Desktop Dungeons Interview: Challenges, Features and Building Prisons For GamerGaters
“Hearing from people who adore your game is one of the best feelings in the world”
Q: Your game is known for being pretty tough; has it ever been tempting from a business perspective to try and ease it up or create more casual modes to try and appeal to a wider audience?
Marc Luck: We’ve definitely thought about it, but for the most part, taking out the challenge makes the game rather boring. Our players don’t tend to go back to the ‘easy’ dungeons once they’ve mastered them because they want that feeling of accomplishment that comes with beating something that, a few hours ago, seemed impossible.
Danny Day: Not really. If the challenge goes away, the game stops working properly – players either learn really bad habits or they think the game is a different beast to what it really is… If someone starts playing Desktop Dungeons and it’s unforgiving but fair, they stick with it longer than if they started and it was super easy and then suddenly seemed to get bullshit. I’m not sure I’m explaining that right, but DD is the game it is, the difficulty is part of learning to understand the game – once you get it, it’s not really difficult anymore and you start trying out tricks and special challenges.
Q: As a game developer, is there a question out there that you’ve never been asked that you really wish someone would ask?
Danny Day: “What can I do, as a gamer, to make this hobby more welcoming?”
Marc Luck: No one ever seems to ask if we’re ok …. send help ….
QCF Design accepting their award for Excellence In Design at the 2010 IGF Awards in San Francisco.
Q: What doesn’t get asked nearly enough?
Marc Luck: The question that should be asked more is definitely “How good *is* Desktop Dungeons?”. The answer is: “SO good”.
Danny Day: “Why do we put up with shit like GamerGate?”
Q: If you had to do it all again from scratch, what would you do differently this time?
Danny Day: Pick a resolution-independent art style and not make quite as much content. Desktop Dungeons is a huge game that doesn’t look like one till you’ve spent your first 50 hours in it. About the only bad part of developing DD has been that it’s taken a long time and I want to make new things now, everything else has been amazing.
Marc Luck: I’d spend more time coming to grips with unity before starting, and I’d make sure to be testing on mobile (for interface *and* performance) right from the start.
Q: When you’re a developer, you often see the ugly side of the industry, what makes it all still worthwhile?
Marc Luck: Mostly it’s the fans. Hearing from people who *adore* your game is one of the best feelings in the world. I’ll leave you with one of my favourite steam reviews : “Took me over 300 hours to realize I had been tricked into enjoying math”.
Danny Day: Honestly, I’m not sure it is. This last year has been all sorts of fucked up and I don’t know why anyone would bother trying to make games for the kinds of people who think they speak for gaming as a whole. We should make prisons for them instead.
Funny Steam Reviews? Do some gamers need to be in prison? Got anything to share, drop it in the comments below!
Thanks to the guys from QCF Design for taking some time out of their schedules to answer our questions, especially with the mobile release coming soon. The Enhanced Edition is available on Steam right now for both PC and Mac platforms and comes as a free upgrade to those who already owned the original.
Disclosure: The interview questions were supplied in a single email and the responses have been posted “as-is” in the state they were received with no additional editing.
The author of this post has known the members of QCF Design in a personal capacity for many years, even before its formation, back when they were just a guy from a skatepark and another guy from online Gears of War.
