Indie Studio on Creating a Dungeons & Dragons-Inspired RPG

Introduction

Discovering roleplay through Dungeons & Dragons in middle school was a huge and positive part of growing up for me. It shaped how I thought, how I related to people, and, honestly, how I learned confidence and creativity. I carried that love for tabletop with me for years, but I never really thought about turning it into something bigger until the early COVID lockdowns.

During that time, like a lot of people, I reconnected with my old group of friends on Zoom, and we started playing D&D again. We used the tools that were available then, like Roll20, FoundryVTT, and D&D Beyond. They did a good job helping people who already knew tabletop keep playing online, even if everyone had different levels of tech comfort.

But what stood out really fast was that they were not built for accessibility, especially for new players. I was running games on an ultrawide monitor with four separate windows open, hosting a server so everyone could connect, and doing a bunch of setup just to make it work. If that was a lot for me, it was going to be impossible for plenty of other people. And that's before you even get to the normal barriers tabletop already has.

That's when it clicked. This hobby offers real positive developmental benefits, and it should be something everyone can access, but the on-ramp is still way too steep. Riftweaver came out of a simple belief: roleplay shouldn't be hard to reach. It should be accessible to anyone curious about it.

My background maps pretty directly to how I think about production at Riftweaver. I started in cybersecurity, which trains you to think about trust, reliability, and what happens when systems fail. Then I moved into DevOps, where most of the job is making large backend systems scale without breaking.

After that, I worked in data pipelining and distributed systems, which really grounded me in building things that stay robust under messy inputs and real-world load. So when building Fablecraft, I have always approached problems with a systems-first mindset, but always in service of the player experience.

We're building a roleplay platform that needs to be stable, scalable, and flexible under the hood, while feeling simple and welcoming to use. I care a lot about streamlined, intuitive design, so we focus on hiding complexity, cutting friction, and getting people into the fun as quickly as possible.

Tales of Fablecraft

Two things ended up being way harder than we expected, one technical and one design-related. On the technical side, we knew we wanted built-in voice and video from day one. What we underestimated was how wild that problem becomes when you're trying to do it inside a standalone Unity app across PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.

That combination hadn't been done before in any production environment, so there wasn't a ready-made playbook. The early road was bumpy, and we had to get pretty creative to solve issues as they came up, then keep testing and iterating until it worked in a way that was reliable and affordable.

The biggest breakthrough was landing on peer-to-peer voice and video, which gave us the experience we wanted while keeping backend costs basically negligible at scale. On the design side, we made an early call that Fablecraft should feel native to the device you're holding. That meant landscape for PC, Mac, and tablets, but portrait for phones.

It sounds simple on paper, but it introduced a lot of complexity. Every screen, every interaction, and even how people read the game state had to work in two fundamentally different layouts. We spent a lot of design and engineering time figuring out how to make that feel consistent and intuitive instead of like two different products.

Our focus has always been cross-platform, not split by platform. From the very start, we decided Fablecraft needed to be playable across desktop and mobile, because accessibility is central to what we're building. It didn't make sense to design a game about bringing people together if the device someone owns could lock them out of the experience.

So we bake that decision in immediately, basically at day one. It shapes everything: UI, session flow, performance targets, input assumptions, and even how we think about groups forming and staying connected. If cross-platform is an afterthought, you feel it everywhere.

In terms of rollout, the desktop came first because it let us validate the core experience faster and with fewer constraints. But getting to mobile was always part of the plan, and in a lot of ways, it was the final accessibility unlock. Most people have a phone, even if they don't have a PC or a tablet, so shipping mobile is what really makes the platform feel like it's for everyone.

Challenges

Even with all the progress we've seen in the last few years, I think there are still three big UX hurdles left in 2026. First, the GM bottleneck is still real. We've taken a real swing at this with Fablecraft and had some big wins, but there's more runway. Our Game Master's Guide (GMG) has been a great step forward. It helps GMs get into an adventure faster, reduces prep overhead, and makes it easier to respond to player decisions in the moment.

I feel that GM tools across the space are still catching up to what they need to be. A lot of VTT and campaign tools are aiming at the same problem, which tells you the gap is still there. Second, onboarding remains one of the hardest accessibility problems, but it’s tricky to get right because "new player" isn't one thing.

You have people totally fresh to roleplaying, people who know TTRPGs but not your system, and people who know the system but not digital play. Good onboarding has to meet players where they are without slowing down the ones who are ready to go. And third, group coordination is still the silent campaign killer.

Getting 4 - 6 adults in the same room, even digitally, is just hard once jobs, families, and time zones enter the mix. Plenty of platforms (us included) have tried to smooth this out with scheduling tools, reminders, async features, and campaign management, but I don't think anyone's fully cracked it yet. The fact that the community still talks about scheduling as a core pain point says a lot. 

Monetization in this space is always a bit delicate because tabletop groups run on trust. If players feel like they're being taken advantage of, you lose them fast. So we've been pretty intentional about making sure spending feels tied to real value. What's worked well for us so far is our pre-packaged adventures.

Players have responded to them because they're tangible, ready-to-play value. You're buying time saved, a smoother session, and a great experience you can jump into right away. That kind of premium content model has been working across the VTT space too, which gave us confidence we were on the right track.

At the same time, we know a big part of the hobby is people wanting to play the systems and worlds they already love. So the next evolution for us is opening Fablecraft up to more settings and more games without losing that streamlined experience. That's where licensing and IP partnerships come in.

We're especially interested in partnering with IPs that have already proven themselves through crowdfunding. Crowdfunding has quickly become one of the main engines for successful tabletop launches in the last couple of years, especially for strong indie and mid-size publishers.

If a physical game can rally a community there, that usually means two important things for us: there's real demand, and there's already a passionate audience who wants to keep playing. We can offer those creators a clean path from a physical product into a digital one, without them having to build the tech stack themselves.

Conclusion

There's some big growth potential here, but the challenge is that if you lean too far in either direction, you lose people. If it feels too gamey or automated, tabletop veterans can feel like the soul is getting sanded off. If it feels too loose or intimidating, digital-first players bounce before they ever get to the good part.

So the real opportunity is in building something that respects both. Give experienced roleplayers the freedom they expect, while giving new players enough scaffolding that the experience feels welcoming instead of overwhelming.

When that balance is right, you don't just serve two groups, you create a bigger one. You bring in people who would never try tabletop otherwise, and you give longtime players a smoother way to play without compromising what they love.

Riftweaver Game Studio

Interview conducted by 80 Level