Since I’ve mentioned multiplayer, I feel some disclaimers might be in order:
Eldritch 2 will not be a live service game. The networked elements will be run on Steam and funded by the 30% revenue share that Valve takes anyway. It will always be fully playable offline.
Eldritch 2 will not have microtransactions or DLC. It will be a one-time premium purchase, and any subsequent additions will be gratis.
Eldritch 2 will not be a worse experience if you choose to play offline. The networked elements are additive, but it is and will always be fundamentally a single-player game.
I teased Eldritch 2 on social media last year, but I haven’t properly announced it. And this still isn’t a proper announcement. That will come sometime in the future, with screenshots and a trailer and a PR agency to do the words good. Please do not write that I have announced Eldritch 2. But I haven’t been shy about the fact that I’m working on it, and that I want to develop it in the open as much as possible.
I buy myself a new Moleskine notebook for every project. Most of them end up unused. Not this one.
So, the three big questions: Why Eldritch 2? Who’s making it? When’s it coming out?
Why Eldritch 2?
Since Eldritch‘s release, many players have asked for multiplayer, and my answer has remained: I originally wanted it to be a multiplayer game, but it would have blown up the game’s very tight (8-month) schedule; subsequent tech and design decisions I made along the way locked it into a single-player structure; and let’s save it for the sequel. Those last words have haunted me for a decade.
The obvious option was to follow Spelunky‘s lead and make a co-op action roguelike. Eldritch was already indebted to Spelunky in so many ways, and the model works. It was always unrealistic to convert Eldritch into a multiplayer game for tech reasons, but if I were starting a new project from scratch, I could conceivably do that.
But then I worked on two multiplayer games (The Blackout Club and South Park: Snow Day!) in my day job at Question. Both of those were developed in UE4, which has very stable netcode (which my own Rosa engine does not have); and still I was reminded how much more complicated everything is when code has to resolve four disparate game states in realtime. Multiplayer makes it harder to make games. Or to put that another way, making a multiplayer game for the same budget necessarily sacrifices a lot of features that are important to me.
So I had kinda sorta promised that Eldritch 2 would be a co-op multiplayer game, but also I didn’t want to make a co-op multiplayer game. And the bigger question in my mind was: why make Eldritch 2 at all? Was I just wanting to relive a past moment of glory? Hoping that the modest success of the first game could penetrate the crowded indie scene? What could I do with a Lovecraftian roguelike immersive sim that I couldn’t just do by adding some free expansions to the original game?
It took a long time and a few false starts, but I feel that I’ve found a way to answer those questions and weave multiplayer into it. I don’t want to give too much away, because it is part of a central mystery of the game, but I’m using the procedural nature of roguelikes in a way that I don’t think I’ve seen done before; and which has the convenient side effect of synchronizing the pseudorandom levels that each player sees. The best analogy I can offer is: imagine the daily challenge mode in Spelunky, where every player sees the same levels on the same day—what if you could also see all the other players running those levels at the same time? And what if there were secrets only accessible on certain days? And what if you could rewind to previous daily challenges, and find those secrets again?
Who’s Making It?
It’s me. It’s just me.
Since 2017, I’ve worked full time with Question, and I hope to stay with Question for years to come. They’ve allowed me to continue my personal work at Minor Key Games (even if it has been mostly on the backburner); and in the last year, I’ve switched to working 4/10 weeks (four ten-hour days), opening up my Fridays for personal use. That has given me a lot more time to work on side projects like Eldritch 2.
I developed the first game (and large parts of its engine) in about 8 months, solo, save for an assist from my old Guildhall colleague Kale Menges on the key art. I like the creative independence of working alone; not because I’m allergic to outside ideas, but because I believe the strongest ideas come from a creator with a holistic view of all the parts working together. I can’t imagine trying to pitch the networked elements of Eldritch 2 to a team that was developing the roguelike elements separately; they all need to function with each other.
I formed Minor Key Games with my brother in mid-2013, and we have operated the company as a collective; a shared identity with shared values, but making separate games. This has led to some confusion, with each of us sometimes being credited for games the other made. To be clear, I’m making Eldritch 2 alone. He’s making Project Verse and I’m excited about that.
When’s It Coming Out?
Man, I dunno. I work fast and I’ve got an engine that was literally made to make Eldritch, but this is a part-time project for me, and the scope of Eldritch 2 is substantially bigger than the first game in a few ways. If this were a full-time project, I’d estimate it could be done in 12-18 months. Given my limited time to work on it, it will take, uh, longer than that.
I don’t have a real schedule yet. I don’t know when I’ll have a proof of concept build or a first playable milestone. I don’t know when I will have enough real art to put together a Steam store page and properly announce the game. I don’t know what my marketing strategy will be. I don’t know if I’ll do any kind of public beta or early access. I don’t know when it will be done.
What I do know is that it is rewarding to share things as I work on them, and that early feedback will help shape it into a better game. And this is the most fun I’ve had MAEKing GAEMs in years, so I’m going to keep chasing that.
I’ve been developing games professionally for 17 years, and I’ve been developing my personal engine Rosa for about as long. This isn’t going to be a post about whether or not you should make your own engine. I generally wouldn’t advise it, but you should make your own decision. I made my decision a long time ago. I love making games, but I love programming too; and engine development provides some of the most satisfying programming challenges. This is a brief history of Rosa and my current ideas for its future.
The origins of Rosa came from my student work at SMU Guildhall (2005-2007). As part of the curriculum, every programming student had to build their own 3D game engine, with OpenGL and Direct3D rendering, audio, input, collision and physics, etc. The more game-specific parts of an engine were left to each individual to focus on, and I chose to pursue AI with studies on behavior systems, awareness models, and pathfinding. This was my first time writing a 3D engine from scratch, and I got it done but it was messy.
When I graduated in 2007 and became a full-time professional game developer, I also began building a new personal engine, taking the good parts of what I had learned and cleaning up the messier, poorly-architected bits. Incidentally, I jettisoned OpenGL at this point, believing Direct3D to be the way (and Windows to be the only OS). I did this work mostly for fun, but I also hoped to eventually make a game of my own. Between 2007 and 2012, I built a lot of engine parts without ever getting close to actually shipping a game.
Brass City Couriers (unfinished, circa 2009-2012).
I leaned on Blender heavily at this time, even using it as my level editor because that seemed easier than building a level editor. The lighting model was baked and static, encoded into level geo as vertex colors and applied to dynamic meshes through a coarse volumetric directional ambience grid. Game objects were inheritance-based. Development was slow.
Codename “Agency” (extremely unfinished, circa 2012).
In the summer of 2011, I was frustrated with the inheritance model of game objects and decided to experiment with this fancy new “Entity Component System” concept I’d been hearing about. I was also eager to explore procedural generation, for reasons I don’t quite recall but probably had something to do with Minecraft. I built a simple textmode graphics framework and began building an infinite procedurally-generated world populated with composition-based objects. It was fast, it was fun, and in retrospect, it may have been the most important step I could have taken in my career.
Second Order (unfinished, circa 2012).
In early 2013, I left the relative security of my Big Commercial Games job and went into business for myself. (A few months later, my brother did the same and we formed Minor Key Games.) I had a very limited budget and needed to ship a game in around 8 months. The obvious choice might have been to lean on all the tech I had built over the prior 6 years, but instead, I ripped it all up and streamlined everything. I used the simplest possible art and rendering: all albedo, no normal maps, no specular lighting. I rewrote my collision code for AABBs exclusively, because it’s fast and simple and I was using voxels so everything was axis-aligned anyway. And I incorporated some ECS concepts to make game object composition and reusability a breeze.
Eldritch (2013), Minor Key Games.
My engine didn’t have a name at this time, but I’ll call this Rosa v1. Eldritch was a modest success and I followed it with my Thief-meets-Deus Ex cyberpunk stealth love letter NEON STRUCT. I didn’t make many engine changes for Neon; I improved my tools and optimized the voxel lighting grid to support turning lights on and off at runtime, but it is fundamentally still Rosa v1: all albedo, with voxel worlds.
NEON STRUCT (2015), Minor Key Games.
By the time I finished Neon, I was growing tired of Minecraft comparisons. I liked the ease of working with voxel worlds, but I couldn’t escape the shadow of the king of voxels. I was also starting to feel constrained by how much I had cut my engine to the bone; in particular, I was constantly working around the lack of dynamic lights and eager to rebuild my rendering skills. I undertook a substantial overhaul of my engine during development of the next game, removing voxels in favor of mesh-based geo and replacing the simple forward renderer with a deferred renderer using a principled physically-based lighting model.
Slayer Shock (2016), Minor Key Games.
My engine still didn’t have a name, but I’ll call this Rosa v2. Slayer Shock missed the mark, but that’s a story for another time. I ran out of money around the end of 2016, got a job, and largely put my engine and my games aside for a while. From 2017 to 2020, I dabbled in a couple of projects but ultimately got nowhere. But while copying code back and forth between a couple of projects and renaming classes to match the project, I realized that it would be easier if I had a unifying name for game-level classes in my codebase. So instead of renaming top-level classes like EldritchFramework to NeonFramework to VampFramework, all my games could use one common codename. I picked “Rosa” because it was like tattooing “MOM” on my arm, and that became the de facto name of my engine.
In 2020, stuck inside while a pandemic raged on, I started doing game jams to scratch the indie dev itch. I finished four game jams that year, and have done at least one every year since. These game jams culminated in what I consider a trilogy of minimalist first-person games: NEON STRUCT: Desperation Column, Li’l Taffer, and Schloss der Wölfe. Each of these improved upon my engine’s pipeline and workflow, largely by leaning on procedural generation. I developed tools to quickly generate procedural meshes and materials for world geo, and I reinvented my procedural level generation algorithm to create indoor spaces nested inside larger outdoor spaces. These three games also share a common visual style which I’ve been calling my signature “toy aesthetic”.
Schloss der Wölfe (2023).
I consider this current generation of the engine to be Rosa v3, and it is the engine I am now using to develop Eldritch 2. It combines the fast iteration and relatively simple art pipeline of Rosa v1 with the physically-based dynamic lighting and materials of Rosa v2. It’s a joy to work in, and work on. My current work is revising my procedural level generation (again) to bridge the gap between the more spatially plausible worlds of my recent game jams and the intentionally bizarro crashed-together spaces of Eldritch.
Looking to the future, there’s at least one unavoidable tech task that I need to deal with. Rosa is still using Direct3D 9 and OpenGL 2, absolutely ancient graphics APIs that have increasingly fragile vendor support. I don’t feel the need to upgrade for any particular modern features—I’m actually rather happy working with 20-year old tech—but OpenGL is no longer supported on Mac and getting a modern Windows PC set up to build a Direct3D 9 app requires jumping through a lot of hoops that they would clearly developers not do anymore. I’ll have to port to Vulkan eventually, and probably Metal if I ever want to target Mac again.
That’s a lot of words, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of my engine. I’ve got some tech that has been largely stable since as far back as Eldritch: AI behavior trees, event + reaction gameplay scripting, collision detection and sweeps/traces. I’ve got a custom cook process that is fast as heck. I’ve shipped 13 games or game jams on this engine, and it has grown a lot along the way. And I’m excited to keep using it!
