Stephen Ddungu animates and scores a one-man prequel

Stephen Ddungu makes videogames the way other people keep notebooks. The solo developer behind Sword of Symphony—the long-gestating action-RPG where combat is musical performance, built in UPBGE, the Blender-based engine Ddungu also teaches—posted a teaser in May for a prequel, dated only “Coming in [2026].”

The project circulates under the codename 00000 00 0x0000000, and its premise is the best piece of worldbuilding Ddungu has shown yet. It takes place in [The Garden], described as a border between Ddungu’s games—the place where scrapped designs, unfinished concepts, and unused ideas go once they’re cut. You play as [first draft], the earliest sketch of Sword of Symphony’s protagonist, fighting toward e[x]istence with a stick, a gun, and the occasional conjured car. Per the dev diaries, the episodic story will bear on Sword of Symphony’s ending.

Metafiction this literal usually lives in literature—drafts arguing with the person who wrote them is Flann O’Brien territory—but Ddungu’s version is playable, and the response has a feel: the comparison the replies keep reaching for is Nier. I love the one-man-band aspect; scoring and animating an entire mythology alone isn’t a limitation here. It’s the aesthetic, the same way a solo on a record tells you more about the player than the band ever could—an argument Killscreen was already making in Digital Soloists, on jazz and the videogame score. No storefront, no date beyond [2026]. Just an account name made of zeroes, and a garden where dead ideas wait their turn.