I recently released a 21-day side project - a top-down 2D tile-based action RPG game I called Dwell.
I’ll have a technical breakdown in another post - but this post is about how I approached the direction and design from a creative perspective.
The rest of this post contains spoilers.
Keep your eyes on the prize
Role playing games are excellent at focusing the player’s attention.
Interfaces, objectives, enemies, rewards, equipment, progression systems, and level layouts all help establish a hierarchy of importance. In an action RPG, that hierarchy encourages moving forward.
Progress is the goal - leveling up, collecting new items, upgrading equipment, obtaining new abilities, unlocking new areas.
Action RPGs give players many reasons to treat an environment as an area to pass through. The environment provides variety as you progress - a blue slime in water, a red slime in lava - while still functioning mechanically as a transitory space: just a stepping stone to an even more exciting place with even more powerful rewards.
Oftentimes, the focus is more on the indicators pointing out the destination rather than the journey.
Is the adventure already here?
Dwell is a game that I designed to explore a specific premise: what happens if your adventure is already in front of you?
It still uses the language of a conventional RPG: it has a path to follow, weapons to choose from, enemies to fight, abilities to gain, and an ending to reach.
At the same time, I added another layer that is much less interested in whether the player is making progress or whether the player even notices at all. That layer only really becomes visible if the player spends their time and attention in places that they would otherwise rush through to get to their goal.
Walkthrough
If you haven’t played it yet - feel free. It takes only a couple of minutes to complete the mission. If not, here’s the overall walkthrough.
Like every game, the player starts on the title screen, with the player character sitting besides a glowing campfire, ready to start the adventure.
You arrive on the island, follow a path to a cave, kill some bandits, gain some new abilities, and return to your boat.
Then, the game ends.
Like every game, the player ends up back on the title screen.
The attentive player
This is where most players’ journey with Dwell ends. The game is over, and nothing requires them to go through it again.
For some, I hope it leaves a sense of disproportion. The game was just a bit too short. The credits were jarringly more emotional and nostalgic than the tiny streamlined experience they just went through. The final word - DWELL - was just a bit too assertive.
Maybe it’ll raise the question: ‘is that it?”
Back on the title screen - the world feels more alive. Something has changed - the player just might not remember what.
In a second play-through, instead of “what am I supposed to do?”, the player can ask a different question: “what didn’t I notice?”
The Design
Reflecting the theme from the very beginning
I designed the Title Screen to establish what Dwell was about from the first moment - patience and attention leading to an experience not found by proceeding.
Here, I intentionally framed the screen in near pitch-black night, with the light flickering to the side, revealing only a slight glimpse of something more at the bare edges.
A player who rushes through and clicks “Start Adventure” jumps right into the game.
However, a patient player who waits long enough for the day can see the world wake up as the title song plays - a gentle pastoral melody.
Designing the map
The first attempt
The first map I made for Dwell was just meant to be a nice walk into the forest where the enemies were - it was literally a straight line.
It felt a bit empty so I added an ‘easter egg’ to reward going off the main path: a bench you could sit on and hear music.
As I sat there watching the wind move through the grass, I realized: why don’t I make this game about the things you normally wouldn’t experience if you stayed focused on progressing?
The second attempt
I intentionally made this area feel like a starting tutorial zone - somewhere that you would normally rush past and never think twice about. There’s a pleasant ambience, non-threatening wildlife, and rabbits that you can just run past towards your destination.
I also made the path deliberately skip and de-emphasize the things you can interact with. In a typical RPG, paths often lead to points of interest. Here, it routes past and around some of the things that might make the experience more interesting.
The break in the path near the bench was one of the first visual signals I added that suggested: stop. But the next section of the path beckons - always visible and ready.
Variations
I tried a few variations, including removing the loop and even adding a bridge to create a direct route from the camp to the cave. None of the changes felt quite right because the player would skip large parts of the island entirely.
The deeper experiences in Dwell come from taking the time to pay closer attention to areas you’re already in. It’s not quite fair to ask people to dwell in a place they’ve barely seen, and putting the adventures in what feels like ’another unvisited area’ simply turns it into a destination. Going somewhere new is itself a form of progression - that’s not dwelling, that’s exploration.
The cave
The second area, the cave, wasn’t always a cave. It was initially a forest where I wanted to add as much depth as the start.
It didn’t work thematically, especially coming from the open island.
Instead, I opted for a cave - constrained, dark, mechanical, linear. It contrasted well with the open area you just came from.
That’s not to say there isn’t ambience in it. Water drips from the top of the cave, the sounds reverberates, bugs crawl on the ground, the bandits play cards and eat food.
It just isn’t as detailed or as deep - it has a purely instrumental role: to house the bandits. You enter the cave, you fight them, and you leave. There’s little reason to remain afterwards - it was designed to perform a single purpose, and the experience is quickly exhausted.
Designing around attention
One of the main challenges with the idea of building a game around noticing was that I didn’t want paying attention to become another explicit task.
It would have been easy to add a journal containing objectives such as “watch the sunset,” “find the turtle,” or “listen for the wolf.” That would make the more subtle parts of the world easier to discover, but it would also change their function. The player would be noticing them because the game had already told them they were important.
Instead, I tried to let things happen without announcing them. I was less interested in hiding conventional secrets than in allowing things to exist without the goal of being discovered by the player.
Temporal exploration
The game world itself is very small. The main map is about 70 tiles wide and 60 tiles tall, and the player can cross it in about fifteen seconds. There isn’t much geography to discover.
After less than a minute, the player can understand the basic layout: the pond, the cave, the campfire, the flower field, the trees, and the paths between them.
Part of the usefulness of that constraint is centered around the ability to provide variation - how do you make the world worth engaging in if it becomes repetitive?
That gave me a different way to think about exploration. Normally, exploration means moving farther to find a new place. In Dwell, I made it so exploration means remaining in the same place long enough for it to become different. Most of the variation comes from allowing the same places to change over time.
The environment
The environment is what makes Dwell work well. Small things that might normally exist in isolation interact with each other to enable moments that deepen the experience.
Weather, wind, lighting, day-night cycles, trees, grass, animal behavior, and smoke all overlap, subtly or dramatically changing a location over time. Together, they make the same place capable of revealing different things over time.
The same place viewed attentively across time can feel entirely different. A field of flowers might have butterflies during the day, but when night falls lightning bugs break up the darkness. The grassy plains may be lush green one day but turn brown and flammable after a week without rain.
I wanted these overlapping interactions to be allowed to exist without the game insisting that the player see them.
Flora and fauna
When the player is focused on completing their objective, the world moves by them in a flash. The player who stands still to pay attention will notice that the world itself is moving around them.
Wind moves the grass and leaves. Plants bob on the surface of the lake. Trees shed leaves that drift through the air. Clouds idly pass by overhead. Animals hop, fly, preen, nibble, dive, and croak. Shadows stretch and shrink as the day opens and closes.
Sound
Listening reveals more, too: Leaves rustle in the wind. Frogs croak at night. Ducklings chirp in the day.
The soundscape changes depending on the time of day and weather. The liveliness of animals during the day dies down in the evening, replaced with an echoing emptiness broken only by the occasional croak.
In Dwell, I was intentional about making sure each sound originated from a specific creature on the map - even if you can’t engage with them.
Sometimes, at night, you hear the howl of a wolf. It’s easy to assume the environmental sounds only exist to provide ambience. Few will discover that it’s actually coming from a wolf already living on the edge of the map.
From most places, the player can’t see it at all. There is one position from which it is just barely visible. Yet, it’s there, and it exists, and it howls whether or not the player ever finds it.
The same is true for other sounds - ducks, birds, frogs, crickets. Every sound originates from somewhere.
Choosing how to engage
Acting peacefully
Waiting doesn’t have to mean doing nothing. I didn’t design Dwell to be a screensaver.
I added a few activities into the game that give the player things to do while remaining in the world. They can fish, skip stones, and do other things that hold their attention without moving them towards the objective.
I designed the fishing mini-game to feel like actually reeling something in. Rapidly alternating Q and E while the fish struggles against you feels like the digital equivalent of wrestling with “the big one.”
Acting violently
I didn’t want to create a game where combat is punished, nor a place where it’s the sole source of rewarding moments.
I was more interested in allowing the result of an action to remain present instead of cleaning the scene as soon as the action was complete. The point of Dwell is attention, and attention can reveal both the pleasant effects of peaceful interactions and the aftermath of more violent ones.
That’s why I made the violence unsanitized. Killing a duck in water, for example, causes blood to spread out and stain the surrounding water red.
A player moving quickly and conventionally experiences combat mostly as an immediate sequence of attacks, blocks, damage, and death - UI ticks, health bar changes, and experience gained.
A player who stays in the area sees that sequence become part of the environment - a different form of experience. Corpses, given time, attract flies and later maggots. They may even attract other creatures drawn by the scent of blood.
It’s experience gained, but not the kind measured by a bar.
A few of my favorite little moments
I filled Dwell with ‘little moments’ that offer another kind of experience besides combat. Many are missable, and not all are guaranteed to even show up in any given playthrough. Many won’t even be noticed as they happen.
The illusion of choice
There’s a mundane moment that players won’t find readily. The conditions have to be right: they have to stay on the island long enough for it to rain, they have to walk over to the puddle, and they have to be attentive enough that they notice their reflection.
If the stars do line up, the player gets to stand at a fork in the road staring at their own reflection, only to discover that both paths lead to the same destination.
The imagery fit Dwell perfectly.
The barrel and the book
At the beginning of the game, the barrel is out of sight and reach of the player. Nothing marks its existence. A player who waits long enough, or spends time bird-watching on the lake, will eventually see it float into view slowly, almost imperceptibly.
The patient player can actually open the barrel when it reaches the shore , revealing an item: a book.
If the player takes the book to the campfire, they can sit down and read it.
I didn’t want the book to be some conventional page of text that could be clicked through quickly. I wanted people to experience the feeling of getting lost in a story.
Rather than showing the book’s text to the player, I let the player follow the character’s journey through the book as they become increasingly invested in it. As they read - day turns to night, animals go to sleep. Eventually you glance up and realize your day has already passed by in a flash.
The adventure is here
That was the structure I was trying to build around the original idea. There’s still an adventure that can be completed quickly, but the world is not paced entirely around that completion. Much of it only becomes visible when the player remains somewhere long enough for the place to change.
Dwell is built around a very small space whose depth comes from time, persistence, and overlapping systems rather than from the amount of ground the player can cover.
Experience can come from the same place viewed differently.
This looks epic! I love RPG especially in 2D and reminds me of pokemon back on the old pentium 2 computer. I also love using the MMORPG analogy on business, teams and how things are structured from a people perspective!