Darren interviews Kornel Kisielewicz about his upcoming game Jupiter Hell Classic.
You can download the mp3 of the podcast, play it in the embedded player below, or you can follow us on iTunes.
Synopsis & Useful Links
- A recap of Kornel's development history and the birth of Jupiter Hell.
- The "success" of Jupiter Hell, relative to most indie releases, and how it has introduced people to the traditional roguelike genre.
- The development of Jupiter Hell Classic, a total conversion of DoomRL, keeping the old gameplay with JH theming.
- Backporting technical improvements in JHC to DoomRL
- The traditional of near-unobtainable achievements in roguelikes.
- Live development on Twitch, and how it keeps Kornel "honest" in his productivity.
- Working with old code as a form of archaeology (and in Pascal!)
- Modernisations in Jupiter Hell Classic, both technically and in game design, and handling long-term community member objections to changes.
- The audience for old school games with crunchy mechanics.
- Kornel's desire to revive all of the old ChaosForge games (BerserkRL, AliensRL, BerserkRL).
- Continuing development plans for Jupiter Hell.
- Jupiter Hell Classic is coming to early access on 13th August - follow it on the Jupiter Hell Classic Steam page - wishlists and positive reviews appreciated! You can also join the ChaosForge Discord for all the latest updates.
I think many people are like "if it is not on Steam, it does not exist". The malware problem mentioned by Kornel contributes to this, but also, the comfort of easy installation and having all your games in one place, the availability of user reviews to learn more about the game from a player's point of view, and getting interested by seeing your friends play the game. Some games got lots of visibility after a Steam release. Maybe someone should run a Kickstarter campaign and put a classic roguelike on Steam for every $100 collected. (I have noticed that some roguelike classics on Steam get bad reviews, mostly because someone not actually associated with the game gets the money, but they could be made free too.)
ReplyDeleteAnd the unloading problem seems to be, yet again, the eternal conflict of tight strategy/tactics vs simulationism, with roguelike fans having different preferences. Could be solved by making it automatic but Kornel usually hates that.
You referring to C:DDA on Steam, Zeno?
ReplyDeleteIn reality, I think a bigger problem that classic roguelike games have (and any classic game in general) is marketing. If you 'just' bring a classic game to steam for a cost, people will wonder why'd you bother to do that; especially if said game can be acquired for free. A developer (or publisher) with any thing to potentially hate will be latched on to.
In regards to Jupiter Hell, I think something that shouldn't be overlooked is how 'thematic' something might be. I think someone on the roguelike reddit recently said something about how roguelikes should be role-playing focused, and I have to agree quite a bit with that sentiment. If a games ruleset starts to take too much precedence, it causes issues with immersion.
C:DDA has this problem, and also NetHack Legacy and Rogue.
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