How To Fail at Writing A Game in 7 Days

Every year, hobbyist game developers (and some pros) are tasked with writing an original game in just seven days, and it has to be a roguelike. What roguelike means is up for debate, with almost any particular roguelike breaking some of the supposed rules, which include randomized levels, randomized loot, a punishing difficulty with no continues, top down perspective, ASCII graphics and stuff like that.

The 7DRL organizers take a “I know it when I see it” attitude toward entries, but if you genuinely think your game is a roguelike, they’ll probably let it in for judging.

My last entry a couple years back was “You Are the Amulet”, and my previous one, years before, was one where I rendered the rooms being drawn on graph paper with a handwriting font and the monsters being various toys I had laying around.

But this year… what I came up with, even Splattercat¹ would have trouble calling a roguelike.

I wrote about what I’m writing a couple posts back. I meant to be doing a lot of other things these past several days, like playing games and stuff, but instead, whenever I’ve sat down at the computer, I’ve been working on the game.

So, here’s some random progress:

LLM are expensive

I run (or ran) all the narrative text through an LLM to add context and to customize the responses to the player. Last night, I ran out of the money I’d prepaid on my OpenAI account, so I guess there’s a problem with that. I quickly implemented an sqlite3 database to store the LLM responses so that the LLM will only be called once, and subsequent playthroughs won’t cost more $$$.

While I can ship the database with the game, combat is still dynamic, so I need to figure out how I am going to get the fun combat descriptions without breaking my bank or giving anyone my API key (and without anyone being required to have their own). I have some ideas.

I think I’m about 60% through the book, still at the stage where each page brings more stuff I have to implement. I’ve made a bunch of QoL improvements and implemented a whole bunch of the bad endings. I think this game is going to be pretty punishing once done, and — if you die, your character can’t run the adventure again; you have to make a new one. See, it is a roguelike!

There is a Tunnels & Trolls-adjacent Kickstarter going on right now

I was kind of wondering how many bad things would happen to me if I put “Sword for Hire” somewhere public when it’s done. Probably nothing, since I wouldn’t charge, and the original module is forty years old at this point. Still, it is still being sold by the current rights-holder for four bucks so it’s not like it’s disappeared from the internet. So someone might make a fuss.

Anyway, I couldn’t find the author anywhere; looks like this module and its sequel were the only things he ever wrote. And BY THE WAY — he sure lifted a bunch of things from the Wizard of Oz. Tin Woodman, Yellow Brick Road, field of poppies, etc etc etc. So who started it, right?

I went looking on Facebook for the creator of Tunnels & Trolls, Ken St. Andre, to maybe find out how he felt about fan adaptations of modules he probably had nothing to do with.

Well, Mr. St. Andre probably has nothing to do with T&T; he’s moved on to a new system, Monsters, Monsters!, which is basically Tunnels & Trolls, except you play the monsters. That’s him in the gunslinger outfit in the picture above, btw, advertising his new Kickstarter project.

Trollgods’ Skull Quest is a capstone to his career as a game designer. Trollgod (St. Andre’s writer insert character) is traveling through his mythical world encountering weird monsters and amazing landscapes and, along the way, providing a source book for adventures in that world, Monsters Monsters and T&T compatible.

BUT…

Pretty much the whole source book is done by AI

St. Andre created almost every image in the book using AI tools, like Midjourney and Dall-E 3, etc. These were then touched up by artist Steven Crompton, who is running the Kickstarter. I backed a book that was largely generated by AI tools. I don’t know how to feel about this.

I think Mr. Crompton interpreted the “didn’t use the work of others to generate the images” differently than I would, as the images Mr. St. Andre used were almost certainly based off the works of other, anonymous, artists.

I doubt any of the text was written by AI, but then, who knows? Maybe it all was. Once you open that door… In my game, the text wasn’t written by AI, it was written by James Wilson, as interpreted and remixed by AI. Some of it is mine. I’ve been rewriting parts to make it simpler to implement.

Rebellion is going to be producing new Tunnels & Trolls content

Turns out that indie game developers Rebellion have taken over the Tunnels & Trolls brand and legacy, and intend to make more T&T content this year. I hadn’t thought about T&T since I was a kid in college, but now that I have started working with it, it seems to be everywhere. They are selling all the old sourcebooks and solo adventures on DriveThruRPG.com. I bought the deluxe rules there, and if I still feel like adapting solo adventures once I finish with the three I have here, I may buy more of them. It would be nice if they would give me the nod to use the Tunnels & Trolls name or this content, but I think the answer would clearly be “no”.

That said, they write that they may be calling for some fan-made content at some point, and I am pretty sure I could write an original solo adventure. From what Sword for Hire is telling me, it’s basically, “write a golden path through the adventure, and then fill the rest of the book with all the bad stuff that can happen.” Because this adventure is very brutal.

You can be turned into a goldfish.

1. Splattercat is a YouTube indie game reviewer who seems to call EVERY game a roguelike. ↩︎