Invoke Studios is making Warlock, a D&D-adjacent single-player action-adventure, and creative lead Jeff Hattem says the heart they are preserving is not monsters, dungeons, or a found party — it is “ultimate player agency.” Since a linear narrative cannot offer boundless choice, the team concentrates all of it into one deep, systemic magic system.
The design moves that make it work:
- The D&D distillation: ask what the game is really about instead of listing features — “it would have been a trap to try and do everything”
- A systemic magic system: spells interact with environment, weather, monsters, and terrain, which “really forced us to change the way we make the game”
- Bug-to-feature playtesting: a tester daisy-chained an eldritch-tentacle spell to reach areas the designers never envisioned — instead of nerfing it, Invoke turned those spots into secret treasure troves
- Opt-in lore: stop overexposing players to worldbuilding; build readable, optional systems instead of forced cinematics and companion banter
- Iterate from the shit version: Hattem’s rule after 25 years is that you “always fuck it up somehow” on the first try — set a vague destination and iterate
The reusable lesson is the playtest philosophy: when a player breaks your system, that is a design signal, not a bug report — reward the emergent move instead of patching it away. And the scoping move is a good template for any design: pick the one system you can go deep on rather than trying to be everything.