From Compost to Collapse

Dungeon Manager Blues (DuMB) did not arrive in a single flash of inspiration. It emerged through slow decomposition — a composting process of conversations, discarded drafts, and persistent analytical friction. The twenty-four hours between first sketch and finished chassis weren’t an act of inspired genius; they were a running battle between constraint and friction, the accelerated final stage of work that had been ongoing for months.

The compost pile was varied and messy: discussions about happiness as social control, about debt as quiet coercion, about the procedural violence of bureaucracies that hum along without malice but with relentless efficiency. There were cultural touchstones layered throughout — the sharp hostility of noise rock, the sharp-edged absurdity of workplace satire, the asymmetry of games like Ogre. And woven through it all were prototypes of a different game: a reverse-dungeon workplace comedy where underlings had quirks and personalities, where the spiral could be slowed, where survival — with cleverness and cooperation — was possible.

But those prototypes never held. Every attempt to inject emotional investment or player agency collapsed under its own contradictions. The more we tried to reconcile the transactional logic of the workplace with collaborative, hopeful play, the more dishonest the system felt. The scaffolding — the soft cushions, the incremental fixes, the illusion that survival was a matter of good management — blurred the point.

That tension sharpened against the backdrop of contemporary game design. The 2020s have brought a culture of safety and care — consent frameworks, boundary-setting tools, and a focus on creating collaborative spaces that prioritize players’ well-being. Those practices are vital in most contexts. But in DuMB, they obscured the message. This wasn’t a game about negotiating safety; it was about a system where safety was never on offer. To add comfort would have been to lie about the structure being simulated.

Rejecting that scaffolding was not about carelessness; it was about repositioning constraints. The decision was to let the system speak without apology or abstraction, to create an artifact that would not soften itself. Hence the early line that became a quiet design manifesto:

Any fun experienced is coincidental and unintended.

Mainstream games like Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius rely on humor, satire, and kitsch to provide padding from the uncomfortable premise that the players are the "bad guys." Running a dungeon or a criminal enterprise is quirky, mischievous, and empowering. We opted to remove as much of that padding as we could (although some bits of snark snuck past us), not just because we're killjoys, but we wanted to eliminate that variable of "fun obscuring the horror" from our experiment.

When the safety nets were taken down, what remained was a skeletal, procedural inevitability: a core game resource tied to the number of players. Utility that only decays unless propped up by scarce, fleeting resources. Overuse penalties that punish competence as much as failure. A spiral designed not as metaphor but as mechanism.

The iterative, collaborative process matters. Every contradiction, every cut, every refinement, every burned-away flourish came through dialogue — recursive questioning and mutual testing until only what was necessary remained. That collaboration shaped the artifact as much as the design philosophy did.

One might say that we machined a metal bar into something pointed–sharp, pared down, and capable of puncture. Its stance is anything but neutral, and its violence is part of its alloy. Like any precision tool, it carries directional pressure toward certain uses. The potential for misuse, as a playground for intentional malevolence, is as present as that for exploration and discovery of real world dysfunction. A player deriving pleasure from that dysfunction says more about that person than the game experience.

"Bad" people exist, and that’s ultimately why this game exists. But most of them aren’t cartoon villains. They’re banally functioning, carrying out procedures and hitting metrics because that’s what the system demands. DuMB is about that machinery — the suffocating inevitability of systems that collapse not because of evil masterminds, but because they were built on extraction and run on inertia. Complicity is wielded as a hammer of judgment, yet in these systems that state of collaboration is the air that everyone breathes.

Playing DuMB is not cathartic in the traditional sense. There are no heroic reversals, no triumphs. The closest thing to release is recognition: the moment when the system aligns with something familiar, when players see in its attrition the mirrored logic of their own workplaces, institutions, or governments. That recognition is the point.

But recognition is not the same as inevitability. The spiral of DuMB feels inevitable because it is clean and enclosed, a system designed to collapse on itself. Real systems are more complex. Collapse is probable, not certain. It happens because the coordination and sacrifice required to prevent it are extraordinary — effort and risk most people, by necessity, cannot afford.

This is the perspective that the game encodes. Systems of extraction and control are hard to escape not because they are unbreakable, but because they are built to make resistance expensive and collective action fragile. Collapse, when it comes, is not liberation. It is only the end of one configuration of violence, a dangerous threshold where something else will emerge — not always something better.

DuMB doesn’t try to simulate what happens after collapse. That space — uncertain, contingent, and political — lies outside its procedural frame. What it offers instead is a tinted window: a machine that models the suffocating clarity of being trapped inside systems where exits are technically available but practically unreachable.

Collapse here is not a metaphor. It is the mechanism. While we would like to believe that the mechanism is not destiny, our systems place a high price on resistance.