Torchlight Interviews

In addition to a new interview with Runic Games’ Erich Schaefer, Wonder Russell, and Jason Beck on Gaming Nexus, there’s a three-part Q&A with Runic’s Matt Lefferts, Matt Tanwanteng, and Wonder Russell on Werit’s Blog.

First, a snip from GN:

Torchlight has a very cool and unique art design, can you talk about how you came up with the design and why you went in that direction?

Jason Beck: We had just come off of Mythos, which was a similar project with a relatively similar art style. It was a bit different in that it was a collection of styles that evolved as the scope increased.it never had a real pre-production phase, so it was a bit of style soup until we got the 3rd zone. You could say the art in Torchlight is a more stylized, refined, and evolved style of what we had done previously. Our basic principle is taking ‘˜classic animation’ techniques of a painterly background with crisp, comic-book-ish style characters atop it to create a clean separation. We also wanted to make sure the game would run on virtually any system, so we went pretty low-tech with the art. It was important for us to make Runic Games’ first game and new IP to have its own style, but still meet our goals of being accessible.

And then a bit from interview #2 on WB:

Werit: The infinite dungeon sounds interesting, how does it work?

Even after you clear out the main storyline quests, there’s still levels to be gained, enemies to kill, and loot to acquire! The infinite dungeon lets you fulfill any extra urges you still have to loot and loot and loot until your grubby little mitts can’t handle it anymore. At some point you’ll cap out on levels, and then you’re on to an endurance test to see just how far you can get before it becomes impossible to progress any deeper. Personally, I’m more of a “create-20-characters-and-try-each-possible-build” kind of guy, but once those are done…