Indie Games has interviewed Steven Peeler of Soldak Entertainment (Depths of Peril, Zombasite) about action RPG design.

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

What's your approach to game design? All of your games are quite similar except for one or two prominent features, such as different settings, the zombie parasite in Zombasite, or a more goal-oriented approach in Din's Curse. Are you starting with specific features in mind that would make the new title stand out, or is it just a matter of experimentation and iteration until you have found something you're happy with?

My design approach is actually a combination of those two things. First, I come up with a few key ideas that makes the game unique from other games in the industry and our own previous games. These are basically the ideas that everything else builds on. Then I write up a relatively short design document. This document fleshes out the key ideas a bit more, adds a lot of smaller details and ideas, and basically is my overall direction for the game.

This essentially becomes my initial todo list for the project. The rest of the project is like you said experimenting and iteration where I'm implementing items from my todo list, play testing, adding new ideas from my play testing, adding ideas from the rest of the team and external testers, removing items from the list that no longer fits or are no longer feasible, and then repeating these last few steps until I'm happy with the game.

Your games feature a dynamic world where things are happening even without any player input and non-player characters are, in fact, treated like actual characters with their own motivations. You have explored this quite a bit already, but do you think this can be further expanded upon, leading to even more emergent gameplay?

I definitely think we still have room to expand on the dynamic world ideas. In every game of ours, that had a dynamic world, we have added new possible outcomes, given entities in the world more tools to work with, and made it more clear the cause and effect of things that happen. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
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