Remember when games were toys you would simply play with? Perhaps you tried wacky strategies in Red Alert, or built amazing looking (and completely lethal) parks in Rollercoaster Tycoon, or the coolest treehouse in Minecraft (before the server’s architecture devolved into more profane structures). Of course, those kinds of games are still being made, but the industry as a whole feels like it’s moved on. Since rose tinted glasses are in vogue right now, let’s try on a pair and talk about video games.

Nostalgia Time

I think the first game I played was Super Mario Bros. on GameBoy. I can still hear the ‘game over’ jingle as if it was playing right here and now, and the soundtrack to the different levels play in my head on occasion. Mostly the castle one. I suppose stressful situations leave stronger impressions.

Another vivid memory is from playing Warcraft 3 custom maps (mainly tower defence and rabbits-vs-sheep style maps. My nerves didn’t handle dota) and discovering the map editor. Suddenly I could make my own games! I didn’t create anything successful (I was twelve) but that wasn’t important. The important thing was the feeling of a digital playground I could play and create toys in.

That feeling of unfettered creativity drove me to a technical high school where I picked up programming in BASIC (it was a time when programming equated to playing happy birthday using the beep function and data structures were limited to ‘a tic-tac-toe board’), and about a decade later I got my masters in computer science. At this point I was a perfectly hireable software engineer, and my idea of programming had developed to include things like “artificial intelligence”, “micro services”, “data pipelines”. “agile methodologies” and “stakeholder value” had become synonymous with writing code. Creativity and toys did no longer fit into programming, as that would get into the way of the very important task of creating stakeholder value. And that’s been my mental model for programming since then. Until recently.

Idle Hands are the Game Devs Tools

This summer I had some time between jobs and felt that urge to tinker. I wanted to program, but I did not want to do anything related to AI or Python (which my day job heavily revolves around). I was looking for that feeling from way back when I was painstakingly arranging beep function calls to build something innocent and toylike, and not a business system. Having recently played the traditional roguelikes Adom and Caves of Qud, I channelled the Dunning Kruger effect and thought ‘yeah I could probably build a simple traditional roguelike’ (a thought every roguelike enjoyer is cursed to have after having played a few). This was after the Unity debacle (where they suddenly decided to start charging developers per game installation), so I downloaded Godot and got tinkering.

And you know what? It did feel like building a toy. The tight feedback loop and the interactive workflow was so very refreshing compared to the daytime software engineering with docker containers and cloud deployments and model training pipelines and AI model prompt engineering etc. This was in August, and all the hours put into the project since then has resulted in Tombs of Telleran, a pixel-art traditional roguelike where calculated risks and strategic thinking guide your path through treacherous tombs filled with valuable loot and ancient dangers.

Welcome Aboard

I’m excited (and somewhat nervous) to start sharing my experience developing the game. A friend of mine inspired me to start publishing progress updates as a way to keep myself committed and hopefully connect with other people to discuss video game design. It is of course also a way for me to let the world know that the game exists, so I’ve set up The Stone Sigil Dispatch mailing list if you want to follow along on my journey building Tombs of Telleran. As a subscriber you can expect monthly-ish updates with

• game development updates
• strategy game design discussions
• technical deep-dives from a modern software engineer’s perspective
• practical experiences with Godot 4, C# and automated testing in game development

If that sounds interesting to you, great! Punch in your email below and I’ll catch you in the next one.

If you just want to chat about game dev, I’d be happy to hear from you on any of the linked social media platforms. Happy tinkering, Sebastian