Superman's Dead
10-17-2011, 09:40 AM
Desktop Dungeons has been floating around in alpha and beta for a while now. In fact, if you need to know a bit about the game you can check out our own thread here (thanks Ravenlock) (http://www.colonyofgamers.com/cogforums/showthread.php?t=15890&highlight=desktop+dungeons)!
If you haven't played before, feel free to head over to their webpage (http://www.desktopdungeons.net/) and try the free alpha version of the game, or make a preorder and download your very own copy of the beta immediately!
So without further ado, here is my interview with Danny Day and Sir Marc Luck. It was a fun interview, if a bit short. John Romero was standing in the next room as his new company was throwing the devs a party, and the two of them were geeking out. Be ready for a wall of text, and some interesting game design philosophies!
Special shout-out to Lekon for having such a good relationship with so many indie developers and sending them strange pictures of goats. It does wonders for community relations.
Superman's Dead: Desktop Dungeons has been out in the wild for a while, and most interested parties know the basics of the game at this point. What's next for your development of the game?
Marc Luck: At this point we're really just going on finishing the game.
Danny Day: Yeah, at this point we're going full tilt on the full version. It's been maybe two years, now.
M: It's been about two years since we started.
D: A year since the Unity version, yeah.
M: We've spent a lot of time building the systems that we now use.
D: In that case, having the freeware version was really useful. It was good to see how players were stressing how the game was designed, we got to see areas it took us huge amounts of time to fix bugs and stuff. We were able to sit down and go, "Okay, how could we build a game from the ground up to do all the interactions that Desktop Dungeons needs, and also what OTHER things do we want the game to do?
M: Yeah, we had the unique opportunity of basically re-designing our own systems. Now we're at a point where we've got all these wonderful systems, adding content is much more simple.
D: Yeah, we're at a point where we can add new dungeons, new bosses, new scripted events and stuff in literally a matter of days.
M: So right now we're just adding content, polishing wheh bugs do show up...that's the great thing about having the beta pre-order. Our forums light up like a Christmas tree every time there's a new bug.
D:I think in terms of the full [version] of Desktop Dungeons, we added the Kingdom. The Kingdom and Preparations are the two big changes, additions to the game itself. With the Kingdom we wanted to give players who were not necessarily liking the way the game worked with the gold and unlocks of classes and stuff. We wanted to fix a couple of the problems we had with the way gold was working.
M: We had this thing where people would only want to play seriously if they had full gold, so they'd have the maximum chance of buying the best things in shops. So we sat down and went, okay, how do we stop this happening?
D: How do we stop them from scumming for good situations in dungeons as well? That's a huge problem with rogue-likes.
(For those who don't know, scumming is repeatedly entering and leaving a dungeon or loading/reloading until you see an initial are with circumstances you find favorable)
M: Half of the feedback we get is people saying, "When I want to do this, all I do is keep playing until I find this specific thing, so I keep restarting." Every time we see that, we say, "Why are they doing that, and is there a way to make it less necessary?"
D: One of the nice things about rogue-likes is that you're not looking for the right situation to win. You're trying to adapt to what the game's throwing at you. You say, "Here are my tools, how can I survive really well?" And I think that's where Desktop Dungeons feels really good, because once you get to level 7 or 8, you start having all these crazy edge-case situations where you're literally squeaking five more mana out of something. Or you're managing to survive an extra hit because you have a little bit of extra physical resist, something along those lines. Those situations feel really cool. You're like, "Oh wait, if I worship this god right now I'll get a little bit of an extra benefit from that". You reward players for playing a lot, because now they know all kinds of little things about the game, and then at the same time they can't really scum (or you teach them not to scum) because they're getting in situations that are really very different every time. I think that's powerful.
S: Your solution to scumming was more randomization?
D: We fixed the randomization isues.
M: Our biggest solution to scumming was actually the Preparation system. The fact that you have to invest some of your gold in going into the dungeon. Every time you do that, if you decide three moves in that the run isn't worth it, you come out and you've lost that gold. Whereas if you say, "You know what? I'm just gonna try and go with this situation I have" then that gold isn't thrown away.
SD: What's the upside of the Preparation system, for anyone who hasn't played the beta?
D: Well, now we have the Kingdom instead of that ugly menu that was at the beginning. It's still ugly right now, but it's going to look a lot better.
M: It's going to be a section of buildings, and a city...
D: For instance, you've got your Guild Hall for fighters, berzerkers, and warlocks. As you upgrade your guild hall you gain access to different things. Basically it's just gold. So you go into a dungeon, you kill the boss, you get a trophy like the boss's head or tooth or whatever it is. You come back and you sell that automatically to the taxidermest and you get a ton of cash for it. That then means that you can go, "Cool, I'm gonna spend this money on upgrading my elf villiage" or "my blacksmith" or "my adventurer's guild." The Adventurerer's guild gives you access to new classes, and it's also a unique building because you get access to locker slots. Which means you can store weapons that you come out of the dungeon with. So if you want to use a slotted weapon, that means that you have to pay a little bit as a rental fee. So before you go on a new dungeon run you get the chance to go through all the buildings you've got and select the preparations you want.
M: Now what we've done is split the preparations according to the type of building. So for instance, the standing stones, the one that gives you priests, is that information?
D: Yeah, dungeon information. And worshipping stuff.
M: So it'll change things about worshipping different gods in the game, or it'll give you scouting. Now the thieve's guild is about money, basically. So either you get more money for piles of gold, or you can change them into these random chests.
D: It's kind of a gambling system.
M: Or you can pay a little money up front, and if you do defeat the boss in the end (it's expensive, but still), when you come out you get double what you were gonna get. So you say, "I'm gonna spend some money now, and if I win I get more gold". You spend that money, and you don't want to scum. Because if you can defeat the boss, the payoff is gonna be much bigger.
SD:Is there a cap on gold, then?
D: As a character in the game you can carry a certain amount of gold. You also have kingdom gold. So once you unlock the bank, you can bring in money with you as an adventurer. And then if you bring in 25 kingdom gold, you don't get that back unless you survive and get back out.
M: That's the thing, when you go in you don't talk all your gold with you into a dungeon. You only take what you've decided your guy should have.
D: But you can do stuff like, once you unlock the shops you gain access to the bazaar. From there you can buy items that effect the shops somehow, so you can get better items from shops if you're willing to spend a little more money up front. So we've tried to basically keep all the items in the shops themselves not as expensive as they were before. Because there's no point having really expensive items anymore, because you're not gonna go in with like 160 or 180 gold at the high end, you're gonna have 180 at the beginning, you know, or 2000 right in the beginning, when you're doing your preparations and stuff. And that's when you make your investments.
SD: My last question to you before you go touch John Romero's hair is, what are you guys excited to play coming up?
D: Lots of stuff.
M: I'm definitely looking forward to Battlefield 3. But that's because I love the big team-based multiplayer stuff. I have a lot of friends who play that kind of thing, and they've been playing Battlefield: BC 2 since it was released. Never with public people. I always play those times of games and get a group of friends together and it's a bunch of fun.
D: I'm not really good at the whole 'what's coming up' because I spend so much time working on our own game it's really hard to know what's coming.
M: And Fez.
D: Yeah. We were giving Phil [Fish, lead designer of Fez] crap about that earlier. And Antichamber, as well. And Skulls of the Shogun for multiplayer stuff.
M: I look forward to so much indie stuff. And I know people might think it's just plugging, but really it isn't. I love the stuff that's coming out of indie these days. Seeing the quality and those sorts of innovations...there's a lot of stuff that comes out where I go, "I don't really care" but there's also a lot of stuff where I go, "I've never seen anyone do that, and I want to play it. GIVE IT TO ME SO I CAN PLAY IT."
D: Like, we played the hell out of Binding of Isaac on the plane. I actually killed Mom on the plane. That was an awesome moment for me, "Wait, there's more?" Binding of Isaac is like a rogue-like in a lot of ways, it's basically a rogue-like Zelda, and you can SEE how that works. There are direct nods to how rogue-likes function, and the expectations you have about that. I think they've got the best way of dealing with scumming ever, because progression is so solidly built. You don't want to play the initial levels over and over again, hoping for the perfect item in the beginning, because there's so much skill in terms of dodging and shoot timing and stuff. I like that. I picked up Gears 3. Stuff. I dunno. I'm kinda out of it.
M: I'm looking forward to X-Men Destiny, because I like the idea of starting a new mutant from scratch. I'm a comic book geek as well.
If you haven't played before, feel free to head over to their webpage (http://www.desktopdungeons.net/) and try the free alpha version of the game, or make a preorder and download your very own copy of the beta immediately!
So without further ado, here is my interview with Danny Day and Sir Marc Luck. It was a fun interview, if a bit short. John Romero was standing in the next room as his new company was throwing the devs a party, and the two of them were geeking out. Be ready for a wall of text, and some interesting game design philosophies!
Special shout-out to Lekon for having such a good relationship with so many indie developers and sending them strange pictures of goats. It does wonders for community relations.
Superman's Dead: Desktop Dungeons has been out in the wild for a while, and most interested parties know the basics of the game at this point. What's next for your development of the game?
Marc Luck: At this point we're really just going on finishing the game.
Danny Day: Yeah, at this point we're going full tilt on the full version. It's been maybe two years, now.
M: It's been about two years since we started.
D: A year since the Unity version, yeah.
M: We've spent a lot of time building the systems that we now use.
D: In that case, having the freeware version was really useful. It was good to see how players were stressing how the game was designed, we got to see areas it took us huge amounts of time to fix bugs and stuff. We were able to sit down and go, "Okay, how could we build a game from the ground up to do all the interactions that Desktop Dungeons needs, and also what OTHER things do we want the game to do?
M: Yeah, we had the unique opportunity of basically re-designing our own systems. Now we're at a point where we've got all these wonderful systems, adding content is much more simple.
D: Yeah, we're at a point where we can add new dungeons, new bosses, new scripted events and stuff in literally a matter of days.
M: So right now we're just adding content, polishing wheh bugs do show up...that's the great thing about having the beta pre-order. Our forums light up like a Christmas tree every time there's a new bug.
D:I think in terms of the full [version] of Desktop Dungeons, we added the Kingdom. The Kingdom and Preparations are the two big changes, additions to the game itself. With the Kingdom we wanted to give players who were not necessarily liking the way the game worked with the gold and unlocks of classes and stuff. We wanted to fix a couple of the problems we had with the way gold was working.
M: We had this thing where people would only want to play seriously if they had full gold, so they'd have the maximum chance of buying the best things in shops. So we sat down and went, okay, how do we stop this happening?
D: How do we stop them from scumming for good situations in dungeons as well? That's a huge problem with rogue-likes.
(For those who don't know, scumming is repeatedly entering and leaving a dungeon or loading/reloading until you see an initial are with circumstances you find favorable)
M: Half of the feedback we get is people saying, "When I want to do this, all I do is keep playing until I find this specific thing, so I keep restarting." Every time we see that, we say, "Why are they doing that, and is there a way to make it less necessary?"
D: One of the nice things about rogue-likes is that you're not looking for the right situation to win. You're trying to adapt to what the game's throwing at you. You say, "Here are my tools, how can I survive really well?" And I think that's where Desktop Dungeons feels really good, because once you get to level 7 or 8, you start having all these crazy edge-case situations where you're literally squeaking five more mana out of something. Or you're managing to survive an extra hit because you have a little bit of extra physical resist, something along those lines. Those situations feel really cool. You're like, "Oh wait, if I worship this god right now I'll get a little bit of an extra benefit from that". You reward players for playing a lot, because now they know all kinds of little things about the game, and then at the same time they can't really scum (or you teach them not to scum) because they're getting in situations that are really very different every time. I think that's powerful.
S: Your solution to scumming was more randomization?
D: We fixed the randomization isues.
M: Our biggest solution to scumming was actually the Preparation system. The fact that you have to invest some of your gold in going into the dungeon. Every time you do that, if you decide three moves in that the run isn't worth it, you come out and you've lost that gold. Whereas if you say, "You know what? I'm just gonna try and go with this situation I have" then that gold isn't thrown away.
SD: What's the upside of the Preparation system, for anyone who hasn't played the beta?
D: Well, now we have the Kingdom instead of that ugly menu that was at the beginning. It's still ugly right now, but it's going to look a lot better.
M: It's going to be a section of buildings, and a city...
D: For instance, you've got your Guild Hall for fighters, berzerkers, and warlocks. As you upgrade your guild hall you gain access to different things. Basically it's just gold. So you go into a dungeon, you kill the boss, you get a trophy like the boss's head or tooth or whatever it is. You come back and you sell that automatically to the taxidermest and you get a ton of cash for it. That then means that you can go, "Cool, I'm gonna spend this money on upgrading my elf villiage" or "my blacksmith" or "my adventurer's guild." The Adventurerer's guild gives you access to new classes, and it's also a unique building because you get access to locker slots. Which means you can store weapons that you come out of the dungeon with. So if you want to use a slotted weapon, that means that you have to pay a little bit as a rental fee. So before you go on a new dungeon run you get the chance to go through all the buildings you've got and select the preparations you want.
M: Now what we've done is split the preparations according to the type of building. So for instance, the standing stones, the one that gives you priests, is that information?
D: Yeah, dungeon information. And worshipping stuff.
M: So it'll change things about worshipping different gods in the game, or it'll give you scouting. Now the thieve's guild is about money, basically. So either you get more money for piles of gold, or you can change them into these random chests.
D: It's kind of a gambling system.
M: Or you can pay a little money up front, and if you do defeat the boss in the end (it's expensive, but still), when you come out you get double what you were gonna get. So you say, "I'm gonna spend some money now, and if I win I get more gold". You spend that money, and you don't want to scum. Because if you can defeat the boss, the payoff is gonna be much bigger.
SD:Is there a cap on gold, then?
D: As a character in the game you can carry a certain amount of gold. You also have kingdom gold. So once you unlock the bank, you can bring in money with you as an adventurer. And then if you bring in 25 kingdom gold, you don't get that back unless you survive and get back out.
M: That's the thing, when you go in you don't talk all your gold with you into a dungeon. You only take what you've decided your guy should have.
D: But you can do stuff like, once you unlock the shops you gain access to the bazaar. From there you can buy items that effect the shops somehow, so you can get better items from shops if you're willing to spend a little more money up front. So we've tried to basically keep all the items in the shops themselves not as expensive as they were before. Because there's no point having really expensive items anymore, because you're not gonna go in with like 160 or 180 gold at the high end, you're gonna have 180 at the beginning, you know, or 2000 right in the beginning, when you're doing your preparations and stuff. And that's when you make your investments.
SD: My last question to you before you go touch John Romero's hair is, what are you guys excited to play coming up?
D: Lots of stuff.
M: I'm definitely looking forward to Battlefield 3. But that's because I love the big team-based multiplayer stuff. I have a lot of friends who play that kind of thing, and they've been playing Battlefield: BC 2 since it was released. Never with public people. I always play those times of games and get a group of friends together and it's a bunch of fun.
D: I'm not really good at the whole 'what's coming up' because I spend so much time working on our own game it's really hard to know what's coming.
M: And Fez.
D: Yeah. We were giving Phil [Fish, lead designer of Fez] crap about that earlier. And Antichamber, as well. And Skulls of the Shogun for multiplayer stuff.
M: I look forward to so much indie stuff. And I know people might think it's just plugging, but really it isn't. I love the stuff that's coming out of indie these days. Seeing the quality and those sorts of innovations...there's a lot of stuff that comes out where I go, "I don't really care" but there's also a lot of stuff where I go, "I've never seen anyone do that, and I want to play it. GIVE IT TO ME SO I CAN PLAY IT."
D: Like, we played the hell out of Binding of Isaac on the plane. I actually killed Mom on the plane. That was an awesome moment for me, "Wait, there's more?" Binding of Isaac is like a rogue-like in a lot of ways, it's basically a rogue-like Zelda, and you can SEE how that works. There are direct nods to how rogue-likes function, and the expectations you have about that. I think they've got the best way of dealing with scumming ever, because progression is so solidly built. You don't want to play the initial levels over and over again, hoping for the perfect item in the beginning, because there's so much skill in terms of dodging and shoot timing and stuff. I like that. I picked up Gears 3. Stuff. I dunno. I'm kinda out of it.
M: I'm looking forward to X-Men Destiny, because I like the idea of starting a new mutant from scratch. I'm a comic book geek as well.