GamesBeat: How long do you expect the realm exploration levels to last?
Gollop: It’s a bit difficult to say yet. I hope you’ll be able to play through a realm in an evening, maybe about three hours, but they will vary a bit. Some may be bigger than others. You might make it through a series of five or six battles against wizard lords, for example, and then a final battle against the king.
GamesBeat: There’s only one type of randomly generated battle map in the game now. What are you expecting to add later?
Gollop: There will be nine different environment types. There will be different pickups you can find there, different treasures you’ll be able to find. All those are connected with the RPG exploration nodes, so you’ll have forests, mountains, ruins, citadels, something called mana fluxes. The wizard king’s palace itself, you’ll fight in that ultimately. There are different environments in the maps.
Above: Concept art of a mana flux area.
GamesBeat: Will the quests and RPG elements also be turn-based?
Gollop: Yes.
GamesBeat: How do asynchronous matches work?
Gollop: Players can do matches like chess, sending moves [by email] when they have a chance. If you click on the match play option, you have a choice between asynchronous or live games. You then get a list of asynchronous games that you can play. You can play while offline.
GamesBeat: Can you talk a bit about your vision for implementing guilds and item trading?
Gollop: The short answer is that I haven’t quite decided yet. Certainly within a guild you’ll be able to trade and exchange items. You’ll have a little guild shop or guild house.
You’ll probably be able to do it universally as well, with other players. But we have to see about how to manage the game economy. That’s quite difficult, once you allow trading. Of course there will be a currency in the game as well.
The main thing is to allow members of guilds or players who have friends to exchange items and help each other out.
I would not like it to be a majorly exploitative type of trading system, but if the game is popular, it will happen. So I can’t really say more than that, except that I don’t want it to completely take over the game by any means. The game economy has to be managed for the benefit of the gameplay and the players as a whole, not just the ones who are making it rich.
GamesBeat: I’m thinking of the Diablo real-money auction house.
Gollop: Yeah. But they even have problems with the non-money auctions. There are many interesting issues there that we’ll have to deal with.
Above: Fans of Gollop’s original Chaos game will enjoy the encore appearance of those Gooey Blobs.
GamesBeat: What are you thinking about as far as leaderboards or modes for the single- or dual-player multiplayer?
Gollop: There will be a leaderboard ranking system. We haven’t completely sorted out how it will be implemented yet.
There will be more than one multiplayer game mode. The standard mode is where you can use your equipment from the realm exploration and equip your wizard with leveled-up equipment.
There’s also a couple of modes for players who might want a more balanced and competitive approach. There’s the symmetrical mode, which means that each player is given a random selection of spells and equipment and they have to discard some. Then they go into battle.
Finally, there’s the random wizard mode, which is much like the way it works at the moment. You just have a random battle with random equipment and random spells. Those are the three multiplayer modes.