Hello reader,

You probably know already, but I’ve been very silent in the press for almost the last 10 years. But now I’m considering a return to my roots and thinking about making a game for PC/Console.

I really miss those days of being out, exploring publicly what a game is about. In the past that has led me into all sorts of trouble – as you develop a game, you try things out, and when you try things out, some things work and some things don’t. Now, in the old days, I used to talk about that process without really making it clear that some features may appear and then disappear. 

Famously in Fable 1, I think I mentioned that if you planted an acorn, an oak tree would grow, but that feature was dropped from the original Fable, and I think that was the start of me getting in trouble. I’m deeply sorry if I offended or upset anybody by my often overenthusiastic and ill thought out press. The great thing about this blog is it’s not trying to do anything but explain the process (you’re probably going to see me get ridiculously exicted).

But here we are in 2023 and I still would love publicly to share the thought process that goes behind creating a new game. And this thought process initially will be just the ideas that are bubbling around in my head, the things that I find fascinating, some of which I am sharing with the team of amazing people that I work with, and some of which are very much in my own head until they surface and become more sensible.

So this blog is really going to start exploring one aspect that I’m very fascinated with and showing you some reference material, especially material from around Guilford, because both the original Bullfrog, Lionhead, and more recently 22Cans, are based around Guilford.

A lot of what’s in Guilford has ended up inspiring both me and the people that I have worked with. For example, when we worked on Syndicate back in 91/92, all the buildings in that game had the same roofs as the offices that you could see through the window of the Bullfrog offices.

Also, a lot of the graphics, environments and other aspects of Fable were inspired by things in and around Guilford. So initially I think this blog will be exploring what inspires me, and when I say me, I really mean us at 22Cans.

Okay, so as we explore these ideas and concepts, and as we move from pure idea to a prototype, and as the prototype moves from prototype to pre-production and onto production, and finally to release, there’s going to be many, many, many times when features bubble up, are explored, and then are killed. So if you are the kind of reader that gets excited about a feature, don’t get too disappointed if that feature is actually dropped.

That’s the first thing. 

The second thing is that I’m mindful to disable comments, and I’m going share something with you now – I’ve had a quite a lot of mental health issues as a result of all the turmoil that happened about 10 years ago from the Rock Paper Shotgun article, and it takes quite a lot of courage on my part to raise my head above the parapet.

That’s the second thing. 

The third thing is that I’m mindful of my age. I am 64 now. And although I’m as passionate as I’ve ever been about making games and creating games and working with incredible people and just seeing the incredible reaction that people often have to games, I am aware that at 64 I wonder how much energy and life I’ve got left to create games. So I’m not saying that this game is going to be my last game, but I am saying that time is running out and that is incredibly sad, but that makes this game, in my mind, very, very meaningful. I feel it should be something which represents parts of my career and the many games I’ve been lucky to work on.

So I’m going to be stealing – I always think designers are great thieves of other ideas – but I’m going be stealing a lot of ideas from games that I’ve done in the past. And so you are going to see some references to those games because I think quite often you explore a mechanic or an interface or an idea, and you take it so far in a game, but you know, there are times when you think, ‘maybe we could expand that further’. 

So, dear reader, please, please be patient. Please be understanding. Please don’t think that anything in here is a promise. It’s not a promise, it’s more of an exploration of ideas. And, hopefully, at the end of this blog, over many months, you’ll have a real insight into the weird way that I work as a designer, and hence how the 22Cans people work.