Steven Peeler Interview: Soldak Entertainment and Making Indie Games

Soldak Entertainment’s games have always had a unique, hard-to-describe feel to them, from Depths of Peril to Din’s Curse and Drox Operative. IndieGames.com had a chance to talk with Steven Peeler, Soldak’s founder. The interview goes over Peeler’s design philosophies, creating dynamic worlds, a hypothetical perfect Soldak game, and many other topics. Something to get you started:

What’s your approach to game design? All of your games are quite similar except for one or two prominent features, such as different settings, the zombie parasite in Zombasite, or a more goal-oriented approach in Din’s Curse. Are you starting with specific features in mind that would make the new title stand out, or is it just a matter of experimentation and iteration until you have found something you’re happy with?

My design approach is actually a combination of those two things. First, I come up with a few key ideas that makes the game unique from other games in the industry and our own previous games. These are basically the ideas that everything else builds on. Then I write up a relatively short design document. This document fleshes out the key ideas a bit more, adds a lot of smaller details and ideas, and basically is my overall direction for the game.

This essentially becomes my initial todo list for the project. The rest of the project is like you said experimenting and iteration where I’m implementing items from my todo list, play testing, adding new ideas from my play testing, adding ideas from the rest of the team and external testers, removing items from the list that no longer fits or are no longer feasible, and then repeating these last few steps until I’m happy with the game.

Has one of your games ever surprised you?

Oh, sure. Usually it is something like I’ll rescue an NPC while distracted by something else and they will betray me by setting up an ambush. Things like that will momentarily surprise me. Of course, I know what is possible, so it’s not a complete surprise.

However, every once in a while there is some interaction of the different systems that makes something happen that leaves me completely baffled. Like right now you can launch projectiles at your NPCs in Zombasite and they will usually move out of the way of the projectile. I have my suspicions, but I’m not quite sure why they do that.

What’s next for Soldak? I reckon you’re working on your next title already?

We are now working on 2 different projects at once since they overlap a bit. The first is going to be an expansion for Zombasite. I can’t say a whole lot yet, but there is about to be a large uprising in the Zombasite world. Will it be for good or bad?

The other project is going to be a separate game that is focused around the ideas of hardcore characters with random skills and traits, the next generation of character is evolved from his/her parents, and each world has a random setup and win conditions.