This brilliant parody of The Elder Scrolls was made possible with pre-made assets

Bethesda RPGs are known for two things: unparalleled immersive open worlds where the possibilities feel endless, only to be undercut by often embarrassing yet hilarious bugs, something that even the new The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remaster doesn't appear to be immune from.

This cringey and heavily memed aspect is however something indie developer Dionysus Acroreites leans on in his parody first-person RPG called, well… The RPG. "I'm a huge fan of the RPG genre, but I wanted to make a game which encourages the bugs that in developers' eyes are usually immersion-breaking and frustrating," he tells me. "The bugs are the features."

This is apparent during the opening scene, parodying the cart scene in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's opening, where you're attacked by a glitchy dragon. In this case however, it's not just a visual glitch but intentionally designed to affect gameplay.

"When you do fight him, he'll do weird things to you like flip your camera upside down, or disable the UI," he explains. "It's a parody but it does have depth, and its own lore. There's a whole dungeon that's like a twisted Disneyland for adventurers to gon raid to kill monsters and get loot, but there are workers in the dungeon, setting up traps, lighting the torches and resurrecting the creatures. So you'll eventually have a choice to be able to join them or just keep things as they are."

The RPG is a solo indie project

The RPG is a solo project for Dionysus, who describes himself as a jack of all trades who likes to wear different hats. "I prefer this way of working, and I see that this trend is going up with the rise in cost of development along with the difficulty of getting investments in the gaming industry after the COVID bubble burst," he says.

The greater challenge however is balancing this indie project along with his full-time job as a senior game developer for Voodoo – no easy undertaking having spent more than two years on The RPG already, though there seems to be no conflict of interest since the day job is focused on working on midcore auto-battler and strategy games for mobile.

"It's all about the schedule and discipline," Dionysus says. "I sleep early in the evening and early in the morning, then I work at night and on the weekends. It's honestly been quite tough, but if the game has a decent result on Steam, I could switch back to indie fulltime."

What has helped to significantly lighten the load is that The RPG uses store-bought assets (for an idea, read our article on Epic Games' FAB store for Unreal Engine). He tells me: "I'm a decent coder, I know what game feel is, and I have some knowledge in game level design, so those are my strengths."

Dionysus adds: "I know what good and bad art is, and I can model something, but I'm not that good at it. It would have taken me another year at least to make all those models by hand."

Given the popularity of the fantasy genre, it's also not too difficult to find assets for say, medieval buildings and weapons. But this doesn't mean these existing assets have just been slapped into the game world – there's still customisation and art direction involved.

"If you buy a bunch of asset packs from different artists and just throw it in together, you'll get a huge mess, like Lego but all the pieces are wrong," Dionysus explains. "I have specific demands for exteriors and interiors that all need to match each other. I also retexture a lot of things to give it a hand-painted look or remove extra details. In some places I had to use AI-upcalers to make the textures look higher res."

Design simplicity means flexibility

However, while it's also possible to buy fantasy character models, The RPG instead opts for minimalist figures resembling 3D stickmen. Dionysus had taken inspiration for this aesthetic from Supraland, also a game made by a solo dev, and which he tells me has a dragon asset that The RPG also uses, albeit with different gameplay functions.

"When you have simple characters, you have more flexibility with changing facial expressions, because if you have proper models, you can get trouble in the uncanny valley," he explains. "The difficult part was that armour and clothing assets had to be modelled differently, so I had to customise them with Blender."

Funnily, the design of The RPG's stickmen's legs means everyone walks around without bottoms. It's a few less assets to worry about, although for Dionysus it also feels like a callback to a quest in Oblivion where you have to help retrieve someone's stolen trousers. It seems this RPG-lite adventure has it all.

The RPG is set to release hopefully by the end of this summer. In the meantime, you can try the demo on Steam. Inspired by the off-the-shelf idea? Then read our guide to best game development software and no-code software.