“Of course, I don’t remember any of this...”
In THE MAGIC CIRCLE game development is absurd but worth doing
The Magic Circle is a game about a game trapped in development hell. A dysfunctional dev team wrestles with the budget and technical legacy issues that come from working on a single game for over ten years, as well as the changing whims of the The Magic Circle’s fictional creative director, Ishmael Gilder. Meanwhile, lead designer Maze Evelyn is doing her best to either finish the project, or get fired from the team so she can reacquire her name and likeness rights before the studio goes completely bankrupt.
Of course, I don’t remember any of this. As a player, I’ve just reemerged onto a platform in the center of a white void. A portal ripped into space and time gapes behind me, while in front of me, a sketched-out, crumbling fantasy land lies frozen. The final boss is long gone, and a horde of odd creatures, apparently under my control, are staring at me. Waiting for me to do something. One is named ‘SkyEffer’. Another is just named ‘Mushroom Wizard’. It is a mushroom. It has a beard.
I may have made a mistake…
Three years ago, I hadn’t considered making a game beyond that pipe dream ‘million-dollar idea’ most players have in their heads. “Oh man, what if there was a game like GTA set on a ruined Earth during a war between Heaven and Hell?!” That kind of thing. Then, I played The Magic Circle. It was the final step in a journey towards realizing that game development, in practice, is really hard. However, rather than sending me screaming in the other direction, the humanity it shows in the process of creation urged me to dive into the medium myself. I returned to the game this week: Three years, ten-plus projects and less hair since I first played it. I’m finding myself stunned by this idiosyncratic game all over again. Learning how the industry works behind the scenes only deepened my appreciation for The Magic Circle’s particular wizardry.
I started again from the beginning, and marvelled at how quickly the game brings players up to speed with its systems and world. The starting point for your journey is called 0,0,0—the central coordinates for a level in a game engine, indicated by the symbol for a movement tool I’ve personally spent more late nights wrestling with in Unity than I care to admit. Jokes I previously laughed at simply due to sharp writing now struck with the sting of truth, as I heard the complaints, reasoning, and sneaky shortcuts I’ve seen in my own career echoed through my monitor.
The devs who actually made The Magic Circle are veterans. Working on series like BioShock and Thief, they’ve seen it all before. Having followed them down the rabbit hole of game development myself, I can see, now—more clearly than ever—it’s an adventure worth taking.
Jokes I laughed at due to sharp writing now struck with the sting of truth