One on One-Andrew Ferguson
With his new campaign The Corruption of Ganon out—and with some new material being added soon—now felt like the perfect time to talk to Andrew Ferguson about his original game: It’s Dangerous to go Alone.
IDtgA—yeah, I’m not spelling the whole thing out every time—is a creation from Andrew’s Chaotic Good Games, a collaborative group of artists dedicated to making…well…some chaotically good games.
The first I heard about IDtgA was when Andrew put out a “call to arts” on Instagram, looking for artists who wanted to collaborate on this fun, new project. So I was surprised to learn that this project wasn’t all that new at all. That the game I worked on with him was actually the 8th version that he’d created himself.
“It started as a tile-set kind of game,” he told me over the phone.
“It was a dungeon crawl based on the first Zelda Game. It had randomized rooms that you could go into in a dungeon and find enemies and keys and bombs.”
He originally used the Zelda Classic site, a sort of RPG maker for games that resemble early Legend of Zelda games, for help and inspiration. But the dungeon crawl quickly turned into a different kind of game altogether.
“I was playtesting it with my D&D group, so naturally we fall into the same patterns. That group is very shenanigans and interactions heavy. So that just started leaking into the game.”
Before he knew it, Andrew’s dungeon crawl was becoming an RPG. The next few versions of the game began to grow in size, with more comprehensive abilities, rules, and magical spells that players could utilize. Andrew kept referring to it as the “content creep.”
IDtgA kept surprising him like that. When he finally found a version of the system he liked, he tried to find some artists to collaborate with over the Internet. He was expecting five to ten volunteers. He wound up with over 50.
I asked him if receiving all the submissions and offers of help was at all chaotic.
“I mean yeah, it’s called Chaotic Good Games for a reason.”
But according to him, he kind of likes the chaos. As a professional animator with Mercury Filmworks, he sometimes feels a bit bogged down by what he called “red tape.”
“Rules, protocol, industry standards, in general the pickiness of balancing the preferences of several decision makers. Working in any established business model means money rules, so often the love of the craft is replaced with a sort of cold transaction.”
He enjoyed working in a less structured way with volunteers who could focus more on the project than the profit. He also enjoyed giving new artists a chance to see what content production is like while still giving them plenty of freedom in what they do and how they do it.
“I think a lot of the time, young artists, they want permission to start anything. Whether it’s pitching an idea to a studio or asking friends if they approve of the work.”
But Andrew thinks that obsessing over whether or not you’re ready or whether or not you’ve got permission to start something is just holding you back.
“This is not an easy thing to realize. It took me so long. I’ve been working in animation for 12 years. And it’s taken me that long to really get started on the things I loved doing when I was a kid.”
Andrew was constantly making up games to play when he was a little kid. But it was a part of him he had to put aside for a while to pay bills, find a job, and do other boring adult things. So he’s grateful that he’s able to make games like IDtgA and that other people can enjoy them too.
There’s more to enjoy from Chaotic Good Games as well, with a secret project in the works! He wouldn’t tell me what it is, but he promised it’d be worth the surprise.
So keep an eye out for Chaotic Good Games in the future. You can expect fun games to play and—if you’re lucky—permission to start the work you’ve always wanted to do.