Happy April Fool’s Day! To celebrate, here is an exclusive (and most certainly not fake) interview I conducted with Steven Peeler of Soldak Entertainment, in which he tells us about the value of urgency, as well as offering some insight on using procedural systems in an RPG. Check it out.   Let’s start basic. Who [...]

GameBanshee has an interview with Brian Mitsoda about Dead State. It has a lot of interesting stuff in it, but from a pure RPG design perspective, I found this perhaps the most interesting: Unlike a lot of other RPGs, you don’t gain XP from killing things – you get skill points from completing objectives, which [...]

It has been somewhat in vogue recently among a certain class of indie game designer to assert that games are not a good storytelling medium. Now, I have never made a secret of my views on dialog and other narrative techniques in games. While interactivity is of course central to any gaming experience, that is [...]

Hopefully, we should have a review of Eschalon: Book II coming soon. In the meantime, however, here is yet another interview by Jay Barnson, this time with Thomas Riegsecker, creator of the Eschalon games. Rampant Coyote: There are a lot of modern RPGs being released on PC and consoles (not to mention MMORPGs) that all [...]

Boy, this is a big week for developer interviews, isn’t it? Jay Barnson conducts another interview, this time with indie RPG dev Steven Peeler, the mastermind behind Soldak (and therefore, the mastermind behind real-time dungeon crawlers Din’s Curse, Depths of Peril, and Kivi’s Underworld). Rampant Games: Why indie RPGs? What prompted you to go after [...]

Jeff Vogel’s given two separate interviews over the last week or so: first this one from Captain D’s PC Gaming Blog, then this one on GameBanshee. Also, just because I find it interesting, here is a recent blog post Jeff wrote evangelizing the reuse of old game engines and assets for RPGs.

Jay Barnson has published his second interview with Indinera Falls, creator of the prolific indie game studio Aldorlea Games. Rampant Coyote: There are a lot of fantastic big-budget mainstream RPGs out now – with more coming soon with plenty of marketing hype for each one. You’d think that there wouldn’t be any room for a [...]