01A simple idea
It all started as such a simple idea. My girlfriend's birthday was approaching and I didn't know yet what I was going to give her. If I could, I would give her the world. Cut the blue out of the sky and wrap it in the red of the fire, if I could. But I had fallen on not the best of times, so my resources were limited and I couldn't do fancy things like that.
Then BlizzCon happened. A new Warcraft III expansion was announced, as well as WoW Forever, and we both got instantly hooked. So I figured, yeah, this will do, I can afford that much.
Blizzard would screw me over several times in this story, but the first time they did, it actually led to much bigger and better things. So I should probably thank them. You see, you can't order a physical copy of either Warcraft's new campaign or the WoW Forever bundle for the new race. They do offer a bundle where you get both plus Warcraft III: Reforged. The issue is, it's only available as a digital copy.
So I figured, never mind, I'll get a license key, print it on some nice paper, give it a box and some trinkets around it, and it will be fine. Yeah, sure. Who sells license keys these days anymore? Not Blizzard.
Obviously, I didn't want to just gift it to her BNet account. That's not the greatest way to deliver a gift.
But I found a workaround online: you can gift the game to an email address and use the link from that email to give it to whoever you want. Great, that was a way. But how do I deliver a link in some funky way? A game, of course. I can stitch together a simple platformer, and if she beats it, she gets the link. I'll make it an invitation to a challenge, print it on a card and give it to her.
02The first game
So I got to work on my game. No, not this one. A completely different one: a simple three-level platformer made in HTML5, no fuss. It worked, it was nice, but it was still a bit too short for my liking. My girlfriend is an avid gamer; she would clear those three levels in seconds. So I expanded it. Nine levels, three bosses. Still a very simple game, but now it at least let you enjoy it for what it is.
Now comes the second issue. How do I give it to her? With the card, of course, but an envelope is not exactly my preferred way to deliver gifts. So I found an empty Blu-ray case and figured, might as well. I printed a custom Warcraft cover for it, put the invitation inside with a couple more printouts and called it a day. I still had a month to go, so I just left it on the table. And just to be sure, I didn't purchase the game yet, so the link wouldn't expire. I planned to finish it before her birthday.
03An empty disc slot
But that was one trap I laid for myself. As the box lay in front of me, it nagged me. It's empty. There's a disc slot in it. And so I began considering what I could do with it.
I obviously needed to fill the disc with something if I was going to include it. What could I do, then? A movie? Nah, no way. Music? I'm only allowed to sing in self-defense, so that wouldn't do either. But a game, a game I can do.
There wasn't even much to think about on that front. Her favorite games are Bloodborne, Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, and that last one in particular instantly told me what I was doing. A metroidvania. Old school, pixel art (I like pixel art), with her in the main role.
04A childhood dream
So I got back to the drafting table. And here I should probably tell you something about my background, all things considered. Ever since I was a child, I dreamed of making a game. When I was five, I made a game in Paint, a dungeon crawler you beat by drawing lines on the screen. It was ridiculous, but hey, I was five. I didn't know what code was. Nowadays, I'm not completely clueless when it comes to coding, yet I would never call myself a developer.
You see, when the time came to decide which uni to pick, courses like Game Development or Game Design didn't exist yet. But there was a course in Software Engineering. I liked tinkering with computers, and at the time, I hoped it would help me make my game, as many did back then. Yeah, you can guess how that went. It was never that much fun for me.
And so I tried many things in life and worked many different jobs. But games, games never left me. I just didn't think about making them the way I did when I was younger. I mostly wrote books. Books are "easy"; you can do the majority of the work on your own. Of course, you need people for some jobs, but you don't need a dedicated team. You write down your story, find an editor, a cover designer, a beta reader, learn proper formatting, and you can bring your stories to life...
I think that's enough background. I was talking about my girlfriend's birthday gift. So yeah, at this point I was designing a metroidvania that I could give her on a disc along with the Warcraft games.
05Building it
I use the cheapest Claude subscription for work and side projects, so I had access to coding. I just never used it much. Most of my Claude work was speeding up my more complex scripting and such.
Anyway, I drafted the basic concept. I prepared the game concept, boss ideas, enemy ideas and room concepts, and used ChatGPT to make a basic model for my heroine.
I worked with Claude on building the first prototype. My engine of choice was Godot, as I've become a big fan of open-source software in recent years. To say the least, I was stunned by how good it came out. You have to understand that I had nothing but the idea in the beginning. But suddenly I had a game with three bosses and 18 rooms that actually felt like a game. So I used AI again to make backdrops, boss models, terrain, hazards and such, and the game looked and played like a real game.
In the meantime, I printed a new cover for the Blu-ray case, now featuring our heroine. I called it "Hollow Witch" as a joke. I made a funny promotional insert, and now I had a new version. I had to redo some of the older inserts as well, now that the design had changed, but I have access to a very good printer at work, so it was a non-issue. The gift was much nicer now.
But I couldn't rest for long. 18 rooms and 3 bosses? Come on, the HTML platformer is almost as long. That's not enough for what the cover looks like. So I kept working. New bosses, new skills, new enemies, new rooms. It took a while, but I ended up with over 100 rooms and over 20 bosses. And I probably would have built more, but my cheap Claude plan, which I had never used to its fullest before, was resetting on Saturdays and running out of weekly limits on Sundays. Nevertheless, I kept working on the project any moment I could. ChatGPT handled the character models, Gemini handled the backdrops, Claude handled the biggest part of the coding, and the music was simply open-source songs I could find.
06The box
During the downtime, when I couldn't work on the game directly, I kept refining the box. What did old-school games include with the inserts? A game manual. So I wrote one, printed it, bound it at work and put it in the box. Then I realized she would recognize a Blu-ray case in wrapping paper from a mile away.
So, in what would be the equivalent of a dollar store over here, I went on a hunting spree to find a box I could hide it in. And I found the perfect one. A box shaped like a big book. I was making a fantasy-esque metroidvania; what more could I have asked for? I sprinted to my car, because I'd forgotten the Blu-ray case in there, and slammed it into the gift box to see if it fit. And it fit like a glove.
So I took the box and went back to designing. It was obvious now that it was going to be a collector's edition. A book for a fantasy-esque metroidvania? Naturally, a grimoire of sorts. At this point, a joke name wouldn't do, so I called the game Archives of Arcana. So I got into designing and printing. I made the cover, put it over the box, and now I had a sick box to go with the Blu-ray case.
07The collector’s edition
And the old issue arose pretty quickly. It felt so empty now. So what goes into a proper collector's edition box? Well, everything I could think of. A soundtrack CD? Of course. Design and prints are all things I can handle, and music from the game burned onto a CD is a non-issue. An artbook? Need to have one of those, so GPT went to work again creating sketch designs of the characters in the game. I printed it, cut it to size and bound it. Stickers, bookmarks, postcards, posters. All within the range of me and my options. I created some fancy packaging for each, and suddenly the box was almost full.
But I'm sick in the head. I still had space in the box. What could I fill it with? Something small. Small, right... MINIS.
I made 3D models of my characters from the game, her D&D characters and even her WoW character, and had them printed by a friend with a 3D printer. Now the box couldn't be any fuller.
08The finish line
Meanwhile, I finished the game, barely in time, just a couple of days before her birthday. Due to time constraints, I had to pull a Bethesda in the end and release the game with a couple of bugs. But most of them are visual and not game-breaking, and I can't ask my girlfriend to move her birthday back two weeks because I didn't make the deadline. So yeah, a bug here and there will hopefully be forgiven by her.
All that was left to do was buy the WoW Forever bundle and put it into the mini game. It wasn't the main gift anymore, more like an afterthought at this point, but hey, I wasn't backing out of this one.
09Blizzard, again
Oh boy. Remember how I mentioned Blizzard was going to screw me over repeatedly? Yeah, I found out the email trick doesn't work anymore. So I came up with another, another idea. Blizzard Balance. It's not what I wanted it to be, but it works for the purpose, and now that it's a secondary gift, it should be fine. So I went to the store to buy some scratch cards to put those codes into the link, only to find out they had been discontinued. The store still carried them, but they weren't usable even as a paperweight.
Thanks, modern corporations, for letting me buy a notification when I want to surprise someone with your product. It's really nice and personal. Thankfully, I can just make a sarcastic ending for the platformer and send it to her BNet account manually after she beats it. Thankfully, the game is just a bonus at this point.
The last thing I realized was that she would probably be sending the game to her friends, and I figured I might as well make it easy for her. So, for once, I went and did something I actually know how to do and made a website. The very one you're looking at right now. And aside from her friends, I made it so anyone can visit it and play the game.
10Afterword
So yeah, this is the story of how this game came to be. From a fake Blu-ray box to a full game. It's not the story of a struggling game dev, or of insane commercial success as an individual, not even a story of dreams fulfilled, really. It's a story of a rekindled passion for game making that, after years of nothing, could be fed for a little while. I still wouldn't call myself a game developer. But this proved to me that it's possible to make something with a soul, even while using AI. Thanks to AI, I got to live my childhood dream again, if only for a while, and I think I'll try to do this again in the future. Maybe I'll even consider upgrading my Claude plan when circumstances allow.
So thank you for reading this far, and for trying the game. I hope you enjoyed playing it at least as much as I enjoyed making it. And hopefully, see you around in the next one.
— Kaiser