Two things happened, the first around ten years ago, when I wrote a fantasy story and thought, this is a pretty cool world, I must do something with it one day. With my two young daughters (young at the time) we'd ponder over various creatures in the this fantasy world (kids can come up with the most glorious ideas if you ask them). I forgot about this world and didn't think about gaming at the time, so filed it away for years. Some time later I wrote another story which, I realise could be set in the same world as "Gallow's Fine Dungeon Torches" (the title of this original story). This new story is almost done (I need to revisit the start which is tropey), but it seems a shame to drop a story when it is done and move on to the next. What if we could develop the story, use it for new work ongoing for as long as we like? As a writer, the logical thing to do would be to write a new short story in the same world, finish it and move on to the next, or maybe start an epic fantasy consisting of several volumes and thousands and thousands of pages.  I'm already doing this for my "Beyond Flesh" universe, and don't think that the old noodle could handle two such writing projects.

The second thing happened this year when I had some down-time around Christmas. I started playing an online trading card game. I loved it, but thought it had some issues. Perhaps it was too commercial, the matching too contrived, the scope too limited. I stopped playing after many, many hours into it, mostly I enjoyed the feeling the game brought to me, the nostalgia of going back to the early 90s when I was into the Star Wars Customizable Card Game released by Decipher...

...but also the strategy and skill involved was engaging and seeing the 'computer' calculate complex battle resolutions in a split second, I thought was something not to take for granted. I cut code in my day job, so what it if I decided to take one of the activities most likely to bring on depression (writing) and mix with another such torture (indie game development), what could go wrong?!

Some other things have fallen into place for the idea of a indie game dev for this type of thing:

 The cloud computing environment, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), is highly accessible and affordable for indie users. While this has been the case in some form for a while, there are new developments like Microsoft's Azure PubSub that makes the IoT (internet of things) style messaging needed for something like this almost trivial compared to some other low-cost-high-volume alternatives; Flutter, a development framework by Google, also makes it possible to code, build and deploy to various devices, like Android, iOS, Windows and browser. 

The AI tools around mean that the indie dev has access to professional services that would have only been available for companies with investment funding. Artwork, graphics and design, music, voice overs, dev support it's all there, today.

The TCG sector of gaming has provided the potential for me to breathe life into a small fantasy world, while there will be nothing groundbreakingly astounding that the game will bring to the fantasy genre (oh, yeah, I got to work on the marketing sell), the game engine itself should offer some surprises over anything that I've personally seen so far. I'm fifty years old as writing this and would be very happy if, by the time I'm sixty, this thing was, like the truth, 'out there'. Let's see, shall we :D

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Title image: perhaps a location card, generated by Midjourney

The gif: no, that's not me. source: https://makeagif.com/gif/johnny-vs-the-pokemon-trading-card-game-wzJ37i

Mid and Below: draft character card designs for the Shield Bearer card generated by Midjourney.