Old School Gamer Magazine chats with game developer Van, who discusses his new Temple of Webshai game.
Project, which he calls “a tribute to the foundational and beloved 8bit classic Temple of Apshai (1979).”
Old School Gamer Magazine: How did this project begin?
Van: I guess it began in spirit with the original Temple of Apshai by Automated Solutions in 1979, that I loved as a kid on the Apple ][+ and later C64. That credit goes to the great Jim W. Connelly of game dev legend. Hope to meet him someday, so I can thank him personally.
Fast-forwarding to today, Webshai began a few months ago as a Claude AI experiment in design-driven development. Im a life-long old-school career programmer, but the sudden and recent AI revolution has made code-writing skills obsolete. I’ve been “vibe-coding” as the kids call it now, on another much larger project when I needed a break.
Ive always wanted to pay homage to the classics that inspired me, so I wrote every note and observation about old Apshai that I could think of, into a design doc to see how well Claude could execute purely on a detailed vision. It was an experiment in new alternative workflows.
Old School Gamer Magazine: What makes it special?
Van: Originally I intended to make no enhancements, just a functional clone written from scratch for the web. But web accessibility is the first point-in-favor, I suppose. The most fundamental change. Just browse and go – no signup, no download, no friction.
Also, it’s genuinely roguelike – people abuse that term today, to the point that they clearly don’t know (or dont care) what it even means. But Webshai is the real deal (largely because Im also in love with Nethack, the direct descendant of the original Rogue). Instead of the original 4 static levels of Apshai (or 12, if you include the also-great Upper Reaches and Curse of Ra sequels), Webshai has a procedural level generator. I defined 7 tiers with their own visual themes, tile sets, and monsters, 4 levels per tier, for 28 levels total. Each level larger with more rooms than the level before it.
And even that was an arbitrary cap. With more art, I could offer 100 levels. 1,000 levels. I will, if I get enough players to justify more development.
And these are generated for each user, uniquely. No two users will see the same dungeon.
And yet yours wont change, so you can still memorize YOUR levels (NetHack is a cold-hearted bitch on that issue – new game? WHOLE new dungeon again!) same as we did when playing the original.
Otherwise, it’s primarily a nostalgia play.
Lastly, all my games are web-based. I love the ease of accessibility and delivery for the players – just browse and go. No bloated 50 gazillion derpabyte download to install.
And no risk of malware in those binaries – a problem occurring with increasing frequency, particularly in the low-budget indie market.
Don’t get me wrong, I have an embarrassingly large and venerable library of purchased games on Steam. Steam is, generally speaking, fabulous. But I wont even download indie games from Steam until the binary has been vetted by others. And I *do not* install binaries from Itch. No hate, I applaud what they’re trying to do, but I do not trust their content creators.
And I don’t build Windows binaries. I bear an admittedly pathological hatred for Microsoft in general, and Windows in particular, both as a user and a developer. The Web is my rejection of all-things Microsoft, and of Apple as well. They work overtime to control us, limit our options, and force us into their walled gardens. The web is freedom.
Old School Gamer Magazine: Who’s the core audience?
Van: Well so far, nobody. Figure in an era of global virality, if you cant earn a following via simple word-of-mouth popularity, you’re doing something wrong. You either stand out, or you die. Blending in,is not an option.
So thus far, I have no players. But I only dropped the open beta of Webshai maybe a week ago. Now Im looking for my first players.
Old School Gamer Magazine: Who are you trying to reach?
Van: The only crowd that I expect will really care – us 40-something/50-something old timers. To the kids these days, the old games just look primitive. Which is fair – they ARE primitive. But if you grew up on Apshai, you were left wanting more. At least I was.
Old School Gamer Magazine: Why does the preservation and homage of this era of games mean something to you?
Van: Two reasons, I think:
1 I was there, I lived it, these are the relics of my formative years, and represent some of the best times. Many a survivor of the torments of childhood, emerges from that battlefield with a guiding light. Something that led them through the darkness. For me, gaming was an HUGE part of that.
2 Those were the frontier days. The developers from that era, didn’t have game engines. They didn’t even have utility libraries. Often they didn’t even have pixels! And there were definitely no standards, no patterns. We didn’t even use the WASD UI pattern for steering yet! So what they made, was raw. It was feral. It was almost random.
And it was ground-breaking. Those early devs went out into the frontier, the wild, and they built.. whatever, whatever they could with whatever they had! And they built a whole new world and a new industry, and invited us to follow, to join them in something they called “home computer gaming” – when us users were still barely learning what a “home computer” even meant!
Old School Gamer Magazine: Why is this all important to you?
Van: That’s a surprisingly important and heavy question. Why do we game? Of what value is it? Sometimes I wonder if what I do – I was an off-and-on big-studio game dev for 35 years – is even meaningful, or just a waste of time. With all that’s wrong in the world, what do I contribute? Video games? That’s it?!
I don’t farm to grow food. I don’t build homes. I don’t heal the sick. All I do is provide entertainment.
Then I remember that 2nd grader, just 8 years old, introduced for the first time to Temple of Apshai, and I remember how a world of magic and fantasy and adventure and wonder opened up before me like an endless landscape.
And I remember, we aren’t just animals. We need more than food and shelter and our health. We need entertainment. And specifically, entertainment that challenges. That invites us to explore.
Interactive entertainment is the next level, beyond books and movies (both of which I still cherish). Interactive entertainment let’s us be the hero, instead of some Hollywood actor having all the fun. It’s the ultimate storytelling, because we get to *tell OUR story*. Not have someone else’s story told to us, whilst we imagine ourselves as the protagonist.
And Ive done this – trying to design games, build games, and empower people to tell THEIR stories – since I was a little kid. Even before computer gaming, when tabletop D&D was all the rage.
Old School Gamer Magazine: Anything else you’d like to add?
Van: Credit where credit is due:
Half the sound FX in Webshai, were done working with Claude AI tuning programmable oscillators by ear to recreate the classic C64 sound. The other half, was my sound artist/musician girlfriend Elisa Berlin of Noise Complaint (and who has a boss cameo in level 4 of the Catacombs tier).
The sprites were all generated on PixelLab.ai – I can’t draw a decent circle to save my life.
Tile art, all procedurally generated by Claude.
Likewise, the code was written entirely by Claude AI. I only take credit for the design and architecture of that code. Ive been developing for the web for the last 25 years, with 15 of those in Javascript. This would have taken me AT LEAST 6 months to build by hand, but with AI it took just 6 weeks. Though admittedly it became a very back-and-forth process after the initial generative pass. Anyone who thinks using AI for game dev is equivalent to pushing some magickal do-it-all-for-me button, should try that sometime.
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