GB Feature: Almost Human Games Interview

Welcome to the first in what we hope will be many “Rolling Independent” interviews that we publish here on GameBanshee. The purpose of the series is to focus our attention on the people who are responsible for the burgeoning indie RPG market – an area of game development that holds a considerable amount of promise for those of us who continue to seek out game mechanics and design tenets that mainstream-focused publishers and developers have strayed away from.

Kicking off the series right and proper are the talented guys at Almost Human Games, creators of the Dungeon Master- and Eye of the Beholder-inspired dungeon crawler Legend of Grimrock:

GB: As an indie developer, it has to be liberating to have virtually no restrictions on creativity. But do you find that this is both a boon and a curse? Have you ever overextended yourselves when chasing “that one unique feature” that your game just has to have?

Petri: It is true that we have virtually no restrictions on creativity but practically speaking indie developers are always restricted by limited resources. Thankfully we happen to be in a good situation because what we lack in resources we can make up with our experience. That means we can estimate with quite good accuracy what we can do and what is beyond our reach. This is very important so that we don’t waste precious time by developing features that would have to be cut in the end anyway.

Perhaps the only thing we underestimated was the time and effort needed to create a balanced skill system. The original plan was to make a simple and traditional class based system, but we didn’t want to risk the game to be viewed as too simplistic. So, we decided to work extra hard and make a more detailed point buy based skill system but balancing all the skills deemed to be a bigger task than we anticipated. We are quite happy how it is now but we still want to add a little bit of extra and variety before release.