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Posted by DuMonde [Wednesday, 09 January 2008 - 09:48]
 0 comments
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Demigod Q&A
The official Demigod website offers a Q&A conducted with John Comes, Demigod's Lead Designer. Word is:
John Comes: What was your inspiration for Demigod? How long have you been kicking around the idea for this game?
A:
Bob Berry (Demigod's producer) and I spent a lot of time playing RTS
mods. We looked at all the popular ones, like Defense of the Ancients
(DotA), Footmen Frenzy and even some tank mod for WarCraft III. Each of
the mods circled around the idea of playing as a single hero in a huge
battle. That was our starting point. From there, we combined those
ideas with my love for team-based first-person games like Battlefield
and Team Fortress, then we added in the principle that we wanted the
game to be quick and fun, something you can play for a short time and
then quit. The Supreme Commander engine was the final piece of the
puzzle because it allows for a fantastic sense of scale. I first got
the itch to create a fantasy game with the Supreme Commander engine
about a year before we started the concept phase of Demigod. Moving
away from the strict RTS model is something I've wanted to do for a
long time, and Demigod has given me the freedom to do just that.
John Comes: How did "white boxing"
(creating the game with minimal art assets) Demigod in the early stages
help shape its design?
A: If you were to look at the
original design document, the original maps or play an early version of
the game, you wouldn't recognize the game we have today. White boxing
gave us a luxury most game makers don't get-we could drastically change
the gameplay when something wasn't working without spending any money
on redoing art assets. "Find the fun first" was our motto. The first
few months were crazy. We ripped out and replaced entire systems over
and over again, but each iteration just got better and better. We
finally got to the point where the game was an absolute blast to play,
and all it was a bunch of white boxes. That's when we knew we really
had something special. By the time we ramped up the team, Demigod was
already completely playable, had a ballpark balance and people were
playing it every day because it's fun. White boxing also gave us an
intangible benefit in that everyone on the team could just pick up and
play the game-they didn't need to read through a big design doc in
order to understand what we were doing.
John Comes: Demigod takes several different genres and combines them into a new experience. Is that the future of gaming?
A: It's hard to say what the
future of gaming is, but sticking with the same model over and over
again has proven to wear out over time. I do believe there are a lot of
in-between-genre areas that we still have to work with. How much of
each genre to put in a game is the tricky part. You don't want to
alienate your RTS players because it's too RPG-esque and vice versa.
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