that I’m ending up with Dungeon Keeper with extra steps. I just got there from a different direction. But it is weirdly reassuring. I guess you really can saddle the same horse from two different ends, huh.

The new Concept: You are the Dungeon

You are a dungeon core. You are an actual, physical object in the world, and you can interact with things within your sphere of influence. For that, the cursor is not just a cursor to handle menus but an actual hand. It lets you pick things up and move them around. But you yourself cannot move. And you also cannot grow and expand, as any good dungeon wants to. So you need minions to do the things you cannot do yourself.

The dungeon is effectively your body. You need to maintain and protect it. You get to design it, architect it, and grow it. But those minions of yours have needs and wants, and you “should” care for them. But let’s be honest: the routine work is theirs; making the big play is yours.

And that solves what always felt fuzzy to me before. It keeps the world personal. It creates tension and makes you invested in both the space and the minions living in it.

Where to go from here?

This is still a really chunky piece of work. There are a lot of different concepts and mechanics tangled up in it. So it will take a couple of extra steps to figure out what the smallest playable and enjoyable slice is. That then needs to get built and tested first, and only then can I start to iterate on it.

But I think I’ve got a good idea of how to structure the project so that it does not collapse in on itself. I also still think Godot is a great fit for the game, and I’ll share my thoughts on that in the next one. Probably.