I spent the summer holidays building a game. Then the holidays ended, September happened, and I was still building it. It is now October, and the game has a demon in a bath, a proper campaign, and more opinions about buttons than any reasonable project should need.
It is called Everyone Expire. You play the Dungeon Master: build the encounters, bait an adventuring party into questionable decisions, and interfere with the dice when things go inconveniently well. The party wants to finish the campaign. You have other ideas.
The seed was a song, I Wanna Be a Dungeon Master. That turned into cards, then party members with personalities, then Malice, the demon who explains the rules and judges your work. Somewhere along the way, “a little game project” became tutorials, boss fights, equipment, custom dungeons, and encounter minigames. Scope creep, wearing a very good coat.
A lot of the recent work has been less glamorous: making the tutorial explain the right thing at the right moment, keeping saves safe, making text readable, and making sure a reward only pays out once. I have also been preparing the Steam achievements, their badges, Cloud settings, and a separate Playtest version.
The next step is a small private alpha. That means getting the build into other people’s hands, seeing where they get stuck, and finding the bugs my own habits have learned to step around. Testing is not open yet, and I am not announcing a release date. There is still balance and polish to do.
You can follow the game and its development over at Rardo, or wishlist Everyone Expire on Steam. When testers do find something broken, there is a bug-report form that reaches me.
So that was my summer. I built a game about making everyone else’s day worse. Naturally, the first person it chose to torment was its developer.