Four years ago (2021), I embarked on a small project involving the renovation of a dungeon crawler dating back to the 1990s called Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol. Despite the complexity and lack of balance, this single player video game featured a unique vibe resulting in phenomenal replayability. I used to exploit a few “legitimate” bugs to make up for the flaws in game mechanics, but regardless of the build and level, there was still a chance you would end up being dispatched instantaneously by a mid-level monster, which invariably chafed your mood. Raise Dead could not console me, a perfectionist. I tolerated the annoying shortcomings in the game until my forties, and then, being a developer, decided to finally fix them.
I had planned to finish the Mordor-like formulas in three months’ time, but several weeks later I realized that the majority of the original game spells had lost their relevance. The new game world had to have magic as its constituent part, which had to remain consistently real. This implied that every single aspect of spell casting had to have a simple explanation and clear math behind it. Well, the persistence of magic caused me some trouble, indeed. The unanswered question was: does magic actually introduce permanent changes to the environment? For obvious reasons, most games give a definite negative answer. But is it by any means justified? For example, if I cast a Water Wave spell, it is okay that the water is either absorbed or evaporates in a while, but what about Earth magic, say the Rolling Stone spell? Rocks are solid after all…
By the time I came up with consistent spell casting rules, the original endeavor of fine-tuning the game has already been challenged. At the same time character and skill designs had to be adjusted to match the new “realism” of magic. A few months of development brought about a reasonable scheme, which appealed to me as a hardcore gamer in my earlier years, and my new-coined game mechanics ended up completely separated from the initial goal and started living a life of their own.
Two and a half years later, I have compiled an eighty-page lore guide and came up with approximately four hundred formulas for skills and spells spread over a dozen of races and guilds, all making perfect sense to me. But… the scale of the game had increased tenfold. Having neither free time nor a dedicated team to continue development, I had no other choice but to put this precious material off until better times…
Once in a while, the game mechanics resurfaced and demanded further elaboration. Seeing that quests, being a crucial part of the game world, were non-existent, I decided to put my mind to their conception. What began as a simple main quest line has evolved into a full-fledged book, bringing the game world to life! Along the way, I’m crafting detailed maps to make it even more immersive, slowly but surely shaping a rich and vibrant world.
Exciting things are on the way! Soon, the site will feature a series of articles exploring the game world and its core mechanics. If you know game studios searching for a unique concept, feel free to share my contact—let’s connect and make something great happen!