Behind the Veil #13

[Flux]

Behind the Veil #13

http://diabloii.net/columnists/behind-veil13.shtml

In this lucky 13th installment of his column, Chris Marks offers up his second game designer interview. Last time around he interviewed Bill Roper, and this time it's... Erik Hermansen. Who? Erik is the designer of the popular and long-lived puzzle game, DRoD, which you can now play for free. Find out how Erik got started programming, what he did to pay the bills while pursuing his dream of earning money programming games, and his thoughts on the industry in general.

 

[Deceit]

MmmMmM Kitty, must shave kitty =)

 

[DariusTriplet]

Interesting interview.

I've played DROD before, got stuck on the tar level, and pretty much gave up. Might give it another shot later on.

 

[Flux]

I'd never heard of it, but I played millions of hours of those old 90's puzzle strategy dungeon type games, so I had to check it out. I played sporadically over the weekend and enjoyed it, and only wished I had more time to plow through more of the levels. I'm down to level 7 at this point, and it's a nice mix of strategy, planning, and action, though it's skewed a bit too much towards "figure some way to move your mimic through 80% of the level to kill a roach queen you could kill yourself in 3 seconds if you could only get to her and then get back over the collapsing bridge once you did it."

Somewhat tedious strategy, in other words, but with dozens of rooms per level, and a lot of variety between the rooms, I know a boring one is only going to last a few minutes, before I get something different next room, or the room after that. It's also nice that the drod site has such a large forum archive of "how do I get past room X", since for the 3 or 4 rooms that i was stuck in (mostly out of noobishness in not knowing how my guy could work or how to use the tools he had at his disposal), I was able to find someone else asking about the same room, with a tip that got me through every time.

Unfortunately, the drod.net site is now down, I assume from exceeding their monthly bandwidth limit over the weekend, since we posted about it here.

Fortunately, the end of the month is very near, and I've already downloaded my copy of the game. It'll just suck if I get stuck in some room and can't figure a way out, and can't check the help forum for tips until next week.

 

[DiMono]

drod.net is having some server issues with their provider jumping the gun and not wanting to reconsider, and so will be down for a couple weeks. The temporary forums until the site get back up on their feet are here, and if you want to read about exactly what happened you can go here.

For those of you who want to download the game, it's hosted on SourceForge, so a search through their site should turn it up for you.