I had some things in my favour, including my BA in English literature (majoring in Gothic fiction) and 30 years experience as an academic: proof-reading and editing are things I’m very experienced at.

Still, I was all at sea in late 2019 when we received EU (Creative Europe MEDIA) funding to prototype the game. I was faced with a mammoth task and had little idea how to start it.

Building the Narrative Structure

Luckily, I’m friends with a very experienced game-narrative director (and awesome writer) Dave McCabe- and he was interested in writing for a traditional RPG (his prior work mostly being the point-and-click Darkside Detective series). Dave worked with me on the game for about 15 months, during which time we put a lot of shape on the story. Under his direction we put together the pre-game timeline, including history, geography and backstory, as well as the biographies of key characters. Dave wrote the 10,000-word prologue for the game, and a lot of the writing for the next three chapters. This provided a good foundation (including stylistically and atmospherically) for the additional writers that we found we needed.

Since I only get to work part-time on my games, I always develop them without hard deadlines, and that played into the requirements of The Necromancer’s Tale. A story turns out best when it is mulled over, iterated, refined, and edited. It needs time to ferment in your imagination.

The Team Expands

Due to work and family commitments, Dave had to step back from the project during 2020, so I put out an advert for game writers to help. I was lucky to recruit an awesome team of writers (two at first: Damir and Zach, with three more following later: Sarah, Michael, and Brad). As it turned out, the strong direction I could provide due to the early work from Dave and I resulted in strong results from the team. This is something I’ve seen too when commissioning artists: the stronger  your direction, the better their work will be.

Branching game narratives and interactive-world to text-narrative integration are pretty complex, even when working with a powerful authoring tool (we used Articy:Draft). I found very quickly that there was a lot of back-and-forth needed between the narrative and my other code: e.g. synchronising in-game actions with the narrative- this required controlling in-game things with reference to the unique IDs of the text nodes exported from Articy. The process was pretty unwieldy while Dave had ownership of the Articy writing and I had ownership of the game code and 3D environments.

The Writing Process

When I recruited the other writers, I took sole ownership of both the Articy project and the Unity project. This meant that the tight integration that was necessary between the narrative, the C# code, and the 3D game world became manageable. Writing was provided to me in simple Google documents, and I copied-and-pasted it into Articy. Although this was a bit onerous, it also forced me to carefully proof-read and edit everything, keep an eye out for any contradictions or inaccuracies (or logic errors), and add extra material where I saw an opportunity.

I put together a pool of writing tasks – made up of scenarios and quests from throughout the game. The writers (including me) claimed these tasks according to their own preference and available time. We met bi-weekly to discuss the ongoing work and to brainstorm current and future writing. This worked really well, not least because it respected the availability of each contributor. (We were all part-time on the project).

Keeping the Writing Coherent

I was concerned about the potential risk, that having 8 different contributing writers could lead to inconsistent characterisation and confused narrative arcs. However, neither of these things happened, and indeed reviews of the game widely praise its coherence and the compelling story arcs – most notably, the mental slide of the player character into deceit, murder, and black magic, as their humanity is chipped away piece by piece. Our foundational work and ongoing process served us well.

In our game design document, everything is laid out chapter by chapter, and one of the things I’m very pleased I did was to indicate at the top of each chapter the internal state-of-mind of the player character (PC). This provided direction for the writers, which ensured a coherent arc. For example, in the early game – as they are just starting to explore quite benign magic for mostly-selfless reasons – the PC’s mental state is framed by the concerns of a young adult whose father has died in suspicious circumstances, but who is generally law-abiding. As the story progresses, the PC requires darker magic to progress their aims, and begins to fall under the influence of entities from ‘beyond the veil’. They begin to see friends and family in a different way – and the player is forced to question how manipulative they would be to achieve their goals.  By the mid-game, the PC is quite unhinged, sometimes not knowing what is real and what is a whispered manifestation from the realm of the dead. Mortals are becoming mere tools, and the PC ruminates on how they are left cold by the needs and desires of mortals.

What Did I Learn?

My early work involved putting together a high-level outline of the total plot. All subsequent work was about iterating this and adding more and more detail. Even before any dialogue was written or any quests specified, I had passed three or four times through the story, identifying puzzles, opportunities, and motivations for the player. This meant that, when detailed material came to be written, it was done with a knowledge of the total scope of the plot. It meant we rarely struggled to identify what aspects of each piece were most important to progression, and it meant we didn’t encounter inconsistencies and contradictions that needed fixing later. I learned that iterating/cycling through the story over and over is a good way to develop a project like this.

The Necromancer’s Tale  has been widely praised for its narrative and writing, and is shortlisted as a finalist in the prestigious TIGA awards 2025, in the narrative & storytelling category.

I used to make lots of BBC Micro games, and sent some to Personal Computer World magazine for publication. In 1984 I had a game listing published (this is how it worked back then.. and actually typing in the code was a great way to learn). This was my first publication and first earnings from computer game development, and has really shaped my whole academic career too.

So yeah, first step is algorithmic town generation. I have bought some nice road models from turbosquid and a bunch of buildings from dexsoft, plus a lot of stuff I had already from Darkwind (including tombstones, buildings, trees) and here’s a first cut at a random graveyard.. the home of the zombie spawnpoints.

A bit more work and we have the basis of a town generation system. The roads are put in first, followed by the graveyard and buildings. The orange areas show ‘free’ regions; the idea is that we search for random free space for each object, starting with the biggest and finishing with the smallest.

Now.. Let’s Break Stuff! seems to be going a bit viral (especially on the Android); downloads are going up at a rapidly increasing rate in some countries (most notably, Italy, but also Spain and most recently, France). This is great, of course, but last night I checked in on the processes on the server, and Apache is taking a much bigger chunk of the CPU than it normally would. Nothing too alarming yet, but it’s averaging about 5% of CPU, when normally it wouldn’t even register. This is fine, but not being an expert on viral growth-curves, I can easily imagine this ramping up to what is effectively a DDOS attack within a few days, if the iOS downloads follow the trend I’m seeing on Android.

So I quickly removed the ‘games and news HUD’ from the Let’s Break Stuff! game, and sent the new version for approval on the iOS, BlackBerry and Android appstores. For once, Google’s total disregard for quality, copyright, or common decency (i.e., their lack of any approval process) is a good thing: the Android version was changed almost immediately. There’s a slightly tense wait for the next week while Apple do their thing though! On the one hand, a game going viral is of course the ultimate goal.. but on the other hand…

Sales of single-player mobile-device games really tails off fast though, from what I can see. Mars Defender has already slumped to a trickle, only 6 months after release. The development effort involved makes a poor trade-off versus what I have seen with Darkwind, which is still going strong after 5 years. Admittedly, Darkwind is a very different beast, but I’m increasingly convinced that online games are the thing to do. Mobile online games are also relatively under-represented on the app stores, and at the same time mobile broadband is ubiquitous. Sure, there are some successful town/farm/empire-building games, and a few ‘lite’ MMOs. My son is still convinced that my High School RPG concept, which mixes Roguelike play with resource-based strategy, is a good one. I have also bought a really nice pack of zombies from 3drt.com, and I’m playing around with these and some ideas about multiplayer co-operative turn-based survival games.

So when I was checking out ‘Pet’ games on Google Play (for research purposes!) I came across a cute-looking one called ‘My Pet Coby’. It’s a nice little (very simple) tamagotchi thing where you tickle your pet, play a bubble popping game with him, feed him ice-creams etc., while the game tries to insidiously lure you into buying virtual food for your pet using your mom’s credit card (which is, hopefully, not password protected). The usual stuff. But it also made a very strong point of reminding me, whenever I started up or closed down the app., that if I came back every day I’d get a free lollipop. This message was so important that it warranted a special full-screen pop-up lasting for several seconds.

It’s probably just me being sentimental but I found this concept really striking, and I could vividly imagine a 3 or 4 year old going around for several days obsessing about getting a lollipop from their pet. It said something to me about lost innocence and of the utterly different goals of a small kid compared to a grown-up. Having a simplistic life where you have very little control of your own destiny, you get transported around to different places and activities according to other people’s schedules, but all the while you have a little private relationship with what you imagine to be a real pet, and you have a little private goal of earning something real (a lollipop) yourself. OK, you get the picture.

So this morning, I started up the Coby app., all excited about my lollipop. Wondering how they would get the lollipop to my house (I imagined a downloadable voucher which I would present to my local shop just out of a pure perverse sense of humour). My sons reckoned the president of the lollipop company would personally fly over in a private jet to deliver it to me. We were all wrong. The game gave me a f***ing virtual lollipop to give to Coby. Something that they value at about 5 cents, if you look at the in-game shop. Gah!

Afterburn hasn’t been mentioned here before – it’s a 3D shoot-em-up that takes you on a tour of the solar system while blasting the baddies. This is an early demo of it.

The main reason I have posted these is that I have started teaching an undergrad class using Shiva, and these games provide perfect examples of game development features that I will want to discuss and illustrate.

1.) Please introduce yourself.

Hi! My name is Sam Redfern, and I’m the developer of Mars Defender and Block Rockin’ on the Android/iOS, plus a bunch of other games on desktops, including a car-combat MMO for Windows/Mac and a wargame on the Amiga – and even a space trader game on the BBC Micro!  this courses are amazing for someone who is working and studying at the same time, the classes and learning process has been upgraded in a really higher way, so game development is a part-time (evenings and weekends) activity for me.

2.) What made you want to be a game developer?

I started programming back in the early 1980s, and being an 11 year old I guess games were the obvious thing to work on. Part of the motivation at the time was that games were hard to come by. Not many were available, they weren’t very good, and there was no such thing as freeware or shareware, which is pretty critical as a penniless kid. I wanted to play games, and to do that I had to make them myself. I have made games ever since; it has always been my passion.

I can actually trace it back to my very young years – even as a 7 year old, I used to make crazy, rules-based boardgames involving lots of little bits of coloured paper and dicerolls. I came from the Dungeons & Dragons ‘do it yourself’ generation.

More recently, my reasons for making games have changed. On one level, the opportunity for making a success is clearly attainable by anyone (the ‘barriers to entry’ have gone away, to put it in corporate speak) – I think mobile gaming has done a huge amount for the democracy of the process, for re-instilling the indie spirit into the industry. So yeah, I want some success But probably more importantly than that, I get a real kick out of bringing pleasure to the people that play my games. Entertainment really is a noble calling, I think. Maybe it’s middle-age talking here, but I don’t think I’d be content doing a job that didn’t improve the world in some way. In Darkwind, for example, I have caused a community of like-minded people around the world to meet – people who have made firm friendships with each other and who spend hours online and even meet face to face – this is my achievement, I have changed these people’s lives for the better.

3.) What platforms do you develop games for and why?

Currently, I develop for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Web browser. Why? Because they’re all important platforms and are all relatively easy to target.

4.) What are your experiences in porting games between two platforms?

If I’m targeting multiple platforms, I would make this decision up-front, and use a cross-platform tool or language. I have never attempted to retro-actively port a game. My MMO (Darkwind: War on Wheels) is based on the Torque game engine, which allowed me to (fairly easily) deploy my servers onto Linux, and clients onto Windows and OSX. My mobile games (Mars Defender and Block Rockin’ – there’s more on the way!) were done using the Shiva game engine. The main reason I picked this engine was its truly astounding list of deployment targets. So, deploying a Shiva game to iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Web Browser is actually very easy – not much code at all needs to be modified.

5.) How do you get inspiration for a game?

Interesting question, and not one I have been asked before. I’d say it depends on the game. Darkwind was a culmination of years of thinking about MMOs, wargames, and my own ‘ideal online game’ – it was a slow process that was certainly seeded in my Cars Wars / D&D boardgaming in the 1980s. My two Android games both grew out of experimentation with Shiva, coupled with a strong sense of what I personally think makes a game interesting. I have in development a mobile/web ‘text-based MMO’ style game (drawing on influences from games such as iMobsters and Vampire Online – games which I think are really poor as games, but which have very clever marketing hooks built into them). Maybe this seems like a slightly more hard-nosed way of going about getting inspiration, but my goal is to develop a game that uses the clever techniques of these games while making a good game in the process.

6.) How long does it take for you to write a game from start to finish?

I depends on the game! Block Rockin’ took about 3 months, Mars Defender took about 6 months (very much part time though, and while working on other game prototypes as well as Darkwind and my day job!), Darkwind took 6 years and counting! (like any good MMO, it’s never ‘finished’). I tend to work alone as much as possible, collaborating only in terms of art and music. This keeps everything much simpler and removes stresses and recriminations.

7.) What are the biggest technical challenges when you develop a game?

It depends on the game! – er.. did I say that before?
OK, let’s say it depends on the game engine.. Shiva is closed-source, meaning I am limited to working within the parameters of the engine itself – if it has a weakness or inability to do what I want, I have to do a work-around. This came as a bit of a shock after years of working with Torque, which provides full source code to developers. In Darkwind, I was free to make fundamental changes to how textures are blended, how the particle system operates, and even how time progresses in the game. In Shiva I have to make the best I can with the exposed API. The benefit to Shiva though is that it’s not my problem to ensure cross-platform compatibilty or future-platform support.
It also depends on the target platform: phones are not as powerful as desktop computers. I started work on a deathracer game last year, while I was admittedly naive about using Shiva, and got quite disillusioned at one point while trying to find a way to have 15 NPC cars moving around under full physics and controlled by AI.

8.) What do you think the future of gaming will look like?

Another good (and difficult) question. I can certainly tell you that gaming has changed radically in the past 5 years or so. Sometimes I give lectures in my university about the history of gaming, so the evolution of the industry is something I think about quite a bit. What mobile and other less powerful devices such as the Wii have brought about is a change to what was previously a relentless drive towards better graphics. It was all a bit depressing between about 2000 and 2005 – but the trend was in place before that too: basically, indies had increasingly no chance of being successful; all that mattered was better eye-candy, and this meant bigger and bigger budgets.

Mobile and casual gaming are, in my opinion, largely responsible for the widespread maturation of the gaming public. I think if Minecraft was developed 5 years ago it may have failed: its potential customers would be unable to see beyond its (on first glance) weak graphics and would be incapable of grasping its awesome and innovative gameplay. I have tangible proof of this too: when Darkwind was first in open Alpha, back in 2006, I used to get a lot of comments about the graphics quality being poor; now, a full 5 years later, I hardly every see complaints about its graphics. This is quite astounding when you consider that this kind of reversal has never before happened in the history of computer games. To some extent, the (modest) success of my MMO project, which doesn’t run on mobile devices, can be put down to the shift in emphasis, from graphics to gameplay and depth, brought about in the minds of the public by mobile and casual games.

Sorry, you asked about the future of gaming, not the past! Well, it’s an evolutionary process that continues from the past to the future, so the simple answer is that I see exciting times ahead. Nintendo and Apple have taught the big companies that innovative hardware can be very successful, while Facebook and others have taught the same lesson with software; and this will hopefully mean that we continue to see original ways of physcially interacting with our devices – this will translate, of course, into original gameplay ideas. While it’s obviously good to have continual graphics improvements, I truly hope that this remains as it currently is, just one factor driving the industry, and that we never return to graphics being the only thing that matters – because that was killing innovation in the early years of this century.

9.) What is your favourite game at the moment and why?

I actually don’t play a whole lot of games at the moment. I have two kids and a fulltime job, on top of my game development, so I really can’t afford the time. As a game developer, it’s important that I’m aware of what’s going on out there, so one of the things I do is buy games for my kids to play and get them to report back to me on them. This can backfire.. (my 8 year old son is the world’s worst Minecraft addict).

Games I actually play at the moment: Pro Evolution Soccer and Grand Slam Tennis on the Wii. These are very much casual, skill-based games which is one of the genres I like and which don’t demand a lot of time. If I had more time, I would probably be playing Football Manager, Minecraft and Darkwind.

As an indie-dev., I think Minecraft is truely inspirational, and it shows what can be achieved. I could have written it! It provides an excellent mix of gameplay that appeals on many levels, and it is hugely successful without having any coherent marketing or even a good website! Even my naive knowledge of marketing tells me that most of the fundamental rules of what a website ‘should’ do are broken by Minecraft’s. But this all just goes to prove that if you have a good enough idea and the vision and drive to carry it through, you can stuff the established wisdom. The modern gaming public has an appetite for deep gameplay and innovation, and this makes it an exciting time to be an indie developer.

10.) What is your advice for new developers?

My main advice would be: don’t be afraid to innovate! You are not going to be able to compete with big companies by copying them and making a poor clone. But equally, they often have too much interia behind them and are unwilling to take risks. So: do something original! The world doesn’t need another second-rate first-person shooter.

My other advice would be to develop some thick skin. The anonymity of the internet means that some people, even entire communities (I won’t name specific websites here) will constantly bash, ridicule and belittle your efforts. You have to realise that these are people who themselves are creating nothing, they have no idea of the talent and dedication involved in what you’re doing, so just ignore them if you can. Focus on those people that do like your work; there will be plenty of them too.

Gameplay will require a few minutes a day to set your ‘school strategy’ by filling up slots in your weekly timetable from available options. Your choices here will affect your skills, exam results, popularity, etc. You may choose to try to get into the football team, debating team, etc., and the various schools in the game will compete in simulated leagues.

You’ll also be able to do social stuff like chat with your clanmates or schoolmates, post on each other’s walls, change your character’s hairstyle, or go on dates (for skillups and achievement badges).

But for those who want some immediate and more lengthy fun, there will be a whole Roguelike thing going on in the labyrinth. This will possibly earn you treasure, skill-ups, or injury! Some monsters may even ben tamed, if you have the skills..

Here’s some early concept art from Matt:

And a screenshot of progress we have made with randomly-generated labyrinths, complete with line-of-sight revealing and a mini-map: