Deepworld was a massively-multiplayer sandbox crafting game that ran from 2012 to 2019. Players explored a post-apocalyptic steampunk world, gathered materials, crafted items, built their own structures, and battled a variety of monstrous creatures (as well as each other). The game was created by Mike Laurence, Jason Pearl, and myself, and built from the ground up with open source software and hand-drawn art.

Deepworld was a modest success, a rarity for an indie game. We pulled in enough revenue to support ourselves working on the game full-time for over two years. We never achieved anything close to the success of Minecraft, our biggest inspiration—but then, neither did anyone else. We had a small but loyal community and it was a lot of fun interacting with them, incorporating their feedback and in-jokes into the game as we went.

By late 2014 we'd hit an inflection point. We were taking on an increasing quantity of contract work to pay for the game and it was no longer feasible for the three of us to call it our day job. I stepped away from the game to take a job as a mobile developer, and outside of a few sketches and ideas, I didn't contribute much to Deepworld from that point on.

The period of time when Deepworld was central to my life is a bit of a blur, but it's a blur I think of fondly. I was impressed that the game continued to coast for as long as it did (thanks to Mike and Jason keeping the lights on). Here's what I posted about the game on its last day before the servers shut down:

Today marks the final day of Deepworld, the massively-multiplayer steampunk crafting game that I helped create with two friends over seven years ago. Out of the hundreds (maybe thousands?) of original art assets I created for the game, I'm most proud of this promotional splash image, which was a huge step up in terms of detail and effort from anything l'd drawn before. Although I haven't been involved in the game for a while now, it was nice knowing that it was still out there in the vast video game landscape, offering its quirky little mix of building art nouveaux mansions with your friends while fighting off terrapi and giant floating brains. But tonight I'll be pouring one out for a game and a creative experience that totally changed my life-leading not just to a total career switch, but to a rediscovery and reinvigoration of my love for creating art. Deepworld taught me two of the most important lessons in life: if you can envision something, you can create it; and never try to make tiling graphics with hand-drawn crosshatching. RIP.