Dungeons II Interview

There’s an interview with Realmforge’s Viktor Linke up on GameWatcher, in which the art director tackles questions about what the team learned from the original Dungeons and how they’re improving the strategy/RPG sequel. Here we go:

GameWatcher: What did you learn from the first Dungeons game that you’ve brought into the sequel?

Viktor Linke: I think a lot of people expected the first Dungeons to be another Dungeon Keeper, and it really wasn’t. It was more like a tower defence game. So we knew we wanted to have more management for the sequel, like you have to manage your dungeon, build up your creatures, care for your creatures. That’s one of the reasons we’ve actually worked on the art style everything’s chunkier, bigger, more cartoonish, so the player has more connection to these creatures.

This reflects in the gameplay as well, so we have much more simulation, and we learned that we had a lot of downtime in the first game, when players were basically waiting for things to happen. They built their dungeon, they built their defences, then they just waited for things to unfold. A lot of players companied about that, so we added the concept of the overworld. So you have to think about those two layers, keep switching between them, and you always have something to do. The first Dungeons had mostly indirect gameplay, and we wanted to give the player more control this time. That’s the reason for the RTS gameplay, and the more hands-on dungeon management.