I’ve got a novel coming out next this year. I’m working on another one. I’m in a band getting ready to record an EP. I have two kids. I’m a public school teacher.

So, obviously, I needed another huge creative undertaking to focus on. That undertaking is Spellblade: Vengeance of the Witch Sisters.

I have actually dabbled with video game development for several years, but always as a hobby, something to pass the time with and keep my mind occupied. I’m terrible at coding, and artwork, so these were mostly for me (and my spouse and older kid when I could rope them into playing for a while).

But as the years went on I got better, and the thought of making a game for real slowly crept into my subconscious, then conscious thoughts. No way, I’d tell myself. It’s too much work. And besides, you’re no good at art.

But something happened a few years back that altered my brain chemistry. I played Wasteland.

My journey into and through CRPG history is twisty and unusual, and I’ll write more about it in the future. For now, suffice to say that I did not grow up playing western RPGs–the closest I got was an obsession with Final Fantasy 1 (a Japanese game still very much rooted in the western RPG tradition) on the Gameboy Advance in 8th grade, during which time I wrote an entire screenplay for a film adaptation (it’s terrible and will never see the light of day).

So please trust that I had absolutely no childhood nostalgia for Wasteland, Ultima, Might & Magic, or any of the 80s/90s CRPGs that I have fallen in love with in the past several years. I came to these games as a full-fledged adult gamer in the late 2010s.

And still, these games have enthralled me. I played Wasteland because of its historical connection to Fallout, and while it took me a while to get into, once it clicked, it cracked open a sort of dormant CRPG-grognard lobe in my brain. I’d already played the first Fallout, but somehow playing Wasteland made me appreciate it more.

I can’t even fully explain it. The “terrible” graphics were evocative in a highly specific way, encouraging me to stretch my imagination-muscles like I hadn’t since I was a kid. All the different options for character-building–attributes, skills, race, gender, gear choices, etc.–made my mind go wild with story possibilities. I spent hours making characters in Wasteland (and later in Might & Magic), just to see what kinds of story/character prompts it would unearth in my mind.

Sure, the game might not have explicitly delivered on most of those character/story concepts (although it did just enough to keep me playing), but something about the abstraction of RPGs in that era meant that it didn’t really need to. I could imagine the types of scenes and story beats that fit within the cracks of Wasteland’s strange, breezy plot. In Might & Magic, I could imagine entire personalities, interactions, and backstories for the characters the game rolled for me (like my elf archer Tegwen’s awesome-but-incidental 17 in Charisma–she was a kind of fantasy-Annie-Oakley, doing archery tricks as a traveling performer. None of this was in the game; it’s the prompt that popped up as I looked at her stats. Roll-to-roleplay!) Ultima IV‘s keyword-based dialogue system put me in just enough of an active role that it was easy to imagine the conversations and personalities that the game had to abridge due to technical limitations.

I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. I often return to an essay by Keith Burgun called “The CRPG Project.” Allow me to quote at some length:

“There’s a quality that I’ve always loved about especially older computer RPGs: you really felt this sense of ambition behind them. You could sort of feel that there was someone who was super excited, who kept asking the question, ‘what if the player could also do X?’ Often, when some of the older computer RPGs would come out, they would be super buggy on release. I feel like this is because there was a prioritization on increasing the possibility space (which invites bugs) and not prioritizing polish (which involves bug-fixing).

I feel like games like Arcanum, Fallout 1 and 2, Daggerfall, Temple of Elemental Evil, Wizardry 8, most of the Ultima games, some of the older Gold Box games, and many others, embody some of the original promises of videogames better than anything else I’ve seen. These games were made, it seems to me, with a real spirit of ambition toward some goal of ‘fantasy simulation on the computer’.” -Keith Burgun, “The CRPG Project.”

I don’t fully agree with everything in Burgun’s essay. For one, he seems to really be yearning for what we’d eventually call “immersive sims,” rather than CRPGs. There’s some overlap and shared history, not least because immersive sims can really trace their origin to Ultima Underworld, but a CRPG doesn’t have to be an immersive sim and an immersive sim doesn’t have to be a CRPG. But he’s getting at something that I feel in my bones.

CRPGs have always been a niche genre (less so right now, thanks to Baldur’s Gate 3), but the people that love them really love them. I direct you to long-running blog The CRPG Addict, whose author has made it a 15-years-and-counting mission to play and catalogue every single CRPG in existence, even terrible ones or games so old they predate commercial video game hardware itself.

Yeah, more people play shooters or sports games. But those people don’t obsess over them the way CRPG addicts do. They don’t devote entire blogs to analyzing and debating their fundamental design principles. They (generally) don’t go back and play, and enjoy, games from the fucking 1970s to gain a better understanding of the genre’s history and conventions the way CRPG fans do. No Madden fan learns how to use Amiga emulators just to play Gridiron! (made by Bethesda, incidentally).

Okay, I’ve bloviated about that for long enough. I became obsessed with old CRPGs (and a few new ones), and more and more became entranced by the idea of making my own. The more I played those games, the more I became the excited designer going “What if the player could also do X?”

What finally cracked the case for me was browsing some old-school game art on OpenGameArt.org. I saw numerous tilesets for old games, some of them in black-and-white, and I started to get that feeling again. The simplicity of the graphics was evocative. It didn’t have to be a flaw–it could be a design element.

And, best of all–I could make artwork like it.

I’ll write more about the art of Spellblade at some point, but the quick version is that after experimenting for a few days on a wonderful pixel-art program called Aseprite, I came up with a 16×16 iconographic pixel art style that I could produce art in that felt right. It felt old-school and retro, but not exactly like Ultima or any of those other games. It was a style that, if used with intentionality, could be an asset rather than a hindrance.

My inability to make my own art had been the last and biggest thing holding me back from making a game for real. Now there was nothing in the way.

Spellblade is the CRPG that I have always wanted to play, since I discovered the genre. I am trying to make a game that takes everything I love from that era of CRPGs and brings it into the modern world. It shouldn’t feel like booting up Ultima IV in 2026; it should feel like booting up Ultima IV in 1985. It should instill senses of wonder and possibility; to work with the player’s imagination to create an experience that is fundamentally different from what you’d get in a modern, AAA RPG with highly-detailed graphics, 3d physics, etc.

Many of the things I’d loved about those early CRPGs did emerge from hardware limitations, and design spaces that had not yet been charted. And CRPG development ended up going a certain way, responding to technological changes and market forces. Spellblade isn’t intended to be a fully backwards-looking game; instead, I’m trying to make something that builds on the foundations laid by early CRPGs, that asks “What if RPG design had taken a different evolutionary path?”

Spellblade will incorporate all the lessons learned about CRPG and adventure-game design in the past 45 years (Jesus Christ I’m old) with a firmly retro-classic ethos. In so doing, I’m hoping to appeal not just to nostalgic fans of those older games, but newer, younger gamers who understand the appeal of those games but find the experience muddled by the passages of time.

It’ll have old-school dungeoncrawling, and also a branching story with lots of choice-and-consequence. Deep character creation and development, and also simple gameplay. Companions and romance, and also adventure-game-style world interaction and inventory puzzles.

It also takes place in the same world as my upcoming novel Seed of the Black Oak. Gotta have a little brand synergy in there, y’know?

I can’t say for sure what the future holds–will I do a Kickstarter? Early Access? Toil away on it for half a decade, then suddenly release the full game? We’ll see.

What I know for sure is that 1.) I’ll be writing about it plenty, here and elsewhere; and 2.) You can already grab a free demo with several hours of gameplay right now.