Players produce everything that is civilization — and whatever a character knows how to do, they learned by doing it. These are the ideas that guide how Defeat The Evil Online is made.
“It is a competition to dominate the map. Evil wants to dominate the map, the players want to dominate the map, and evil has to use the game’s resources to keep getting stronger.”
Both sides play the same game: the same mines, the same costs, the same board. That is what makes this a contest and not a sequence of events. Every mine has an owner, and owners change — the map is a scoreboard. And holding a lot of territory is expensive for both sides: thirty scattered mines are thirty places to defend with the same people.
At the center of it all stands the Crystal. Players cannot attack it; monsters can, and from time to time they gather an army that marches on it. Evil can take the whole map and the game goes on — the only ending is the Crystal falling.
“We should not make the game in a way that makes it impossible for players to lose. It has to be fair: there must be a chance for them to win and a chance for them to lose.”
If the Crystal falls, the world ends for real: everyone loses their character and everything they built. Nothing in the game exists to prevent that — everything exists so that, if it happens, it is fair. And fair means three things:
And the evil army has no size limit: it grows with what evil has mined. If it reached five hundred soldiers, it is because nobody cut off its supply.
Everything that goes into the game has to fit them. They are grouped by theme.
A map that was not drawn by us, that gets more dangerous with every step, and that feels like a real place.
We, the people making the game, only build the enemy’s structures. Every city on the map was raised by players — and it only stays standing while someone defends it.
The map is divided into ten rings around the Crystal. Each ring is a biome and takes at least an hour on foot to cross. And harder doesn’t just mean monsters with more health: it means monsters that demand an answer you didn’t have yet.
The map is generated by the computer, but it must not look like it. Things cluster as they do in nature, each one grows on the kind of ground that suits it, and water flows the way it really would.
Evil is not scenery waiting for you to show up. It is an opponent playing the same game, by the same rules.
It grows, builds and takes over the map. Four lineages, each with its own way of advancing: the evil plant smothers, the undead pile up where people die, the vampire converts whoever it kills, and the demon marches.
Iron, coal, gold and silver. Evil invents nothing: whatever it has, it extracted from the map, with a colony over a vein, just like players do. It uses iron and coal to arm itself; gold and silver it occupies only so players can’t have them.
Your character is the record of what you did: what you learned by practicing, what you crafted and what you helped build.
What sets classes apart is what each one can do, not bigger numbers. Each one fully masters its own field and only lightly touches the others — which is why none of them is enough on its own.
The world only produces raw materials. No NPC sells equipment, and bosses drop materials, never finished items. Every item carries the name of whoever made it.
There is no screen for spending points to improve a skill: it only gets better through use. The points you earn by leveling up are for unlocking new skills and for passives — the rest is practice.
Attribute points come from leveling up, so at level 99 everyone has the same amount. What sets two characters apart at the top is what each one practiced and what each one wears.
A guild city has workbenches — for refining, weapons, armor and accessories — that anyone can use by paying the fee the leader sets. It levels up through use, and no building inside it can exceed its level.
The way all of this is told.
The style comes from silhouette, camera, colors and line work. Every class has to be recognizable by its shadow alone — and no equipment may erase that shape.
The sun and moon in the game are where they are in the real sky, with the real moon phase. The light moves with them: golden at sunset, moonlit blue at night.
At night you see less — and the moon matters: a high full moon lights more than a moonless night.
Torches, the Light spell and campfires push back the dark. But whoever carries the light is seen from afar by those in the dark — not the other way around.
True fog of war: behind a tree, nobody sees you. Outside your vision there are no attacks or spells, and anything never explored is black.
All of this is in development: the principles guide what is being built, and the devlog tells what has already left the drawing board. Have an idea that fits them — or one that challenges them?