Maybe the name of the next Soldak game will be Din's Curse 2:

Hardcore game name

So I'm thinking about the name for the next game. I really don't like naming things; it's a pain and I don't think I'm that good at it. I'm actually more and more tempted to name it Din's Curse 2 and be done with it since there are plenty of similarities with Din's Curse. There are also some differences though.

A quick rundown of the next game: you play as one of the Mutated, characters are hardcore (permadeath) and mutate over time, the next generation of character is evolved from his/her parents and most of your total power carries over, you do have a lot of control of guiding your character's development (picking parents, picking skills, getting rid of unwanted mutations, etc), each world has a random setup and win conditions, and your goal in each area is to prove to the world that the Mutated is a "good" and powerful race.

Similarities to Din's Curse:

• Overall goal is to move to an area, more often than not to help the local people, and move on to the next area
• Both have same kind of resurrection mechanism thanks to the gods (Din in this case)
• Tighter focus than most of our other games (not controlling a clan)
• They are both cursed (DC your character is directly cursed by Din, in the new game basically the entire race is cursed because they are split off from Orcs)
• Random, dynamic world (this is also true of all of our games except Kivi)

Differences with Din's Curse:

• You're not playing a human, but a mutated (race introduced in Zombasite: Orc Schism)
• You're not forced into redemption, but simply trying to prove your new race is good and powerful
• It's not a true resurrection, but mutated and carry on from "parents"
• There are no direct hybrids, but guided mutations/evolution
• Not just a town and a dungeon (although many scenarios do this)

I didn't start this game as a sequel, but it fits pretty well; mostly just a change from Humans to Mutated as the focus. So what do you all think? Do you think I should go the Din's Curse 2 route or make this a separate game? Is it too different to be a Din's Curse game? Or do you not care what I call it as long as I hurry up? :)

Thanks Farflame!

Steven Peeler talks about his 13 years of RPG-making for Soldak Entertainment:

Q&A: Soldak's lessons learned in 13 years of making RPGs

Steven Peeler has been developing RPGs as Soldak Entertainment for 13 years now. From his first title Depths of Peril up to last year's Zombasite, you always know you're playing a Soldak game right away. He manages to cram a great deal of depth and innovation into a compact file size.

We talked to him about his design philosophy and the things that have changed for indie developers over the years.

[...]

How hard has it been to get press coverage? I know you're still doing your own PR, and with the flood of press releases we get each day, I can imagine that this is increasingly difficult.

It has definitely gotten a lot harder to get press coverage the last few years for small indies. There are just so many games coming out, it's difficult to cut through the noise especially if you are like me and would much rather focus on actually making games instead of marketing.

I noticed that there have been quite a few Youtube channels that covered Zombasite. Is this the future of game coverage?

I'm not sure I would call YouTube channels the future of game coverage, but they are certainly becoming an important part. The most annoying part of this is that every time we release something, we get tons of emails from people pretending to be some big YouTuber, but they are just someone scamming developers for free keys. It's usually not hard, but it's a pain to wade through these for legitimate YouTubers...

[...]

Our next interview this month is with Steven Peeler of Soldak Entertainment who took time out of his very busy schedule to answer some my questions for our site.

Couchpotato: Welcome to RPGWatch Steven can you give everyone a brief introduction about yourself, and your gaming studio Soldak Entertainment?

Steven: My name is Steven Peeler. I’m the programmer, designer, and owner at Soldak Entertainment. Soldak is a small indie game developer. We’ve been making action RPGs since late 2004.

Couchpotato: How did you get started in game development, and what were your motivations for founding Soldak Entertainment?

Steven: I basically started writing games back when I was a kid and as I got older the games got more and more complex. I started by typing in games on my parents TI-99/4A from magazines. I created some simple games in high school. I built a software renderer in college and started some more sophisticated games. After college I started working on a full fledged action RPG with a small group of other people, but ultimately we really didn’t have enough experience to pull that off.  Then I went to work for Ritual Entertainment.

After Ritual, I started Soldak mostly because I wanted to focus on actually making games instead of having meetings, getting sucked into politics, and having publishers constantly demanding dumb things.

For the next couple of weeks all Soldak games can be bought with a 50% discount from the Soldak site.

Soldak Entertainment sent us a link to a new blog post on their website where they talk about the developers next unnamed project.

We've started initial work on game 5 now. For our first few games we kept things quiet until we were ready to officially announce things, but that was a pain and not very fun, so we are going to start talking about the game now. Don't take anything we say as a guarantee though. It is still very early, so anything could change.

Just to be clear, this is a zombie survival game set in the DoP/DC universe. It is in a fantasy setting and will use an isometric viewpoint. While it's not really a true sequel, it will have lots of elements from DoP, DC, and even Drox.

I know there's probably too many zombie games, movies, TV shows, and books out right now, but I like zombies. :) If you haven't noticed, every game we've done has had zombies in it, even Drox. Anyways, as usual we would love your feedback. Questions, ideas, and criticisms are all welcome.

Soldak Entertainment has sent word of various patches and two game bundles. Read on for more information.

For those that follow our action RPGs, we have another update for you.

First, we released a 1.020 patch for Drox Operative today:
http://www.soldak.com/Drox-Operative/Patches.html

We also released a beta 1.027 patch for Din's Curse today:
http://www.soldak.com/Dins-Curse/Patches.html

The Drox Operative music is currently in Game Music Bundle 5:
http://www.gamemusicbundle.com/ (only 5 days left)

And last but not least, Depths of Peril is in the Be Mine 9 bundle:
http://groupees.com/bm9 (only 12 days left)

I haven't been keeping up with the news from around the web due to Dhruin's awesome ability to get it before me, but he's a bit busy so I'll be throwing everything at you today. Some of it will be things I meant to get to, but never did.

First up is Soldak is now on Google+. Nothing really to say other than if you use Google+ then add him or whatever it is you crazy kids do on there.

Steven Peeler from Soldak has been interviewed at Space Game Junkie about the as-yet unnamed space action/RPG they have in development. Steven reveals the game is a fair way along and they hope to release in Q1 '12 but here's a clip on the "character":

Brian: Now, let’s talk about the main character in the game, our ship. First off, apparently there will be several different ship classes — escort, frigate, destroyer, cruiser, battleship, flagship — but will there be different ship variations within these classes, or will these just be generic classes that we customize through crew and equipment?

Steven: For the most part a new ship gives you access to more component slots. Most of the customization is going to be crew and equipment. Do you want to focus on weapons like Ion Cannons and Plasma Torpedoes or defenses like Deflectors, Titanium Armor, or Point Defense? Do you want to just use brute force with your Ion Cannons or do you want to immobilize the enemy with Tractor Beams? Do you want to use automatic defenses like Point Defense or active counter measures like Chaff? When you have one slot left, do you add in another beam weapon for some more offense or add in a secondary engine so if the first is destroyed you can still flee with some useful amount of speed? I’m hoping that everyone will design completely unique ships.

Soldak has kicked up a new blog posting on their as-yet unnamed Space action/RPG on the environment. As usual, Soldak will be creating dynamic events:

Some examples of environment related events/quests:
Stars: solar flares, super novas, and gamma ray bursts.
Planets: mega drought, super volcano, earthquakes, super swarms, and killer plants.
Asteroids: usually not a problem until they head towards a populated planet.
People: riots, civil war, plagues, power grid failure, nuclear war, and mutants.

Steven Peeler has kicked up a new log entry on "monsters" (read: enemy races and ships) for Soldak's upcoming space RPG. Here's a snip:

In most RPGs monsters for the most part sit around and do nothing until the player comes along and kills them. For those that have played our two other dynamic games, Depths of Peril and Din's Curse, you know I like our monsters to actually impact the world. The don't stand around waiting for the player and babble completely empty threats. They stir up more trouble, call for reinforcements, attack towns, etc.

Well in our upcoming space game the monsters will behave in similar manners as the did in DoP and DC. They will still cause uprisings, start wars, launch raids, build dangerous devices, and generally cause havoc for everyone else. When they plant a Super Nova Device next to the star in the home system of your favorite race, I would suggest you do something about it.

There is an interesting difference from our previous games though. When a monster launches an asteroid at one of your enemy's home world, what do you do? Do you save their planet and possible start changing them into an ally or do you let the asteroid hit, cause massive amounts of destruction, and weaken their overall empire? I suspect a lot of people are going to let the monsters cause a lot of damage as long as it is directed towards races they don't like.

Soldak has posted a new update on their Space RPG, discussing the economy:

So how does this effect the player? Well you can't sell an infinite amount of goods to any specific race, they will eventually run out of credits. Although they might very well turn around and use the items that you just sold them. The different races also might have resource problems here and there and ask their nearby friendly mercenary for help. You can even handicap an enemy race by destroying an important colony of theirs. Think of how much damage you can do when a race has a main food planet.

With an actual economy this leaves a lot of room for quests that are real requests filling a specific need that actually matters if you accomplish it or not. It also allows the player a lot of room to effect the outcome of the galactic space race on what they do from little things like selling items to an ally or from big things like destroying colonies of enemies.

Soldak has a new update on their spacey action/RPG, discussing the races players will encounter:

This is starting to be pretty typical of our games but in our upcoming space action RPG we are going to have a really cool, dynamic setting for the game to take place in. There are four main components of this: multiple races fighting for dominance, an economy, "monsters", and dynamic events. Today I'm just going to talk about the races part of this.

With each new game that you play you are thrust into a brewing war. While you are only playing a mercenary, there are multiple alien races that have just begun to colonize this region of space. Each race starts off with only one colony and a few ships, but their ultimate goal is to take over the entire region by whatever means is necessary.

A new blog entry at Soldak covers the attributes and crew in their under-development spaceship game. A sample:

Currently there are 6 "attributes" for your spaceship crew: Tactical, Helmsman, Structural, Engineering, Computers, and Captain. Each time you level up you get a few (right now 5) attribute points to allocate however you want. This essentially represents your generic, unnamed crew.

Tactical increases your damage and is the required attribute for weapons.
Helmsman increases your defense and is the required attribute for thrusters, engines, and defenses.
Structural increases your structure hit points and is the required attribute for armor, damage control, and structure related components.
Engineering increases your energy and is the required attribute for batteries, engines, power collectors, power plants, and shields.
Computers increases your attack and is the required attribute for computers, ECCM, jammers, radars, and sensors.
Captain unlocks hulls.

Soldak blogs about the use of items and upgrades in their not-yet-officially-announced space game:

I thought I would talk a little about the item system in our upcoming space game today. First off I think this game is going to be pretty heavily focused on items, more so than our previous games. In our other games skills are also pretty important. Whether or not you should invest in or use Fireball as opposed to Ice Storm is an important choice. In a space game choices like that are more item focused. Do you want to use your tractor beam to immobilize them and then shoot them with your disruptors or just launch anti-matter missiles at them? Those aren't skills. Those are ship components you either have installed on your ship or you don't. Since items are going to be pretty important let's talk about them a little.

Soldak has a blog post on "health" in their upcoming space-y game. A lengthy snip:

Health or hit points in RPGs is kind of a nice simplification of reality in RPGs. It works pretty well, but it's a little boring. I'm not sure in a fantasy game there are many other good options, but there are a lot of interesting things you can do when you are in a spaceship. Here's how I'm planning on implementing "health" in our upcoming space game.

Right now I think your "health" will be shields, armor, and then structure/internals. The interesting part is that each layer of "health" increases in cost for you.

Usually your shields are your first line of defense. Shields will automatically recharge fairly quickly over time so damaged shields aren't a big deal.

After your shields are down, your armor will start being damaged. Armor probably won't auto repair at the beginning and when you do get automatic repairing it will probably be fairly slow. You will be able to pay someone to repair your armor though and it will probably be fairly cheap.

After your shields and armor are destroyed, you are in a bad position. Those were your only real defenses. Now all the damage taken is trashing your ship. Some of the damage will hit the structure of the ship. When your structure gets to zero you explode, so that's kind of bad. However, anything that doesn't hit the structure is hitting important internal structures. You know unimportant things like your engines or weapons. :) Repairing internal components will probably be much more expensive to fix.

Steven Peeler has revealed the concept of Soldak's next game in a fairly lengthy blog post, having already dropped enough hints for fans to figure out the setting. Here are a couple of snips from the post:

Really quick summary: MOO from a mercenary captain's point of view.

In each game you start in a random galaxy with several races. Each race's goal is to conquer the galaxy, the problem is the other races are in the way. This is the plot of many strategy games like Master of Orion or Civilization (well Civ is planet bound).

These races expand their territory by scouting out and colonizing suitable planets. They build up their planets with more and better buildings that enhance their economy. They go to war and attack enemy races to hurt them or take their planets. They do much of this by building fleets of starships. They also research new and better technology to build better buildings and ships.

You aren't in control of any of this, directly at least. You are a mercenary in this very dynamic galaxy. Your job is really to survive and make a good living in the meantime. You can pick the side that you feel is right and help them conquer the galaxy for its own good. You can pick the side that you think is going to win and go along for the ride. You can even try to play the races against each other and simply try to pick the winning side at the last second.

You might just be a small mercenary ship but you have a lot of influence in the direction of the galaxy. You can scout out suitable planets to be colonized. You can attack and destroy defenses. You can find and possibly even steal technology to give to the race of your choice. You can even find items and arm whoever you want, including yourself.

At the very beginning you start with a small escort ship, but every so many levels you can upgrade to a larger ship like a frigate, destroyer, cruiser, battleship, all of the way up to a flagship.

Steven Peeler from Soldak has been dropping hints about their next game in this thread. The hints include:

New game hint: you will probably be human, although there are other races.

New game hint: the setting is pretty dark.

Next game hint - I'm pretty sure it will have a very dynamic environment (quests, ai, events, etc).

New game hint: probably more effects than last game (from weapons, skills, explosions, etc.).

Last new game hint for today: will probably play as a mercenary.

Next game hint: lots of open spaces.

Next game hint: will include a mode of transport other than on foot.

I'm running out of hints for our next game, how about some potential unit names: Behemoth, Enforcer, Guardian, Talon, and Valkyrie.

Any bets on a space-based trader, somerthing along the lines of Space Rangers?

Blog site Random Tower has an interview with Soldak's Steven Peeler, mostly covering his work as an indie:

2. Can you describe a typical day in a one-man company (at least as a programmer and designer)?

I really don’t have typical days, they vary a lot. It really depends on what I’m working on currently, what phase of development our current game is in, what I need to finish in the next few days, and what has happened recently. For example, right now I’m doing lots of marketing tasks. A month ago most of my days were spent fixing bugs and polishing the game. A couple months before that I was spending much of my time implementing new things. The only things I really do every day is email, checking our forums, checking any recent, relevant threads on other forums, and keeping tabs on places like twitter and facebook.

Steven Peeler from Soldak writes they've done their first interview for Din's Curse at a site called Game Boomers.  Here's a snip on the gameworld:

Q: In reading the summary of Din’s Curse, it sounds like the game’s environments are randomly generated and your interaction impacts the game as you progress; I’ve always found that style of gaming fascinating.  Can you tell us something about the creative process that goes into building such a game world?

A: Yes, the environment is randomly created and randomly populated with items, monsters, quests, and objects that are appropriate for that particular area. You will never see the same setup multiple times.

From the creative side of things, this type of game is a bit different from creating a linear game. In a linear game, you have full placement control and you are explicitly setting up interactions, so you know what to expect. In a game like ours, just about anything can happen. I have to think about all of the pieces individually and collectively. Is this going to be fun and cool? How is this going to impact everything else? If these two objects are placed next to each other will they interact like the player expects? What happens if the player ignores this quest for too long? What happens when they succeed? What happens if they fail a quest? Can they fail this quest? In general, how does this quest lead to other quests? 

Once setup though, your actions, NPCs' actions, and the monsters' actions are what progresses the game. If war is brewing and you are asked to stop it before it breaks out, your actions really will impact what happens. If you are successful, you will save the area from becoming a war zone. If you fail, the area will be ravaged by a war. Players need to remember that lack of action is also an action. If you don't stamp out an uprising in time, they will likely find something interesting to do, like raid the town.

Steven Peeler has kicked up a second blog post about the hybrid class system in Din's Curse:

I originally thought that we were going to have a couple of disadvantages by using a hybrid class system. In Depths of Peril, each of our classes had a distinct type of mana that worked differently. The warrior had rage, the rogue had momentum, the priest had faith, and the mage had mana. Each of the DoP classes also received different stat amounts per attribute point. Warriors get more damage per point of strength, rogues get more attack per point of dexterity, etc. These differences really helped each class feel and play a bit different. I was sorry to see that it looked like these types of differences might go away (and from some forum comments I'm not the only one).

Steven Peeler explains the hybrid class system in Soldak's upcoming "hardcore" dungeon crawler:

Change is becoming a common theme, and now it's time for the class system. In our upcoming dungeon crawl, we will have 6 main, fully fledged classes with 3 specialties, each offering 10 skills for a total of 30 unique skills for every class. So far this is similar to how our first game, Depths of Peril, worked. The major difference is that instead of picking a full class, you can choose a hybrid class!

The advantage and disadvantage of hybrid classes are one and the same- you choose any 2 specialties you want from the 6 main classes. You have a lot of freedom to choose any combination, however, you end up with less skills than a full class has (20 instead of 30). It's the penalty of pursuing two completely different specialties at the same time.

Soldak's Steven Peeler has blogged about the item system in their upcoming "hardcore" dungeon crawler.  Starting with the Depths of Peril system as a base, they've expanded from there, such as cursed items:

Cursed items are going to make things interesting. No they are NOT like D&D cursed items that bind to you if you equip them. A cursed item has at least one negative attribute, like a strength penalty. I think the cursed items are going to be amusing in many cases and add a lot of variety. Is that cool rare sword with the curse better than your merely common magic sword?

The positive side of cursed items is that they have lower level and attribute requirements to use them. So thanks to the curse, you might be able to use an item that is well above your level. Many times a curse will be bad, but sometimes it will be a blessing in disguise. It also lowers the item price which will be good or bad depending on if you're buying or selling. Some possible pure cursed items: axe of flabbiness (less vitality), staff of lameness (less spirit), mace of impotence (less strength), long sword of the Idiot (less intelligence), and dagger of clumsiness (less dexterity). Ego weapons with a monster friend type are also cursed items.

In a new blog post, Steven Peeler discusses the dynamic nature of the quest system in their next action/RPG, which results in genuine urgency and consequences.  Here's the intro and the first of several examples:

Pretty much all rpgs have quests, so how is our quest system in our upcoming dungeon crawl different? Well frankly in most rpgs (there are exceptions of course) quests exist in a vacuum. They will sit there forever, nothing can change them and they change nothing either. Your choices don't really matter. There are no consequences to your actions. You can't really fail. Text like "hurry", "emergency", and "or else" are just flavor text and don't mean anything. And every time through a typical rpg the quests are exactly the same as the last play through.

None of this is true for our upcoming game (Depths of Peril is similar in many ways). I'm going to show this with a bunch of examples of the typical rpg and our game. These examples will overlap a bit.

Real choices:

Bonelord has taken Airik hostage and demands a ransom to be paid. In a typical rpg, if you even have the choice of whether or not you pay, either direction is going to end up with you rescuing Airik, either because the choice is phony or you have to use save games when you fail. In our game, you really do have the choice and the choices lead to different outcomes. If you pay off the ransom, you will get Airik back, but Bonelord leaves with your money and is very likely to take another hostage now that he knows he has a sucker. If you refuse, Bonelord will attack and try to kill Airik. Airik is very mortal. If he dies, he really will be dead and you might be without an important NPC for the rest of this adventure.

Steven Peeler from Soldak (Depths of Peril, Kivi's Underworld) dropped us a line to say he is designing their next game and is looking for feedback.  Here's some background:

Well I've started working on the design of the next game and as I have promised before I'm going to try to be more open during the process. This is not an official announcement or anything because it's always possible I will change focus. However as of right now, our next game is going to be more of a hardcore, realtime dungeon crawl (hardcore compared to Kivi that is).

It's going to be an action RPG that is going to take some elements from Depths of Peril (no covenants though) and some from Kivi's Underworld. I'm thinking of having some of the key features revolve around random elements (controlled randomness), a very dynamic world, and lots of smaller game mechanics that can interact to result in some more emergent gameplay than is usual in an action RPG.

...and this thread links to some previous related conversations.  I enjoyed the hell out of Depths of Peril, so hopefully the new game includes some cool ideas.