Din's Curse Preview and Interviews

A new Din's Curse preview and interview with Soldak's Steven Peeler is available over at Werit's Blog, while the Examiner just focuses on getting us a Q&A.

A snip from Werit's interview:

Werit: Dynamic and changing worlds seem to be a hallmark of both Depths of Peril and Din's Curse. What are some examples of how the world can be different from game to game?

Well I see this as being two different things: a random world start and a dynamic world.

Each world is going to start out very different. There will be different NPCs in town and each town will have unique problems (starting quests). The dungeons will look very distinct every time and have a unique layout. The placement of items, objects, and monsters will also be changed each time.

Even if you somehow got two people to start with the same world, it will evolve separately based on what the player does, what the monsters do, and what the NPCs do. Let's say the world starts off with an uprising of Imps. The first person takes it seriously, goes down into the dungeon, and quells the uprising. The second person decides to ignore the uprising.

Eventually this will blow up in their face. The consequence will never be the same exactly, but here's an actual possible scenario. The Imps get restless and decide to go to war with the Zombies. Ok, Zombies and Imps killing each other doesn't sound like a bad thing, not yet at least. Then the Zombies drag the Skeletons into the war also, still not a problem. Now an uprising of Skeletons and two different Zombie uprisings occur.

Now the problems are building. The Imps are no match for the Zombies and Skeletons together and are beaten into submission and the war ends. Soon after though, the Zombies get bored and start raiding the town. The player finally returns from their adventure to find that all of the NPCs in town are now undead.

And a snip from the Examiner's interview:
What part of creating a video game do you enjoy the most?

Well I love doing things that are different. I'm very proud of the fact that both Depths of Peril and Kivi's Underworld fit into the action RPG subgenre, but there really isn't anything like either one of them. There are other things I enjoy, but I think it actually varies from project to project. Lately I've mostly been enjoying system design and polishing. With system design I get to add cool elements and figure out how they work together. There is just something fun about creating building blocks of a dynamic world. As for the polishing, I just enjoy play testing and making things progressively better and better. It's very rewarding.