So tell us about the upcoming content pack for Children of the Nile.

Chris Beatrice: We need to set people’s expectations right. We’re a real indie now, so people shouldn’t expect something like they’d get with Societies or something as big as Children. It’s not going to be a 15 or 20 dollar expansion, just a content pack. But this will be the first of hopefully more to come. Each one will have two or three scenarios within a specific campaign and the first one will be called “Alexandria.”

Alexandria will have the Great Library and the Lighthouse of Pharos as monuments you can build. It’s a specific city in a specific period of time, so there are new units (Greek hoplites will be raiders.) There are new carried resources such as copper and tin. There is also a world level now. It’s a new setting and era all tied together to be about 10 or 20 hours of gameplay in a focused experience. Alexandria will sell for fewer than ten dollars, which is about as cheap as you can get. It’s not Destinations, with 115 new buildings, but as a dollar value, I think it will be worth it for people who like Children.

Jeff Fiske: That’s a lot of game for the price, I think. You know, we have a lot of maps up on our website. Gordon Ferrell, who used to work for Stainless Steel Studios, as a fan he did several good maps. So you know, the idea is partially to revitalize the community internationally. There were people in New Zealand who couldn’t even get the game. It might be two years from now that people hear of Children of the Nile for the first time, so now they can come to the site and not just see 30 or 40 free maps but now we have these download packs to mess around with. It will be interesting to get a fairer gauge of what Children was all about, and what it will grow to become. Based on the feedback from the first content pack, we’d love to do more of them as long as the consumer is happy with them.

Is there any interest in doing another city builder altogether, like an Immortal Cities: Babylon?

Chris Beatrice: The pessimist in me says that city building games are not cost effective to make. They need a lot of content, a lot of buildings. It’s surprising, actually, when you start playing a game and you wonder why it doesn’t feel like a city yet. You hit this threshold where you’re adding dozens of buildings and only having a minimal effect towards it looking like a real city without just repeating the same building everywhere. And then to get it all to work right. It’s just hours and hours of testing with things crashing because off-screen you have thousands and thousands of little brains doing stuff. They are very labor intensive to make and so they cost a lot of money. That’s not something that, right now, we can afford to fund ourselves and I don’t know whether anyone else is willing to invest in that either.

Because if you just look at the numbers and the sales on city building games, you see this downward curve and that’s what publishers look at. They go, “OK, they’re not viable anymore.”

As far as whether we are interested, sure. I think you can capture with a very simple game model, possibly not 3D, but with some of the new engines out there you could possibly make a cost-effective city building game but might not hit the level of graphical quality and detail or content that current games have. Right now, I don’t see all those things lining up, so I’m pessimistic about the genre.

Jeff: Obviously if the new Children takes off and does really well, that might write its own story.

Chris: Yeah, if we look at the initial sales of Children and these latest sales and we get up into some good numbers, I’d feel really good about that, and as I said earlier, a lot of the cost of Children went into the engine and there are other solutions out there now. It is where our core expertise lies and all of our next crop of games have that as their roots. They are connected to city building games in some way.

So what can you tell us about your new game, the one you’ve been teasing for the last week? Does it build directly on your city-building experience?

It’s more of a life sim thing, where you have the sense of a living community. It’s something RTS games don’t really have, and very few games have, but it’s something the Caesar series had so far back. When Warcraft I came out and was a real time strategy game, people at Sierra came to us and said “We need to make a real time strategy game!” They actually asked us not to make Caesar turn-based, and it had always been real time.

It’s sort of a unique dynamic where you place buildings and people come out of them and then interact with other buildings. You get a living, organic thing. That kind of core is something we liked and something we’ve always thought can add a lot to other types of games. But our current crop isn’t city building games by any stretch.

The game is called “Hinterland” and its slogan is “Loot, Level and Build.” The idea for this game goes back many years but the basic premise is you have this small medieval fantasy village and all the people that are in the village are real people like in Children. So we thought, wouldn’t it be cool if you had this wizard in the village where he can heal people, operate the infirmary and so on, and if you take him on a dungeon crawling adventure he’s a real powerful combatant. But what if he goes out and gets killed? My town is now suffering.

You have key players with a dual role of dungeon crawling vs. being in the town. And right in parallel with that, your town produces food, makes weapons, produces people, etc. and basically fuels your adventures. You’ll be more successful adventuring the better your town is at producing this stuff.

When you go on adventures, you get loot. Treasure, knowledge, magic items, experience and so on that you bring back to build up your town. It’s still only a village, a dozen buildings – not a hundred buildings; a much smaller scale than any city building game. It has party based combat à la Baldur’s Gate, so it’s that kind of scope. Our history goes back to games like the Lords of the Realm series where you have the same kind of relationship, a slower paced town management strategy component and then a faster paced combat part. When you lose guys in combat you really feel it because it took you so long to train them.

Jeff Fiske: What really makes it different is the intimate scale. You need to take your farmer with you initially because you don’t have anyone else with you. You begin to tame the wilderness and other people come into town, so you coax them to live in the town and help you out. If a blacksmith settles in town, now your farmer can go adventuring with a sword. Your collecting resources and the world is going on in real time, so when you choose to get your party together and set out, that’s also a strategic decision.

Matt Williams, Hinterland’s producer, and I are big Roguelike fans and that random world element is heavily emphasized here. You play for four maybe six hours at most and then you’ll be replaying it. In a single game you won’t see everything. You won’t see all the creatures. One thing we’ll have is different resources, as Chris said. One item may be an artifact that is a prerequisite for a character to show up, such as a magical tome the wizard will use to do research. If you don’t have the tome, then you may never get the wizard. So not every game you play will have a wizard in it.

We’re looking forward to getting fan feedback on this, maybe devising some sort of hardcore mode or editors, depending on what the audience wants to see. It’s really one of these things where we’re trying to hone in on a gameplay dynamic that we think has been underutilized, shine a light on it and play test it and improve it for years to come.

Chris: One thing I want to follow up on is this thing about relativity. This game is sort of the opposite of God of War. I remember first playing Dungeons and Dragons and counting copper pieces just to see if I could afford more rope, where an apple is a big deal. Eventually things scale up and you’re godlike and you kind of lose all context or sense of perspective. I enjoy it more when it’s down to earth, like how many pots of oil do I have for my lantern and can I afford to throw one at that guy over there? We folded that into this paradigm where you look at everyone in the town. A farm kid might be really strong, so you think he might make a good fighter. They go on an adventure and find some gold, and that’s a big deal, or a sword, which is great because you’ve been using sticks. We like keeping it where the creatures are your standard folklore creatures – giants, trolls, maybe a dragon here and there – but staying at the level where you get attached to your characters, really counting every little resource you have.

The small scale is an interesting approach, since it probably makes it both easier to expand and easier to manage.

Jeff Fiske: Yeah. The maximum party size is four guys. Everything that is made in town and equipped on your characters can be seen simultaneously. Every sword, every pitchfork that you own, you can just drag it around to where you want it. It allows for ease of play and you become attached to that dilemma of how you turn the corner in your town. You’re not just looking at the lord; you’re looking at all the characters you might have in your party. Maybe you should be leaving your smith behind making shields for everybody instead of taking him with you because he’s good with a sword. I think the small scale allows us to push the game in a variety of directions.

So you have control over the adventuring party and the town at the same time?

No, you are always playing yourself, sort of a console RPG model.

Chris: You do both of those things, but you play a character and only interact with other people and buildings through that character. As it’s currently designed, you can’t lead guys on an adventure and then scroll back to town to do some tweaking. You identify with a particular character, and walk up to buildings in order to activate them. That’s why said it’s not a city builder. You don’t plan out where the buildings go or lay out roads. It’s more like you lead an adventuring party and the town is your base, but it’s not like a single building you keep upgrading. It’s ultimately about who you have in your series, not where things are placed.

And if your character dies?

Jeff: We haven’t fully play tested this, but the model now is you get severely wounded and transported back to town and then you recover. You can lose a game in the sense that the town can be overrun if you take too long to recover. But I don’t think it will be long before you see a hardcore mode where you die and have to start over.

Modding and customization are the big things in the PC gaming world right now. Are you going to be opening up your products to more user customization?

I think that will flow naturally out modern gaming tools which are more user friendly than before.

Chris: Children, for example, is the most unmoddable game ever, even for us. We definitely recognize that PC gamers like that and expect it, that it is a small but important part of the audience that can benefit everyone. If other people see that modders have invested their time in a game and are still playing it that helps.

It’s not something we can provide a lot of support for in the initial release. We need to make sure that the game play is fun, but it is something we will look into. But like Jeff said, as it is, Hinterland is already very moddable because of the data structure. It’s nto as though we have a mod team or anything to make sure it’s seamless.

Jeff: Or even a mod manager.

Chris: With Children, people would come on the forum and ask “Can we do this?” and we’d have to reply, “No, you can’t do this.” They would want to change a texture on the townhouse and it would change the textures somewhere else because of how the data was shared, so even something small like that couldn’t be done. Our eyes are open to that, but it’s a judgment call about how much support we can give it.