Easy Does It either took two months or one to complete, depending on whether you count the time spent thumb-twiddling, waiting for an idea to take root. All I knew at the start was that it would take place in a cave (which was ultimately translated to “an underground ruin”). If you trawl through my blog archives you’ll also find a load of posts concerning googly-eyed NPCs called “paddlers” that never made it into the game. (Not this one, at least.) Some ideas take. Some don’t. I never know which is which until it’s all over.

Every time I had an idea, I drew up a design document for it. I found these useful, not as requirements or contracts, but as arguments. Poor arguments tended to vanish.

I wish I’d started writing the script earlier. I left it for the last week of development, and wound up with a set of one-liners that start repeating early on. Does it matter to the game? Possibly. If I’d started earlier, I could have given each ghost a history and a story to tell, or at least something original to say.

Originally, the game ended in one of three ways. You accumulated enough will to leave the ruins on your own, or enough luck to find some powerful artifact that Easy had missed, or enough money to set yourself up for a while. On the last day of development, I decided this didn’t really work for me, because it didn’t address Easy, and it seemed so oddly triumphant for a game that’s all about the little people of the RPG world. So, that’s why the ending is what it is.