Pact Warden

Steam Page

Trailer

I've been working on Pact Warden (explicitly) since March of 2025. But many aspects of the game originate from earlier, canned projects.

Prototypes Before

1-800-HELL-BBS

The first project was 1-800-HELL-BBS, a Game Boy style multiplayer horror game similar to Lethal Company. It was a really fun prototype to work on. I had this idea-- from an unfinished Resident Evil game on the Game Boy Color-- for the combat to take place in a first-person quick time event with a moving slider as the trigger. This implementation of combat was advantageous to the scope of the project because it would mean enemies would not need to be animated in real-time.

I worked on the project to the point of having functional game lobbies with several interactions possible within the game. I booted it up with some friends and we navigated a puzzle together. I still really enjoy the aesthetic I had crafted and I would like to return to it one day. But the multiplayer had connection issues due to the limitations inherent to the Godot engine. Designing the multiplayer around Steam's API would fix that issue, but-- at the time-- I did not want to commit to reworking the whole project for Steam's multiplayer API. Regardless, the multiplayer aspect of development began to eat a significant portion of my time and I lost interest in the particular combat system, as it seemed ill fitted for multiplayer. I decided to put the project aside while I focused on a singleplayer game. My main focus for game development in general was to limit my scope, so it felt like the right thing to do (and I still think it was).

Love Spun Fate

After the previous project, I recycled many of the mechanics and art assets into a singleplayer game for a game jam. The 2025 Boss Rush jam. I had a solid idea for the game and began prototyping a boss fight against a god of time. The main idea for the bosses would be this: the player's performance in the first stage of the boss fight would dictate whether or not the player proceeded into the second stage of the boss fight. If the player performed poorly, some reason would be given as to why the player would not partake in the second boss fight-- it was different for each boss.

For the first boss (god of time): if you performed poorly, he would peer into the future and see that you would fail in your quest (which I'll get to later). Knowing that you would fail, he decided to let you proceed without fighting you any longer. If you performed well, he would see you as a threat and continue to fight you. For the second boss, it would kill you if you performed poorly, preventing the second stage of the boss fight. You would then be resurrected by an NPC and continue to the next boss.

The main story was that of a weaver of fates. The protagonist is not a god, but she performs the godly task of weaving fates of mortals, alongside several other weavers. The protagonist was placed into this work after the passing of her mother, who was a weaver before her. The game begins with the weaver abandoning her position to visit her mother in heaven. In the game, the stars align every decade to open the pathway to heaven. Many mortals use this as an opportunity to visit loved ones. But-- to the gods-- this is not a privilege granted to mortals such as the weaver, as her occupation is too important to permit absence. So with the gods restricting the protagonist from visiting her mother, she defies the gods and leaves anyways, knowing she may never have the chance to find closure with her mother.

The reason I abandoned this project was due to laziness. I was distracted by social life, distracted by mindless distractions, and demotivated. The deadline for the game jam approached. I did nothing. The deadline passed. The opportunity was lost.

Pact Warden

The world of Pact Warden has been on my mind long before either of the prototypes which laid the foundation for its art and mechanics. I had actually worked with this world for a little bit as a text-based RPG, writing several encounters with branching narrative choices. It is a deeply personal world, and one which is the product of nearly a decade of crafting worlds in D&D.

I think this game is really something special. I can feel it when I play it. I find it hard to write about, so I'll leave it at that. One day it will be finished. After that I'll find the words to articulate what it means to me.