A solo dev, a gray world, and why scope is an act of mercy
# A solo dev, a gray world, and why scope is an act of mercy
There’s a special look people get when they’re building something bigger than their free time. It’s part stubborn hope, part spreadsheets, and part “please don’t crash on me right now.” That’s the face Denis made as we talked through Crux Diaries, his Unity-built, isometric RPG that carries the bones of classic Fallout but breathes with a very different heart. He’s not the “quit my job, sell everything, go all in” archetype. He’s a full-time developer, five years deep on a project that refuses to leave his head. Honestly, I respect that. It’s the kind of commitment that doesn’t trend but quietly ships.
## What we talked about
We started with the obvious: yes, Crux Diaries is a solo-dev project and yes, it nods to the original Fallout era. But it isn’t a museum piece. Denis has been here before. Back in undergrad he hacked together his own RPG, complete with a custom scripting language to handle branching dialogues. That same impulse—give writers tools that make choice cheap—followed him into this build, now ported into C# and sitting inside Unity.
We dug into how tools shape ambition. Unlike the 90s, he doesn’t have to reinvent the engine, but he still has to be a ruthless editor. Every feature he cuts saves a web of downstream work: content, testing, tuning, and the combinatorial chaos of quests touching systems they were never meant to touch. That’s why stealth, crafting, even “repair” might never make the cut. You don’t miss what you never build, especially if the trade buys better writing and cleaner pacing.
Then we moved to tone and setting. Crux Diaries isn’t post-apocalypse so much as post-optimism. It lives in a fictional Eastern Bloc country where institutions are brittle, borders feel heavy, and the city tells the truth through concrete and cracks. Close to the capital you see polish and infrastructure; near the fringes it’s rust and rumor. Denis grew up in Russia, moved to the UK, and watched history repeat with new costumes. That perspective shows up in the game’s moral palette. It isn’t about saving the kingdom. It’s about living with the cost of your choices when there are no clean hands.
Finally, the market lesson. Trailers create assumptions you don’t control. People will project entire feature sets onto a 90-second clip and then get upset when the game is not the imaginary title in their head. The antidote is clarity. Show what the game actually is early. If you’re narrative-first, say it and demonstrate it. If combat is optional, show someone winning with words, not bullets. That kind of expectation-setting filters the wrong players out and helps the right ones find you sooner.
## My closing thoughts
I left this conversation thinking about gray spaces. We love binary design because it sells cleanly, but the work that lingers lives in nuance. Crux Diaries aims for that difficult middle, where a city can be both alive and dying, where a casino might be economic oxygen and moral rot at once, where the “good choice” hurts someone you had to stop seeing to sleep at night. That’s not bleak for bleakness’ sake. That’s adult.
From an indie-business angle, Denis is playing a long game that looks realistic to me. Build a tight vertical slice. Cut aggressively. Use a demo to earn feedback and wishlists. Keep code pragmatic. Spend money where the player actually notices. Seek outside eyes for narrative craft, even if it’s freelance. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, he still ships something honest, which is more than most ideas ever get.
Games don’t need to be longer to be memorable. They need to be specific, confident, and brave about what they’re not. Crux Diaries looks like one of those. I can’t wait to see the first slice hit player hands.
Episode Info
Combat exists, but it isn’t the point. The grid is there for the players who want friction and release, not a power fantasy. He’d rather you talk, lie, empathize, and avoid violence entirely if your build supports it. It’s why the trailer doesn’t flex firefights. The promise is a narrative RPG first.
We also hit the dev-life realities. Five years in, progress has been nonlinear because life is nonlinear. Full-time work, overtime, travel, burnout cycles, world events that steal your focus for months. He’s close to a vertical slice, the kind that proves the loop and the tone. A demo is the goal next year, not as a marketing checkbox, but as a feedback engine and a wishlist magnet.
## What stood out / lessons learned
The first thing that stuck with me is how scope is mercy—on the player and on the developer. Cutting features isn’t just about shipping; it’s about respect. If your audience is older, busier, and allergic to 100-hour commitments, then shorter, denser, more intentional play is a gift. There’s a business truth buried in there too. Solo devs don’t win by breadth. They win by taste.
The second thing is how morality lands differently when systems remember. Denis’ scripting model tracks state in ways that let different characters react to your contradictions. If you cozy up to law enforcement in one district and run errands for the rebels in another, the world files that away. Not to punish you with a color-coded karma bar, but to surface consequences that feel like they belong to you. That’s where replay value actually comes from. Not from five endings stapled on at the finale, but from the journey mutating because you were inconsistent, opportunistic, or simply trying to survive.
Third, AI is a jump-start, not a ghostwriter. Denis uses it the way a good designer uses a whiteboard: to unstick, to test angles, to generate sparks. But the voice, the specifics, the cultural texture of his setting—the cars, the panel flats, the off-brand optimism—those come from lived memory and deliberate research. In narrative design, originality isn’t a fancy plot twist. It’s the details you refuse to fake.
