[GDN] Is there any interest at Soldak on doing a real-time or turn-based strategy game?

I’ve played and enjoyed many real-time and turn-based strategy games, but I don’t think Soldak will create either one any time soon. Of course next week I might have a cool idea for a strategy game and change my mind. [smiles] Actually, a turn-based game is getting more and more tempting because frankly, I miss them. However, if we do a turn-based game, it will most likely be an RPG.

[GDN] How does your experience at Ritual differ from your time running Soldak?

My experiences at Ritual and Soldak have been very different. I had a lot of freedom at Ritual to do whatever I wanted (within reason), but it’s nothing like at Soldak. I really can do anything I want now. On the other hand, now I have to worry about all of the business and marketing stuff and other small things like actually making money. At Ritual I dealt with a lot of people, but most of them were internal people like artists and designers.

I did occasionally deal with external producers or vendors. At Soldak, however, I’m the contact for just about everything, so I deal with the team, the press, publishers, portals, and more importantly gamers. I have much more direct contact with gamers at Soldak, which I like very much. Another difference is that while at Ritual my primary duty was programming, with just a bit of design input (except when I was doing AI work). At Soldak I’m much more split between programming and design since I’m the only programmer and the lead designer. There are many other differences, but we’ll leave it at that.

[GDN] Does Soldak have any interest in expanding away from traditional computer platforms and moving into say consoles or mobile games?

We are definitely interested in getting on consoles at some point in time, Xbox Live and WiiWare being the two best possibilities. I think Kivi’s Underworld would be pretty cool on the Wii, whereas Depths of Peril would be better suited to the Xbox.

I’m not so sure about mobile games. A game like Kivi’s Underworld might work fairly well on something like an iPhone with some interface changes, but for the most part I tend to like deeper games and that doesn’t translate to mobile very well.