Hard Neon

If I had to describe Hard Neon to someone in one sentence, it would be that. ↑

If you know Princess Maker, you might've just nodded. If you don't, here's the short version: Princess Maker is a stat-raising simulation from the 90s where you raise a young girl to become, well, a princess. You manage her time, education, relationships. The choices you make shape who she becomes. It's less about winning and more about the kind of person that emerges from the decisions you make on her behalf.

Long Live the Queen did something similar and found a devoted audience. There are quite a few of these types of games now. The formula is compelling: time is limited, choices have consequences, and the character you end up with reflects how you played.

Hard Neon borrows that structure and does one thing differently. You're not raising someone else. You're the one being shaped.

You're behind the bar, in service, making choices under pressure. The stats that develop aren't an abstraction of someone else's growth. They're yours. Your Assertiveness going up or down is a record of how you've been navigating the world. Your Morals drifting one way or another is a record of the choices you made when it wasn't easy. No single decision defines you. It's the pattern that matters. The hundred small moments that add up to a person.

The power fantasy is real but inverted. Most games put you in a position of increasing power and agency. Hard Neon puts you in service. The people who walk through the door have wants and needs and histories that have nothing to do with you, and somehow you're in the middle of it anyway. The universe weighs on you. It's up to you how to react and how it shapes you.

Real life is like that for a lot of people. Everyone, honestly.

Part of what I hope Hard Neon does is give different people different things, depending on who they are when they sit down to play. It's obviously a niche game. I don't expect thousands of people to end up playing it. They're not going to be making films starring Jack Black about this. But I do hope that there's something compelling here for a variety of people. For some players, being in service, navigating pressure without power, having the world make demands of you, that's already familiar territory. I hope the game renders it with enough care and honesty that it feels true. That it feels like being seen.

For other players it might be something they've rarely or never had to inhabit. A perspective that doesn't come naturally. I hope it's uncomfortable in a productive way. The kind of discomfort that teaches something.

And for some it might just be a safe place to try something on. An identity, a body, a dynamic, a way of moving through the world that they're curious about but haven't had the space to explore. That's what games can do that other mediums struggle with. The distance of fiction makes certain kinds of exploration possible.

Princess Maker understood that there's something compelling about a character shaped by accumulated small choices rather than dramatic ones. Hard Neon is trying to do the same thing, with a little more edge and a lot more neon.

One year. One bar. A lot of small moments.

Who you are at the end of it is up to you.

Every character in Hard Neon is built around two questions: what do you want, and what are you afraid of?

Sounds simple. It isn't, really. Or rather, it's simple in a way that gets more interesting the longer you sit with it.

When I was designing the character creation system, I wanted something that felt meaningful without being overwhelming. A list of stats to distribute is fine mechanically, but it doesn't tell you who someone is. I wanted the player to make choices that felt like they meant something even before they'd done anything at all.

The starting point was a spreadsheet I'd made years earlier for my tabletop games. A quick tool for improvising NPCs on the fly when I didn't have one prepared. Wants, fears, basic traits. Enough to make a character feel something like a person in thirty seconds. When character creation came up in design. I fed that spreadsheet fed into an LLM and it took what I'd spitballed off the top of my head and grouped it in a way I hadn't seen myself. (More on using LLMs as a design thinking partner, not a replacement for a person but an augmentation of one, in a future post.) Those categories that emerged became the first set of wants and fears. They worked pretty well, but I wasn't satisfied.

I picked at it. I went digging.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs was an obvious starting point, but it had a problem: It's inherently tiered. Security sits lower than Meaning, which implies Meaning is more evolved, more worthy. That's the kind of implicit judgment I didn't want the game to make. A character who wants Security isn't less developed than one who wants Meaning. They're just different. They're interesting in their own ways.

I kept looking. I'm not an expert here. This is Wikipedia-level research, not academic study. I haven't read the source texts cover to cover. I spent time working through the implications of different frameworks, not just stress-testing them but asking what felt true, what matched my own understanding of how people actually behave.

I looked at Steven Reiss's 16 Basic Desires, an empirically-derived framework that treats all motivators as equally valid personality traits rather than a ladder to climb. I spent time with Karl Albrecht's five core fears, which map the deep existential things people are actually afraid of rather than surface phobias. A fear of abandonment is character-defining. A fear of bees is a Tuesday.

A lot of the actual working-through happened back and forth, testing implications, following threads, seeing what held up. What came out the other side wasn't a direct lift from any one model. It was something distilled, filtered through what felt true and useful for the game.

The final six pairs:

Connection and Abandonment

Status and Humiliation

Pleasure and Pain

Dominance and Helplessness

Actualization and Stagnation

Stability and Risk

Each pair sits on the same psychological axis. Want is what you're reaching toward, something you move toward, desire, actively try to make happen. Fear is different. Fear is compulsion. It's instinctive, sometimes cautious, sometimes reckless. People don't always choose how they respond to what scares them. They just do.

They're not opposites. They're the same wound from two angles. Someone who wants Connection and someone who fears Abandonment are oriented toward exactly the same thing. But they feel completely different to inhabit, because one is hopeful and one is defensive. In game, both grant the same stat bonus, but in play they feel different in how you read your own character and how they impact your choices.

I was talking to my partner and mentioned these Wants and Fears and how they were circling in my head, thinking about people's motivations. There wasn't much pushback, more a recognition: yes, it's simplified, but it felt real. There's something there that rings true to how people tend to behave. The distinction between wanting and fearing, between moving toward something and being compelled by something else, that maps onto how people actually live.

What really landed for me is how the mechanics extended into the game's state system. High Stress suppresses Assertiveness. It shortcircuits the ability to hold your ground, to take up space, exactly the way real stress does. It makes the Fear limit you. High Excitement loosens Morals. It makes you do things you normally wouldn't, things that align with your Wants more than your values. The game is modelling something that feels true: we are not always the authors of our own behaviour. Sometimes want and fear are driving and we're just along for the ride.

I didn't set out to make a psychology game. I set out to make character creation feel meaningful. The fact that it seems to brush up against something real is a side effect I'm happy about. It speaks to the importance of design and asking why. Even if you don't end up with something useful or successful, you learn along the way. Maybe you even recognise something about yourself, too.

I've been roleplaying in one form or another for a long time. Tabletop, video chats, in games on dedicated servers. You pick things up. Some of it's about expressing your character in a way that's compelling and creates someone different from yourself. Some of it is creating NPCs that are interesting, either because you love or hate them. Or both.

The most important of it is etiquette and social mores. The best tables and communities I've been part of had a few unwritten rules that everyone understood. They sound obvious when you write them down. They aren't, apparently, because not everyone follows them and they can really ruin the fun quickly when they're not followed.

1. Play to fun, not to win.

Go for the interesting outcome, not the optimal one. A failed roll, a bad deal, a decision you knew was wrong-- these aren't failures. They're opportunities. A character who loses sometimes is more interesting than one who doesn't. It gives a story somewhere to go and others a chance to be a part of it. This sounds simple. It changes everything once you actually believe it.

2. Make room.

In multiplayer RP this means giving other people space to shine. In a single-player game it means giving NPCs enough of an inner life that they feel like people rather than furniture. Not every room needs the player to be the most interesting person in it. Not every scene should be about you in RP.

3. Consent matters.

Especially in anything that gets into difficult or adult territory. Nothing should happen to a character or especially a player without buy-in. This isn't a mood killer. It's what makes the difficult stuff actually work.

I didn't realize it, but as I worked away at systems and mechanics, these principles ended up being the entire design philosophy of Hard Neon.

No failure states-- only different paths. Reputation going negative isn't losing, it's running a different kind of bar. Stats represent who your character is, not how optimised they are. A character who's bad at asserting themselves isn't weak, they're telling a specific kind of story. The game doesn't have an opinion about who you should be.

I didn't set out to design a game about roleplay etiquette. I just kept making decisions that felt correct and interesting to me, and I eventually looked back and noticed the pattern.

The very interesting thing to me about all this is how much these rules extend outside of roleplaying, into the world as a whole. When I look around right now, there's a lot of people who are struggling to find meaning and happiness, or who lack the psychological safety to take risks for fear of making mistakes.

This is just a blog about a silly game I'm making, but I think there's a message here about creating spaces where people feel safe and supported. We can all push spotlight onto others and help them be part of our stories in return. Take a chance where you can to make room for other people to shine. Look at failure as part of a story that's not done yet. And treat other people as people first, 'cos it's what makes the difficult stuff work.

Play to fun. That's the whole thing. That's life.

Naming something is hard. The difficulty rises depending on how seriously you're taking something. A one-time NPC in a game you're DMing? Just make something up. A CHILD? You're gonna wanna think about that.

Naming a game falls somewhere in between those things. The game needed a title that did several things at once:

It had to signal the setting without spelling it out

It had to hint at the tone: gritty, playful, a little charged, without overselling any one element

It couldn't read as an action game, a shooter, a fantasy RPG

It had to be memorable enough to search for and strange enough to stick

Worst of all, I had to like it because I'd be staring at it for hours on end.

I started just spitballing words that sounded cyberpunk or sci-fi or techie. I threw together all kinds of opposites, Hard Burn. Neon Dreams. Chrome and Velvet. At one point, the title was tentatively Hard Burn Neon. I think the idea was to sell the spaciness of a "hard burn" and the neon would give it that gritty service feel.

It was just too long and I didn't like the idea of the three words on a title screen. (I'm not always style above substance, but when I am, I AM.) I dropped the burn. Thank you for your service. Hard Neon

It felt right. Two words that don't quite belong together, more texture than a description. Hard suggests danger, weight, something unforgiving. Neon suggests artifice, glow, a vibe. Together they describe the setting without naming it. A place that's rough around the edges but lit up regardless.

I liked it. I mocked it up mostly as you see it now, chrome and neon, cool blue and magenta. I turned to other things. After some time, I came back and decided to make the NEON flicker and glow, and the HARD metallic. It worked. Then I noticed something.

There's a fucking risque pun in my title. I hadn't set out to make it, but there it is nonetheless, a hard on in my title. I am accidentally lewd. This will come up again later.

You goof, I thought. I shook my head and moved on. I still had to actually build things!

I didn't know what I was making when I started.

I had been bashing away at an idea for an all-encompassing, skill-based RPG for a while, just picking at ideas. Every time I knocked away at it, I ended up making it bigger, more complicated. I couldn't keep track of it anymore because I was starting to think I was simulating the whole world.

So I binned it all and went back to scratch, telling myself, "Keep it simple. Aim for MVP so you can actually finish something." That's what I did, but it was still vague. There was a shape of something. A game that felt tight and interesting and flexible. Something where choices accumulated into a character rather than a score. Something replayable not because the levels reset but because you could be different each time. That was about as specific as it got.

A lot of the concept emerged from RP I'd done before in other games, but it was disparate threads I was trying to weave together and curate. For example, the tavern came from characters I'd played, but I realized it's a setting where personal pressure feels natural and human-sized. A bar made sense. You're broke. You're in service. The door keeps opening and interesting people keep walking through it. The stakes are real and easy to relate to.

The setting came from instinct, a failing bar on a space station at the edge of somewhere nobody chose to be. Transient population. Everyone passing through or quietly stuck. Nobody quite belonging. That felt right.

The philosophy took longer to name, but I recognised it when it surfaced. It's based on roleplay communities, or at least the best of it, the kind where everyone is more interested in a good story than a winning or a specific outcome. Play to fun, not to win. Losing can be more interesting than winning. No punishment for being a specific kind of person rather than an optimal one. The game shouldn't have opinions about who you should be.

That's the spine of it. Everything else got carved away to reveal a game where you try to manage a cantina on a distant space station, where choices you make and what you do define the type of character you play and what they become.

There's more to say about what it's becoming, what it's called, why it's called that, the moment that clicked into focus, and all the little decisions and design work, but that's it for now!