This month I’ll be sharing a sequence within Sad Land that is currently mid-development and still very rough around the edges. If you’ve been following this project, you may have heard me describe the game as explicitly non-violent, something I hope will set this Zelda-like apart from other games inspired by the hack-and-slash nature of the Legend of Zelda series. Although the player’s avatar, a weak slime creature, does not have the ability to inflict harm (no ‘press A to attack’), violence is absolutely a theme within the narrative.

In the game’s demo, there are five sequences, each with their own bespoke character interactions that explore the game’s themes in one way or another. Over the past year, as I’ve been working on other sequences in the demo, there has been one that has been hard for me to crack. An elusive question mark on my to-do list. This sequence centers around a character teaching Slime a war game, as he believes all of the castle’s residents should be able to think strategically in a combat scenario. It’s not actual combat but a simulation within the game. Up until three months ago, this concept is all I had with no real understanding of what it would look like or how it would function in the finished product. Inspiration came, as it often does, when I wasn’t looking for it.

One weeknight, after my wife went to bed, I stayed up (something I do sometimes as someone who has a difficult time falling asleep and who often leans into ‘revenge bedtime procrastination’) to watch a documentary on the making of the game Dwarf Fortress by the documentary team over at No Clip. Dwarf Fortress is a dense simulation game with a text-based visual style developed and maintained for nearly two decades by brothers Tarn and Zach Adams. Their strange and notoriously esoteric game has you oversee a colony of mining dwarves in a fantasy setting, exploring a procedurally generated world and witnessing civilizations rise and fall over many in-game years. I appreciate the complexity and the immersion of the game but, based on my tastes and free time, find it to be more compelling to read about than play. That said, the brothers partnered with publisher Kitfox Games to add a more conventional sprite-based user interface. This polished paid version was released in 2022 and is available on Steam, while the classic version remains available for free on Bay 12’s website.

The documentary is a fascinating watch overall but what really grabbed my attention that night was the short history of developer Strategic Simulation’s tactical RPGs embedded in the documentary’s first episode. Strategic Simulations was an older software developer of systems-driven simulation computer games that paved the way for games like Dwarf Fortress. Instead of summarizing this myself, here is the transcript of the introduction of this segment as narrated by No Clip’s founder Danny O’Dwyer:

In the same way film noir emerged from the crime/mystery fiction subgenre of pulp novels, so too did the analog table-top Dungeons and Dragons spawn a long list of different styles of fantasy video games with statistics and storylines. And before D&D there was Chainmail, which was inspired by Siege of Bodenburg, which can be traced back to older historical tactical wargames. But emerging from these tactical fantasy simulation games of the SSI era, we get these unique pillars of play that different developers experiment with in all different ways. I also won’t delve into it here but the JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game), also inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons systems, is a large and thriving subgenre all its own, notably resulting in the Pokémon games on the Game Boy, now the highest-grossing media franchise of all time. Although, yes, you could draw a straight line from the invention of chess in 6th century India to that Pikachu plush you bought for your nephew, I think this really just illustrates the curious nature of art, creation, and inspiration over time.

Where does The Legend of Zelda fit into this story? Here I’ll turn to video game historian Jeremy Parish’s retrospective of the game from his NES Works YouTube series:

Sad Land is my own take on this simplified and sanded-down version of these older style fantasy RPGs, the inspiration I had upon seeing these pre-90s PC SSI role playing games in action was that my war game minigame could be a pastiche of this other style of RPG to contrast with the game’s already established playstyle. In A Christmas Story (1983), we join Ralphie as he imagines himself as a “good guy with a gun” defending his helpless family from Black Bart and his gang, the film temporarily shifting its style of cinematic language to that of a pulpy Wild West serial.

This type of temporary style shifting isn’t just a fun diversion for the audience; the contrast conveys to us his desires and how his imagined cowboy Ralphie persona is very different from the shy powerless boy we’ve grown to know. We see the joy in his power fantasy and get a glimpse of his understanding of the world by way of the media he consumes. In Sad Land, the embedded war game will allow the player to explore the characters and how they view their outside world through the pastiche of a different style of game.

I’d also like to mention that this type of experimentation isn’t new to video games. The kernel of this idea stems from the 1996 Japanese-exclusive dating simulation Tokimeki Memorial. The game plays out over several years of high school as your character builds his stats and builds his social standing. I first heard about it from Tim Roger’s beautifully unhinged 6-hour deep dive on the game and first played it after hearing an English-language translation patch was available for the SNES version of the game. For the vast majority of the game you are scheduling dates and selecting dialogue options but once in a great while the game will shift into a silly JRPG combat sequences where you as the hero have to fight off attackers to protect your date.

It’s delightful, it perfectly borrows the visual language of a different type of game, and it adds a spontaneity to the game that feels like anything could happen. We love to see it.

Here I’ll share some of what I have so far for this system as it currently appears in Sad Land’s working build. Using placeholder visuals borrowed from games of the era, I created a simple working map select screen that allows you to choose between three locations to attack. Upon selecting the area, you get a popup to either receive information about the area (INFO), move forward with an attack on that area (ACTION), or cancel out of the popup window (CANCEL).

The text that appears when you select INFO and the combat destination when you select and confirm ACTION change based on which area you select on the map screen. That is to say, the logic and functionality at this step is working. From here I’ll need to polish and expand what I have.

The font here is one I purchased from game designer ChevyRay through their itch.io page. The other font I use for Sad Land is one I created myself, but I felt that I needed something with a different flavor for this sequence. For a few months I was considering making a specialized new font myself as every single asset in the game (barring placeholder assets) has been designed by me. After giving it some thought, I decided that adhering to a purist approach to solo-development where every individual asset is hand crafted by me is a fool’s errand. Chevy’s font Scoop was exactly what I pictured in my head when imagining this wargame and I purchased it within minutes of seeing it show up in my Bluesky timeline. It was actually discovering this font that motivated me to start work on this leg of demo.

Anyway, I’ll be creating simple combat encounters as a subtle way to teach the player about creatures in the world and locations you’ll eventually explore in the main game.

I used the SSI PC games as a jumping off point for research and came across the war simulation game Genghis Khan II for the SNES, which offers visual inspiration to draw from that better suits the cute pixel-art style of Sad Land.

We’re half-way though 2025 and, looking back on the last six months, I’ve taken several big steps toward building a demo that I can be proud of. I hope you’ve enjoyed this bit of truncated gaming history. I had other plans for this newsletter but sometimes inspiration takes you in strange directions.

Sincerely,
Neil