Hinterland Interview

[GameBanshee News]

GameDaily's Big Download Blog is offering up a two-page interview with Tilted Mill Entertainment co-founder Chris Beatrice about their recently announced RPG/strategy crossbreed, Hinterland.

From the description of the game, Hinterland combines aspects of your city building genre with more RPG and strategy elements. How hard was it to make the game work with all those kinds of features?

Most, if not all, of our games have been pretty demanding to make, in terms of balancing a lot of interdependent elements into one big living "machine," and we have a lot of institutional knowledge at this point about how to do that, and where the various pitfalls lie. The lack of direct control that characterizes "life-sim" types of games, including city-builders, is certainly one aspect of this. So that's not a huge challenge for Hinterland. If anything I'd say the challenge is that you can't compare the depth of the RPG aspects of Hinterland with a full blown RPG, or the town building aspects of Hinterland with a full blown city-builder. Hinterland is a smaller game than, say, CotN to be sure, and managing user expectation is certainly part of the challenge with it.