Delve Deeper Developer Interview

Adam: I'm the Lead Developer of Delve Deeper. I'm responsible for most of the code, testing, some tech support, and a lot of the design.

Neil: I’m essentially the Creative Director, though I joke I’m also the art department. I'm responsible for the look of Delve Deeper, and nearly all of the in-game art assets.

Neil: Simply put, we decided to start our own company, and that was our first step. We all had the skills we needed to build one and lots of design sense from years of playing games pretty analytically. I had done several extensive mods for other games, and I’d been involved in game design as a hobby for a long time.

Adam: It all really comes from a love of video games, right? I started in childhood, modifying QBasic Gorillas, making Doom 2 wad files, and hex editing Sim City save files. I took my first programming course in 6th grade, and my last one a few years back. From there I pretty much just stayed the course.

Neil: The other guys were working on a concept for a smallish game that would take less time to do than the colossus we had been discussing before, and I thought that Dwarfs would make a perfect fit.  I even brought over my copy of the animated “Hobbit” movie to sell them on the idea.

Adam: The original design for Delve Deeper was play-tested as a table top game. Eurogames with a tile-placement mechanic, like Carcassonne, had a large influence.

Neil: The indie gaming press is awesome—and they really seem to like smart design and interesting ideas. I never expected us to get much attention but we did, and a lot of great reviews followed. Nothing really failed for us, we just kept putting in more and more time and moved goalposts when we had to.

Adam: It's real difficult to actually finish your game. There comes a point where you have to side with pragmatism and stop implementing features. Besides, if you implement everything… what surprises will you have for the sequel?

Neil: It’s ten thousand times more complex. It was going to be a simple little boardgame with some fun art and clever special mechanics, and then when it was halfway done we all looked at each other and thought, “Shouldn’t we add combat and make this into an action-adventure game?”

Adam: This was actually one of my biggest concerns as we built the game. We added a large number of options for the player to configure: the number of monsters, difficulty of battles, strength of the AI, treasure saturation and the like. The highest two levels of AI will actually cheat. These options, along with some other tricks in the AI and combat code, let the user accurately define their difficulty. Of course, the default levels are set high enough that we still get a few complaints.

Adam: We didn't have too many test machines, so we were relying on our alpha and beta testers to find problems for us. For the most part, they did, but there was a mad scramble upon release to fix our Delve  Deeper on netbooks. Particularly those with onboard graphics cards.  Then there are other, less-intuitive things you miss, like configurations for left-handed mouse users or palette swaps for the colorblind.

Neil: Not having a guaranteed income is a big part of it. If you work for a bigger developer you know that when you’re hired you’ve got a job to do and so long as you do that, the paycheck is there.

Adam: It's a bit tricky to get your media presence out there. Just because you put a press release out, it doesn't mean that people are going to come looking for review copies. Building a media presence and online community takes constant work. This is largely the reason we added a 4th member.

Neil: Digital Distribution is a great asset for indie developers, and surprisingly, the guys running those services are really helpful at getting your product up there. We approached all the big names, got a good response from a few, and eventually good press got us into Steam where we got a lot more attention.

Steam Achievements are pretty easy to create. You kick around some good ideas for benchmarks to measure, think up a bunch of terrible puns, and make a boatload of little collectable icons. We're also pleased with their distribution, with the easiest being unlocked by 1 out of every 2 players, and the hardest by 1 out of every 1,000.

Adam: You have a lot of control, but not total, which is to be expected. Sale terms and prices are sometimes dictated by large-scale sales, but you're never obligated to do exactly what they say.  However, from our experience they were usually right. Our distributors were really nice about providing us sample data of other titles near our pricing point. We strove to deliver what is perceived as a good value. I think we succeeded.

Neil: Without the digital distributors out there that we have now it wouldn’t be possible to support such a diverse indie gaming industry.  So many small publishers can now afford to get their games up there for sale where it would have been impossible to reach or market small games like this to a global market.

Adam: No. The involved costs of producing and distributing physical copies of a product would quickly eat any margin for a five dollar game.

Neil: Demos are a great way to give people a taste of the game, and that’s important. Nowadays people expect you to drop 60 dollars or more on a game you haven’t even been able to play yet, and that seems crazy. It took a few days to make a demo version, but it was worth it. We see those retro conventions as things worth keeping up with. We would have shipped Delve Deeper with an Ultima-style cloth map if we could.

Even for a small game like ours, letting people try it out first is telling the player that we think they’ll want to pay more for a good product if they’re given a choice. It’s the same reason we don’t support abusive DRM policies.

Adam: The majority of our bugfixes post version 1.0 are direct results of forum posts and an occasional email. Since we have 2 developers who also constitute tech support (amongst other things), having stickied threads for common problems is a lifesaver. It gives you a place to scream "Full screen is on F12!" before your inbox explodes.

Neil: Most people would say they don’t listen, but we do. We also take notice of the hobbyists who take the time to put their reviews on blogs or websites. People who care enough about your product to give you their fair opinion are a great asset. Even if a reviewer is wrong about something it still is good to hear what they thought.

We got tons of glowing reviews and not even a handful of negative ones, so we didn’t see the nasty side of the Internet Game Critic community. If we were a bigger developer and just shoved garbage down people’s throats then I think some negative feedback is justified. The best way to make sure the critics don’t eviscerate you is to put in the time and energy to make a quality game. Who knew?

Adam: Absolutely! We love the Humble Indie Bundle. In fact, we're just finishing up a '5 for $5 Bundle' this week. We also ran our own charitable drive over the Christmas holiday. We're fully intending on more philanthropy in the future, and doing it with others is a great way to garner exposure for some great causes.



Neil: We’re also advocates of fair pricing, and “Pay What You Want Pricing” is certainly a fair way to do it.  People underestimate the astounding generosity of the gamer community, and if you give people an option to pay what they want, they’ll often pay you more than what you would have asked for. You just need to give them a well made product in return.

Neil: Our games do not ship with intrusive DRM, and that was one of the things we had plan on keeping true to. We think that DRM is going to be the downfall of a lot of well-meaning people, and even though Piracy is scary, it isn’t going to kill you and it isn’t worth punishing your actual customers for.

Adam: I was really impressed at how quickly you find your game hosted on warez pages (it was under 12 hours from launch, I think). You have to think of piracy as free advertising, especially at our pricing point. If somebody wants to pay for a 5$ game, they will pay because they want to.

Adam: I think, like many things, it can be good or bad. Good, are expansions to games intended for gamers who want some more game from a game engine that had a deadline. Of course, you could argue these 'add-ons' could have been part of the game to begin with.  However, this is distinctly better than money grabs like paying for palette swaps or World of Warcraft's Celestial Steed.

Adam: I'll simply say I play a lot of video games. I'm actually writing this in a room with 8 different consoles represented. If I had to pick a few influential games in my life, I'd go with: Super Metroid, Fallout 2, Final Fantasy (especially the first one), and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms franchise. So I guess it's strategy games first.

In terms of other developers: I drew, and continue to draw inspiration from companies like Ska Studios, where you can see the improvements with every product. And, though not quite 'indie', I really like what Pixel Junk does on PSN.

Neil: Listen to criticism, there's advice behind it. And keep organized, because the odd tasks and late hours can be a bit overwhelming at times.

We would like to thank the boys from Lunar Giant Studios once again for allowing to get a peek into the life of an indie developer.  You can pick up Delve Deeper at the official store and Steam.