Over a decade in a shoe box

For my first post, I wanted to tell the story of Scourge of the Necromancer. I say "over a decade" in the title because I honestly don't remember exactly how long it has been, but I think it's somewhere between 13 and 15 years (don't quote me on it).

Back then I worked in an office, and at lunch a bunch of my friends and I would get together in the lunch room and play board games. All sorts of them: some cooperative, some competitive, some team games, each with its own flavor. It was my favorite part of the day. Just playing games with friends, talking about whatever, and having some fun on break. I always liked the cooperative games the most, or at least the ones where you had teammates. I didn't feel like I had to beat my friends, and we could win or lose together.

I liked the games we played, but like so many people before me, I started wondering if I had what it takes to design my own. What did I like and not like about the games we played, and could I make something my friends and I would want to play?

So I spent time at home trying to come up with one. I knew I wanted it to be cooperative. I like medieval fantasy and the whole "defend the realm" vibe, and I wanted a villain who had no desire to rule, but just wanted to watch the world burn. The heroes weren't adventuring for wealth or glory, and they weren't choosing between one bad ruler or another. They were fighting for survival, and to do that they had to cooperate. I'm not saying "heroes save the world" is an original idea, just that it was the trope I wanted for my game. Our lunch group could also get fairly large, so I wanted it to support more than the four players a lot of board games seem to cap out at.

I also liked games with fast turns, where you could plan during everyone else's turn and then act quickly, and where the mechanics were more "built in" than time-consuming (auto-defeating monsters instead of drawn-out fights, auto-trading when you share or pass through a tile with another hero, and so on). And I liked strategy: better results based on your actions and placement, and real choices, like trading relic pieces, or spending a whole turn assembling your relic instead of doing anything else, or deciding who should assemble their relic and who shouldn't.

In any case, I designed it. I cut a piece of cardboard down to board size, pasted a sheet of paper over it and drew some lines, cut up an old protein bar box for the game pieces, grabbed some poker chips for markers, and stuffed hand-drawn slips of paper into card protectors to keep them together. Then I played it with friends. As you can probably imagine, the first game didn't go so well. But I kept refining it and we kept playing, and it got better and better over time. So I decided I wanted to try to build it as a video game.

That is where the dream died. You see, despite being a computer programmer, I had never written a video game. I tried, but I couldn't even figure out where to put the light sources or the camera, let alone design the graphics, much less the sound, 3D modeling, online networking, or voice. It was just me. I was in over my head, and after spending a lot of my free time trying and making no progress, I knew it wasn't going to happen. And that was the end.

I didn't regret it, though. I had learned so much in the failed attempt that I considered it time well spent. As a programmer you are always learning new things anyway, so I chalked it up as an investment in my skills, and that was that.

Many, many years later, wanting to sharpen those skills again (and honestly not wanting to get left behind with all the stir AI is causing in our industry), I decided to learn how to use an AI coding assistant. I know this is where it gets controversial, but please hear me out.

I got a subscription, but I needed a real project to work on. From what I'd read it was a powerful tool, and I didn't want to just write a "Hello World" program with it, but I didn't have anything particular in mind. That is when I remembered that old game I had designed all those years ago. I wondered if I still had it somewhere, so I went looking in my game closet, and there it was: the old shoe box. For some reason, the last time I packed it up I hadn't included the rules I once wrote for it, but I pulled it out and started trying to remember how to play. It came back to me fast enough, and I started translating it into a video game.

This time, with the help of AI, I was able to do the things I couldn't back then (and honestly still couldn't without it). It started to take shape in ways I never thought I would reach, and I even began to think that maybe this wouldn't end up like last time, a passion project I gave up on, but something I could actually put out for others to enjoy.

I know there are people who would otherwise buy a game like this but won't, because AI was used to make it. And honestly, I encourage it. I believe everyone should stand by their beliefs, and if that is how you feel, you should act on it. I also know that if AI didn't exist, this game would still be sitting in a shoe box in my closet collecting dust. I'm at peace with that, and I've tried very hard to make something of quality that people will hopefully enjoy.

While it is playable solo, my sincere hope is that people will play together and experience some of the same joy that I did all those years ago, playing with friends with the game as a backdrop to share stories about their lives, having some fun defeating the Necromancer in the process.