A friend of mine was doing a gaming magazine for his Media GCSE project, I thought I'd post it here since I was answering it pretty seriously
-----
Q: Could you sum up the game in a few words?
Sekaru: It’s a survival-dungeoncrawler-sandbox game; it’ll make sense one day.
Q: We’ve heard that you’re programming the whole game from scratch?
Sekaru: Yeah, being a programmer is pretty annoying. You have to think about programming as a whole rather than just for your game. Will the language be around for as long as the game? Will it be fast enough? Can I learn it quickly enough to produce a decent product quickly? I only ended up going with VB6 because truthfully it’s the language I know best and I’d like to make up the mistakes I made with Avian, i.e. not getting out a game for a while.
Q: You seem pretty hesitant about the language, are there any limitations?
Sekaru: Yeah, support for it was cut out a few months ago and it was made in 1998. We’re also limit to about 65,000 pixels, its okay but having bigger maps would really enforce some of the concepts we’ve put down.
Q: So how do you plan on releasing the final version?
Sekaru: Well, what we’re going for is a pay what you want system, you can get the game for free, if you like, without any sort of limitations, but the people who donate will get some sort of special bonuses that we haven’t quite worked out yet.
Q: These ‘bonuses’ will of course not make paying customers more over powered, correct?
Sekaru: No not really, I mean, what I’m thinking about doing is creating either a new difficulty level or increasing certain rates by only a little; things like EXP rates, day & night cycle rates, possibly NPC spawn rates but we’d have to work that all out for the long run.
Q: Will there be DLC?
Sekaru: DLC is a pretty general statement; if you mean that content companies make you pay for because they were too lazy to finish the game then no. Nowadays “free updates” is classed as a feature and that’s certainly something we’ll be having.
Q: A lot of voxel based and sandbox games have started supporting modding, will Crawle also support modding?
Sekaru: Possibly. If I find a decent and effective way to do it then it’ll definitely be in the first release, but again, it has to be done effectively; games are slow because their scripting/mod support is done horribly. Then on the other hand is the issue of security: if we release our source code, will people just go off and do what they please with it? Possibly, possibly not, thats really what I’m most afraid of.
Q: I’m sure you’ve been told Crawle is some sort of [insert voxel/sandbox game here] clone.
Sekaru: Oh yeah, plenty. To be honest I don’t personally see any obvious inspirations from Minecraft. Terraria? Possibly, at one point we were even going to go sidescroller but then we were already getting Terraria-Clone complaints. Also, if you look at the pixel art I’m sure you can spot some Haven and Hearth in there.
I’m neither trying to run away from or embrace the genre, we’re just trying to make a great game, something that’d we’d enjoy and something that’s long overdue in the game market.
-----
Original Topic: Sleepystudios.com
