DeathSpank Interview

Industry veteran Ron Gilbert took the time to answer three pages worth of questions about DeathSpank in a new interview on Gamasutra.

Did you end up going back and forth on complexity of combat systems? As a fan of Diablo-style action RPGs, it definitely seems that it’s difficult for developers to really nail the right balance. It can’t be so complex that you lose the fluidity, or so simple that you aren’t doing anything.

RG: Yeah. That’s a really hard thing. One of the things that I wanted to do with DeathSpank was to be able to get the combat working just as fast as we possibly could. So we got that up really quickly, and we’ve redesigned it three times already.

We’d done a combat system, and we lived with that for several months, and then we just threw it all out and started over. Then we lived with the [new] thing for several months, and then we just threw that all out and started with the third one, which everyone really likes now.

I think that was a really good process. It allowed us to play with these things. The whole system that I put together to build DeathSpank is really about very rapid prototyping. If we have an idea, we can get it in the game in a matter of minutes if it’s just some funny little gag or funny little joke. Things like the combat system and how the user interacts with it, that probably took less than a week to completely redo, and we’ve done it three times already.

That is really important, because games are things you play. You have to touch them and feel them and see how they react to you. And if they don’t work, you start over.