The Rise of Dagon Revealed, Preview/Interview

It’s not easy letting the world know about your ambitious, independently developed video game, and it’s just as difficult for us as a media outlet to sift through the thousands of games being announced every day to find the ones that fit squarely within our role-playing coverage. Such is the case with The Rise of Dagon, an upcoming dungeon crawler inspired by such series as Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Lands of Lore, and Legend of Grimrock, which has fallen completely off of our radar despite a Kickstarter campaign that launched last month and was ultimately cancelled.

But between the closing Kickstarter update, official blog, and Twitter feed, development appears to be continuing, and this preview/interview on Slickster Magazine has us more than a little interested in seeing where this one ends up:

The Rise of Dagon contains a procedurally generated loot system. With any CRPG, there are plenty of mechanics and details that would go into processing loot advantage. Kidwell breaks down his inspiration for the feature and how it differs from different types of loot table generation mechanics.

(Really for me the Diablo procedural loot system (and I mean Diablo I) was the first time I was totally blown away with procedural loot. I mean they just totally nailed it to the point where there was this entire mini-game around what was going to drop next and they figured out ways that even the items you didn’t have a use for have an actual use like decomposing or selling for gold and then buying more potions or doing magic-item gambling systems to try your luck for an epic item. Additionally, you might see an item that builds up on one of our core sub-systems in the game which is the Affinity Power system. With procedural loot if you find something really amazing in the course of a particular play-through all of a sudden you can play to the strength of what you’ve found and make a build around it and your having a unique experience)

I asked Kidwell what he sees in the future of growth for indie games with crowdfunding sources and possibilities. Here’s his take.

(I honestly think that it’s going to vary a lot according to the game and the audience. For example if you have a sandbox game that in early alpha stages like say 7 Days to Die that’s on steam right now .. well you can get away with early access due to that sandbox aspect of gameplay and people will have tons of content. But in the case of an RPG like The Rise of Dagon early access is not nearly as plausible because if I went out early with say the first 2 levels of content the gamers are going to tear through that really quickly and then want the rest of the content which would take a long time to produce. Some games really need upfront backing, like mine, to produce that full set of content so we can deliver something that allows you to sit down and enjoy the whole thing in say a week and then feel really satisfied and not have to wait months for the next slice.)

I’ll also leave you with the teaser trailer that debuted on Kickstarter to give you an idea of the game’s overall tone: