Depths of Peril Interview
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What would you have done differently, given a choice? Also, what are your best and worst DoP design decisions?
Looking back on the project, I would probably say something I would do differently is bringing in artists a bit earlier in the project. This turned out fine in the end, but finding artists and getting good progress on the artwork was pretty stressful for me during a lot of the project.
I think the best design decision of the project was including the covenant gameplay. Not only is this one of the biggest distinguishing features of Depths of Peril, but it is also the feature that led to other important unique things in the game like consequences to your actions and the very dynamic world. The covenants is one of those features that changes just about everything in the game. They adventure in the world, they can solve quests before you do, they start wars and raid other covenants including yours, they help out when the town is attacked, they can grab recruits before you do, guards, rumors, and crystals all are due to the covenant gameplay, they can destroy your covenant, and the list just goes on and on.
This is going to sound like a copout, but at the moment I really can't think of a worst design decision. There are plenty of decisions that people are going to disagree with me about, but they all had really good reasons and I haven't changed my mind about them yet. For example, Depths of Peril has lower poly counts than other recent games and doesn't have top of line rendering technology like bump mapping, but if we had included this we couldn't have town attacks and large covenant raids without having a ridiculously high minimum requirement. Although plenty of games do that last part. Another example is leaving multiplayer out. I originally had multiplayer in the game when the game was simpler, but I realized that releasing multiplayer at the same time, as it does with many games, would compromise the single player game. This wasn't acceptable to me, so I decided to make Depths of Peril a single player game only, at least initially.
