1984 was the year I invented roleplaying games.
Or so I thought.
I had yet to encounter the work of my arch-rivals and peers Gygax & Arneson (Dungeons & Dragons, 1974), Jackson & Livingstone (Games Workshop, 1975).
But that was because I was nine years old and not allowed near that stuff.
At that time, my influences were those Choose Your Own Adventure books you could get by collecting Weetabix boxes, and wandering around in a school playground playing make-believe between the painted netball court tram-lines (or Corridors of Certain Death as they quite clearly were to a group of pre-pubescent boys).
But as I narrated the imagined monsters and explosions to my friends, bowl-haired, nerdy little me yearned for more structure and jeopardy, so I started using a coin toss to determine the success of our choices. When it became clear that a 50:50 chance was a bit blunt and repetitive, I drew up a probability matrix (I definitely didn’t call it that back then) to provide more variety.
It looked something like this (thanks Gemini):
In an amusing twist, reconstructing that table from memory and getting AI to bring it back to life for this blogpost revealed that nine-year-old me was wrong about the probability of the ‘hard’ tier 2-from-3 toss (which it says is still a 50:50 chance). AI gently correcting a flaw in my 40-year-old ‘game design’ dovetails beautifully into the focus of this post.
I am not a game developer. At least, not in the traditional mainstream career sense. But, as I hope my opening paragraphs illustrated, I have always developed games. Because it is my passion.
After building a game about barbarians punching drunk zombies with Google AI Studio, my most recent passion project has been making a spaceship crew simulator.
Using Google Gemini, NotebookLM, and Anthropic’s Claude, EVE Crews is a browser-based game-within-a-game that builds out from the existing sci-fi universe of massively multiplayer fleet-fest EVE Online by zooming into the activity within a single spaceship.
EVE Online gives its players god-like command of vast spaceships to work together to wage war, harvest resources, and explore the cosmos. But the activities of the ordinary inhabitants of EVE’s structures remains abstract, dealt with only in snippets of lore in and out of the game.
The power of AI tools might finally allow me to breathe life into my long-standing desire to oversee my ship’s crew. Playing make believe again, but this time, in space – and with better* hair! (it may be greying, but it’s not a bowl!)
I learned from my previous experience developing Tavern Keeper that forward planning pays. I worked with my AI ‘colleagues’ to lay out a development strategy, a workflow protocol, and various clever little command line scripts to shortcut deployment of updates. I’ve been following good practice.
More than that, I was able to develop the EVE Crews platform as something far more sophisticated than just an EVE-inspired standalone minigame. With careful AI-assisted planning and research, I was able to scope out how to get authorised access [Oauth 2.0 Single Sign On (SSO)] to use API data that EVE Online publicly shares to give my imaginary crewmen the stimulus to react.
Ship damage sustained in EVE can translate into engineering casualties that the medical teams can respond to. Events triggered by cargo carried in EVE can lead to escaped cattle roaming the lower decks. Officers can be hired and fired, mutinies can be put down, varied affiliations and competency levels among crews can be monitored and managed. And if it all still goes wrong, cadavers can be sold on the black market.
More technical barriers came tumbling down: To save my progress, I was also able to set up a hosted database to allow for persistent game saves (Supabase), and leverage Cloudflare services to provide security and Discord integration for my new eve-crews.com domain.
I’m aware that those last few paragraphs contain a lot of technical jargon (and possibly some warped ideas of fun). A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have understood most of those terms. Which is the bigger point I’m circling around here.
While my inner nine-year-old is in the cockpit flying the spaceship into unknown peril, adult me has been enabled to step into the role of creative director, designer, producer, playtester, researcher, and many other roles, learning as I go, while outsourcing the interstitial labour to AI. The production cycle is off the scale.
What started as an idle experiment became an obsession. In four weeks, the cycle of iterative game design, prompt engineering, deployment, and testing accelerated as new ideas were planned and delivered, bugs were identified and resolved, and the vision came into focus.
The dopamine hits from drawing a creative line between a forgotten bit of EVE lore and a useful game function has become weirdly addictive. EVE’s ‘biomass’ became Soylent Green-like crew sustenance for a +1 Resilience bonus per session. Having certain fluff items in your cargo hold helps to resolve events – in the absence of a ship’s cat, the Amarr slaver hound is great at getting vermin, tourists will pay for a tour of the system, and abandoned drone parts can [redacted].
I’m caught between the joy of experiencing the fruits of my labours as my frigate XO finally earns her promotion and we upgrade to a destroyer hull and can finally hire enough officers to stop the morale collapse in the Security department, and the perfectionist editor’s need to modify just one more bit of flavour text or tweak the UI layout again. And maybe add a new event when you jump through a gate. I’m not sure which experience is The Game. I love the intermingling of creative opportunity and player satisfaction.
My brain has become a dopamine-addled sponge. Along with absorbing everything I can about AI-led productivity, I’ve learned ‘ludonarrative’ is a word describing the connection between story and game mechanics, and ‘heuristic’ is AI slang for cutting corners (or more accurately, the logic behind making an informed guess with incomplete data). Starting early, finishing late. I’ve been on a self-inflicted crunch and still I want more.
In one month, one human from outside the IT industry was able to plan and deploy over 250 software updates comprising 1,600+ individual changes.
Or as Claude analysed it:
“280 documented versions, approximately 1,650 individual changes, 31 days. The equivalent senior developer cost at UK market rates: roughly £215,000 and two and a half years.”
By happenstance, in the middle of drafting this post, CCP Games became Fenris Creations and announced a partnership with Google DeepMind. They named themselves after the wolf who brings about Ragnarök – and then invited the world’s leading AI research lab in to study how intelligent behaviour emerges inside a universe built on consequence and loss. EVE Crews was built on the same cyclical philosophy of life, loss, and rebirth (or biomass). I’m choosing to take that as a good sign.
Now if I can just figure out how to make this pay, maybe I won’t have to go back to healthcare…