Depths of Peril Interview
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RPS: What challenges did you face putting it into action? What sort of advice would you give people trying something similar?
There were a bunch of challenges with getting the factions and dynamic world working. I'll just talk about a couple of them though.
The first challenge, one that I think a lot of (hybrid) games fail at, was finding a good balance of strategy and action and doing both well. It seems to me, a lot of (hybrid) games end up trying to take too many features from both genres. You tend to end up doing both halves badly and have a big mishmash of random features that don't work well with each other. In Depths of Peril, we knew we wanted to primarily be an action RPG, so we chose very carefully what strategy elements to include so that all of them enhanced the gameplay and all together created something unique and fun.
The other big challenge which I touched on earlier was testing and fixing bugs. In a linear game, when a game crashes at the first left turn on level 5, it's most likely because the player did something specific that crashed the game or the game is coded/scripted to do something specific right there. In other words, many times you know what caused the problem and can reproduce it fairly easily. However, when you have multiple factions that are constantly adventuring or raiding one another, monster uprisings, attacks on the town, and many other dynamic things going on in the game world, it is rarely obvious what happened if the game crashes. I'm not saying that linear games are easy to test or debug, but a dynamic game is much harder to track down these things. Depths of Peril however is pretty stable and has fixed most of our bugs a long time ago.
