“Hark Elm! We’ve been missing you back at the party, it’s such a shame you got laid off,” reads a scroll on my desk in the opening minutes of Dungeon Bodega Simulator. “I heard you opened a shop! What a quaint way to bounce back, I’ll try and stop by next time we adventure in that area.”
I can actually feel my heart rate spiking, reading those words. Early in my career I was laid off from game development. Twice. Sadness, anxiety, even a little bitterness as still-employed coworkers “reach out” with hopes that you’ll “find something soon” are all swallowed stones that fester in your stomach. You start asking yourself if you deserve to “bounce back,” if everyone is quietly condescending to you, if you should cut your losses from the industry entirely.
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It’s not safe to go alone
Dungeon Bodega Simulator is immediately charming. Other than the brief existential flashbacks it gave me, I had a lovely hour playing its demo. The low-poly characters and crunchy textures harken to the lo-fi PS1 aesthetic trend while the picking stuff up in front of my face with my invisible hands makes me think of the little joys of goofing around in Phasmophobia.
Former adventurer, now dungeon shopkeeper Elm Myrkwater, has been laid off, and is now (literally?) locked in a dungeon, growing apples and bananas inside an abandoned cell and concocting potions to sell to passing adventurers from beneath a portcullis.
Each day I wake up in my roomy dungeon flat and walk downstairs to water my incarcerated apples. I fill a cauldron with water and chuck in an apple and banana together to brew potions to place on my store shelves. I check my magical chest to find that my new item stock has arrived overnight: more apple seeds, refreshing drinks, and “bandages” that look like toilet paper for some reason. I pick a cassette tape to play as my day’s soundtrack, pet my bodega cat, and open the portcullis to fill the requests of a waiting line of adventurers. Life of a small business owner, eh?
As the days pass and Elm’s shop earns more, I can learn to craft weapons to sell. I can grow and breed dungeon slimes too. Tucked away in the back of my dungeon block is a cell with arcane runes on the wall that grant me unlockable passive upgrades like a “bag of holding” to more easily collect and shelve my bananas, a bonus for completing orders quickly, and eventually a kobold shop assistant who will water my cell fruits for me. Dungeons are cozy now.
The “LFG” life
Alien Fruit’s developer Harrison says he started the first iterations of Dungeon Bodega Simulator as a side project just a couple months before getting laid off from Turn 10 Studios where he was working on Forza games.
Harrison says he knows the common advice about not making work your identity, “but it’s hard not to let it go to your head when you get to work on cool big projects,” he says. “Being laid off was a major blow, and I was hit with imposter syndrome hard.”
“Those feelings of inadequacy, the tension of seeing other folks get jobs quickly while you struggle for months, the days of wondering if you can even stay in your chosen industry.”
Continuing to work on Dungeon Bodega Simulator started out as something to give structure to Harrison’s unemployed days—something to devote his time to that wasn’t obsessing over the wallowing job market. And it’s no wonder that those letters Elm gets from old coworkers made me crash out a little. Harrison says they were cathartic to write. He says Elm begins by feeling a little bitter before realizing they’ve got more feathers to their cap than just that former job title. Yup, relatable.
“It was a reminder that I am both capable and good at my craft,” Harrison says. “That the title of ‘game dev’ is something anyone can earn by making a game. It is not something a corporation can take from you when you get laid off.”
Eight months after that layoff, Dungeon Bodega Simulator has just launched on Steam. It’s a bittersweet story, though. The market is so tough on indies right now, Harrison thinks, that “success” for DBS probably isn’t springboarding into another solo project and is more likely as a good portfolio project to showcase his versatility.
Harrison has recently accepted an entry-level QA position “to help pay the bills,” while he continues looking for a position comparable with the one he lost. “Getting to work with a team is something special, so I’ll definitely be on the lookout for another systems or gameplay design role,” he says.
Dungeon Bodega Simulator may have taken me on a real emotional rollercoaster, but I can respect not wanting to stay indie for life even if it does go over as well as I hope at launch.