Dungeons Interview

Gaming Nexus has done the Q&A thing with Realmforge Studios creative director Christian Wolferstetter about Dungeons, the forthcoming Dungeon Keeper-inspired strategy/RPG we’ve been following for the last few months. On some of the design decisions they’ve made over the course of the game’s development:

Were there any design decisions you made early on that turned out much differently (for better or worse) than you expected? Could you talk about a few?

There were many of them! In the beginning, there wasn’t a Dungeon Lord, just a hand (like in DK). Later we argued about having a Dungeon Lord, but with him never leaving his throne room, giving him the role of the dungeon heart. This didn’t turn out very satisfying so he can now freely walk around the dungeon.

During the design process, we came up with the idea of pre-made rooms that the player couldn’t change but only place them in his dungeon. This turned out terrible because it was so inflexible and every room looked the same. Luckily we dismissed this early.

Also, in the beginning we had no goblins (workers). We thought about your Dungeon Lord just magically digging out rooms. However this was static and boring, so we implemented goblins first for digging only. Today, they carry out a lot of jobs in your dungeon that previously the player had to carry out himself. Which is a good thing, as it turned out that these jobs meant too much management and not so much fun in the end.