[GDN] When you’re looking at the next game to make what catches your eye? Is it the genre, the storyline, the gameplay or something else?

Yes. [smiles] An idea and thus the starting point can come from any of these for me. Depths of Peril didn’t really exist until I thought of having warring covenants as a big part of the game. Kivi’s Underworld was more of creating a casual RPG and what would that look like. Normally you would think that of casual and RPG as opposites. [grins] And as I mentioned before, we might do a sci-fi game some day where the storyline came first. No matter where the idea starts though, in the end, gameplay is the most important thing.

[GDN] You mention in the blog that you’re considering a hardcore dungeon crawl. Would this be more along the lines of Neverwinter Nights with a party of character to manage? What kind of combat system would you put into that sort of title?

I’m not a huge fan of having multiple characters to manage in a real-time fight. I would rather have full control of a party in a turn based game or control my one character in real time.

My thinking right now on a hardcore dungeon crawler is that it would be something in between Kivi and DoP. The combat would probably be closer to DoP with a fairly fast pace, many skills to choose from for each class, and a full scale item system. It is likely that we will mix in some of the action elements from Kivi though, like lots of traps to avoid and maybe even the powerup system.

[GDN] I’ve played a lot of really cool single character, single player games in the last couple years - Larva Mortus, Kivi’s and DoP come to mind - do you think that there is still a large market for single player only games when it seems all the big houses are focusing on expanding multiplayer capabilities for their console titles?

I don’t think single player games are ever going to disappear. Two of the reasons people play games is to relax and get away from things. Sometimes other people are the problem and people just want to escape for awhile into a nice single player game. Even MMOs are using more and more instances so that other people don’t get in the way. At some point in time single player and multiplayer games will settle into some kind of balance. I have no idea what that balance will be, but I don’t think single player games will ever go away.