I chatted with Matthew Nevers, master of tension, modern horror magistrate, and seasonal sensation. We discussed building in public, fake doors, and learning from other games.
Adapted from a conversation on May 31, 2025
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Alex: You recently finished up a Kickstarter for The Winter Door, a horror adventure. Was that your first published game?
Matthew: I’ve been releasing games just purely in digital form on my itch page for, I want to say, a couple of years now. I want to say 2023 was my first game that I put up there. And that was Danger Noodle Disco. It’s a Honey Heist hack where your two stats are disco and snake.
Alex: What prompted you to make The Winter Door?
Matthew: I had initially made this for a game jam that I hosted back in October. It was the Beyond the Gates Jam. And I was just noticing a lack of really good horror-themed game jams for the Halloween season. And I ended up just putting something together that I was really proud of. That’s not to say I’m ashamed of all my other games! But I felt like with this one, I kind of leveled up, so to speak, as a designer and as an artist.
Matthew: I’m very proud of the layout work and the artwork I did for this game. It was time. Going to print is one of those things that we dream of since we’re little baby gamers who, you know, before we even design our first game, we imagine our name on a book. I just kind of got sick of more of my life going by, where I wasn’t fulfilling those dreams that little baby designer Matthew had all those years ago.
Alex: What does that leveling up look like as a designer? Can you talk about that?
Matthew: Specifically with the Winter Door the project came together in a very fluid, organic way where I was essentially, like, I’m doing the writing and the layout and kind of the design work, like, at the same time.I will admit, it is maybe a chaotic process. The smart way to do it is probably to do it in the stages of, like, all right, I’m gonna do my writing and then I’m gonna think about the layout and the art, whatever. But this was one, like I said, it just came together very organically. I didn’t feel at any point, like, I was forcing it.
Matthew: The game I was making was very limited in scope, it was focused, and I was able to marry the mechanics to it in a way that supported only what I wanted this game to do. Nothing more and nothing less. I wasn’t combating scope creep or anything like that, and I think I was just very focused on what this game wanted it to be.
Alex: Now that you’ve put this one out, you’ve mentioned that you have plans to continue this as a series of season-based games, but you don’t see that as scope creep, each of those are going to be similarly scoped?
Matthew: The initial idea when I finished it, I had this idea for the Seasons of Terror. Basically three more self-contained horror stories, each based off of a season, and how that shapes our social conventions and relationships with each other. And of course, just horrible, terrifying things happening to people. Because that’s my two modes of game design: screaming terror, and silly nonsense. But actually, the project has kind of evolved. I am still going to return to Seasons of Terror, but right now, my most recent project that I’m working on is called The Decay.
Alex: And the Decay, is that not a horror game?
Matthew: Oh, no, it absolutely is! I’m using the Breathless system as a framework, which is what the Winter Door was based on. But when I was doing the Winter Door, I heavily modified it. René-Pier Deshaies-Gélinas of Fari RPGs wrote the Breathless system that I absolutely fell in love with. It’s beautiful and elegant, and just so compact. I took that and heavily modified it with The Winter Door, and now it’s kind of evolving a bit more from that. It’s becoming its own — it wants to be it’s own system. Kind of like how you have Forged in the Dark evolving out of Powered by the Apocalypse. It’s still very much going to be rooted in the Breathless system, but it’s becoming its own thing. So the Seasons of Terror are going to be made for the Decay. My plan for that is to be a setting-agnostic survival horror game.
Alex: In terms, excuse me, in terms of inspiration, you list Evil Dead, and The Thing on The Winter Door, and you have quotes from each of those as well in the pages. Where else do you find your inspirations when you’re designing these games?
Matthew: I think the easiest cop-out answer is everything. I know I’m not unique in this, but when you’ve got that game designer brain, or even just the game master game, every interesting piece of media you watch, every show, every movie, there’s that little voice in the back of your head that says, “Alright… how can I turn this into a game? This is really cool… How can I make a game out of this?”
Matthew: I’m sure I’m not the only one who watches John Wick and says okay, which game system would I run this in? But a lot of my inspiration actually comes from music. I read your interview with Asa [Donald] and I thought it was cool that he had kind of a similar answer. I don’t use music during game sessions, and that’s not because I have anything against it, it’s because the way I run games, I don’t have enough spoons to manage a dynamic playlist while I’m running a game. Because if, say we’re running a cyberpunk game. If I just pick a cyberpunk playlist and let it do its thing, it’s not going to line up where I want it to, and it’s gonna urk me to no end. So I’d rather just leave it. But when it comes to game design, pretty much every project I do either had a playlist or a theme song. When I listen to this song,—
Alex: It’s like your mood board.
Matthew: Yeah! So rather than having a Pinterest board, I’ll have a playlist of songs.
Alex: As an aside, I want to share my last horrifying playlist experience. I’ve got a few. I was at a halloween party for my kiddos, we were carving pumpkins, and the average age of the kids here is like 12. And I went on Spotify, and I said, oh, let me look up a Halloween playlist. I clicked the first recommendation, shuffled it, and the first song that came on was called “Let’s fuck like animals.”
Matthew: Classic halloween jam. That’s the subtext of Monster Mash, you know.
Alex: (laughter) I said, I think we got some wires crossed here! Back on track, you were telling me about inspiration.
Matthew: I find inspiration in other RPGs as well. Sometimes even if I’m pretty sure I’m not going to play a game, if there’s something I think I can learn from it, whether it’s writing or layout, or anything like that, I’ll still get the game and use it as a case study. The BREAK!! RPG is a masterclass in layout and design, it’s beyond… I was flipping through the book without even reading any of the words, and my jaw literally dropped open as I was reading this book, the way everything is laid out, the flow of information, the headers and thumb plates being used to show where you are in the book… it does this amazing thing where on the left hand side of the page, there are 3 d20 results: a high, a low, and a medium, and this is a 400 page book so if you don’t have a d20, you just flip to a random page and there you have a die result!
Matthew: The flip side is I’ve learned to be a lot more critical of a lot of layout and design. I won’t give any examples of things I don’t think are great. As a rule I don’t want to shit on anyone’s endeavors. Being critical is one thing, but being negative is unnecessary. But I will look at other books and I have as much to learn from the mistakes I find, because I can see those same mistakes in my own work. When you look at your own work, you have to have someone else edit, you kind of have blinders on. So if I’m looking at a book where they’re using like weird transparency on layers that muddles the images, or the text is just really tight and grouped together and claustrophobic, I’m not looking at my work so I get that visceral “ugh” reaction, but then I look at my own work and I think, “Oh I’m doing that same thing, so I have to fix it don’t want other people to get that reaction when they look at your own work.” So I have an idea of what to correct in my own work.
Alex: That makes sense to me! What makes a Matthew Nevers game? If I pick up one of your games, it sounds like I should expect horror. Are there other things I should expect?
Matthew: I saw this question coming, and I thought about it a lot. Because if you go to my Itch page, it’s very random. I make a lot of very different games in both tone and subject matter. So I have The Winter Door, which is very tense, tight supernatural horror, but then I also have Jason Squad, which is honestly the game I am most proud of. It’s a stupid game where you just play different famous Jasons.
Alex: I can only think of two, and one is fictional.
Matthew: We’ve got Jason Voorhees, Jason Bourne, Jason Statham, and Jason of the Argonauts.
Alex: I forgot Bourne and Argonauts.
Matthew: Jason Mantzoukas is in one of the roll tables, but what I’m getting at is that I don’t think there is an overarching theme that connects [my games], but something I value a lot is the G in TTRPGs. I really like games as games. Is this making sense? There’s a lot of games that are designed so the rules get out of the way to let you enjoy the story, and that’s cool! I have nothing against that. But I really like it when a game is mechanically fun to engage with, when the rules are fun and interesting, and they’re married to what the game wants to be.l So a Matthew Nevers game — there’s no way to say that without sounding arrogant in my own head — is a game where the mechanics are intentional. Nothing is there arbitrarily, and everything has been interrogated and thought about. I’m not afraid to kill my darlings. I have cut out so many “clever” ideas from my games, because I want the game to be what it wants to be, and I want it to be a fun, engaging experience at every level of play.
Alex:Do you have any other projects you wanted to talk about?
Matthew: I have entirely too many projects that are active.
Alex: If you want to talk about them, great! Personally, I try not to talk about them until they’re ready, so I respect that as well. Actually, that’s not true. I try not to talk about them until the moment I can’t proceed with other input.
Matthew: You know what, actually, that’s not a bad thing to talk about, because I have the complete opposite approach.
Alex: Are you a build in public guy?
Matthew: I am very much trying to be a build in public guy. I think I’m actually a messy chaotic creator. I’m not, by nature, a very disciplined person. So I’m trying to shore up those areas where I lack, or have deficits, in other ways. If I’m just let alone and I never put any material in front of other people, I can noodle around on one project for years and essentially work sideways. It’ll never progress forward. It’ll just get more things bolted onto the side. I find that for me, just having that MVP (minimum viable product), if it’s just a single spread, a bit of rules, whatever, I just put it out there. And generally when I get feedback on that, that kind of encouragement, just having my enthusiasm reflected back at me is a very motivating factor.
Alex: I envy people who can do that!
Matthew: It took practice! I just posted a spread I did for The Decay on Bluesky and in a few Discords. It got a few likes, and that’s great for validation, but the best part was oh, people saw that and they got excited, so now I’m like all right, I’m excited to keep pushing forward on this.
Alex: Do you find that the public is almost holding you accountable?
Matthew: Yes. I think that’s part of what it is. I know that if I’m left alone with no deadlines, no expectations, I’m not good at holding myself accountable. And I think that’s why it took me until I was 40 years old to publish my first print book. It’s another reason why I love game jams too, because a game jam forces you to get something done, get it out in the world. They’re generally run for a month. Stop worrying if it’s perfect, stop worrying about every single thing being the best it could be because perfection is the enemy of progress.
Alex: I’m always saying that!
Matthew: Being able to just throw out unfinished things and let people get excited knowing that yeah I’m probably gonna change it, I’m gonna polish it and and I’m gonna build it up. Or like a game jam where I do what I can within the time frame and just let it be. It’s a good motivating factor, and something I found as a designer is that having personal momentum is key. I think that’s what I’m rambling around is that if I put something out even if it’s just a quick little project, I did something and I feel good about that. And you’ve got those kind of endorphins going and you get a little pep in your step and you kind of carry that energy forward to the next thing. If I’m working on a big project and I can’t just put something out that is done, well I can put something out that I can share, I can put something out that you can look at, and I can share that progress and like keep using that kind of positive momentum to just keep going forward.
Alex: You’ve inspired me, when I stop talking to you, I’m going to share something from both of the games I have in progress. Thank you.
Matthew: That’s amazing, I’m glad I could help. And you know what, that’s another thing is that other designers doing that, building in public, and sharing things that weren’t done and that are just like a Google Doc with no art, no layout… that has been personally encouraging to me. Because when we look at, say I get a Dungeons & Dragons book, or even just like an indie book, like if I got a copy of Cybeerrats and all I saw was that copy of Cyberrats, it’s a finished product. Seeing that finished product is cool, like I’ve got a book. But seeing the process, and seeing that this is the end result of like bare bones documents and rules changes and things like that is encouraging to new designers.
Alex: You’re in one of my playtests of Cyberrats right now where I had to tell someone, “Don’t take this mech, I’m going to rewrite it over the weekend.”
Matthew: I’ve had those kinds of sessions! Like all right, you can technically play this, but it’s only half done, and I’m just putting it there to see if people think it’s cool enough to pick, but don’t really do it.
Alex: But there’s a tool in software development that not enough people use, in my opinion, and it’s called Fake Doors. And what it is is you’re building an application, a website, whatever. You put in a bunch of buttons, a bunch of menu items that don’t do anything. You click them, and they come up, and they say, hey, this feature’s coming soon. You know, if it truly just does nothing, people get mad. But what it does is whenever someone clicks that, you send… You know, you log that. You send a piece back and say, hey, 25 people clicked on this button today, and 10,000 clicked on this button. Neither of them do anything. But we should probably focus on the one that 10,000 people clicked on, or that got 10,000 clicks, you know.
Matthew: I see that a lot with games that are playtesting that have character classes and there’s… I know so like you were saying how nobody’s ever picked the Germinator mech [in Cyberrats in Space]. One of my big projects is Hellbreakers it’s a tactical action game. There are the classes that someone always picks and then there are I think one or two that no one has ever picked. I’m like okay I need to — those either need need to change or something, but like — all right everyone loves the hex mech —
Alex: How could they not?
Matthew: I mean it’s a magic mech! But more on the theme of fake doors, I will sometimes include like include a class that’s not done, but I want it to be on the list to see if people want to take the class, and then I’ll let them know hey you can if you want, it’s not done, but you know it’s a work in progress. And they usually pick something else, but I just like to have that data.