Devlog: Inspiration for the game

Hello there!

In today’s devlog, we want to share some insights about our inspiration for the game. Let’s jump right in!

The moment that sparked the idea for the game was the announcement of Darkest Dungeon II and the reveal that it was going to be a roguelike. I’d wanted to make games since I was in high school, but that was the moment that I realized I should give it a shot. Some time after that, I quit my job and started developing The Necessary Evil - though it’s gone through several major rewrites since then, to the point that it’s no longer the game I had in mind at the start.

The core elements of the design philosophy behind it still exist. All enemies should present a dilemma to the player, synergizing with one another such that a group of enemies is more difficult than the sum of their parts; on the other hand, all player-controlled characters ought to possess powerful toolkits, but not complete ones. Being strongly focused, the player is afforded opportunities to understand what their characters can do and, more importantly, what they can’t.

It’s that search for focus that inspires many of the character and enemy skills. Any mechanic can be made a focus for a character or enemy, whether it be manipulation of the battlefield, mastery of persistent effects, aggro management - anything. A player that finds synergistic foci can build a team that all but breaks the game. A player that doesn’t learn the mechanics will struggle. Without that dichotomy, the fun of build planning is all but eviscerated.

The idea for visual style is a magical world going through a painful and contentious industrial revolution. Half of that is from Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and the other half is WARMACHINE. The combination of steampunk and straight supernatural sources feels incomparably cool to me.

Our music was inspired by filk, work songs, and waltzes. In terms of artists, the Clockwork Quartet is a big one.

About the setting - I had this image in mind. The Masque of the Red Death and a myth of the roaring twenties, rich elites spinning in tighter and tighter circles in rotting rococo mansions, while outside, the starving masses toil at building a monument to their excess that no soul wants, and that no mind enjoys. A Babylon built of steam and sweat and sacrifice, a blind and zealous narcissism and the weighing of human lives in human hands, cold utilitarianism borne to great and terrible fruition. The machinery of civilization is grinding forward in ceaseless, pointless churn. The passive, unthinking cruelty of the belief that the ends justify the means, and how any evil can be justified as necessary when done in the service of some great enough supposed good. But that’s just context, after all. The real story is what the player decides to do within that framework.

For the design of the characters, we went with old-school diving bells and NBC suits for most of the human characters. World War 1-era gas masks and arcanopunk styling. They operate in a hazardous environment - the Dreamweb - which you’ll hear more about in the future. The denizens of that place had a different design philosophy; nightmare fuel and sleep paralysis demons.

As an aside, I think that a player's expression of skill is fundamental to the nature of games as art. Difficulty is necessary to encourage the skill to develop. A game that allows players to “sleepwalk” through its content without ever engaging with or understanding its core mechanics underutilizes the strengths of the medium and fails its players. A game that does not allow the player to overcome its challenges through effort and understanding, but instead crushes them with tedium and random loss, betrays itself.

The arete of gaming comes from the metamorphosis of the game’s challenge from overwhelming, to manageable, to trivial. It’s a game designer’s duty to make that transformation enticing to the player.