The Highs and Lows of Game Design

In which I ramble about the creative process and the highs and lows therein

Working cover for Bright Crescent Company, art by Eric Dill ©2026

Sunday, as is my wont, I played another small TTRPG. This time, instead of someone else’s game, I played my own. Bright Crescent Company picks up on a small tidbit from the lore of the Chainlands, the setting for my (releasing sometime) knights on sky islands fantasy TTRPG Oathbound. In one of the first lore tidbits I wrote for Oathbound, I mentioned how the High Queen’s father led the offensive that defeated the demonic hordes threatening to overrun the realm. The lore of Bright Crescent Company is that your character is the Commander, leading his company of four, into the Burning Lands as a diversion (while the High Queen’s father takes the fight to the Demon King). The meshing of lore and my recent love affair with solo dungeon crawling in Dark Fort-style games absolutely fanned the flames of my creative bonfire.

“It feels good to create”

That fire drives me to create almost constantly. When I write the lore, craft tables fit for a particular setting, and determine the exact way the mechanics should work, I experience a heady sense of accomplishment. It feels good to create.

Sometimes it’s work, and sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation, but in the end it always feels good. In that first instance, just after the final period has been placed, or that last troublesome table is complete, the sheer satisfaction is unsullied. It’s pure. If creation stopped there, with that high, I think I’d create constantly and never stop. But, as all creatives know, the creative drive desires—even demands—to be recognized by others. And it’s here that the deep descent from the peak of creative ecstasy begins.

I hit both highs and lows as I played through my game Sunday and it made me think about why I design games to begin with. What’s the goal? It certainly can’t be to make a living off of the games. That’s a rare reality that only a few indie creators can claim. Even Shawn Tomkin, the creator of Ironsworn and Starforged, works a day job. So, what is it that drives me to create?

I think I’ve narrowed it down to three things:

1. Creativity for creativity’s sake. I enjoy the act of creation. Designing something new, even if it’s only new to me, is a high that is hard to match. I create because creating is fun, it’s personally rewarding. If it wasn’t, I’d have stopped when Feyroam, my very first game, wasn’t a huge success.

2. The search for my perfect game. J.R.R. Tolkien, in a letter to W.H. Auden, said “I wrote the Trilogy as a personal satisfaction, driven to it by the scarcity of literature of the sort that I wanted to read” (Letters, p. 211).¹ Just as Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings in pursuit of the kind of story he wanted to read, I began designing solo TTRPGs in search of the game that I wanted to play: a game that catered to all of my desires, whether in roleplay, narrative generation, combat, crafting, or any other mechanic. The futility of such an endeavor is beyond the scope of this article, but is worth analyzing further elsewhere.

3. Striving for recognition. Perhaps it’s selfishness, the side effects of being raised in religion, or some other component of my psyche that would require at least a few PhDs to analyze, but I have always longed for recognition, to be seen as valuable to others. It is, perhaps, one of my most glaring flaws—though certainly not my only one.

I would like to say that 1) and 2) drive me far more than 3) does, but that would probably be a lie. Instead, they jockey for position constantly, always seeking to out pace the other. Sometimes I feel like I’m just along for the ride, without any real say in where it takes me.

The Highs of the Creative Act

Ideas are easy to come by, at least for me. At any given time, I have ideas for at least five games and a couple of writing projects. I’m sitting on a novel that’s nearly 20k words that my wife and I have worked on together, but time and motivation are seldom on my side at the same time. There’s also no less than two ideas bouncing around for LitRPG-style novels, one of which I have put down the first couple paragraphs of. I have another three Ironbound Adventures roughly summarized or outlined, and Oathbound is waiting for a final playtest and layout, with another solo dungeon crawl also formulating. As you can see, I am positively drowning in ideas.

Ideation is the first stage of creation and is often one of the most entertaining—and frantic. It is from the foundation of ideation that the true joy of creation springs. Seeing the ideas slowly form into an actionable document feeds the soul in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve also experienced it. Writing the thing—whether game, short story, actual play, or novel—is the pinnacle of the creative mountain for me. Little competes with the sensation of accomplishment when a new section is complete, and even more so when the last period on the first draft is placed.

With Bright Crescent Company, I wrote the bulk of the game in about a week and a half. Granted much of the mechanics are pulled from Oathbound, to which this game is connected in mechanics and lore. Even still, I found myself refining the mechanics, trying new ones, and all around enjoying the process of building another game. That nova of positive feelings that swell to bursting when experiencing such a thing is addicting and is clearly one of the reasons why I continue to design games and write fiction.

Once the draft is complete, it’s time for play testing. Usually, I will test a game a handful of times, editing it as I go on my iPad, until I think it is in a viable condition to pass on to a couple of friends or trusted associates here on Substack for reading and play.

I spent a couple hours play-testing Bright Crescent Company on Sunday. It was a mostly enjoyable experience, with a couple issues that I’ll have to work on before letting others test it out. My character, the Bright Crescent Company Commander Cynin and his unit consisting of a scout, cartographer, champion, and pikeman managed to make it to the final boss in the depths of the Burning Lands. After a slug fest, the boss was defeated and the game was complete. I battled poison and darkness nearly the entire descent, which was, in many ways, more dangerous than the enemies I fought. Managing my hit protection and resources became incredibly important and, fortunately, I found a condition cleanser item (the Rune of the Blessed) about two rooms prior to the final boss.

It was gratifying to find my systems working almost exactly as intended, and even more so to experience the risk of poison and darkness. That whole element was largely unexpected even if I did design the game. Moreover, it prompted several ideas (!) for other games using those mechanics as the primary danger. My wife, who’s only real context for TTRPGs is listening to me ramble and a few sessions of Curse of Strahd years ago, is all in on a game where you race against the clock (literally) and the disease/poison/what-have-you coursing through your veins. Her idea, not mine, she’d be cross if I didn’t give her credit. But I digress.

The full experience, from ideation to implementation, is personally satisfying. That high of accomplishment is, ultimately, the reason why I continue to design games (and write fiction) despite the limited audience of solo gaming and the difficulty of getting eyes on my work.

The Lows of Creation

While creation is full of highs, it is also rife with lows: mechanics don’t work how you wanted, gameplay loops are unsatisfying, repetitive, or otherwise boring, laying out a game is a time consuming and frustrating endeavor at times, or you get very little traction once the game is released into the world. Any one of these are demotivating, at least to me, and take real effort to overcome and continue to climb out of the creative valley back to the heights.

Sometimes it takes a long time. Part of the reason Oathbound is still sitting on my computer, despite being play-tested relatively thoroughly, is that I fear that my biggest game, one that I’ve sunk so much of myself into, will be dead on arrival. Doing the dragon-y thing and hoarding the treasure instead of letting others see it feels safer.

The high of play-testing—seeing your hard work pay off in a satisfying play experience—is a double-edged sword. On one side, it’s gratifying. But with a single movement, the blade cuts the other way and it’s demoralizing.

Bright Crescent Company’s mechanics work, but not all of them are fun. The depth mechanic, where it is supposed to get more dangerous the deeper you go, proved to be incredibly repetitive. I rolled the same chamber contents and encounters so often that I started giving myself a +/- 1 just to get different outcomes. This is, obviously, not an ideal situation. It’s certainly not a thing I’d want to release into the world. If I’m not enjoying it, I doubt others would either. Of course, as my wife is fond of pointing out, I am my own worst critic. Fortunately, she’s brilliant and helped me with a solution (spoiler: it’s more tables).

While the experience of playing the game while managing my Commander’s dwindling hit protection did inspire ideas for other games/mechanics, it was also the only real danger I wound up facing in the ten levels of travel through the Burning Lands. I took approximately one damage from enemies the entire run—including the final boss.

When I wrote Bright Crescent Company I was trying to experiment with having less dice rolls in combat. In Oathbound, your character attacks by rolling 2d6 + modifier against a target’s danger rating (DR). Meeting or exceeding the DR is a hit. Then, the character defends against the enemy’s incoming attack in the same way. On hits, there’s the extra roll of damage dice (which can explode for the PC), equaling, at minimum, four dice rolls per combat round. That’s a lot. So I simplified it for BCC: PC rolls attack against DR, meeting or exceeding is a hit and the PC rolls damage. Rolling less than the DR means the enemy does damage instead. That’s two dice rolls (attack + damage). On paper, it should work out well. In practice, it becomes easy to bypass taking damage at all, except against specific, more difficult enemies.

Interestingly enough, while writing about the combat mechanics, I think I’ve come to a bit of a solution (that isn’t going back to the old combat mechanic). Enemies have a DR of 8 unless they are specific types of enemies that should be more difficult to hit for lore reasons (shades, ghosts, etc.) or are bosses. The final boss and one or two others have a DR of 12, which, in Oathbound: Trials of Caernlun (my first foray into the Dark Fort-style dungeon crawls) was incredibly difficult and often run-enders. The change to combat makes it less so, I think. Thus, the solution might be to raise the default DR higher. I’m going to test that out before I go back to the old mechanic.

I also wanted to talk about the difficulties of releasing a game, getting eyes on, getting people to play…but this has gone on longer than I intended. Releasing the game to the world, the highs and the lows, probably warrants its own article. I will say, here, that recently getting views on my posts has been difficult. Most of my posts have dropped 50 views below my average and I haven’t the slightest idea why. Suffice it to say, I have trepidation over releasing games based on how difficult it is to get seen now.

In the End, Does it Even Matter?

When mechanics don’t work how you expect, it can be absolutely demoralizing and demotivating. For me, depending on my mental state when the realization hits, it can make me want to give up completely. That’s honestly why I wrote this article: to remind myself why I love making games. Despite the difficulties and setbacks, the joy experienced in the creation of a game far outweighs the lows.

“Its the joy that matters most”

I am working on changing my mindset—its hard, I’m stubborn and prone to bouts of self-doubt. I want to hold on to the creative ecstasy that comes from ideation, writing, and realization of my games because, in a world filled with the tragic, awful, and horrible, you have to take the sunshine where you can find it. Whatever you find yourself doing, whether it’s making games, writing novels, making art, or what-have-you, in the end, it’s the joy that matters most.

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1. “Letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June 1955” in Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Houghlin Mifflin Harcourt, 2000.