Dark Disciples I & II Interview

RPGWatch offers an interview with the developer of indie RPGs Dark Disciples and Dark Disciples II, Laurens Lafebre, talking about games and life as an independent developer.

RPGWatch: Obviously there was a lot of blood sweat and tears poured into these games so why did you choose to have these wonderfully oldschool games as freeware? Personally speaking I would pay for more games like your Dark Disciple series.

Laurens: For me, writing DD1 and DD2 was always a hobby I did it for fun and for a challenge. With DD1, it didn’t occur to me that I could perhaps charge a small fee for the game. In fact, I nearly didn’t bother finishing the last 25% of the game because, at the time, I wasn’t sure if anyone would actually be interested in playing it that far (or at all). With DD2, I did briefly consider charging for it but I really wanted as many people to play it as possible, so freeware was clearly the way to go. Another significant factor was that I’ve had a lot of people donate their time and energy playtesting the games, and offering constructive criticism. Their assistance has been invaluable and I would have felt a little uncomfortable saying ‘˜thanks for all the help guys, now I’m going to charge you for the game’. J In the end, I did put a link on the website where people can donate a few bucks to help cover the web hosting/domain name fees.

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RPGWatch: How long did you work on Dark Disciples 1 and 2?

Laurens: Hmmm, I couldn’t even guess a number. Hundreds of hours? The most time consuming aspect of DD1 and DD2 *by far*has been writing and testing the NPC scripts. I dumped the text from DD2 to a txt file the other day and discovered I’d written an amount of text equivalent to a modest novel!