To understand the Deadly Path, it's useful to know what I was doing before I made it.
You see, I used to make Detective games. I made quite a few of them in fact, each larger than the next. In October 2022 I released Riley & Rochelle, a visual novel mystery about two forgotten pop stars. It was released within a month of both Immortality and The Case of the Golden Idol and sank without a trace. Not only was my work distinctly unpopular (except for with my parents), but I felt completely out of ideas. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde - I was fucked. Something had to change.
The main challenge with my games to this point was that they demanded an enormous amount of work for content that would likely only be played once. For example, Riley & Rochelle had 12 original songs, plus countless documents and custom pieces of artwork. It took a year to create something that could be completed thoroughly in 6 hours. I felt tired of hiding clues in newspaper articles and song titles. I wanted to make something re-playable and more system driven, which could be played over and over, without costing millions to make.
At this time I was playing a lot of Stacklands – a village building management game by the Dutch collective SokPop. I was also playing Cultist Simulator, Alexis Kennedy’s genius-level narrative game about dropping cards into slots. Both games combined elements of management, idle games and survival within a board-game-like framework. They had very few verbs, mostly just click and drop. Later I would discover Reigns, which scratched a similar itch.
Crucially, these games didn’t simulate anything. They used timers and spat out results, but nothing relied upon complex under the hood calculations. In Stacklands your villager didn’t need to walk to the warehouse to pick up the fruit to take it to the hall to eat it - they just ate. In fact, the only element of Stacklands that was simulated was the combat, which I thought was the weakest part. Abstraction not only was easier and cheaper to make, it also allowed for more immediacy.
There were other games as well – Domekeeper, Loop Hero, Against the Storm – short games with tangible goals and quick restarts. I loved how compact these experiences are. Where most games want to meander on forever with nebulous goals and weak tempo, these took off like a rocket. You always had something to do and interesting, chunky decisions to make.
However, it was not immediately obvious how I could harness my interests. Nor was I sufficiently educated in systems to be able to imitate my references. Instead I spent quite some time making a game called The Gentle Art of Slaughter, where you play a woman called Abigail, traveling around a frontier town killing cultists. It sounds good, it’s not. It was full of cheesy, weak mini games and was met with universal derision.
Then one day I had the thought, “What about a game where you make a dungeon and defeat raids”. Obviously this bore some resemblance to 90’s Dungeon Keeper, however, I wasn’t worried. Firstly, that game was really old. Secondly, it was a traditional building simulation, where this would be anything but.
Originally, I wanted to make it exactly like Stacklands – dragging monsters onto production nodes to produce resources. It wasn’t exactly the right approach, however, there was a chilling moment of realization when I released a card onto another and a timer started. This works.
I then parked the idea for several months while I worked through Slaughter. When that game had finally gone as far as it could (which was pretty much nowhere), I turned to The Deadly Path. Firstly, I needed to work on my education. I got some sessions with Alexander King, the professor of games economy at NYU, read some books and gradually started to get a handle on this numbers thing. The game progressed, codebases written and rewritten. Things started to fall into place and with help from a systems designer called Arthon Kleerekoper, I turned to crafting the economy of the game,
which will be the focus of the next post.
Thanks to everyone for reading and for supporting The Deadly Path.
See you next time,
Tim