News from the Lair : Forging a World Engine

Everyone always tells you this, but making RPGs are infinitely more complex than you think they're going to be. I was fully aware of this when I joined David to work on the game (about 18 months ago) and I figured building a decent set of editor tools would take a year or so , and yet here we are, I'm still working on them.

Anders Lauridsen (of Skald fame) often told me in conversations how important building decent editor tools are. You're essentially front loading the work to make creating the actual gameworld/story later a lot smoother. When David and I met up in Japan in October (he's based there, I'm in Australia) , we sat down and took a long look at the game's editor tools together, and going through them I realised they were really clunky and needed a lot of improvement if we were going to used them day in and day out for the next few years.

With that in mind, I've spent the last month or so improving every aspect of the game's editors. From draggable panels to props you can right click to duplicate, everything is now easier and more streamlined. We can build dungeon maps in hours instead of days, and its much easier to tweak stuff later.

There's also been a lot of work done on the Encounter Editor, so now we can create points of interest and easily add interesting scenarios - perhaps its a druid in a grove that appears only at dusk and sells healing herbs, or maybe its a troll ambush in a valley that only occurs if you have Stinkums the Dwarf in your party.

David has been hard at work improving the character animations and portraits, as well as creating a ton of dungeon props, from tables , food and drink, to bubbling cauldrons and decaying stone walls. He's also started working on really nice location introductions that appear the first time you enter a town. These will be varied depending on the town's location - a town in a forest will have a different intro to one nestled in the mountains, for example. I think these add a ton of flavour to the game.

Dungeon movement and pathfinding has been greatly improved too. The party now follows the leader naturally, there's proper Y sorting so they can walk behind pillars, in front of tables. Doors can be opened and closed (with lockpicking coming soon), shadows fade in and out, there's a dungeon fog.

Towns have been improved too, with NPCs that can patrol, chickens that walk around randomly. NPCs can be chatted with and in some cases you can buy and sell from them - I'll also be adding the option to pickpocket from them and potentially even be able to slay them ( though there'll be consequences!)

The overworld has birds that flock and soar, thunderstorms roll in , day turns to night, heroes fade into the shadows in forests and more. The overworld viewing area has been expanded too for even more visibility too!

While sometimes it seems like we're quiet here, we are working hard every day on the game and next year we'll really start to see some great gameplay systems come together. I've been promising combat for a while, but I had to go back and actually fix the editor tools first before I could work on that - each system works together and if there's one weak link, the whole thing falls down, so I didn't want to start on yet another system until I was happy with how the other things were looking! 2026 will be a big year for the game, we're in talks with publishers right now and hopefully we have something to announce in the months ahead. Once the systems are more fleshed out ( and combat done!) we'll aim to get a small playable demo out for people to try out and then potentially look to bring it to early access before the end of next year.

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has taken interest in our game, through messages here, in the Discord, on RPG Codex and social media. Every kind word, every bit of advice, every question, all motivates us. No lie, this is easily the most daunting project I've ever taken on in 25 years of building games and it's definitely stretching me to the limits of my skills as a developer.

David's art and design is improving every single month and it's a joy to see his pixel art (somehow) get better with every new piece. His work is the heart and soul of the game and the main reason we are where we are , with almost 30,000 wishlists and counting. Looking forward to sharing more of the journey with you guys in 2026! Cheers, Oliver Joyce and David Aron Whiskeybarrel Studios + Nostalgic Realms