How Do We Benefit From Each Others' Work?
Instead Of Being 100,000 Isolated Indie Game Devs?
What you'd be building in
Alderhoard is a valley you walk, with arcade games in it, and no obligation to do anything in particular. You can just play the arcade games, or defeat the Warlord, or both.
Technically I started the whole project as a low-stress gaming option for nostalgic reasons, as a 60 year old.
There's a well with a bunch of stuff at the bottom. Do you actually NEED to get there? What's there? I'm not telling.
The world under it is called ELDSEAM, and it's public domain (CC0). The places, the creatures, the names, the rules, the story under all of it. Any genre, any engine, any look.
Sell what you make. Credit is welcome, never required. Dream scenario: this gets people together into small teams to build together, or even build separately but form real game-and-story connection through-lines.
What isn't free is Alderhoard's own code and art. If you want help making art that fits the universe, just let me know.
Making it belong
- Break the rules.
- Try to make it something that won't confuse the hell out of anyone over 45.
- Strange unexplained stuff is encouraged.
- The first two minutes don't fail the player.
- Low stakes, high fun.
- No streaks, and no guilt for leaving.
- It doesn't have to be "finished". It can be a public work in progress as long as players can achieve an objective or complete a level.
What's under everything
There's one real thing under it all, and nobody has ever seen it directly. Everybody who meets it comes back with their own version, shaped by what they already believed. No two accounts match, and none of them is exactly the truth.
What you build should not clash with the baseline reality.
- Many worlds, one universe. Every game is its own complete world, any era, any planet, any genre. Subtle hints at connections occur across games, in-game games, etc.
- The connection has no name. If a character needs a word for it, give them a local one.
- The thing under it all has no body, just an arrangement of nine points, so it can turn up anywhere: in space, on the Moon, in a modern town, in prehistoric Australia.
- It shows up one way at a time. The nine points are in a landscape, an arrangement, a mystery, an ecosystem, or in somebody's old records ... whatever. They might be a sound, a song, with the ninth one late or off pitch.
- Eldseam is also what people call their beliefs about it. Schools, sects and factions, and they argue. Give a place its own school with a plain local name. Just like actual people do in our real world.
- Places you/we build should feel like something else built here first. Sometimes for a body that wasn't human: ceilings might be too low, stairs might seem nonsensical, doorways wider than they are tall. Nobody explains them. So far this is only mostly true about my text adventure games, but it's also coming soon to new games. I know the text games are not going to be the draw.
- Your game has to stand on its own. Someone who's never heard of any of this should be able to love and finish your game.
- A few names are sealed. They're listed in the canon; ask before you use one. New places, creatures and factions can join the canon too.