4. Compared to your last game, Din’s Curse, what kind of new features players could find?

The biggest new feature is basically all of the diplomacy with the races vying for control of your current sector of space. It’s up to you who to support, who to hinder, and how you will accomplish all of this. Just a reminder, it’s your goal to eventually be on the winning side. It gets tricky pretty fast though.

For example, the ship Cyano is terrorizing the star system that you are currently scouting.You believe that you could win the battle and the Cortex are offering a pretty hefty bounty for the destruction of Cyano. Do you destroy Cyano and collect on the bounty? In this case, the Cortex are the second most powerful race, they are well behind the Drakk empire, the Cortex and the Drakk are at war, and the Drakk don’t particular like you.
Yeah, it just got much more complex.
If you take the bounty, you will make the second most powerful race happier and more stable, but at the same time you will piss off the most powerful race. Do you take the quick cash and try to repair the relations hit later? Do you throw your full weight behind the Cortex and try to overthrow the Drakk? Or do you kiss up to the Drakk and let the Cortex handle their own problems? It’s completely up to you.

…

There is a lot a Drox Operative can do to change the outcome of a sector. A few of the things that they can do to help out their chosen race(s): scout for bountiful planets, locate technology to speed up a race’s research, destroy dangerous monsters, give monetary gifts, and solve major problems like Galactic Flu, incoming comets, and geomagnetic storms.

Check out the full interview here. For further reading, check out detailed descriptions of the factions you’ll be dealing with in the finished game here. (Peeler tells me that two races have yet to be added to the page, and there will be 20 additional sub-races once Drox Operative is complete.)

Drox Operative is a starship action RPG with warring alien races, fierce space battles, a dynamic, evolving galaxy, and co-op multiplayer.

Eons ago the Drox ruled the galaxy through their mighty Operatives. These elite starship captains were trained to accomplish the impossible at whatever cost necessary. Whether employing stealth or brute force, they were always deadly. Using these Operatives, the Drox built a starlane system for quick travel amongst the stars, colonized and conquered millions of planets, and ruled the galaxy with an iron grip for over 100,000 years. Eventually realizing their Operators were a threat, they attempted to assassinate all of them. They failed. The following Galactic Civil War was devastating.

Thousands of years later, the Drox are extinct, but the secretive Drox Operative guild lives on. They have learned their lesson though: loyalty to any one race is foolish. They now work for whoever can pay. And pay they do! Empires might span hundreds of planets and thousands of ships, but when a critical task arises, they still turn to an Operative.

In the new space race, the major races are scouting, colonizing, and expanding, trying to take over the galaxy by diplomacy, technology, war, or any other means their scheming minds can contemplate.

As a Drox Operative it’s NOT your job to manage all of those annoying people, build thousands of buildings, play nice with your enemies, or balance the budget. It IS your job to pick the winning side and maybe even help them conquer the galaxy if you’re being nice, more importantly though is to rake in as many credits as possible, well that and build the coolest, deadliest ship in the known universe. Not many screw with an Operative captaining a Dreadnaught!

Drox Operative is scheduled to be released in the 1st quarter of 2012, however it will be released when it’s done.

I asked Peeler if he had any screenshots I could show; unfortunately, it seems the game isn’t yet at that stage of development. However, Peeler did give an interview to Space Game Junkie about the title earlier this month, which you can read here if you want to find out more details.

My name is Steven Peeler. I do all of the design, programming, and business stuff here at Soldak.

It’s not really that a Diablo type game attract me more than something like a turn-based RPG, it’s that I feel that the main features of our games that we have created so far work better as action RPGs. For example, an enemy covenant in Depths of Peril raiding your covenant or Demons attacking your town in Din’s Curse are much more intense when everything is real-time and you can actually see everything because of the isometric camera position.

Yes, this is definitely one of the things that we have purposely changed in Din’s Curse and Depths of Peril. In most games when an NPC says solve this quest quick or we will all die, it really means nothing and the player knows it. There isn’t any emotional impact when everyone is 100% sure that the threat is a bluff. Well in DC and DoP there are no bluffs. When an NPC tells the player that an Orc uprising is planning on attacking the town, that’s really what he means. If nothing is done to stop them they will eventually attack the town and at least attempt to kill everyone. Once players realize that the threats are real, they feel actual pressure to stop that Orc uprising in time. Well that or they will feel the intensity of trying to quell an Orc town attack before everyone dies.

Basically in the base game of Din’s Curse the world was very dynamic. The monsters, the environment, and the quests all evolve based on interactions with everything else. Now with the Demon War expansion the NPCs are also very dynamic which matches the rest of the game much better.

The NPCs now have money, happiness, and have relationships with each other. This helps the NPCs impact and interact with the world a lot better. Let me give you an example that touches on all of these things. Gregor is superstitious so he tends to gamble more than he should. Eventually he runs up a sizeable debt gambling and is having trouble affording food. Luckily the vendors, other NPCs, and player keeps him fed enough to not starve to death. However, starving, always in debt, and gambling losses makes him really unhappy. Eventually he resorts to stealing and taking bribes from monsters to sabotage the town. Since the player tracked down the source of these problems, the townspeople are quite pissed at poor Gregor and finally banish him from the town. The cool thing about this scenario is it is just one of many possibilities that can happen, it isn’t just a set script that happens, and the player has many chances to do something about it. He can help Gregor with food. He can donate money to him. He can even kill him.

This actually started with Depths of Peril. In DoP, the core feature is the covenants that trade with one another, go to war, and eventually raid each other to attempt to wipe out their rivals to become the supreme covenant of Jorvik. All of this is naturally very dynamic. Once we had this in place and working it felt a little strange to have a static story line especially once your enemy covenants could compete with you and solve some of the quests. Ultimately the finally version of Depths of Peril had a small normal story line, but most of it is dynamic. With Din’s Curse we have followed along the same path (minus the covenants), but we have expanded greatly on the idea.

So the focus on dynamic enemies in Depths of Peril was originally an AI feature that expanded to become a storyline-generating feature as well?

Yeah pretty much. One of the nice things about being an indie is that I don’t have to write a huge design document at the beginning of the development cycle. Instead I can start with some solid ideas and iterate from there. Personally I call this exploring. I’m usually pretty accurate, but sometimes cool ideas just don’t work in practice and sometimes you don’t think of the awesome ideas that really make your game standout until you are halfway through the project because they build on other ideas.

What’s next for Soldak? Will you make another action RPG, or are you going to branch out?

We are still too early in the process of the next game to really say anything yet. Although, one of these days I’m pretty sure we will branch out some more. A turn based RPG, a more strategy focused game, a sci-fi game, or any number of other things are all possibilities.

Thanks for your time.

For anyone curious to know more, you can read my review of Din’s Curse right here.

If Diablo and Diner Dash had offspring, I imagine it would turn out something like this. Din’s Curse is a 3D isometric action RPG by Soldak Entertainment (which is to say, it’s by Steven Peeler and a small group of contract workers). The basic gist is that the god of honor, Din, is making you atone for a wasted life by having you pull a Diablo: you have to venture into a dungeon beneath a randomly generated town in order to save the town and show a horde of demons, undead, and other assorted nasties who’s boss.

A la Diablo, the dungeon is randomly generated. But so is everything else, leading to an impressively dynamic dungeon-delving experience.

The quests and selection of NPCs are generated procedurally. Some quests cause beneficial totems to be built on certain floors of the dungeon. Explosions in the dungeon can trigger localized cave-ins. You’ll discover just lying around the dungeon floor plans to visit chaos upon the town–plans which you must thwart. Likewise, every few minutes, it seems,  some monster or another is attacking the town, and you have to rush back to keep it from killing valuable NPCs.

Certain monsters don’t get along, and can be seen be fighting each other as you roam through the dungeon. In fact, all monsters belong to factions. Faction leaders can (and do) declare war on one another, turning certain levels of the dungeon into–quite literally–war zones.

In short, Din’s Curse is constantly changing as you play, whether you’re taking advantage of the changes or not. Just about every new thing that appears in the world appears with a hidden timer. NPCs that visit will leave town again after a certain amount of time. Take too long to beat that quest you picked up, and you will fail it. Take too long acting on a set of plans you discover, and the scheming monster will succeed, making your life a lot harder. The game starts out fairly hectic, and only gets more frenzied as you progress. You’ve been warned.

One of my favorite features of Din’s Curse is that every floor of the dungeon contains a gate back to town. One you’ve activated a gate, you can use it to travel to and from town as much as you want. It’s a huge improvement on the annoying town portal mechanic of the Diablo games. An elegant design choice, it both removes the need for town portal scrolls wasting space in one’s inventory, and provides an optional “find and activate the gate” objective for each floor of the dungeon.

Just as nice is the ability (with my necromancer character, at least) to identify items without having to cart around a load of “identify” scrolls. It is clear that Peeler set out to design this game with a strong awareness of the fact that you will mostly play as a one-person party (though the game does support multiplayer co-op), and he doesn’t leave major abilities like item identification out-of-bounds to the player because of his or her choice of character class.

Along those same lines, you don’t need to create a rogue to be able to spot traps and open locked doors and chests (the ability is open to anyone), and if you still aren’t satisfied with your character’s assortment of abilities, you can adopt a hybrid class. This high degree of customization extends to the world as well, where you can set the difficulty of the game with admirable specificity.

On the whole, Din’s Curse is very well designed. I do have a couple of complaints, however. The first is that in areas of the dungeon where you are beset by large groups of enemies, it can become very difficult to attack once the bodies start hitting the floor, as you’ll find yourself clicking on corpses (and therefor not attacking) at least as often as you find yourself clicking on the still-living enemies. Needless to say, this can be frustrating, and it mars what is otherwise an elegant and intuitive combat system.

The second complaint is that your inventory is pitifully small, especially compared to the mountains of loot you’ll accumulate as you mow through enemies. One gets the sense that Peeler intended the player to spend a lot of time rushing back and forth between the dungeon and town. Arguably this isn’t a bad thing, as it helps contribute to the frantic “Diner Dash” feeling I mentioned earlier, but the presence of constant threats besetting the town accomplishes this effect well enough on its own.

There is one major area where Din’s Curse drops the ball, and that is in the narrative arena. One gets virtually no background about the setting, and characters rarely have anything to say beyond giving you quests (and even those interactions consist of selecting from a list). You “win” by improving your reputation. Your reputation improves every time you complete a quest, and degrades every time a quest ends without you completing it (even if you never found out about the quest to begin with). If there is a plot beyond the basic premise of redeeming yourself to Din, I have yet to encounter it.

The in-game music is mostly well done but unmemorable. The title screen track, however, is a cringe-worthy exception (what can I say–I have an aversion to MIDI violin). The game runs smoothly on my machine. Graphically, Din’s Curse looks like a AAA title released around 2001-02. However, while the graphics are far from current gen, they’re attractive and more than adequate to the task. My only real complaint with the graphics engine is that I am unable to take screenshots of the game for some reason, which unfortunately means that the screenies above are necessarily scavenged from other reviews.

The Verdict: 4/5. If you liked the original Diablo, you’ll love Din’s Curse for its abundance of action, loot, and emergent, madcap gameplay. This is not, however, recommended for players looking for a leisurely or story-driven experience.

Rampant Games: Why indie RPGs? What prompted you to go after one of the most challenging game genres right out of the chute, and what has kept you on that path?

Steven Peeler: I like RPGs. It really is about that simple. Since I started Soldak, the “smart money” in the indie world has shifted from making match 3 games to hidden object games to iPhone apps and now to Facebook social games. I could have worked on any of these to “make the quick bucks”, but if I can’t work on something I love, what’s the point of being an indie?

Here’s the full thing. And, just for fun, here is another interview Peeler gave to GamersInfo.net from earlier this year.