SEATTLE – "I've been in game development since 1998," says Jordan Thomas. "I've been through many cycles of games, I've gone through the entire curve of cynicism and idealism and back out the other side, like Andy Dufresne. So the idea of a dark comedy set inside an unfinished game from the game's eye view—it tickles my particular funnybone."

You may never have heard of Thomas, but he may have blown your mind more than once. If you thought "Robbing the Cradle" was the best level of Thief: Deadly Shadows or "Fort Frolic" was the apex of the original BioShock (many did), you've encountered Thomas' handiwork. He was the creative director of the acclaimed BioShock 2, and made major contributions to BioShock Infinite and South Park: The Stick of Truth.

Now, like many of his Irrational Games confederates, Thomas has gone independent, opening a studio alongside two other veterans of acclaimed big-budget projects. Their upcoming game, The Magic Circle, is born of their experiences in blockbuster hell. You're stuck inside a triple-A vaporware project that's been in development forever and probably won't be finished. All around you are unfinished graphics, placeholder sound effects and glitchy interactive elements. All the while, you hear the arguments of an egomaniac game designer and his hapless staff as they fail to make any decisions—they're represented by giant godlike eyeballs that float above their slapdash creation.

Although it's tempting to think Thomas and company are having a laugh at their ex-boss at Irrational Games, Ken Levine, Thomas says the idea of a comedy game lampooning blockbuster game development hit him only after he had to sit in the big chair for BioShock 2. "Maybe somebody could mock all of this in a playable form," Thomas thought, reflecting on the things he did well and the ways in which he was a "failure on legs."

"I think anybody who's ever directed a game becomes a kind of caricature of themselves," he said, standing in his unassuming booth at the Penny Arcade Expo last weekend, where attendees could try The Magic Circle. "They really can't help it. They're making too many decisions too quickly, they become fatigued, and they lose a little bit of attachment of what it's like to either work for them or be a player."

Thomas says that if he and his fellow creators don't feel they've been guilty of a certain failing of game development themselves, they won't ascribe them to The Magic Circle's self-absorbed designer Ishmael Gilder (who in a Lord British fashion has dubbed himself "The Starfather").

"It's impossible to please everybody," he said. "You can martyr yourself to the assumed whim of the crowd, at which point you will not see any of yourself reflected in the game. Or you can go the other way, ignore all their feedback and play the auteur, at which point what will happen is they'll all bail. I don't see any of that as sustainable. You do your best to go in and strike a balance."

Unfinished Symphony

Last year's breakout indie hit Gone Home was another BioShock baby, born of designer Steve Gaynor's experiences working on the shooter series. But don't go thinking The Magic Circle is the same sort of gameplay-light experience. While it's certainly no shooter, The Magic Circle promises some brain-taxing puzzles.

The trick is you meet a character—he's a leftover game protagonist who's been stuck on the character select screen for a decade—who helps you hack the world. You can get into any object and see a list of its parameters. An enemy character might be set to run on the ground and attack you, for example. You can tweak the code so that he flies through the air and attacks your enemies.

The Magic Circle developers Jordan Thomas (L) and Stephen Alexander. Chris Kohler/WIRED

You can manipulate all of these variables to put together freeform solutions to puzzles, Thomas says, "a system that is very much like Lego."

"You can interchange all these different objects and give powers to creatures that you'll never have," he says. "That interaction is not mandated."

All the while, you're seeing and hearing lots of in-jokes about how game development fails. Starfather refuses to bless any of his underlings' suggested color schemes. Placeholder text, not all of it flattering, is everywhere. ("We cut sidequests, so what goes here?") At one point you end up in a low-polygon, low-resolution environment that resemble what Duke Nukem Forever must have looked like when they started it.

Isn't a lot of this stuff inside baseball, I ask Thomas. Will it make sense to people who haven't spent a decade toiling away on a piece of almost-vaporware?

"You're certainly painting a good picture of failure for us," Thomas says. "To us, if the game is impossible to understand or appreciate unless you make games, we have screwed up," he says.

Players, he says, probably will get it. "A game is a sort of subset of reality," Thomas says. "A scale model of a place that doesn't exist. Things go wrong all the goddamn time. If you've ever bought a game, you've probably ran into something that wasn't intentional. If you've bought lots of them? You have seen the rough edges. You have seen under the skirt. And it was ugly."