The Founder Who Couldn't Code… and Still Built a SaaS Startup
A few years ago, a friend shared a startup idea with me.
It solved a real problem.
People seemed interested.
There was just one issue.
He couldn't write a single line of code.
And because of that, he spent months convincing himself he wasn't qualified to start.
Every time the conversation came up, the same sentence appeared:
"I just need to find a technical co-founder first."
Weeks passed.
Then months.
The idea stayed in a notebook.
The market kept moving.
Nothing happened.
Eventually, someone asked him a question that changed everything:
"What if your biggest job isn't building the software?"
That sounded strange at first.
Wasn't software the entire business?
Not exactly.
When he looked closer, he realized something important.
The biggest challenges weren't technical.
They were:
understanding customers
validating the problem
refining the idea
finding early users
explaining the value clearly
The code mattered.
But it wasn't the first challenge.
The problem was.
So instead of waiting for the perfect co-founder, he started talking to potential customers.
He asked questions.
Collected feedback.
Tested assumptions.
Some of his original ideas were wrong.
Some were surprisingly right.
Slowly, the concept became clearer.
Then came the next realization:
You don't always need to build everything yourself.
Development partners exist.
Freelancers exist.
Agencies exist.
No-code tools exist.
AI tools exist.
The startup world looks very different than it did a decade ago.
And while having a strong technical co-founder can absolutely be valuable, it's no longer the only path forward.
What surprised him most wasn't how difficult the technology was.
It was how difficult customer discovery was.
Finding the right problem.
Understanding users.
Learning what people would actually pay for.
Those became the real founder skills.
The truth is, many successful founders started as problem-solvers, not programmers.
Their advantage wasn't coding.
Their advantage was persistence.
Curiosity.
Execution.
And a willingness to learn.
Today, too many aspiring founders delay action because they believe they need every piece in place before they start.
The perfect co-founder.
The perfect team.
The perfect product.
The perfect timing.
But startups rarely work that way.
Progress often begins with one simple step:
Talking to customers.
Key Takeaways:
✨ You don't need to be a developer to start a SaaS company
✨ Customer understanding is often more valuable than technical expertise in the early stages
✨ Validation should happen before major development
✨ Technical co-founders are valuable, but not always required
✨ Development partners and modern tools can help bridge technical gaps
✨ Many startup ideas fail because founders wait too long to start
✨ Solving a real problem matters more than knowing how to code
Soft CTA:
If you're a non-technical founder exploring a SaaS idea, I recently found a detailed guide that breaks down validation, MVP planning, choosing development partners, and common mistakes to avoid:
Discover the proven roadmap non-technical founders use to validate ideas, build MVPs, and launch SaaS products without a technical co-founde
A useful read for anyone wondering whether they can build a startup without a technical background.
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Common Cloud App Architecture Mistakes and How to Avoid Them?
Cloud App Development Services -
The development, deployment, and scalability of the current generation of applications have been affected by the emergence of Cloud technology. Also, despite its versatility and speed in Cloud Application Development, poor design choices in Cloud development can result in serious performance, cost, and other problems.
Developers will typically avoid many of these issues when they understand the common pitfalls of Cloud development and leverage the Cloud's advantages for sound design, architecture, and planning.
Below are some of the most frequent cloud app architecture mistakes—and practical ways to avoid them.
1. Treating the Cloud Like a Traditional Data Center -
One of the biggest mistakes in Cloud App Development is simply lifting and shifting on-premise architectures to the cloud without rethinking the design. Traditional monolithic applications often rely on fixed infrastructure, manual scaling, and long deployment cycles. When moved to the cloud unchanged, they fail to leverage elasticity, managed services, and automation.
How to avoid it:
Design applications to be cloud-native. Embrace microservices or modular architectures where appropriate, use managed databases and messaging services, and build stateless components that can scale horizontally. The cloud is not just a hosting environment—it’s an operating model.
2. Ignoring Scalability and Elasticity Early On -
Many teams think, “We’ll add scaling later when the app grows.” This is often followed by painful refactoring when the app experiences a surge in traffic or demand. Hardcoded limits, tightly coupled components, and stateful services make scaling difficult and error-prone.
How to avoid it:
Design for scalability from day one. Use auto-scaling groups, load balancers, and asynchronous processing. Design services to scale independently and use cloud-native patterns, such as queues and event-driven systems, to handle varying workloads.
3. Overengineering the Architecture -
Flexibility is a strength of Cloud App Development, but it can also be a pitfall. Some teams start with too many services, layers, and technologies too soon—microservices, multiple databases, and complex CI/CD pipelines—before the app actually needs them.
How to avoid this:
Begin simple and grow incrementally. Design an architecture that meets your needs today, not tomorrow. Observe your usage patterns and performance metrics before adding more services or subdividing systems into smaller pieces.
4. Poor Cost Management and Resource Sprawl -
Cloud expenses can add up rapidly if resources are over-allocated or left running when they should not be. This can happen if unused virtual machines, bloated databases, or abandoned test environments are not addressed.
How to avoid it:
Plan with cost considerations in mind. Leverage right-sizing, auto-scaling, and serverless computing when appropriate. Utilize cost monitoring software and budgeting alerts to ensure resource utilization is reviewed regularly. Cost optimization should be a consideration in architecture, not an add-on.
5. Neglecting Security by Design -
It is a dangerous assumption to rely solely on the default security settings provided by the cloud provider. Inadequate storage configuration, overly permissive access roles, and the absence of network segmentation are among the architectural pitfalls that can lead to sensitive data exposure.
How to avoid it:
Be a “security by design” thinker. Apply least privilege access, encrypt data at rest and in transit, and segregate your network using virtual private clouds and subnets. Integrate security scanning in your deployment pipeline.
6. Tight Coupling Between Services -
In cloud systems, tightly coupled services can cause cascading failures. When a component fails, other services that depend on it can also fail, reducing the system's resilience. This is particularly troublesome in distributed systems.
How to avoid it:
Loose coupling is the key to avoiding cascading failures. APIs, messaging queues, and event streams are used to loosely couple services. Timeouts, retries, and circuit breakers are implemented to stop failures from cascading. Resilient design is critical in Cloud App Development.
7. Lack of Observability and Monitoring -
If not properly monitored, teams may be left to identify problems only after receiving user complaints. The lack of logs, metrics, and traces makes it difficult to troubleshoot problems, especially in distributed cloud environments.
How to avoid it:
Make observability a part of your system architecture. This includes logging, tracking key performance metrics, and tracing requests across a distributed system.
Building successful cloud apps is not just about picking the right platform. It means designing with cloud principles in mind. By avoiding mistakes like treating the cloud as a traditional data center, ignoring scalability, or missing security and cost concerns, developers can build strong, efficient, and scalable applications. Companies like Suma Soft, IBM, and Cyntexa offer specialized Cloud App Development services tailored to startup needs—ensuring speed, security, and scalability from day one.
UPDATE 4.54pm: Epic has confirmed reports of widespread layoffs at the company, saying the move will affect "around 830…
Just so you get to know that there are alternatives to this:
Back in 2013-2014 Nintendo's President and CEO Satoru Iwata (rest in peace) cut his salary in half (along many of the other execs like Shigeru Miyamoto cutting 30& of his own salary) to avoid laying off employees at the company after the Wii U severily underperformed.
Here are some of Iwata's notable quotes from an investor Q and A:
Source: Polygon
"If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease," he said. "I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world."
"I know that some employers publicize their restructuring plan to improve their financial performance by letting a number of their employees go, but at Nintendo, employees make valuable contributions in their respective fields, so I believe that laying off a group of employees will not help to strengthen Nintendo's business in the long run."
In 2021 everyone was rightly scandalized and enraged when it was revealed that Bobby Kotick ( Activision-Blizzard's CEO and one of the biggest scumbags in the world) received a $200 million bonus after laying off around 240 employees at ABK ( Source: Yahoo News)
Now your next question should be: How much money will the CEO and executives at Epic (or any other AAA studio or company doing massive lay offs this year like the Embracer Group, Electronics Arts) will receive and why are they receiving said bonuses if their mistakes have led to 830 employees being laid off.
And of course most people won't care, much like when it was revealed that there was a super toxic and chauvinistic environment in Activision Blizzard that led to many women being rampantly sexually harrased and even on of them taking her own life.
Or the severe crunch that employees at CD Project Red had to endure with Cyperpunk 2077 (even after they were promised there wasn't going to be cruel crunch like they had to endure with The Witcher 3)
As long as consumers can play their game sadly they won't care and that massively sucks! There won't be any effective change in how employees are treated at these big corporations if consumers don't vote with their wallets and advocate for the workforce's well being.
And this tweets ring true:
- The metaverse isn't worth 830 people being laid off even if it was the" next big thing", but let's be real it isn't and it won't.
-This is another reminder that corporations aren't anyone's friends.
-Also fuck corporations.
3 Most Common Worldbuilding Mistakes for Writers and How to Fix Them
Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. World Anvil, a 2021 NaNoWriMo sponsor, helps you develop and organize your characters, plot, and world setting. Today, World Anvil founder Janet Forbes is here to share some pro tips for worldbuilding. Don’t forget to check out the offer to NaNoWriMo writers for 30% off a World Anvil membership!
I talk to hundreds of writers every week, in our World Anvil Q&A live streams, our World Anvil writing challenges, and meetings with our professional authors. And mostly, they’re encountering the same few worldbuilding problems! Here are the 3 most common worldbuilding mistakes, and how you can fix them:
1. Mary-Sue Worldbuilding
You’re probably familiar with the Mary-Sue—a flawless, artificial-feeling main character. Mary Sue Worldbuilding follows in the same vein. If everything in your setting is directly related to your main character, it feels like the world revolves around them. It’s too convenient and artificial. That’s Mary-Sue worldbuilding.
Mary-Sue worldbuilding is usually caused by worldbuilding exclusively around your plot. Introducing larger-scale conflict in the backdrop of your setting, current affairs like civil or religious movements, war, disasters, or technological breakthroughs, can help expand the world beyond just your main character.
Your main character might interact with these elements, or more usually, with problems caused by them. For example, they might help some refugees from “that war over there”. But your character should not be at the core of everything—they’re not the cause of the war. Other things are happening outside of your story, in the background. (Pro-tip: this is a great way to reinforce your genre and themes, and make your world feel alive and expansive, too!).
Fixing Mary-Sue Worldbuilding
Of course you’ll need a series bible like World Anvil to help you keep these current affairs organized, connect them together, and make sure you don’t lose your notes! Use World Anvil’s worldbuilding templates to get inspired for your big conflicts, and remember - you only need to write a few bullet points to start with! You can always expand more later (we’ll talk more about that in a moment).
World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Templates are custom-made by experts to help inspire and guide your creativity—and you can customize your own templates too!
2. Mosaic Worldbuilding
You know those computer game worlds where each area feels like a self-contained zone? Where the “desert” region and the “forest” region have no trade, communication, or overlap between them? That, in a nutshell, is Mosaic worldbuilding. It ruins suspension of disbelief, makes your novel setting feel false, and can pull your readers out of your story!
Fixing Mosaic Worldbuilding
The best way to avoid Mosaic Worldbuilding is to make sure that you have a clear overview of your world early on, with each major region and concept penned out in just a sentence or two. That way, each region will feel like a connected aspect of your seamless setting, not a tile shoved on the side.
On World Anvil, each world setting has a “Worldbuilding Meta” section to help you detail the 10,000 foot overview—the big stuff. And not just your physical world and its people, but your genre, your motivations, and your themes. This invaluable reference tool helps you expand your setting and add more detail, and will also help you sense-check what you’re adding!
Once you have a clear picture of your meta, and know the overview of your world, it’ll be easy to make use of cultural aspects like imports and travellers, cultural diasporas and geographical transition zones to make your world seem more connected and less artificially divided! And you’ll be able to do it without spending too much extra time worldbuilding. Which brings me to my final common worldbuilding mistake…
World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Meta tool helps you focus, streamline and sense-check your world setting! It’s full of guides to create an excellent overview for your worldbuilding project. This is the view mode of Manifold Sky by B.C.G. Wurth.
3. Worldbuilder’s Disease
Sounds nasty, right? Well, Worldbuilder’s Disease is a very common problem—a compulsion to continue worldbuilding things which aren’t actually useful. Here’s my favorite example—the “elven shoes”:
In your world you have elves. They wear shoes. So far, so good. Maybe there’s a plot-point where an imposter’s revealed because they’re wearing the wrong shoes. So you fill in a few details on your series bible. But if you find yourself writing a 5,000 word treatise on elven shoes through the ages… honey, you have worldbuilder’s disease.
I use shoes as an example, but it could be anything. It might be detailing three centuries of monarchy, or expanding unvisited areas in excruciating detail. Sure, it can be fun, but all that time spent on unnecessary parts of your setting isn’t helping you polish the core parts—or get your novel written! It’s distracting you from your primary goal.
Curing Worldbuilder’s Disease
There are three major causes of worldbuilders disease:
Lack of perspective
Lovers of prose
Fear of losing your ideas
1. Lack of perspective
Lack of perspective can often lead down a worldbuilding rabbit hole. Keep clarity on what’s important in your setting with tools like World Anvil’s Worldbuilding Meta. This helps you define your active worldbuilding area - not just geographical but thematic areas—which helps streamline your world and your project, so you can be sure you’re spending your time where it counts!
Also, be clear with yourself WHY you’re worldbuilding the element you’re working on. Keep clear notes in your series bible about how this new element fits into your novel. If it’s little more than set dressing, you only need a few words. For a core concept, you might need more.
2. Lovers of Prose
As writers, we love to write (duh)! But for most of us, writing in prose in our series bible can cause serious problems. Not only does it mean that you write MORE than we should (your get in flow, words happen!), it’s also harder to reference your ideas quickly later on. Stick to short, organized articles in note form. Make sure the salient information is there, and link in anything relevant. You can always expand to prose later if you need to.
Keep your series bible in brief notes with clear headers! This character article took 5 minutes using World Anvil’s character template which automatically adds the headers. The linked articles help me easily reference related people and places as I’m writing.
3. Fear of losing our ideas
Fear of losing our ideas is actually one of the most common reasons for worldbuilder’s disease—that we’ll forget or lose our notes if we don’t write them out in vast detail. To combat this, make sure you have somewhere to keep your world details safe, organized, tagged and searchable. Then you can reassure yourself that you can go back and develop more later if you need it.
Obviously, World Anvil is custom made for this, backing up everything in one place and linking everything together, so you can easily search, reference and update your series bible whilst writing your manuscript and not have to worry about losing things!
Anything here ring true for you? Or maybe you’re struggling with another worldbuilding mistake or problem? You can always hop into our live streamed Q&A sessions on our Twitch channel and ask us directly! We go live three times a week to answer questions about writing and worldbuilding, as well as helping our community with World Anvil queries too! Maybe we’ll see you there. And happy worldbuilding :)
Janet Forbes is a published fantasy author and RPG writer, whose recent credits include the Dark Crystal RPG with the Henson Company (coming 2021). In 2017, she and her husband created World Anvil, the ultimate worldbuilding and novel writing platform. World Anvil helps you organize, store and develop your worldbuilding and series bible privately, and market your books to the world too! The inbuilt novel writing software, accessible from anywhere, integrates seamlessly with your worldbuilding. And when it’s time to publish, you can export, or publish directly on the World Anvil platform and monetize YOUR way! Check it out at World Anvil.
Here’s an update on how things are going. It’s three pages long. Cool.
Update 1.0.4?
As of now, I’m deciding not to proceed with the update anymore. I don’t want to rush through anything and I want to focus on the full game. I am still planning on a Fall/Winter 2022 release, but it’s possible that it could be out by the beginning of 2023 instead.
1.0.4 was supposed to focus more on accessibility features and update some older artwork. With the former, I want to spend as much time with implementing those features and figure out what needs to be added. Which segues me into…
Accessibility Features
I was just talking about this!
Some lines of dialogue do not sound right when read with a voice reader, so I need to figure out how to have it read properly when that feature is enabled. I also want the player to be able to toggle captions for sound effects, music, and cues. There are minigames that involve decrypting a made-up alphabet, so I need to find a way to make that more accessible.
I don’t believe anything I listed above in this section is impossible to do, but it will take me a while to implement properly. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around coding and I have a hard time grasping things that are more ‘technical’. I find these features to be very important so I would rather not rush through them.
These features will be in the full game at launch (along with some others) and you will have the option to toggle them on and off.
Art
There’s a lot of artwork in Introdemo, which is one of the reasons why the file size for the demo was so big. That, and some music files.
I’m trying to figure out ways to not make the final size for the full game be 100GB. Saving images as pngs, then optimizing the images in png gauntlet, then saving them as png-8s cuts down on a lot and there’s no quality or color loss either. Moving forward, I plan on working with a more limited color palette, utilizing webms more, and….I dunno, I’m still thinking of other ideas.
I also plan on updating some background art + sprites, but this will be saved for last. I learned the hard way not to update sprites in the middle of development, haha…..
Writing
I was about to make a spoiler joke, but actually, I have a few things to say here.
In the survey, a critique that came up a few times was that there were some scenes that went on for a little too long. One scene in particular was when Fennel meets Clyde in the hallway. There’s a lot of fluff that needs to be cut out. I do like long set-ups, but it’s incredibly difficult to pull off. Also, I’m kinda rambly and I think that reflects in my writing. This post is two pages long so far. Wow!
There were some scenes I didn’t have time to put in the demo. For example, the bathroom scene plays out the same, no matter what. I always wanted that scene to be a ‘checkpoint’, if that makes sense. If you had more bad boy points than good boy points, it plays out differently. It should give you an idea of what choices you should be making if you want a good or bad ending.
Also, proofreading. I will make sure to proofread everything thoroughly this time. Until 1.0.3., I did not think to use writing or proofreading software to catch my mistakes. Very stupid, I know. Of course, a program isn’t going to catch all of my errors so I’ll try my best to look things over and maybe look into getting a beta reader.
Gameplay
Introdemo is primarily a visual demo, so there’s not much to say about that. You read. You click to advance to keep reading (or hit the spacebar or enter key). The end.
Though, there are minigames throughout Introdemo. You do have the option of not playing them and you will not be penalized for doing so. Though, you are rewarded for playing them (sometimes). Choosing to play or avoid minigames reveals different information about the story and characters.
Anyways, I’ll try to talk a little bit about what I have planned for the minigames….
Look it’s Fridge and Bear from Fridge and Bear!
What does throwing eggs have to do with Introdemo????? I wanted to test out a drag and click feature since it’ll appear later in the game.
Darcy’s minigame will be getting revamped too.
Concept for it was helping Darcy brainstorm ideas for his romance novel. Mad Libs, but with decadent vampires. It’s a fun idea but it doesn’t add anything to the game or to the story. Instead of allowing you to type whatever, you’ll have a set of options you can select now. The minigame will still be about helping Darcy brainstorm for his book, but it will be relevant to Introdemo’s story now.
I’m still working on how I want the decryption minigame to play out, so there’ll be more info about that in a future blog post.
I also want to add an inventory list to Introdemo. Fennel doesn’t use/carry enough items to justify a complex system, but I believe having a list will come in handy. This game will be long so the reader might forget what Fennel is in possession of.
Other Stuff…
The reproductive health drive is now over, and I want to thank everyone who contributed to it. Some money went to itch.io, so I will have to wait until my fees are processed so I can give you guys the final amount. I will also be pitching my own money in too.
The art book will continue to be worked on alongside the demo and will be released with it.. Another thing I learned: you cannot create a book overnight, did you guys know that??? I didn’t, and I spent a week working on that rough draft trying to figure that out.
The full will still be free but the art book will be NYOP (as long as it’s a dollar or more).
That’s it for now. I’m sure there are a few things I missed, but I’ll cover it later. I just wanted to catch everyone up on how the game is doing. I’m just starting to work on it again after taking a couple months off from it.
I want to thank everyone again for playing or checking out this blog! Thank you thank you thank you.
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Ugly Man Chronicles Reignition Book 2 Chapter 2: My Breakfast With Evan
Just a couple dudes getting to know each other.
“If you must know,” Evan sighed, spearing a glistening sausage on the end of a flimsy plastic fork, “my jackass older sister thought it would be hilarious to give me a cupcake she'd baked with about a dozen powdered viagra for my fifteenth birthday. I wound up passing out eventually. Burst a lot of blood vessels. Damaged the erectile tissue beyond usefulness.”
Titus froze mid-coffee-sip. “Seriously? What a bitch!”
“Buddy, you don't know the half of it.”
“So... no signs of life down there?”
“Nothing for twelve years.”
“I think I would literally kill myself.”
“It's not so bad, I guess. At least I don't have to drain the blood out of it any more.”
“Eugh! Fuck! Did not need to hear that!”
“Well, maybe you shouldn't ask questions you don't want the answer to.”
“Do you get, like, blue balls all the time, then?”
“That's basically my ground state of being.”
Titus whistled flatly, avoiding looking Evan in the eye. He settled for staring at the table. There wasn't a lot of Evan's face that he felt comfortable looking at; every part seemed to at least be adjacent to some unpleasantry or another. About the only safe area was his right eye, which, as luck would have it, was directly opposite Titus's 'good' eye. Titus rallied and met Evan's gaze again. “Alright, your turn.”
They'd agreed on a sort of mutual interview process, taking turns asking questions to suss out what the other was capable or if he was worth having around. Evan took a bite out of the sausage and chewed thoughtfully for a moment.
“Who's Moreno?”
Titus hissed through his teeth. “A real piece of shit.”
“I'm going to need more than that.”
“I'm getting to it. He's basically, like... a freelance henchman? Like, sort of a mercenary criminal. Sells his services to the highest bidder.”
“And why's he matter?”
“That's another question.”
“No, it is not,” Evan said, quiet and serious. “Do not argue with me in bad faith, Titus. I have very little patience for it in the best of times.”
Titus regarded him for a long moment. The man across from him was wider than the table they sat at. His muscles were so pronounced in some points that Titus could tell when he was about to move by the way they bulged and contracted. Yet he gave the impression that he was constantly trying to pull himself inward, to make himself smaller. He spoke quietly and with a simple formality, but only hours before Titus had watched him single-handedly beat down some of the nastiest people he'd met in the past month.
Hmm.
“Fine. Moreno matters because I'm after the guy he's working for. You see, Moreno isn't just a normal scumbag. He works for people who need nasty things done. Not like regular nasty, either. How much do you actually know about magic?”
“I've got some... notes. So far I'm not able to find a lot of coherent rules. It mostly seems like it relies on things that nobody would normally do.”
Titus snapped his fingers and pointed at Evan. “Hit it right on the head. Rituals, reagents, that kind of thing... the reason—well, one of the reasons—magic doesn't just happen all the time by accident is that it's all weird little things. A lot of the more heavy magic relies on some pretty elaborate and obtuse shit to get it going.”
Evan momentarily thought back to the Book of Fate and his ritual in the woods. “So Moreno does these things for people?”
“Yeah. Thing is, though...” Titus stopped raising a forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth and set it down again, as if he'd momentarily lost his appetite. “The people who use his services generally practice some pretty vile magic. Real depraved shit. And to empower depraved magic, you need depraved rituals. Moreno is the guy you go to when...”
“I think I get it,” Evan interjected, since Titus seemed to be struggling with deciding whether to continue. “Your turn.”
Titus tapped his fingers on the table for a moment, then looked Evan in the eye. “How smart are you?”
The scars on Evan's face squirmed around as he actually smirked. “What kind of question is that?”
“Hey, we agreed no 'whys'.”
“Alright, alright. Well, there's really no objective metric for it, but... I have Master's degrees in computer science and theoretical physics, Bachelor's in those in addition to mathematics and electrical engineering, and associate's degrees and certificates in everything from EMT training to ballet. I should have my doctorate in physics, but...” he said, with a bitterness that Titus made a note of, then changed gears. “Oh, and I also speak Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, French, and Arabic pretty fluently. I also know ASL. I can get by in German and Russian, too. I don't know if any of that is what you meant but--”
“Jesus, I get it,” Titus muttered, rubbing the side of his head. “How the fuck do you make money?”
“Software consulting, mostly. I specialize in security and processing efficiency. People pay me to break into their systems and then patch the holes, or to make their code run quicker or make their programs smaller. I've got a few patents I've licensed that bring in most of my income nowadays, though.”
“Anything I would have heard of?”
“If you've used a computer made in the last four years it probably has something I wrote integrated somewhere into it. I also helped develop a protein-sequencing program that helped develop a vaccine for this nasty SARS variant that broke out in China last year. They say if they hadn’t nipped it in the bud it could’ve spread worldwide and we’d be looking at millions of deaths by now.”
Titus scrunched up his face. “Oh yeah, just say that like it’s no big deal.”
“I’m just glad it turned out not to be one. What I'd really like to do is get my compression algorithm out there, but if I do that, somebody's going to try to hoard it all for themselves.”
“Are you talking to yourself or me?”
“Look, I... a few years ago I figured out a way to compress memory down by a exponential factor of six with zero loss. All it takes is a couple software plugins that don't take up much room themselves. Essentially, I could make a gigabyte fit in a kilobyte with very little trouble, now that the math's figured out.”
“Holy fuck, that's insane! Why haven't I heard anything about this?”
“Mainly because I don't tell people. If I put it up on the market, some ISP would buy it and bury it. If you make information smaller, you make it faster. Can you imagine what it'd do to internet access if dial-up and barebones cellular networks suddenly had the bandwidth of fiber optics? It would... maybe not revolutionize our society, but it would level a lot of playing fields. Bring a lot of underdeveloped areas of the world—hell, this country—up to modern levels with no extra cost. The telecomms would crash and burn so hard. But I don't have the means to get it out there without going through someone else. Yet,” Evan added. “So I basically work watered-down versions of the compressor into the software I make. Nothing that can be duplicated, and nowhere near its full potential, but enough to get me hailed as some kind of genius and pay the bills.”
“So why aren't you on your own private island or something somewhere instead of puttering around God's Ashtray in a shitty old Bug?”
“Hey, the Beetle is not shitty,” Evan said, defensively. “And I'm just waiting for the AC in my RV to get fixed or I'd be driving that.”
“Oh hot damn! Now that's the way to live!”
“Not the one I'd choose voluntarily, but it could be worse.”
“How come you're doing it, then?”
“I think it's my turn to ask,” Evan said, mildly.
“Fine,” Titus said grumpily, crossing his arms.
“How do you make money?”
“That's easy. I'm basically a freelance bailbondsman. I just roam around, drop my advertising around bars and courthouses.”
“You get many clients that way?” Evan asked, cocking his remaining eyebrow.
“Oh, you'd be amazed how desperate people can get,” Titus said, shrugging. “Of course, they're usually not the most responsible people, so when they bounce, I track 'em down myself, drag ‘em back to jail, get the money back. My eye usually makes it super easy. Sometimes they don't even see me before I get the cuffs on 'em.”
“Why did you feel the need to rob a bunch of drug dealers, then? The thrill of it?”
“I had a pressing need for a large amount of cash that my normal work doesn't bring in. That got me enough to hold it off for a while. My turn.”
Evan waved down a waitress for a refill of his coffee, trying not to take it personally when she gasped upon seeing his face. “Go ahead…”
“No, no, hang on.” Titus waved a hand dismissively. “I want to try something. Take your hair out of the ponytail.”
“What? Why?”
“Humor me.”
Evan groaned and reached back, removing his hair tie. After shaking his head, his hair fell over his face, obscuring everything but his nose and mouth. Titus pursed his lips and regarded him seriously for a moment.
“Can you see?”
“Yeah, I guess. Well enough to not walk into things, I think, and I could probably read if I had to.”
Titus snapped his fingers. “Good. Go with that from now on.”
“Why?”
“Because now you don’t look like God’s mistake. Now you look like a big, dumb-but-lovable goon. Like Jack Black would voice you in a cartoon.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Do you like seeing people contemplating their own mortality and the general cruel absurdity of the tragic farce that is human existence when they get a glimpse of your face?”
Evan felt his cheeks burn and was actually grateful his hair was covering most of his face. “…not particularly, no.”
“Then there you go. You’re welcome. Okay, question time. Uh… how did you get your powers?”
“Which one?”
“Oh, now who’s arguing in bad faith? Fucking all of them, you thick-lipped gargoyle.”
Evan had the feeling he hit a sore spot. Titus's easy-going, jocular tone had bled away from him, leaving behind the hard-edged razor-blade of a man that had ambushed him the night before. He decided not to belabor the point.
“I don't know why I can rege—why I heal so quickly. No, I'm serious, as far as I know, it just started happening sometime in the past few months. I can't remember. Don't look at me like that, I'll get to that in a minute. When I was younger I recovered from a lot of injuries a lot quicker than the doctors thought I would, so maybe it's something I was born with and it just got stronger recently for some reason.”
Evan took a sip of coffee, mainly to buy a few seconds to think of how much to explain for the next part.
“The ability to shut off powers... that's part of, well, I guess you'd call it a magic ritual, because I don't know what else to call it. I found a weird old book that said it contained the key to making someone an instrument of universal justice, or something of the sort. Since then I can see... I guess they're souls? Maybe? I can sort of move mine and when I run it into someone else's it seems like I can shut off their powers. Or... take them entirely, if they're dying.”
“Horseshit!” Titus scoffed. “That's... that's like meta-magic. I don't even know if that's real.”
“No, seriously! I don't think it's just magic powers, I think it... 'normalizes' things.” He briefly recounted his encounter with the pain monster.
“Are you kidding me? That...” Titus took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair, exhaling slowly and loudly. “Look, I don't know much, but the fact that you even ran into something like that, let alone survived... those odds are astronomical. And you say you negated not just its powers, but its whole form?”
“Yeah. Once I... reached into it, like I did with you—oh don't make that face. Grow up—I kind of disrupted what made it... different, I guess? Like I cut it off from its special qualities. Like it was...”
“Disjuncted,” Titus cut in.
“Yeah, that's a good word for it. Like the old Mordenkainen spell?”
“Fucking nerd.”
“Eat my ass. Anyway, after I killed it, I was able to reach into its... soul? Animating force? Aura? I don't know what to call it. I was able to grab something and pull it out and it just got pulled into me.”
“Not aura.”
“What?”
“Aura's a different thing,” Titus said, dismissively. “So what did you get from doing that?”
“I.. I feel pain differently. I don't flinch or get adrenaline rushes from injuries that don't actually impede my ability to function. I think I have a better sense of what is actually dangerous to my body now. It still hurts, but I don't react to pain like people normally do. It's like...hmm.” Evan drummed his fingers on the table. “Do you know anything about video games? Fighting games, specifically?”
“I used to fuck around on an old Alpha 3rd Strike cabinet when I was a kid. Why?”
“Do you know what 'super armor' is?”
“Isn't that where a move can't get stopped by being hit when you're doing it?”
“Right. I'm kind of like that now. Pain doesn't interrupt me.”
“Fucking nerd.”
Evan's fist involuntarily clenched. “I'm trying to put this in terms you can understand, you stupid reprobate. My experience with your judgment thus far hasn't given me much faith in your intellect.”
Titus burst out laughing. “So he does know how to banter! I thought you might be one of those Rainman types.”
“Oh sure, call it 'banter' to try to excuse the fact that you've been insulting me for the past half hour. Do you say you're ‘just joking’ when people get mad at you for saying stupid shit, too?”
“C'mon, lighten up! We're partners now! Tell me more about this soul thing. I still think you're full of shit.”
Evan sighed through his nose, then held up his left hand, forming his fingers into a circle and peering through them.
“Yours is... a sort of cross between a sea green and an oil slick. The tendrils of it keep reaching out and snapping back, going all over the place. It seems to keep expanding and contracting. It's almost flickering, like... it's indecisive. Very chaotic. The tendrils that aren't snapping around seem to be kept pretty close to your body, wrapping around you like... I can't tell if it's protective or restrictive.”
Titus's expression slowly became serious. “What does that mean?”
“I don't know. I have a lot of theories, but nothing solid to go on. I'm not sure if it's allegorical or a literal representation of a person's... power, maybe? Yours definitely looks a lot different than most people's.”
“I don't believe this for a second. Let me see.”
“How would I do tha—hey!”
Titus grabbed Evan's wrist and held his hand up to his eye. “Ho-lee...”
He pulled back from Evan's hand, staring at him. Then he looked around the room, mouth slack as he took in the diner's other occupants.
“Huh. Did you know it keeps working until you blink?” He said after a moment, a faraway tone to his voice.
“I didn't even know other people could do it,” Evan said, awe in his voice. “Hey, wow, you're right!”
“Jesus, yours is, like, really blue. It looks like... a bunch of steel cables. It's weird, I felt like I both could and couldn't see the edges of it...”
“I can kind of move it, but I'm not sure if I can do anything with it beyond interfering with people's powers. It's like learning to use a muscle you didn't know you had.”
“Huh.” Titus was again silent for a long moment. “Your turn.”
“Can you do anything else supernatural? Besides your time-eye?”
“Don't call it that, it sounds stupid. And... sorta. I seem to have whatever innate talent you need to actually do magic, but it's not like it's easy to find instructions. Most of the people I know who can use it just dabble with half-broken magic items—wands, amulets, charms,” he pulled the silence charm out from under his coat and bounced it at the end of its chain. “I guess I'm sort of a dabbler. I know a few tricks, I can use a lot of magic tools, I can sense magic pretty well, I can dowse... Most of the time I really never have to use anything besides the eye, though.”
“Is the eye all-or-nothing?”
“Yeah. It's not nearly as useful as you'd think, but any edge is an edge.”
“When I turned off your power and it was coming back, though, you started speeding up—or, I guess, everything else was slowing down? You were moving faster, one way or the other. You were able to touch me, and those punches hurt.”
“Huh, yeah, you're right.”
“Do you think there's a way you could learn to only partially activate it?”
“That'd be great, wouldn't it? Thing is, just using it is a huge strain, and that time spend outside of time adds up. Going by normal calendar time I'm only 26.”
“Fuck, I'm 27!” Evan laughed.
“Yeah, well, I'd rather be prematurely gray than what you've got going on. My turn. Uh... huh, I can't really think of anything else. Uh... are you gay?”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“No, but the question still counts.”
“I'm bi,” Evan mumbled, crossing his arms across his prodigious chest. “Not that it matters. And before you ask, no, you are not my type. We're done talking about this.”
“Huh. You ever sucked--”
“We. Are. Done. Talking about this.”
“Fine, God. Go.”
Evan mentally circled back to an earlier question he felt hadn't been properly answered. “Why are you after Moreno?”
To Evan's surprise, Titus didn't hesitate. “I'm actually after his current boss. He's just the best lead I have to go on.” He took a deep breath, then started talking with a rushed, deadpan pace, as if he was eager to get the words out as quickly as possible so they wouldn't be in his mouth very long.
“Moreno is working for a guy only known as the Soultaker. He has an innate supernatural ability to pull a person's soul out of their body. When that happens, the person just... shuts down, usually. No motive force behind them. Eventually they just die of dehydration, usually. I've seen some people so set in routine that they keep going without a soul, but... it's not really life.
“It seems like the extraction process takes a while, so he can't just walk past you on the street and pickpocket your entire essence. So he needs people rounded up for him, held until he can do his nasty juju. So that's where a degenerate like Moreno comes in.
“So when he pulls out a soul, it, well, it looks like this.”
Titus pulled a battered, faded Crown Royale bag out of his jacket. It bulged strangely and made a quiet clacking when he set it on the table. He pulled out what looked like a large marble, or maybe a dull pearl, and handed it to Evan.
Evan brushed his hair out of his eyes and peered into the milky depths of the sphere. After a few moments of staring, the murky clouds inside the thing seemed to clear and a face floated to the surface. A black man, maybe in his late 40s, going thin on top. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping, but his expression had a look of discomfort to it, as if he was having a bad dream.
“Jesus Christ,” Evan whispered, “I've seen this guy... Martell Calloway? I saw some news article about how his family found him tied up in his apartment and completely comatose! But he didn't have any injuries beyond being a black eye... so he's dead?”
“Life support,” Titus said, taking Mr. Calloway's soul back from Evan's unresisting fingers, “technically, he's one of the lucky ones. They found his body before it wasted away to nothing, and I was able to intercept his soul before it got to a buyer.”
“Why would someone buy something like this? What use is it? Can you fix him?”
“A human soul is a damn near exhaustible arcane battery,” Titus said gravely. In the split second between sentences, Evan noticed something—after he'd put the bag back into his jacket, Titus surreptitiously touched a pocket on the other side of his jacket, as if he was making sure something was still there.
“If you know what you're doing, you can power a lot of magic using a soul. And you can reuse them as long as you don't overdo it. If you know what you're doing, you can wring all but the last drops of essence out of a soul and let it heal or recover or whatever, and it'll eventually be back to full strength. Very resilient things,” Titus continued. “I don't think they're conscious in there, but... anyway, it's supposed to be really hard to extract a soul. But this guy was born with or spontaneously developed or somehow figured out a shortcut to the whole process. So the market is getting flooded with torture-batteries and ECUs are getting flooded with vegetables. And families are winding up with loved ones who are as good as dead, without having any idea why this happened to them. Dozens of them have been taken off life support in the past few months. Half these souls have no body to return to. And no, I can't fix it. At least not yet,” he sighed again. “I was hoping once I found him, I could somehow get the secret out of him or force him to put them back, or... maybe I thought if I killed him it'd reverse the effect. He needs killing, either way.”
Titus's eye widened as a thought struck him and he looked Evan in the eye for the first time since he'd started the story. Evan realized what he was thinking and looked down at the tattoo on his left arm, flexing his fingers.
“If you can take people's powers after they die...”
“...then we can save these people.”
Titus put a hand over his mouth and for a moment Evan thought he saw his eye well up.
“I'm in,” Evan said, a sense of righteous purpose welling in his heart. “I don't really know what the universe wants, but I doubt... I know it's not this. We'll find him, we'll stop him, and we'll save as many of these people as we can.”
“...thanks,” Titus mumbled behind his hand. He swallowed hard, then seemed to come back to himself. “We're back to square one, though.”
“You said you could dowse? Like, for real?”
“Yes, for real. I can find things and people with the pendulum method. It's handy for tracking down bounties.”
“Why don't you dowse Moreno?”
“Why didn't I think of that?!” Titus said incredulously, smacking his forehead. “Because he's warded. He's not magic himself, but he's collected enough gear through his career that my normal methods don't work.”
Evan rubbed his chin. “What if we used an abnormal method?”
-------------------
An hour later, they were in the RV. Titus was poring over the collection of Evan's notes and the strange papers he'd bought from Delmann's shop. Evan was very carefully slicing a strip of skin from his own ankle up all the way up his leg. The Guiding Light—the Finder's Follysat on the table between them, filled with fresh blood.
“Even if this works, he's going to know we're coming,” Titus muttered, engrossed in the pages. “Remember what I said?”
“That's why we're not going to look for him,” Evan said, adjusting his grip on the potato peeler. “I don't know how we'd even write his name. Can you read that, by the way?”
“Kind of. This is... most of this is written in, like, arcane pidgin. Who compiled these notes?”
“I did, I think.”
“You think?”
“Oh yeah, I forgot to clarify on that. Apparently a couple months ago, before the ritual, I drilled a hole in my own brain to erase some kind of very dangerous memory.”
“You what.”
“That's not a metaphor or anything. Really did it. I could show you the video.”
“I'll pass. So you don't remember where this came from?” Titus shook the Book of Fate at him.
“Nope.”
“Jesus shit, do you have any idea--”
“How reckless that was? Yeah, yeah, I'm still here and I'm the answer to your fuckin' prayers, aren't I?” Evan gave a whoop as the peeling skin reached his thigh. “Got it this time!” he said cheerfully, snipping the flesh-ribbon off with scissors.
“God, that's so fucking gross. Anyway, you haven't explained how we're going to use that thing to find Moreno.”
“We don't set it to look for him. We look for somewhere he's been. Maybe the last place he slept. Do you think you can describe him well enough in that language for it to work?”
Titus looked like he might actually be impressed, but he hid it well. “Yeah, probably.”
“Good. I've got a dictionary I've put together on that tablet next to you, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. Maybe it'll help?”
---------------------
Two hours later, they had it.
Find where a man born between the 27th and 28th north parallels during a new moon under the sign of capricorn with black hair and green eyes who has killed at least 10 people slept in the past week.
They really had to squeeze the letters in, but when Evan put a flame to the wick, it sprung to life, wavered for a moment, and then pointed east. Both men cheered. Evan threw Titus the keys.
“Drive! Drive north until I tell you otherwise!”
While Titus started the engine, Evan spread a map of the United States on the table in front of the lamp, then produced a protractor and a notebook from a drawer. “Okay, you bastard... let's see where you've been hiding...”
It took three days—one spent driving north, one spent driving back to where they'd started, and one spent driving south. While Titus drove, Evan made meticulous notes of the flame's direction, marking angles on the map. Finally he threw the pencil down triumphantly.
“He's in Salt Lake City.”
“Well, that narrows it down a little, I guess. So what, do we just go there and hope this thing points us in the right direction?”
“Too slow,” Evan called, stepping back into what used to be his bedroom and sitting at his computer. “Now I work my magic.”
After parking, Titus walked back to look over Evan's shoulder. The half-dozen monitors on the wall were flickering between rapidly-changing pictures of faces and what appeared to be CCTV footage.
“What is this?”
“This,” Evan said with dramatic pride, “is Blaccat. Facial recognition algorithms that the CIA wishesit had. I actually started working on it years ago before I thought about the implications of it, but I shelved it. I figured since I may be needing to, uh...”
“Be Batman?”
“...yeah...that I should get back to work on it. Right now it's comparing faces to the description you gave me and cycling through every damn security camera in the city looking for it.”
“How illegal is this?”
“Soooooo illegal.”
“Oh, hey, can you get into police department records?”
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
“See if you can get into the Las Vegas mugshots from... February 2019. Run your face-recognition thingy there.”
“Alright.... and... is that our boy?”
A handsome Latino man in his early 30s with shoulder-length jet-black hair and piercing green eyes stared at them from over a booking clipboard.
“That's him,” Titus breathed.
“Perfect! Now I just have to feed that into... wow.” Evan made a gesture and a black and white video popped up on the biggest monitor. The man in the mugshot was walking along the street, flanked by a short stocky man in bandanna and a lanky man with the ugliest white-boy dreads Evan had ever seen.
“That's him! Where is that? When is that?”
Evan grinned up at Titus. “That's live. I can track him and put us at the nearest intersection.”
Titus smiled, eye overbright, and began breathing heavily through his nose. “We got him.”
A couple of years ago, I was hired as a Technical Account Manager for an enterprise software company. My job was a combination of project management, technical support, and customer relations management. When I started, it seemed like a decent job, for the most part, though the software, seemed immature. The software's purpose was to audit customer systems, searching for certain data, to be able to report on compliance. It was a very new company, founded by some guys who been successful at starting companies before, there was stock, it seemed on the up and up.
I had a couple very large customers, and we were having performance problems with two of the searches. I filed bugs, and worked on managing the processes to get to resolution. During this time, my management starting getting distant. We were signing lots of contracts, so I just put it off as them being busy.
They issued a release to fix the performance problem. I installed it, and we reran the job. I'm monitoring the logs, and the performance problem still exists. The job is hanging when the system tries to query this one table, which has literally billions of rows. Our logs do not display the actual query being run, to avoid exposing information about database security. But the customer guys I worked with were DBAs, and they could see the query on their side. They showed it to me. The query was using a WHERE clause that was of the form, SELECT this, that, theother FROM table WHERE CAST(column) AS VARCHAR = searchvalue.
Now, any competent developer who was evaluating a performance problem would instantly see that it would have been efficient to cast "searchvalue" to the column type, which would have executed the CAST once, as opposed to doing it on the column value, which would be done as many times as there are rows in the table. The CAST was being executed billions of times. This meant multiple things:
the developer doing this was careless and/or unskilled
nobody with 1st year computer science skilled had reviewed the 'fix'
they hadn't actually verified improved performance before shipping the fix
I summarized this in email to my manager and our boss, asking that they raise a stink about this. We bragged about our excellent development team, and this wasn't up to our standards. Silence. Like, literally no reply.
We are still selling contracts left and right, and the company meetings are all about how our valuation is soaring. I am being told to tell the customer that we are working on this and other improvements. During this time, our preliminary runs are at the customer are not returning the results we should be seeing. After the above experience, I check out the source code and start digging in. I realize that there is a fundamental logical flaw in our search approach, and that for certain systems, the software simply cannot work as designed, without significant additional development. I can't go into what that was without violating an agreement that will be discussed shortly. I bring this up in an email, and again, silence. The customer is getting frustrated and angry meetings are being had. I bring these up with management, and again, silence.
Along the way, I invent a way to use our software, that, with a small bit of additional functionality, creates the ability for a customer to use our system at a customer's vendor companies to expedite the audit. This turns every customer into a salesman for us, as it causes them to demand that their vendors buy and use our software. Huge win.
The next week, I get a call from the senior manager. I am told to leave the customer site, and go home. I can see the handwriting on the wall. I find out from co-workers that he has told the customer that the reason for the lack of results is my poor skills, and that they will replace me. Internally, they are telling my coworkers that they were tired of my toxic attitude.
During this time, two other employees have been removed from projects due to customer complaints about the project. They are redeployed to other accounts, I am not.
A week later, they fire me. No reason given, no severance. They, however, don't fire the other two guys. Big mistake. I'm over 50, they are 30 somethings. This is the US, where being over 50 is a protected class for discrimination law.
I realize that what is going on. They are pumping the value of the company, getting the contract volume growing, so that they can flip the company to a corporate buyer and make some quick big money. The talk of going public was always bullshit.
I contact a lawyer. We write a demand letter. We explain the disparate treatment due to age, and note that:
the state I am in doesn't allow mandatory arbitration in employment contracts, so they can't force private arbitration, and we will be able to pursue court action
they have no record of any job performance issues or lack of technical skill, given that I found the bug, explained the fix, and added significant capability to the product supporting substantial new sales. I had great relations with the customers, and we would call them to say so.
while we might or might not prevail, the technical issues and poor engineering practices that I found would become a matter of court record, becoming visible to anyone doing due diligence on the company, crushing their valuation in their pump and dump scheme, and that this would be visible to new and existing customers.
I had a check for six months pay in my hand a week later. I had also been interviewing, and landed a great new job with a product that actually works (completely different functional area) that same week. The agreement that we signed prohibits me saying anything public about them, and them from saying anything about me, so no further details. And they neglected to collect my Macbook, so free computer, as the agreement says that no further claims can be made by either party.
TL/DR; they tried to throw me under the bus to further a get rich quick scheme, and I got a better job, and six months pay for them trying to fuck me over.
For my final video of the year, we're reflecting on everything we know so far about Dragon Age 4 throughout 2019 and beyond! Sit back, brew yourself a nice, ...
ICYMI: As my last video/post for 2019, I figured we should have a reflection on Dragon Age 4’s major news updates and uncover what we know about Dragon Age 4 throughout this year and beyond! So, we can go into 2020 with the right expectations and understanding of the game’s development!
The Dread Wolf Rises:
To boot of this year - we had the most exciting announcement from The Game Awards in December - the official confirmation of the next Dragon Age project with the current given title: #TheDreadWolfRises.
The trailer, while enigmatic, showcased the next Dragon Age centring on the Solas’s plan to rise up and destroy the veil, fulfilling the Dread Wolf’s prophecy. At least that’s one interpretation of it.
The trailer seemingly was made for the fanbase of Dragon Age with the given title, because if you didn’t know what Dragon Age was, or anything about The Dread Wolf, you could totally pass up that trailer as a different game entirely. So, it was more of an ode to the fans that the next Dragon Age game is in the works.
Alongside the release of the trailer, the Dragon Age website was updated for #TheDreadWolfRises with Mark Darrah, Executive Producer & Matthew Goldman, Creative Director sharing a few words on the production of the next Dragon Age.
TLDR: Mark is excited to show more and Matthew states that this is the strongest team yet and they’re venturing forth on the most epic quest ever.
In a September blog post, Casey Hudson wrote that ‘I can confirm that indeed the Dread Wolf rises,’ alluding to the narrative and production of Dragon Age 4. Before we delve into the current development of Dragon Age 4, we’ve got to talk about the two initial iterations of Dragon Age 4.
Project Joplin:
Based on Jason Schreier’s expose’ into the past and present developments of Dragon Age 4 - the previous iteration of Dragon Age 4 was known as ‘Joplin’, like Janis Joplin.
Janis Joplin was one of the biggest female rock stars of her era, she revolutionized her genre of music for the next generation – clearly, this is something the devs were going for with the original Dragon Age 4 project – to revolutionize the Role-Playing Game genre.
The developers on Joplin were committed to avoiding the mistakes they’d made on Dragon Age: Inquisition. Veteran Mike Laidlaw was the creative director of ‘Joplin’ until the project was canned and reworked so ‘live service elements’ could be added. After the decided rework of Dragon Age 4, Mike left the studio in late 2017.
Project Joplin’s initial concept followed the next protagonist ‘playing as a group of spies in Tevinter, a large chunk of the narrative centred on heists. The goal was to focus as much as possible on choice and consequence.’
There was an emphasis on this ‘hugely reactive game, smaller in scope than Dragon Age: Inquisition but much larger in player choice, followers, reactivity, and depth.’
The developers talked about building systemic narrative mechanics, allowing the player to perform actions like persuading or extorting guards without the writers having to hand-craft every scene.
It was very ambitious and plenty of the developers were excited, stating that they put some of their best work into this project.
However, Anthem was in real trouble, and there was a concern that it might never be finished unless the studio did something drastic. EA and BioWare took that drastic action, cancelling Joplin and moving the bulk of its staff, including executive producer Mark Darrah, onto Anthem.
Project Joplin was reworked into Project Morrison with a skeleton team building the very foundations of the next Dragon Age.
Project Morrison:
The latest iteration of Dragon Age 4 that is currently in the works is known as ‘Morrison’, like ‘James Morrison’ – the lead singer of the rock band ‘The Doors’.
Jim Morrison is regarded by music critics and fans as one of the most iconic and influential frontmen in rock history. (Wikipedia).
Morrison is being built on Anthem’s tools and codebase of the Frostbite Engine, this will save time as Mass Effect: Andromeda, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Anthem were each built from scratch. With a pre-set already there, Morrison’s development can save a lot of time.
This new version of the fourth Dragon Age is planned with a live service component, built for long-term gameplay and revenue. It’s not clear how much of Joplin’s vision will shape Morrison.
Matt Goldman, art director on Dragon Age: Inquisition and then Joplin, took over as creative director for Morrison.
Many of the BioWare developers “know it’s going to change like five times in the next two years.”
Morrison will change its shape multiple times. However, “Dragon Age games shift more than other games.” So, it’s not uncanny for a Dragon Age project to undergo drastic changes in its development.
Live Service/Multiplayer:
It has been confirmed on LinkedIn that BioWare has hired a software engineer to work on a multiplayer component for Dragon Age 4, however, it’s unsure what exactly this multiplayer could look like.
Jason Schreier stated that “he heard some ideas for Morrison’s multiplayer include companions that can be controlled by multiple players via drop-in/drop-out co-op, similar to old-school BioWare RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, and quests that could change based not just on one player’s decisions, but on the choices of players across the globe.”
In 2018, Casey Hudson tweeted a statement on live service: “Reading lots of feedback regarding Dragon Age, and I think you’ll be relieved to see what the team is working on,” he wrote on Twitter. “Story & character-focused. Too early to talk details, but when we talk about ‘live’ it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story.”
It’s still unclear how much of this game will focus on live-service elements and multiplayer, it could follow something as simple as Dragon Age: Inquisition’s separate multiplayer mode, or it could transform the game completely. Take note that Morrison is still early in the works and it will change multiple times until release. That is for sure.
Production:
Now we get to the tea - The past and present developments of Dragon Age 4’s new iteration.
So, Project Joplin was canned in late 2017, with Project Morrison rebooting sometime after that with an essential, small team. The rest of the Dragon Age team that worked on Joplin, went to fix Anthem during its troubled development. Even Mark Darrah, the Executive Producer of Dragon Age was shuffled to Anthem’s production. All the while, Morrison lay low in very early pre-production stages.
In 2018, the majority of the news we got on Dragon Age 4 came out in January, with Joplin’s initial codename and Anthem’s reshuffling. However, with Morrison in deep pre-production, nothing substantial - production-wise - was heard on this project until The Dread Wolf Rises teaser launched at The Game Awards eleven months later in December. Of course, this trailer was hype hype hype!
In early 2019, BioWare resumed their focus on Anthem and its release date. After Anthem was released in February 2019 - according to comicbook.com - the core Edmonton team working on Anthem, returned to work on Dragon Age 4 in full-scale development following the reworks of Morrison.
Built on Anthem’s codebase and its pre-sets of the Frostbite engine, following a very enigmatic live service model – Dragon Age 4 entered its pre-production stages with a full-team. As Casey Hudson later confirmed in September:
“We have several other big projects in the works. I wish I could tell you more about them, but they’re mostly super-secret right now. I can say however that one of our projects has a large and growing team in Edmonton working through pre-production, and based on the progress I’m seeing, I can confirm that indeed the Dread Wolf rises.”
Key processes during the pre-production stages include:
Concept Art
Storyboarding
Level Design
Mechanic Design
Around June, an IGN Greece article resurfaced again, according to said article ‘an anonymous BioWare employee had given clues Dragon Age 4. Stating that the game will be released in 2020 and that the voices of the characters are already being recorded, which indicates an advanced stage of development.’
This article initially launched in 2018 and has many rebuttals, the first being the release date.
This 2020 expected release date has been debunked because according to EA’s 2019 earnings call, the new release window for Dragon Age 4 is at least April 2022, and any time after that. Perhaps Joplin’s initial release window was 2020, and the developer may have shared that, but as far as Morrison is concerned, the project is 3 years away.
However, voice work being in the works could be plausible at this stage. Alix Wilton Reagan has teased a few seasons of her in full mocap mentioning NDA’s and #dragonage and #inquisitor, this could just Alix teasing us, or using social media to its full advantage, or it could be something Dragon Age-related.
Surely the Inquisitor will make a cameo appearance and that could justify why Alix could be doing VO?
On top of both Alix’s tease and IGN Greece’s article, very recently Jo Berry, a writer at BioWare tweeted about voice over work coming in and it being fantastic, however, they have to remove the goofy robot text to speech which is awkward and funny to listen to.
“When VO is coming in and it’s fan-tastic, but it means saying goodbye to that goofy robot text-to-speech that makes you all laugh.”
So, indeed voice work does seem to be going on for Dragon Age 4’s development at this stage.
In jest, BioWare hasn’t replied to my request for voice acting a character in Dragon Age 4, so I think because of that, we can assume that they haven’t started the majority of the main character’s voice work just yet, right?
Moving on…Throughout the months of August and September, BioWare moved to a new office space in downtown Edmonton. Once they had settled in, a few very interesting Dragon Age 4 titbits came to light.
Emily (Domino) Taylor posted a picture on Twitter, showcasing a post artboard for Dragon Age 4, as we can assume it’s Dragon Age! There’s a Grey Warden and their Griffon-friend showcased in the picture.
Griffons and Grey Warden’s confirmed for Dragon Age 4? It’s not too much of a stretch considering the drama at Weisshaupt and Last Flight’s ending, but alas, as we can see BioWare’s art division are getting ready to line up concept artwork for further production and development. Probably for 3D model creation and animation stages.
Regardless, it’s very exciting to see the start of official artwork developing for Dragon Age 4, I’ll be keeping an eye out to see how this board develops further.
Another huge titbit that was revealed with BioWare’s office move, was when the mayor of Edmonton decided to visit and congratulate BioWare at their new offices. On one of the photos the mayor and his team took, there was a shot of an HD version of Solas on a TV Screen.
I personally believe that this is a shot from Dragon Age 4 or the prototype version of Morrison showing off Solas. There’s been no confirmation of where this shot comes from, and I’ve spent an entire video dissecting it. However, my point is, I don’t think this comes from Dragon Age: Inquisition, it’s way to HD, look at his face, the fur on his outfit, the outside environment. It’s very distinct, and I believe it’s the first shot of Dragon Age 4 revealed.
I’ve not seen any rebuttals to this, and I’ve openly asked multiple times online, however, no one has come up with anything. So, even towards the end of 2019, it remains a mystery. I think this is a Dragon Age 4 shot, let me know if you think otherwise!
Around the same time, Matt Rhodes, an Art Director, posted a short story on his Instagram stating that he’s “more excited working on Dragon Age 4 than any other project so far.”
Just after BioWare moved offices, Fernando Melo, a senior producer on The Dread Wolf Rises left the studio after 12 years.
As stated on his LinkedIn profile, a lot of Fernando’s job on Dragon Age 4 surrounded “help[ing] establish the vision for the game. Guid[ing] the team through EA’s concept and early production phases. Prov[ing] out the core concept and key innovations of the game”.
He signed off with an email sent to everyone on the Dragon Age team, stating that he left at the “least disruptive timing as it would likely get.”
Considering that Fernando’s job was ensuring the pre-production stages were completed efficiently, and with his departure being at a time where it’d be least hectic for the development of Dragon Age 4, it’s safe to say that the pre-production processes are wrapping up and the team can begin to enter full production.
Fernando said that “with a great game leadership team in place, a fantastic creative vision, and some of the best devs in the world. Morrison is well underway to becoming the definitive Dragon Age experience - and I’m incredibly proud and honored to have played a part in that. I’ll be eagerly awaiting the opportunity to experience the next DA as a fan this time around.”
So, with Fernando’s send off via email, the entire Dragon Age team has moved on from the initial pre-production stages to the main development of the project with an estimated release window of any time after April 2022.
Mark Darrah Major Hints & Teases:
Now we get to the most divisive news topics - the teases from Executive Producer Mark Darrah!
Mark has actually been teasing us since the beginning of 2017, when he dropped a video of an artbook that collated a plethora of Dragon Age concept characters, with many mysterious and ominous photos showcasing potential concept art and character designs.
A logo of a wolf, on fire encased in a tower, was all we had on Dragon Age 4 at the time. However, considering Project Joplin was canned at the end of that same year, I think it’s safe to assume this work went alongside that project, whether it will remain, we’ll uncover in-time.
At E3 2018, in a video interview with Game Informer, Mark Darrah said that Dragon Age 4 was going ‘swell’ with a cheeky grin.
At Pax West 2018, Dragon Age 4 was officially confirmed again since it’s reboot in development, the Triforce Quartet played Dragon Age: Inquisition’s theme as Mark Darrah confirmed that the next instalment is in the works… again.
Towards the end of November, Mark Darrah teased the entirety of Twitter with his Dragon Age remarks. Having tweeted the single words “Dragon Age”, he had PC Gamer and many other onion articles writing up on his huge Dragon Age 4 tease.
However, to be fair, Mark dropped an image that resembles Dragon Age, only we’ve never seen anything quite like it before.
Midnight snow, rocks, forests, a completely different landscape to any of the maps in Dragon Age: Inquisition, yet very familiar with its Frostbite Engine aesthetic… is this a shot of Tevinter, more than likely taken on Mark Darrah’s phone?
Well, I think so. It doesn’t resemble any location I can recall in Dragon Age: Inquisition… But you might say “there’s snow in Tevinter, which is the opposite end of Thedas’s Equator, that doesn’t make sense lore-wise.”
Well, Mark Darrah replied to someone questioning if and why there would be snow in Tevinter, he sent them a link to this article that explains how there can be snow on the equator, meaning that Tevinter can have snow.
So, is this our second or first look of Dragon Age 4? Well, depending on if the Solas shot is viable, I’d say definitely, but I’ll let you make your own mind up on that. Speaking of Tevinter, Mark Darrah also teased that the working plot title of Dragon Age 4 is titled “Tevinter of Our Discontent”, which is a huge story reference that I’ll touch upon in a separate category.
However, back to the picture teases, and Mark Darrah also posted another photo…
A sun blinding a knight, very ominous, I don’t even know where to start with this one… I mean it could have some subliminal message about how Solas may destroy the veil, or it could have a rather obscure context that fits to Dragon Age 4’s narrative, but I honestly just don’t even know what this is…
On Dragon Age Day, Again, Mark Darrah posted another screenshot of Dragon Age 4 with everything redacted other than a pixel in the corner.
And, erm, yep. That’s super. Thanks for that, Mark.
If you’d like to see more Dragon Age 4 teases that may or may not make sense and will most likely leave you frustrated and clueless, why not give Mark Darrah a follow-on Twitter. He’s one to keep an eye out.
Story:
The next narrative surrounds the Dread Wolf rising and attempting to destroy the veil, it’ll most likely be our next protagonist’s goal to stop Solas from achieving this.
We will have a new protagonist, like every other Dragon Age game. It’s been confirmed copious times by many developers old and new that the Hero of Ferelden will never return in the future, so stop asking. And even if they did return, Patrick Weekes is in charge now.
Dragon Age 4 will be set in the Tevinter Imperium, if Trespasser’s ending wasn’t a good enough clue for you, Project Joplin was also set in Tevinter. Alternatively, according to PC Gamer, it was the newly announced Tevinter Nights book that confirmed Tevinter to be Dragon Age 4’s setting.
Mark Darrah confirmed and teased on Twitter that the working plot title of Dragon Age 4 is Tevinter of our Discontent, derived from Shakespeare’s “The Winter of our Discontent” which is the opening lines from the play - Richard III (3rd).
As a TLDR: the words lay the groundwork for the portrayal of Richard as a discontented man who is unhappy in a world that hates him. However, since his family were victorious in the war, they reign the nation once more, and so as winter dies, glorious summer is upon them.
There are plenty of references we can make to Solas and his scheme to destroy the veil, he’s woken up to a world that despises his name and people that revoke his actions as evil. He wants to correct this world and restore his ‘family’ so to speak. Perhaps, like Richard the 3rd, Solas’s glorious summer is what awaits him in the next game.
So, we have plenty of plot potential with this given title and I do have a separate video for even more thorough speculation on this topic. However, based on Shakespeare’s work being the main inspiration for Dragon Age 4’s narrative, we should expect tragedy to be one of the main themes of the plot.
According to Video Gamer, in 2017, Alexis Kennedy was writing freelance for BioWare, ‘working on a whole chunk of lore and backstory for the faction in the game that you would think of if you were thinking big old goth. You know, if you were interested in death.’
Instantly what comes to mind is Nevarra’s Mortalitasi – Death Mages that’s responsible for the mummification process of the dead in Nevarran culture. However, we’re not sure how much of his work went into the cancelled Joplin, considering the timing at which he worked on Dragon Age 4.
According to Alexis’s LinkedIn page, he worked freelance at BioWare from February – August 2017. The end of 2017 was the same time Joplin was canned, and Mike Laidlaw left the company, so there’s a huge possibility that Alexis’s work has been shelved.
Even if Alexis’s work wasn’t shelved at the time, given his recent allegations and controversy, Mark Darrah confirmed on Twitter that BioWare no longer has a working relationship with him, so his work seemingly has been scrapped.
According to Dark Horse writers Nunzio DeFilippis & Christina Weir who’re creating the comics. In a comicbook.com interview, they shared the collaboration with the BioWare writers, it’s a case of sharing notes on where the narrative is going, and how the comics can help reach that point for Dragon Age 4’s narrative.
So, if you want to see where Dragon Age 4’s narrative may go, or which characters could turn up, read the comics as they’re pushing the narrative forward.
According to Chelsea Fariello, Assistant Animator at BioWare, it seems we could have a Mabari War Hound companion, or at least NPC in Dragon Age 4, as she stated on Twitter that she was interested in what interactions people would want to see for a dog-like creature in a video game. With the hashtag Dragon Age. Perhaps Mabari War Hound, or even a Griffon?
“What interactions would people want to be able to do with a dog like creature in a video game? I need to know…for reasons… #DragonAge “
The “creature” part in that tweet is what makes me think it could be a small griffon? If it’s a Mabari then it’s just a dog, however, if it’s a small griffon then that could make sense. That’s just my hot take.
On Dragon Age Day, Arby’s expressed their interest in opening a new branch in Thedas, could we see a new type of cuisine in Tevinter? It’s hard to say, other than the fact that John Epler loves Arby’s, not Wendy’s though. Don’t mention Wendy’s!
Weekes’s Tweets:
Adding to the story category, we have plenty of tweets by Patrick Weekes that hint at future elements for Dragon Age 4.
Patrick Weekes responded to Autumn Witch when asked on Twitter ‘to pick one character from Dragon Age that has never been a companion or advisor that you would like to see as a companion in DA-4? (For the sake of this post, Lace Harding is also not available.)’
Patrick said: “Oh that’s obvious, I’d go with (Reads parenthetical) THIS IS RIGGED.”
So, Scout Harding as a Dragon Age 4 Companion teased? I freaking hope so.
Patrick Weekes posted on Twitter that they just teared up reading a scene, so unless they’re cutting onions while writing, we should expect tears to be shed in Dragon Age 4. If I were to guess, I mean Solas is walking the Din’anshiral. Which means there is only death on this journey…
Weekes was asked about non-binary lingo & representation and if the players would have the option to not identify as a male or female in the next Dragon Age. They replied saying:
“No guarantees (it’s something that is very difficult in romance languages we get translated into), but our team is always looking for better ways to let players see themselves in our games.”
Other Dragon Age Projects:
According to EA’s 2019 Earnings Call, “there are plans for not only Dragon Age 4, but other Dragon Age products too.”
At a guess, this ‘other product’ could simply be a mobile companion app to coincide with Dragon Age 4’s launch. Or it could be the rumoured tactics game that we haven’t heard about since Mark Darrah’s tease in 2017.
On top of that, at a guess, it could also be an extension to the Dragon Age Keep.
Expectations:
There’s still a couple of years yet with an expected release window at any point after April 2022. However, that doesn’t mean the news will not be coming, just look at all the tidbits I’ve uncovered from developer tweets on the side.
Not to mention that BioWare generally start the marketing phases of their upcoming games two years prior to release, so if Dragon Age 4 were to release in 2022, we could actually see something in 2020. I’m not banking on that, but just for the doubters out there, we’ll easily hear something regarding this game in 2020, whether that’s a trailer or small tweet trials of news, we’ll be sure to get something, and I’ll be sure to stay on track of that.
if you have anyone saying there’s no news for Dragon Age 4, just gently send them my way and share this video in their dm’s!
