About 5 hours (heavily, frequently, and enthusiastically interrupted) is how long it took me to design this game. 

It almost didn’t even get made. When my friend and fellow designer Kona sent me a link to the Game Dunk 2022 game jam, it was already the afternoon of July 25th; the 48-hour challenge had already started and was in its final hours. But I kind of wanted to do it. So I got myself excited about it, decided to make an effort — and then discovered it was an Australian game jam, and had concluded just mere hours ago.

But thanks to Kona, I wound up joining the ARC discord, stumbling on a very welcoming, kind, and relaxed community. And, sure, the jam was over, but there was still room for a late submission. 

So I took a look at the prompt: “The Devil You Know.”

 I’m not a huge fan of telling stories about religion, so I hesitated to go down the path of demons and devils. My first idea was actually to look to nature. I was considering a game about Thorny Devils (an Australian lizard whose scales can transport water directly to its mouth) or Devil’s Claw (a plant that’s patiently dedicated to doing some murder, so it can plant is seeds in a fertile body). I really loved these starters, but nothing was coming plot-wise, and I reluctantly admitted that people other than me would want more substance than just “be a deadly plant” or “be a weird little lizard.”

I glanced through some demon taxonomies, and considered doing something with aqueous demons inspired by a poem by Poe, read during the game jam. (My head is still full of octopus’s gardens, submerged strongholds, and strange mechanics, so perhaps that thought is still incubating.) But again, it wasn’t quite sticking.

That was when I found myself thinking of knowing, knowledge, and books. I’d recently been reading an old, emotionally significant book and reflecting on how we forge ties to books and the times and places we read them. I found myself wondering about the words themselves. Words can be so powerful. And a single page in a standard book probably only had ~500 words on average… Once I started wondering about this new word-based mechanic, the ideas fell into place quickly. Within minutes I had a new experimental mechanic as the backbone of this game. 

Which left my other concern: the unequal relationship between the two characters and the desire to own or control someone else. It’s been a theme in my game design lately, and as part of this dynamic having been on my mind, I found it easy to make one big safety consideration — the demon always wins their freedom.  Does this take the teeth out of the game? Maybe for some. For me, though, it gives the players security that the summoner cannot enslave the demon, allowing the two players to focus on the true narrative stakes of which goal of theirs is most important and whether they can achieve it first. The true teeth of the game, in my opinion, is the parting word, given in the face of the knowledge each has gained. 

—————

What final word ended your game? I’d love to hear what it was and what it meant.