I spent the summer holidays building Everyone Expire. Then the holidays ended, September arrived, and I was still building it. Now it is October, Malice has become your demanding demon boss, and the next job is getting the game ready for other people to break.
It started with a song
The starting point was "I Wanna Be a Dungeon Master", a song I made while playing around with Suno. The idea stuck: what if the Dungeon Master did not particularly want the adventuring party to succeed?
That became the heart of Everyone Expire. You are the Dungeon Master, working under Malice and building encounters, tempting the party into bad decisions, and interfering with the dice when they roll inconveniently well. The adventurers want to finish the campaign. You have other plans.
The song needed somewhere to live. It got a game. The game got Malice. Malice got a bath, because apparently even a demon needs somewhere to complain about your performance.
From the first prototype to a proper campaign
The early version was phone-shaped and called Do Not Trust the DM. As the ideas grew, the game moved toward desktop landscape and became Everyone Expire, built in Godot and aimed at Steam.
The first big job was making the central loop work: choose your Bait, build the encounter, watch how the party reacts, then decide when to intervene. Party members needed personalities and weaknesses worth exploiting, rather than being four health bars waiting to be depleted.
From there came campaigns, bosses, career progression, deck preparation and custom dungeons. Equipment and conditions now belong to actual party members, and some encounters open into their own minigames. The cards, angular character art and comic presentation have grown together into something that feels much more like Malice's world.
September was about making it understandable
Having a lot of systems is one thing. Explaining them without burying someone in a rulebook is another.
Recent work has focused on the scripted tutorials, clearer dice and modifier feedback, party inspection, reward choices, and giving players time to read what just happened. There has also been plenty of less visible work on saves, interrupted actions and rewards behaving consistently.
The automated checks help catch mistakes. They cannot tell me whether a new player understands the tutorial, whether the pacing feels right, or whether a joke has outstayed its welcome. That is what the next stage is for.
Where things stand now
The Steam page is up, the current Windows builds are packaged, and a separate Steam Playtest version is being prepared. The 43 Steam achievements have their matching badges and progress statistics, and Cloud settings are configured for testing. Testing builds also have a clear notice and a Report a Bug button linked to my support form.
There is still delivery verification to finish before those builds go into testers' hands. The next milestone is a small invited alpha, focused on tutorial clarity, saves, campaign pacing and bugs. After that, I will work through the feedback and consider a wider Playtest when the build is ready.
Testing is not open yet, and there is no release date to announce. Wishlist and follow Everyone Expire to hear about the next milestone. Thanks for following a song that somehow became an entire dungeon.