MOONRING
How Fable designer Dene Carter’s RPG passion project became a surprise Steam hit – without making a penny
When Dene Carter released Moonring in September, a few days before his 25th wedding anniversary, he’d spent four and a half years working on it. His Ultima-inspired RPG had attracted so little attention in its early-access form that his expectations were low: “I honestly thought it was just going to die without a trace.” He’d even begun to put plans in place for his next project, having supported himself over the prior two years of development through freelance scriptwriting jobs on other games. “Then it kind of blew up.”
It helped that Carter released the game for free.
“Life is hard, COVID sucked, everyone’s poor and stressed,” he said in the comments of YouTuber Splattercatgaming’s Let’s Play video, which he credits as being one of the biggest factors behind its success. “I don’t need the $300 this would make me – I’d rather take the goodwill.”
That is, he admits, only half the story. Yes, there was an altruistic motive behind it – “ethically, it didn’t make any sense to charge for it,” he says – but that was partly because he saw Moonring as a “complete vanity project”, having originally set out with a more selfindulgent goal. “I was at a point in my career where I really wished I’d made a game with a cloth map,” he says. “This is not a joke. I thought I’d release the game for free and then raise some money via Kickstarter or something to pay for the cloth map, so it’s not just a completely insane idea.” And now? “Well, it is just a completely insane idea.”
The player response says otherwise. At the time of writing, Moonring has over 500 Steam reviews, adding up to an ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ rating. Which suggests there were plenty of people in a similar place to Carter when the creative spark first ignited – because this was never just about a cloth map. “Part of the reason I actually started making this is that I was playing Bloodborne for the third time, and I realised that was a problem,” he explains. Nothing else – at least within the triple-A space – was grabbing him. “I was so bored seeing exactly the same games with exactly the same best practices.”
Having tired of modern standardisation, Carter looked back to the 1980s for inspiration. “There’s a reason games came with manuals back then,” he says, “because you had no bloody idea what you were doing if you didn’t have one.” Rather than “do the 12 things we expect every game to do now but with a slightly different palette,” he hoped to make something that fostered deeper engagement. “It sounds very highfalutin, but games felt like a relationship: you had to put yourself out the
