Desktop Dungeons! It’s the hot local roguelike everybody’s talking about, and it’s on its way to the 13th annual Independent Games Festival next week where it’s been nominated for the Seamus McNally Grand Prize, as well as the Excellence in Design category. In the dank bowels of My Gaming HQ, our expert interrogators strapped creator Rodain “Nandrew” Joubert to a rack and demanded he answer our questions, or we’d confiscate his fireball spell.
[MG] So, Desktop Dungeons. What’s it all about?
[RJ] Desktop Dungeons is often summarised as a single-screen, short-session puzzle-roguelike. This is the simplest way I can manage to describe it, and even that description is technically kinda wrong. It features perma-death, randomly-generated dungeons and some other roguelike genre staples though, so it’ll have to do.
Desktop Dungeons is also occasionally described as “basically a NetHack clone”, usually by the sort of people who’ve played neither NetHack, nor Desktop Dungeons, nor (I hazard to guess) any kind of roguelike whatsoever.
In any case, I’m a WAY bigger fan of Dungeon Crawl than NetHack. š
Difficulty curves, accessibility, and brutally unforgiving gameplay. How’d you find the right balance, and why goats?
The difficulty curve operated on a surprisingly simple concept when I made the first prototype, and it’s remained more or less unchanged ever since. Players start the game on level 1 against entirely fair opponents: simple combat usually results in victory, there’s enough experience and items to go around and the initial portion of the dungeon typically poses little to no threat. On every character level after that … well, EVERYTHING gets just a little more unfair. Monsters enjoy increasing health and damage bonuses, healing and experience become steadily more scarce, and players eventually have to start thinking of clever little game hacks just to keep their heads above the water.
What starts as a casual romp at the beginning of a ten-minute game session can quite quickly (and rather subtly) become a rather vicious experience by the time the level 10 boss needs to be confronted — especially when the average player usually only reaches level 7 or 8 by then.
As for the goats … well, they were inspired by Dungeon Crawl’s common dungeon yak. And I do believe that the goats are the very best thing about this entire damn game.
WHAT IF I DIDNT WANT TO BUY THE POTION? WHAT APOUT QUESTS?
Players can usually work around that by upgrading stranth [Oh, I get it – Ed]
Funny you should mention quests, though, we’re actually working on those…
The big news at the moment, of course, is that the game’s a finalist in the IGF. What’s a discreet hit on Markus Persson worth to you right now?
It actually makes more financial sense to bribe the judges. We’re damn excited just receiving a nomination — winning any actual prizes would most likely entail cutting a bloody swathe through the entire list of finalists, and that sort of stuff just harms the industry as a whole.
Even the public gets a vote! I voted for The Dream Machine, because I want a dream machine. I’m joking. I wanted to vote for Ultimate Quest, but it wasn’t on the list. Anyway, here’s your opportunity to persuade our readers to vote for Desktop Dungeons, and I’ve decided you have to do it in the style of a retro text adventure.
> CHOOSE DESKTOP DUNGEONS
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO “CHOOSE”. COULD YOU REPHRASE THAT?
> VOTE FOR DESKTOP DUNGEONS
MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE MORE SPECIFIC.
> VOTE FOR DESKTOP DUNGEONS IN THE IGF AUDIENCE AWARD
SORRY, THAT AWARD NO LONGER EXISTS. VOTING CLOSED A FEW DAYS AGO.
> WAT
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO “WAT”. COULD YOU REPHRASE THAT?
Copyright infringement, Desktop Dungeons, and the ironically apt Lazy Peon Games. How about a new spell called “The LOL of Epic Heroes” that randomly clones a monster somewhere in the dungeon, only to disappear shortly thereafter leaving only a small puddle of ignominy?
Gotta give credit where it’s due: this whole copycat debacle with League of Epic Heroes has actually resulted in the emergence of our first detractors — hate-mail and everything. It’s not as bad as it sounds, either: you KNOW that you’ve hit a success point when people actually care enough to make you their enemy.
What’s the wildest idea you’ve had for the game, only to subsequently chuck it because, actually, it was just too wild? Have you ever considered a Horde mode, with players simply killing as many waves of enemies as possible? If you haven’t, I thought of it first.
One word: Goblintopia.
Give us a good Desktop Dungeons tip.
Cheat at every possible opportunity. And don’t worship the Earthmother, she’s actually a kinda crap god right now.
What’s next for the game? Obviously, the live action movie. How about Shia LeBeouf as an angsty teen sucked into a fantasy world through a magic computer, who must battle a bunch of increasingly formidable monsters as a sort of metaphor for the war in Afghanistan? With explosions and tits.
I’m all for exploding tits, but I’d rather steer away from metaphor and depth. Sounds yucky and pretentious.
Nah, the next major thing in the pipeline (after our demo at the IGF) is to get a commercial version of DD pushed out — hopefully within the first half of this year or something — and then get the game onto as many platforms as humanly possible. It’s a rather intimidating prospect, because naturally people will be expecting us to one-up the existing freeware considerably. Here’s hoping that it all works out!
Anything I forgot to ask?
Yes.
[Okay. Hypothetically, then] Are you going to ask Jonathan Blow to autograph your naked body?
[Hypothetically] Totally.
Everybody at MyGaming wishes Rodain and the team at QCF the best of luck with the IGF. In the meantime, check out our review of Desktop Dungeons or play it yourself.
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