Solasta: Crown of the Magister – Dungeon Maker Interview

About a week ago, Tactical Adventures revealed their new Dungeon Maker tool for Solasta: Crown of the Magister that should help you create your own custom adventures for Solasta. And if you’d like to learn more about this tool and the team’s plans for it, along with some general information about the game and its early access journey, you should check out this WCCFTech interview.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

Given the importance that you’re placing on verticality in Solasta, will there be a way for dungeon makers to replicate some of that?

Mathieu Girard: Not yet, because I’ve prioritized simplicity first. When you go with a 3D editor, you’re going to lose 50% of the users who can create content. We’re thinking of adding some verticality props like platforms, stuff like that, or maybe rooms with gaps in it. And then again, we will be driven by the community’s wishes. If they say we need to have 3D, maybe we can go, I don’t know, with an isometric perspective for the dungeon maker tool. It could be like an expert mode for the dungeon maker because most people want to use 2D first.

Emile Zhang: During the Kickstarter for Solasta, we had many people asking for a dungeon maker. One of the biggest issues was that the complexity was a little bit too harsh, as Mathieu said. We actually discussed with many modders from Pathfinder Kingmaker, for example, as that game used Unity as well. At first, we wanted to give the modders some kind of advanced SDK tool that they could load into Unity and make their own dungeon using our tools. That would include the verticality you were asking about. But the problem is that it was so complex that even the modders themselves told us that this would require someone to know how to code video games, meaning that it would be too harsh of an entry barrier. That is why Mathieu prioritized making a simple tool and then working on top of it to add new features on the go, depending on what the users will ask for. For example, we already know a lot of users are asking us for a dialogue system so that NPCs can talk to us and we can add NPCs to dungeons outside from monsters. We also know that they would like a quest system so that NPCs could also give you a quest and you have specific quests in your dungeon. So maybe, as you said, the verticality will come in because it’s a huge part of Solasta. We will take a look at how to include that in a simple enough manner so that it is still interesting to use it. But at the same time, it doesn’t lose half of your modders when you introduce this feature.

Mathieu Girard: We have a backlog of evolutions for this tool, with lots of cool ideas. It’s just a matter of how much time we have and what the community wants to do first. This is why we are going to release this dungeon maker with the next update in the early access to get early feedback and to really adapt. Do they want, above all, new environments? Like caves or forests, etc.? Or do they want new features? Specifically, that’s what we want to listen to.