This is the first entry of a journal — I’ll be documenting this journey as it happens, from the first idea to whatever it becomes. This one covers the idea, the inspiration, and why I started at all.
245 hours of Stardew Valley
This project starts, like many good things, with my girlfriend.
She had never really played video games. Not her world, not her hobby, no opinion on the matter. Then one evening we started a Stardew Valley farm together, mostly as an experiment, honestly, and something unexpected happened: we played 125 hours together. Planting seasons, arguing about barn placement, panicking in the mines, naming chickens. She went from “which button makes me walk” to optimizing sprinkler layouts.
And when our farm wound down, I wasn’t done. I played another 120 hours on my own.
That’s 245 hours in a game about watering plants. As an engineer, that number demanded an explanation. What Stardew does and what almost nothing else does is give you a daily loop with gentle pressure and honest rewards: wake up, make a plan, run out of daylight before you run out of ideas, go to bed, and wake up wanting one more day. It’s cozy, but it’s not empty. Progress compounds. The place becomes yours.
So I went looking for the next one. Another cozy game with that same pull, ideally something we could play together again.
I didn’t find it. Plenty of farming games, plenty of cozy games, but nothing that hit the same way and nothing with the flavor I actually wanted, which, it turns out, was less “farmer” and more “wizard.”
There’s a detail I only learned later that still makes me smile: ConcernedApe, Stardew’s creator, apparently started building his game for a similar reason. He was looking for a game to play with his girlfriend. The genre seems to run on this.
A gamer at (almost) 40
There’s a second inspiration underneath the first, and it took me a while to say it plainly.
I’ve been a gamer my whole life. I turn 40 this year and I still play. I still love it. Much of that life was played alongside my brother: we started as teenagers, and to this day we face off at StarCraft and Warcraft every Christmas vacation. It’s part of the ritual now, the tree, the food, the family, and at some point the two of us hunched over laptops trading build orders like it’s 2003. Somewhere along the way I stopped waiting for any of it to fade and finally understood: this isn’t a phase, it’s part of who I am. The storytelling, the escape into fictive worlds, the particular joy of inhabiting a place that doesn’t exist, that’s been with me for over thirty years and it’s coming with me for the rest.
Once you accept that games are a permanent part of your life, a question follows naturally: do you only ever want to visit those worlds or do you, once, want to build one?
Why not build it?
I’m an engineer and a product manager by trade. I spend my days shaping products, writing specs, making tradeoffs. I’d been wanting a real creative project for a while, something that wasn’t a spreadsheet, something with texture. And there was this persistent thought: the game I want doesn’t exist, I know how to run a product, and the tooling for small-team game development has never been better.
So I told myself: why not.
Not “I’m going to be a game developer now.” Just: why not try to build the game I couldn’t buy.
First job: write it down
The PM in me refused to open a game engine before the idea survived a document. So the first artifact of the project wasn’t code, it was a design document: the influences, the identity, the pillars, the main features. What this game is, and just as importantly, what it isn’t.
Then I did what you do with any product idea: I pitched it to people who’d tell me the truth, a couple of good friends and my brother. The document held up. The idea that survived those conversations is the game I’m building now.
The game: Broken Spire
Broken Spire is a 2D top-down cozy game about a young wizard who answers the call of a ruined wizard tower.
The identity is what I’d call dark cottagecore: warm and homey, but with dust, shadows, and things fluttering in the rafters. Think of the feeling of a candlelit study inside a half-collapsed ruin. The vibe boards I built pulled from Stardew Valley (obviously), from the warm-fantasy corners of Tolkien, and from years of playing WoW, I wanted a game where being a wizard is domestic, not just explosive.
The core fantasy: the tower is broken, and you fix it by living in it.
- A real day. Time passes. You wake at 07:00, the light changes, night falls, and if you’re not in bed by midnight the tower drags you back to where it found you, humbled, and at half mana. Sleep is the heartbeat of the game. (Yes, this is the Stardew loop. It’s the best loop in games)
- Reclamation. The tower starts as rubble and dark rooms. You clear debris for materials, chase out the bats, and reopen it room by room, the workshop, the alchemy lab, the research room, the farm.
- A wizard’s economy. You don’t sell turnips at a village stand; you feed junk into a transmutation machine that converts it to gold overnight. You wake to a little morning report of what your tower earned while you slept. It’s absurdly satisfying.
- Spell research. Magic isn’t given, it’s researched, at an altar, from ingredients, overnight. The spell book shows every spell in the game from day one, with recipes pointing at ingredients you haven’t found yet. The research board is secretly a map of the world: reading it tells you a forest exists, a town exists, bosses exist.
- A home you actually shape. Every piece of furniture can be picked up, moved, crafted, placed. Mushrooms grow in pots in the damp cellar. Loot can be set out on tables because a wizard’s tower should have a skull on the shelf.
- Combat, but cozy-sized. Spells on cooldowns, a loadout of three, enemies that matter but don’t dominate. Fighting is one thread of the day, not the whole day.
And the long-term dream, the one that started all this: co-op. The game is designed from day one to eventually be played by two people — because the whole point, the real origin story, is those 125 hours on a shared farm. I’m building the tower I want to reclaim with her.
Where this journal is going
This is a journal of the journey, and I’ll keep writing it as the game grows. The next two entries are already drafted:
- One about how it’s being built, the tooling and the process, including the part where my design partner and half my dev team is an AI. It’s a genuinely new way of working and it deserves its own post.
- One touring what exists so far, with videos and the milestones ahead.
After that: whatever the tower demands. Farming, the first step outside, the mechanics that make it ours. You’ll read it roughly as it happens.
The studio banner, for the record, is Orthanc Studios. If you know your Tolkien, you know a thing or two about towers.
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