"I think our difference is one of outlook," a friend told me recently. "I don't think the world is coming to an end."
He meant, of course, that I do. Over the last two years, I worked on a game called burncycle that was about just that: our world coming to an end, and what comes after.
Early days
The full story of burncycle (no capital b) isn’t mine to tell. It originated years ago, the germ of an idea from Josh Carlson, lead developer and co-owner of Chip Theory Games, where I work on writing, editing, project management and game design. I first entered the picture in the summer of 2020.
I’d just finished work on writing the lore for the second cycle of Cloudspire content, and our inaugural burncycle campaign was launching on Kickstarter in the fall. Josh invited me to a few meetings with him and Andrew Navaro, who was CTG’s studio director at the time, and we worked to flesh out the specifics of the game’s world before announcing the project publicly.
Though Josh had been mulling the idea privately for a long time, as is often the case with CTG titles, he started with a few core ideas and then developed the rest in the months before, during, and after the campaign.
Aesthetically, Josh had in his mind an old 50s sci-fi image of a team of scientists standing around a robot on a lab table, watching in awe and satisfaction as their creation came to life for the first time. Josh wanted the world of the game to evoke this image, but in the reverse: a world in which robots created the first human, and their progeny quickly got out of control. The other central aesthetic was the idea of the burncycle itself: a piece of code around which the players, and the world of the game, is oriented, allowing robots to perform an evolving loop of actions every turn.
The campaign
As is often the case in collaborative work, core concepts can look a bit different when all is said and done. By the time of the campaign, thanks to Andrew and Josh’s preferred aesthetic go-tos, the 1950s sci-fi element was all but gone. The robotic player characters and human enemies, art directed by Andrew and drawn by the always-excellent Anthony LeTourneau, reflected something a little more industrial or hard sci-fi, while a lot of the items and campaign page art, which was more influenced by Josh, had more of a cyberpunk, retrofuturist feel.
The campaign itself was a bit of a challenge. Though we have a lot of goodwill from our fans, some were a little put off by the sci-fi aesthetic in general, a very different feel from the combat-oriented, fantasy or sword-and-sandals titles we’d put out in the past. Others were uncertain about how the final product would look, as artist Yoann Boissonnet was still working on the game’s stunning room art when the campaign began. Chip Theory started crowdfunding back when Kickstarter really was a place where you could shepherd an idea into a realized product, but with more board game companies (and consumers) treating the site like a glorified preorder system, not having finished components became a significant deterrent for some backers. Finally, the campaign launched during a weak time for the global economy. In the end, the campaign topped out over $400,000 – respectable, and far from a failure, but well below the total we earned on Cloudspire that spring and absolutely dwarfed by the totals contributed to Hoplomachus and Too Many Bones: Unbreakable the following year.
Meanwhile, I was having a problem of my own: I didn’t know how to approach the material.
The breakthrough
My primary job on burncycle was to create the lore, name the characters, and come up with in-game descriptions of the missions created by the designers. We were also selling a burncycle lore package that people could buy separately and I would write.
The circumstances of the game’s creation had left me creatively conflicted. While everything we’d spotlighted looked cool, the blending of styles had me uncertain on how seriously to approach the storytelling. Was this a goofier world, akin to our Too Many Bones franchise, or was it bleaker, more serious, like Cloudspire? The CRT TVs on the campaign told me one story, but the painful biomechanical implants on the game’s bosses told me another.
So, too, I felt a little stymied by the premise – even though I helped come up with it! To match Josh’s idea of robots creating humans while still allowing for the game to take place in the future of the “real world,” we settled on the idea that humanity goes extinct sometime in the next few hundred years, leaving behind naught but the sentient AI they’d created prior to their self-inflicted end. After several centuries of peace, robots figure out how to restart the human race, bringing the first new humans back to life shortly before the year 3000. Humans being humans, however, it’s not long before their baser impulses act up again. In no time at all, the newly-resurrected homo sapiens have instituted crushing authoritarian rule over their robotic saviors, necessitating the robotic liberation movement players find themselves a part of when the game begins.
It all works, but I’ll cop to it being a bit roundabout. Between these two aesthetic challenges, I was having a tough time cracking an angle for the game’s fiction that felt compelling. Ultimately, there were two factors that helped me settle on my approach, both related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first factor was watching the completely ineffectual government response to the pandemic in the US. While it’s tempting to blame people who didn’t follow social distancing, mask mandates, and vaccine recommendations for the lasting ill effects of coronavirus fallout, ultimately these failings pale in comparison to the systemic breakdown on display: a government that would prefer to pretend like everything is normal, one that willingly used (and is still using) the blood of its frontline workers to grease the cogs of the stock market rather than present a unified, honest front about what we were facing.
The second factor was watching the richest people in the world grow their wealth exponentially during what was otherwise an economic downturn. Thanks to the United States’ deregulation and anti-labor policies, any global misfortune simply becomes the seeding ground for the Bezoses and Musks of the world to recapitalize and squeeze more money off of the middle and working classes. It all seems so hopeless at times, so intractable.
That’s when it hit me: What if I leaned into that feeling so hard that it became ridiculous?
The approach
The thing I decided to do with burncycle is indulge myself. What if I took those feelings of frustration and hopelessness I often get about current affairs and turned them into a joke – a commentary on the dire state of things, yes, but also a parody of the doom I so often find myself fortelling? This approach allowed me to get very goofy while also expressing my real frustrations with the state of the world and fantasizing about a resistance group that could work to create meaningful change within it.
For example, when it came time for me to decide what humanity's in-universe extinction event would be, rather than picking nuclear annihilation or climate disaster, I opted for a both/and solution. In the future foretold by burncycle, humanity dies because a giant tidal wave, spurred by catastrophic climate change, makes landfall at a facility that acts as the brain center for the United States’ nuclear arsenal, causing a malfunction and inadvertently launching a barrage of missiles that eradicates non-robotic sentient life. The Amazon Rainforest became the Amazon Desert. The Great Barrier Reef became the Modest Barrier Reef. When making decisions about the world, I tried to come up with the silliest version of a bleak dystopia.
This approach extended to the CEOs and captains that shepherd the quasi-nation-state corporations infiltrated by players over the course of a game. Many of them aren’t new humans at all; instead, they are the consciousnesses of pre-extinction tech billionaires implanted into new human bodies, Dollhouse style (any resemblance to any real-world tech billionaire is, of course, unintentional. Of course). These billionaires’ first act upon reawakening is to entrench themselves in government and reinstitute the old global financial system, allowing them to once again seize the power and labor of the less greedy or fortunate.
Finally, I had a theme I liked and could operate within. The higher-ups at Chip Theory usually allow me a pretty free hand with my fiction as long as they feel the overall feel of the game is working, and burncycle was no exception. Now that I knew how I wanted to write, I had to buckle down and do it.
The process
So far, I’ve written a lot about burncycle without actually explaining how the game works. Simply, it’s a solo or co-op game in which each player uses one unique robot to infiltrate a human corporation and perform some kind of stealth or heist mission. Each corporation (there are four so far) comes with eight mission cards to choose from; each mission will take you across one, two, or three floors of a given corporation. To move around the corporation, the bots employ the burncycle – an ever-changing pool of chips that allow them to optimize specific actions as they complete their turns.
One of the most fun writing tasks I had was helping come up with the mission ideas. After elucidating the core gameplay concept (with some help from Josh Wielgus, one of our other designers), Josh Carlson handed over most of the nitty gritty development finishing work to Shannon Wedge and Salem Scott; these two are largely responsible for the final product being as polished and well-received as it is. One day in early 2021, Salem, Shannon and I sat down for an entire day and pitched funny mission concepts. To prepare, I watched a lot of heist movies and thought a lot about the function of each of the four corporations in the world of the game. While I contributed a few game design ideas at this stage, they were more conceptual and vague; actually iterating those ideas in a way that would be fun and compelling to play fell to Shannon and Salem.
For the bots, I came up with some thematic character frameworks that Josh designed to and expanded on. When it came to equipment, network, and “imperative” cards (which force you to take specific actions in exchange for earning power), Salem, Shannon and Josh came up with the mechanical ideas, and I went through and named all of them, coming up with concepts that seemed to be a good thematic fit for what the card was actually doing. I had a lot of fun here, too. For example, one of my favorite pieces of equipment is the “Kung Fu Knower,” a device that gives you a bonus to an attack made against a guard; for the art, Anthony faithfully drew an interface that looks an awful lot like a famous cranial plug-in from a certain sci-fi classic.
Finally, for the lore package, burncycle’s world seemed too expansive and wide-reaching for a novella to encapsulate. Instead, I decided to write a series of short stories, each of which is collected in its own small portfolio and packaged together in a deluxe package (I also helped write a few materials for the secret “something special” you can find in the bottom of the package, though the actual design of said object is all Logan Giannini). My intention with the lore portfolio is to parcel out discrete bits of world-building in each story, allowing readers to approach the material in any order and fill in more information about the universe as they enjoy each story individually. You can order the package now, independent of the game itself, and CTG will be posting a digital version of the portfolio for free on its website soon.
The final product
In the end, the entire team at CTG took a concept with raw potential and turned it into a really cool final product. As we promised, the end result is a lot nicer than how it looked on the Kickstarter page, thanks to the work of Yoann, Anthony, and our graphics team, including Shaun Boyke and Melonie Lavely. Once the finished game started to make its way out into the world, the buzz began to build, and a title we once feared might not have the legs of some of our franchises is shaping up to have a passionate fanbase all its own. It’s very gratifying to play my small role in a project like this, and I feel very privileged to work in the environment and with the people I do.
Part of that environment is one of creative freedom. My friend was right: It often does seem to me like the world is ending. I hope I’m wrong about that, but I’m grateful burncycle allowed me to express some of those fears and have a lot of fun in the process.
———
What else is good on the internet?
This article expressed quite well some feelings I’ve been having about the content creation machine that is consuming our entertainment landscape.
———
From the field
You can check out burncycle at the Chip Theory Games store. If you’re interested in the lore package, it’s called the Deluxe Lore Recruitment Portfolio.
———
Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer, read my Letterboxd reviews @mrchumbles, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.