Steven Peeler interview

You can read my last interview with Steven Peeler from Soldak right here

1. Hello Steven, I'm really happy you have time for this interview, so please describe what is Soldak in terms of objectives?

We’re similar to many indie companies; we simply want to create really fun games that aren’t being created by the mainstream games industry.

2. What about your next game, Drox Operative? Can you describe it?

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

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 Operatives 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!

3. Your past works was action rpgs with innovative ideas and systems, why change and try to build a "a starship action RPG" ?

Well, we’re really big sci-fi fans and we wanted to do something that was different. However, we also wanted to do something that our current fans will still love. We felt that a starship action RPG would accomplish all of this.

As a side note, given that Diablo 3 is launching within a couple weeks, I’m pretty happy that we aren’t working on a fantasy game right now.

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.

5. Your next game will be a real time game, with to tactic-pause or turn based options, why this choice?

I’m personally a huge fan of turn based games, but we feel that real-time works better with our dynamic galaxy gameplay. You can actually pause whenever you want to change your strategy and tactics (assuming you’re not playing multiplayer).

6. In a Drox Operative play seems to be immersed into a 4x (eXplore eXpand eXploit eXterminate, like Master Of Orion 2, or Galactic Civilization) play, from a different perspective, it's true ?

Yes, from a background perspective it is very similar to 4X games. However, instead of controlling an entire empire like a real 4X game, you are an elite operative that chooses which races to help out. Overall it’s your goal to ally with the winning side, either by becoming friends with the strongest or forging one of the races into the strongest.

7. What sort of influence can have a lone Drox Operative in a game of thrones (ops, races)? What player can do?

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.

8. What kind of ultimate goal player have? Destroy a race? Maintain peace in galaxy? 100 level of play?

Sure a skilled Operative can destroy races or maintain peace if they want to, but their ultimate goal is to ally themselves with the most dominate race and help them conquer the sector. A true Drox Operative would never do anything less.

9. How do you plan to balance a dynamic game like this?

We balance these types of things mostly with lots and lots of testing during alpha and beta. In our developer builds, we also have a bunch of cheat codes and automated testing that helps quite a bit.

10. Do you plan to release some guides or tutorial to mod Drox ?

Yes. We will release info and tools similar to what we have done with our previous games. The nice thing is that with the help of our gamers each new game of ours gets more and more modable.

11. When game will be ready? Do you plan to release a demo?

We will definitely have a demo. Unless something pretty radical happens in the future, we will always release a demo for each of our games.

I’m not sure when the game will be ready, other than when we feel it’s done. Right now the game is in alpha testing and everything is going very well.

12. Thanks Steven and keep work! Do you think it's possible a Depth of Perils 2 ?

It’s certainly possible that will we make Depths of Peril 2 at some point in time, but right now I have no idea what we will work on next.

Mortier interview

1) Hi and welcome on randomtower of games, can introduce yourself?

Hello, to be short, I'm an IT expert but in my free time I like to continuously
learn new things and experiment with different frameworks.

2) Why develop computer games? Why do you decided to follow this path?

Because it is so much fun and it is a sort of way to express my creativity
and idea's. I'm always interested in how things are made then the next challenge
is to do it yourself and add your own interpretation.

3) When you develop a game, where your inspiration comes from?

In most of the cases, because I consider this as a hobby, I try to find a game
mechanism that could be fun to encode and which I could use to also extend it with my idea's

4) What about your next game, Heaven&Hell, where inspiration come from?

So I decided to make my own match3 game but I had no inspiration at all,
actually I gave my designer all the freedom to create whatever he wanted based
on some artwork he made. I always like to give the freedom to people I work with
because in most cases it is motivating them and results in better quality

5) What are your tools, libraries and IDE?

I've used Intellij IDEA 11, Slick and Excelsior Jet engine for the packaging
of the project. Before I've prototyped it with JavaFX because I didn't knew that
Slick existed. Slick2D is a simple set of tools wrapped around the LWJGL OpenGL
binding for Java.

6) Do you plan applet-webstart-facebook-android port for Heaven&Hell?
    Seems a good casual game, ready for casual players or not?

I do plan to port it to android, also to gain some experience on that level.
Atm I skip the idea of iPhones because there is an additional cost.
It already runs on the web via the lwjgl applet loader but it isn't published.

7) How do you organize your work? Do you have a plan, or just follow an "idea" ?

I just follow a certain idea, but it is always important to listen to people
who test your game so I try to implement most of their ideas as much as possible

8) What are plans for future? Next game will be...

The android version of H&H I guess or another casual game type.

9) When will your game be released?

I'm planning a release somewhere in the summer because there is still some
fine-tuning and tests to-do.

10) Could you suggest some good game to play?

Sure, Heaven & Hell ;) but if you are searching something more exiting MW3

Kevin Glass interview

    1) Hi Kev and welcome on Random Tower of Games, can introduce yourself?

    Hello, I'm Kevin Glass, normally seen as kevglass or "cokeandcode". I've been developing games for a little over 25 years spanning back to the NASCOM and Sinclair Spectrum all the way to the modern era of iOS and Android. I love RPGs, I love retro games and I love pixel art.  I'm known for several games probably the most famous being Putty Puzzle and/or Legends of Yore.

    2) Why did you developed Slick?

    Slick came about because of the tutorials I wrote many years ago. I'm a big fan of Java and it's tooling and I like to encourage people to use it so I wrote some tutorials about getting 2D games working in Java and then eventually using OpenGL. I got a lot of questions about the tutorials and how to take them further and I thought the most simple way to answer them forever was to write a library that showed the basic ways of doing everything... Slick was born.

    3) What are plans for future of Slick? We can read on forum you think Slick is "done" and "complete" it's right?

    Slick is pretty much what it was intended to be. A modular toolkit for writing 2D games in Java with OpenGL. It's never tried to be the fastest, or the most elegant, just the easiest way to learn in without getting bogged down in details. I'll be doing bug runs as I always have but I don't think I'll be spending too much time on adding new features.
    However, that doesn't mean it's "dead". I get frustrated when developers seem to believe because a library isn't in a constant state of development it's no more use. Code doesn't just die like that, a useful tool is a useful tool.

    4) Talking about game development, where your inspiration comes from?

    My inspiration comes mostly from late 80s and 90s games. I loved Bullfrog, Bitmap Brothers and everything around then. When games felt like games and not "visual and audio experiences". I really enjoy puzzle games so you'll generally find a bit of puzzle in my stuff. Though my big love is for RPGs, I lived on Ultima 6 for 6 months - no joke.

    5) What games are must-play in this days?

    Must-play games these days? Well, Minecraft is great, Cave Story and anything by Niffla is worth checking out. Puppygames do some wonderful purest games. I also recommend checking out decent roguelike's like Tametick's Cardinal Quest.

    6) Your last project, Legends of Yore it's interesting can you explain it and tell us why you started a similar project with so different "end-user-tecnologies"?

    Legends of Yore was just meant to me experimenting with things that shouldn't be, oxymoron type things. Legends was meant to be a casual roguelike and a single player MMORPG. It ended up being a test at building a roguelike UI that worked on the mobile and then things just started getting out of hand. The game is pretty huge now and set to get bigger shortly. The different end user technology is just me as a geek keeping things interesting!

    7) Do you have plans to open this tecnology in the future? More platforms maybe? C64 support?

    The multi-platform technology might be available in the future, I really don't know yet. I think the Java to Flash stuff should be - I can imagine that having a huge impact on the Java Gaming world.

    8) Do you will partecipate on next Ludum Dare?

    Ludumdare was awesome last time, I'm so in next time! Can't wait.

    9) How do you organize your work? A massive todo-list or more "engeneerized"?
    I'm afraid I'm not organised at all. I just have a big TODO list that things move up and and down. That's it. I don't use tracking systems or any of that, just a text file in source control.

    10) You have a work a life, so how to hadle all this stuff with game development?

    My day job has to come first, every time. It's what pays the bills and keeps me fed. However, I'm lucky enough to work somewhere I can do my job well without being stressed out all the time. That leaves me plenty of time at lunch and at home to get all the interesting games stuff done.

    11) Three opensource or freeware games to play (not yours, of course :D)

    Cave Story
    Titan Attacks
    Cardinal Quest

    Cheers, Kev

Thanks to you Kev for this interview and for Slick!

Interview to Synapse game

On Kongregate you can find an interesting interview to Synapse, developer behind Tyrant a game born in Facebook and ported to Kongregate.

Time interview

Quietus 2 preview image

1) Welcome here on Random Tower of Games, it's nice to have you here, so can you introduce yourself? How old are you, where are you from, anything

I’m Connor Ullmann, commonly known across the internets as “Time,” and I’m 18 years old living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, US. My most popular game releases to date are Quietus, Casus, and Dromad which can all be found on Kongregate and Newgrounds.

2) Let's start with a simple question: why develop a game?

Games are a great way to literally put your ideas in motion. To me, I was always big into drawing things when I was little, but the biggest disappointment was that I couldn’t interact with anything. Programming a game and making the graphics for it yourself allows you to make your own little world; maybe I have control issues, but having that kind of universal power really brings the whole idea of game development together for me :)

3) Where your inspiration come from?

Super Mario World for SNES was one of the biggest contributors to my game development attachment because, when I was little, my dad would always play it and I just loved the whole idea of the game; I could enter a new world and play in it. Nowadays, I actually play very few games myself, sadly, as I enjoy making games much more than playing them. My inspiration now usually comes from other small games I hear about, such as demos I get from other indie developers across twitter and any games that hit it big on indie news, like Super Crate Box, Minecraft, and Canabalt. The simplicity of SCB and Canabalt really resonate with me and I like to reflect that in my games with the pixel art style and ease-of-access control schemes.

Quietus 1

4) Do you think it's possible to live developing indie games? Or you just plan to join in triple-AAA title?
It’s certainly possible, and I would really like to try and become an indie developer as my occupation when I get older. Stories like Notch’s with Minecraft are really inspiring (however rare) and it would certainly be my dream to have something like that happen to me. However, I do understand that there is a certain amount of luck involved, and even if I work hard, there’s a possibility I will have to go AAA even if it isn’t my top choice. I’ll actually be giving two-weeks-notice on my part-time job this week in order to make indie game creation my new part-time job to fund college, so this is an exciting time for me with monetizing my development!

5) How do you organize your work? Do you have plans or just ideas?

Almost all of my games simply stem from a prototype that I find fun (usually, if I play with it for more than an hour, I end up making a full game of it), and from there I just ask people for ideas and input things myself as I develop. There has never been a design document or anything complete along those lines to lead development on a project I’ve finished. In fact, I have two games that are only partially finished that are the only two I’ve ever come up with designs before creating them. However, I do plan to try and get these kinds of things in order more for the future, as I want to try and make more cohesive environments and storylines, as well as a longer finished game.

Dromad

6) What tool do you use in your work?

I do my programming using FlashDevelop with Flex 4 and Flashpunk version 1.5. For sprite-work, I use the Game Maker 8 sprite editor (old habit; I used Game Maker for four years and learned all of my spriting with it) in combination with Gimp for the more complex and larger material. For sounds, I use SFXR by Dr. Petters, and music is done using PXTone (there’s a great manual out there by Gryzor87).

7) How did you meet Flashpunk and Flash games in particular?

I actually came across it while I was looking for a way I could branch out from Game Maker to a more complex programming language. Flash seemed like a great idea; when the games grew, there was a possibility for money, and in-browser games would be a nice break from the traditional .exe download that was necessary for Game Maker. I think that I was introduced via Noel Berry and his platforming engine during Flashpunk 0.85 or so, and I actually used that engine for my first several games, including Robot Climb (basically unreleased, so I expect no one will remember it), Quietus, and Casus.

8) What are your plans for future?

I intend to delve much farther into developing indie games using Flash, although I’m seeing what I can do about doing iOS development with apps in the app store. I think there’s a lot of market viability there that I think is certainly worth looking into, although I don’t own a mac as of yet. For the future of specific games, I am going to release Quietus II soon (development is almost complete, but sponsorship and bidding will come before true release), and after this I will probably work on the game Nisus, which I started as a collaboration with Noel back in about November. Behind this in the queue is Havern, a 2D-cave exploration game, and then a little puzzle-cloud prototype I worked on and have a nice little game working with an easy level editor.

Casus

9) What are best indie free games around in your opinion? Can you give us some links?

As I mentioned before, Super Crate Box, Minecraft, and Canabalt are among the pieces that inspired some of my most recent work, and I think they’re some of the best games around. Minecraft isn’t free for the full version, but I definitely think everyone should put down the cash to experience the full game.


Thanks time for this interview and good luck with your games! And visit his website for news about incoming Quietus 2 !

Rouge survivor

Rouge survivor is a rouge like game in a post zombie-apocalypse: brave survivors fight against zombies in a no good-end story.

Setting is interesting and gameplay is really good (no, 3d triple AAA graphics not in this game, you can stop here.. and go to play boring games with incredible graphics!)

. Unfortunately interface is really hard to master for a casual user.. so you are warned! Good and innovative point of this game is that there are another survivors around city, collecting useful stuff and fight with you (or not!) against zombies. Every day you see light on dawn, you have a new level!

What about barricades? You can barricade in a building, destroying tables, cabinets and so on! :D Sleep could be your worst nightmare, with zombies everywhere.. and you need food to survive, right? And new weapons too :D

Keep on eye on this little game, for now is just interesting in future could be great!

P.s: you can find an interview with game author here

Steven Peeler interview

Today we have an interview with Steven Peeler, one-man-company of Soldak.. yes, Depth of Peril, Kivi's and Din's Curse (see my review on demo here) creator! Here we start:

0. Hi, and thanks to be here. Is a pleasure to have you here!
   
   

Hello. Sorry it took me so long to finish this interview. I’ve been extremely busy.

1. We already know your past work on Ritual, what is the most important thing you learned from this experience, both technical and human?
   
   

From a technical standpoint, the most important thing is probably that I was exposed to programming just about everything. This is really important for an indie because you really will be responsible for everything, not just a subsystem like AI. One of the other important things I learned was how to finish a game. Starting a game is fun and easy. Finishing a game is hard work.

2. Can you describe a typical day in a one-man company (at least as a programmer and designer)?
   
   

I really don’t have typical days, they vary a lot. It really depends on what I’m working on currently, what phase of development our current game is in, what I need to finish in the next few days, and what has happened recently. For example, right now I’m doing lots of marketing tasks. A month ago most of my days were spent fixing bugs and polishing the game. A couple months before that I was spending much of my time implementing new things. The only things I really do every day is email, checking our forums, checking any recent, relevant threads on other forums, and keeping tabs on places like twitter and facebook.

3. What are your sources of inspiration? Trivial question, but I'm curious: D
   
   

I have lots of sources of inspiration. It mostly comes from other games, books, and movies and probably in that order. These days I play games with more depth in them like RPGs and strategy games. The interesting part of games being an inspiration is that a lot of times for me they give me good ideas because they lack something. The dynamic nature of Din’s Curse is my response to a lot of games that feel hollow because nothing ever progresses. Like the woods are on fire, but they will stay that way forever or a quest asks you to hurry but hurrying doesn’t really change anything.

4. What tool do you use in your work? What language, what ide, such as libraries or tools opensource?
   
   

I primarily use C++ in Visual Studio. I also commonly use Xcode, Vtune, and Photoshop. As for libraries we use Zlib Data Compression Library, libpng, Independent JPEG Group's JPEG software, and Crypto++.

5. How do you organize your work, in particular the design of complex games like Depths of Peril and Din's Curse?
   
   

I start by creating a small design document. I use this mostly as the vision for the game and a basic guideline. I then iterate from there. This probably wouldn’t work very well for a large team, but for me and Soldak this works really well. I think of my work as exploring in a lot of ways. You make a general map of the direction you want to go and then set off and see where it takes you.

6. What do you think are the major flaws of the developers and designers in your work? Or at least what yours?
   
   

I think the major flaw for the industry at large is that they spend so much money on art that it is hard for them to take risks on new genres, twists on old genres, or even make games in certain sub-genres at all. My biggest flaw is I don’t talk enough. I should be constantly telling the world why they should be buying and playing our games (which you should because they are awesome). I’m normally fairly quiet though, so this isn’t very natural to me.

7. What do you think of your most recent creation, Din's Curse? And when it comes out? :D
   
   

Personally, I think it’s our best game ever. Some of the dynamic world stuff that we are doing is really cool. I’m of course very biased. We have actually released Din’s Curse now. It is available at http://www.soldak.com/Dins-Curse/Overview.html

8. Do you think to translate your games in the future? What do you think of language barriers in games in general and in your in particular? Are an obstacle in the fun?
   
   

Everyone just needs to learn English. I’m kidding of course (although a lot of things would be simpler). With each new game of ours we make translating easier. Both of our previous games have been translated to multiple languages (retail and through mods). One of these days it would be nice to ship our version with multiple languages. If you know a little bit of English, you can probably get by in Din’s Curse. It’s not a heavy dialog game or anything.

9. What are your plans for the future? Maybe Depths of Peril 2? Or new games?
   
   

Right now I really don’t know. I would like to make Depths of Peril 2 some day. Din’s Curse 2 or some expansions would be fun to work on. I also have a bunch of other new game ideas I would like to do some day. So far I really just haven’t thought too much about what we are doing next, I’ve been focused on finishing up Din’s Curse.

10. What advice can you give to those who are approaching for the first time to your profession?
    
    

My usual advice is to pick a small project that is unique and innovative and actually finish it. Nothing teaches you more than actually working through the entire cycle of development for a game.

Thanks Steven and good luck!

You can found new and exiting games on Soldak web site: www.soldak.com/