DWERVE

Brotuzak: So what game are you working on and what part do you play in the inner workings of the game? 

Milko: Yeah, I’m one of the developers working on Dwerve. It’s a tower defense dungeon-crawler RPG. Dwerve is a dwarf, so Dwerve the dwarf is a clever way for you to remember it. 

Brotuzak: Awesome. I guess can you just give us a small summary of your game? 

Milko: So a quick summary of the game verbally—it’s hard to describe this verbally, ’cause you gotta see this game—but basically it’s an RPG that has a story, characters, a world that you traverse through, but the combat is tower defense. So it’s a genre mashup that introduces a new game mechanic. It’s what indies are known for, and I hope it works in our favor this time. It takes about 30 minutes I think for it to click in people’s heads, which is why we have quite a long demo, and you can play this demo on Steam right now. It’s called the Dwerve: Prologue. 

Brotuzak: Awesome. So I guess to jump into it, what inspired you most [in] creating this game? 

Milko: So the game is 2D top-down pixel art, right? And that’s inspired by Zelda, and the art is 16x16, which is tiny pixel art, but we’ve gotten an excellent pixel artist that has managed to put an insane amount of detail in each of these little tiles. So in regards to the RPG aspect, I would say it’s inspired by Zelda, and then the dungeon aspect of it—of course we gotta touch on that—it’s inspired by Dungeon Defenders, and personally, my favorite tower defense game is Kingdom Rush. And if any of you have played Kingdom Rush, they have heroes in that game, and the heroes have abilities and you can move them around the battlefield. And for me, that was the funnest part about Kingdom Rush. I wanted to have a hero. So with Dwerve, you are the hero that builds all the towers, and the enemies, they want to kill you. So whenever you get into a combat sequence, they pathfind to get to you, so you have to look at the location that you’re at and notice how the environment is going to work to your advantage or against your advantage. You have to quickly think on your toes. Instead of there being a building phase, all the action happens real time. And because of that, it makes tower defense a lot more exciting, and it makes tower defense a lot more tense. 

Brotuzak: So it’s almost kind of like… when you start up it’s, you gotta have, like the levels get harder, and then you gotta figure out what you gotta build first to defeat that level or dungeon?

Milko: It’s—no. It’s really on-your-toes creative tower defense. So for example, a bunch of enemies will start coming at you from different corners, and you try to find a chokepoint, and then [at] that chokepoint you would put like, a melee weapon, right? And you can use the environment to your advantage. For example, we have a turret that is a giant punch glove, right? A boxing glove, it’s a giant boxing glove and it punches enemies back.  

Brotuzak: OK. 

Milko: But there are pits in the environment, so if you put the punch tower in the correct location, you’ll punch enemies into a pit. So we reward you for being clever, but you can place towers anywhere, so you have to come up with a completely unique strategic idea for surviving that battle. And if it doesn’t work, it’s OK, because we have checkpoints at every battle, and you can change out your loadout. By “loadout” I mean the towers that you use. There are about fifteen different towers. Each has a skill tree, so you will be able to create your own playstyle. And if you think about the tower defense as combat, then these towers that you choose to fight with, it’s almost like choosing your abilities. So everybody that plays this game is going to have a different set of favorite towers. They’re going to have their own playstyle that they created, that they experimented with, and it will be fun to see how people play this game, because people will play it differently. 

Brotuzak: I love those kind of games because you can just pick kind of like, niche ways to play, or just like, super meta ways to play. 

Milko: Oh yeah, you could do some things just for fun because they make you laugh, right? 

Brotuzak: Yeah. 

Milko: So for example, you will discover combos in the game, and since we were talking about the punch tower, I might as well tell you about a combo. 

Brotuzak: Yeah. 

Milko: We have spikes that come up from the ground, right? So if you put a punch tower right after some spikes, you can force the enemy to keep walking over ’em over and over again, since they’ll get punched back. 

Brotuzak: Oh, OK. 

Milko: So there are combos in the game that you will discover and you’ll want to share with your friends, which will make you do a lot more damage than if you just use the towers without thinking of clever combinations. But we will also try to teach a few of those in the very beginning of the game. 

Brotuzak: So is this a multiplayer game? 

Milko: We plan on release for the game to have about a 10-hour single-player campaign, and it’ll take you longer to beat if you explore the environment. Every level is going to have a hidden key and a chest that requires you to solve a lever puzzle for people who enjoy exploring and solving puzzles. In regards to other game modes and multiplayer, we will have a boss rush mode where you just fight bosses. I didn’t mention that, but in the trailer you can see that there’s a boss. There are boss battles, tower defense boss battles in this game. 

Brotuzak: [laughs] 

Milko: It’s really interesting to use tower defense as the combat system. But we plan to also have a wave survival mode. It’s kind of like a zombie survival mode where there’ll be waves coming at you and you’ll be able to upgrade your turrets between the waves. And for that we can make several levels. Something I want to mention about that though, is that if you get the game on Steam, anything that is local co-op on Steam actually becomes online co-op because Steam allows you to stream a game to your friend, and their inputs get put into your game. So even if we do co-op multiplayer on Steam, that means it’s going to be online multiplayer. 

Brotuzak: Awesome. That sounds like you got a lot of content packed into this game. But let’s go on to the next one. I want to see like, if you could go back in time, change anything about the game, would you do it? And if so what would you change? 

Milko: [laughs] We all want to go back in time so bad! I love this kind of question. But if I could go back in time and only change things about the game… There have been decisions that we have made that are very big business decisions, right? And of course, in regards to the design of the game, the way we designed the game is iterative, and an iterative design process is the kind of design process where we try an idea, we get feedback on it, and then we change it. So we have been consistently changing the game design of Dwerve. And right now, when you play the demo, please give us feedback. Let us know what you think is working, what you think we should work on. And we are taking all that advice and constantly tweaking the game. So I don’t think there’s anything that we missed in the game design that we would have changed now because we have already changed all those things. So the only things that I would change going back in time is really business decisions. 

Brotuzak: OK. 

Milko: There’s a whole business aspect to indie game development that is extremely complicated, like for example, this interview that we’re doing right now, right? 

Brotuzak: [laughs] Perfect. Cool cool. So I guess what was your most favorite part in the developmental process for Dwerve? 

Milko: My favorite process is exactly what I’m doing right now, which is building the levels. I would say that the thing I’m most passionate about isn’t programming or art, it’s actually design. And Dwerve is one of those games where, like you can tell that someone who loves design worked on it, right? Because it is a genre mashup, and we’re trying to make it work. And that’s difficult from a design perspective. Also, all these levels? They’re all little puzzles. Like if you think about it, I have to make the environment a little puzzle for the player to solve. The player has to find the chokepoints and notice things in the environment to use. So we can’t procedurally generate stuff like that. It has to be hand-crafted, and you have to be really clever and experiment when you’re designing levels like that. It’s a difficult process for Dwerve because it’s a strategy game. Sorry, I always mess up that word. Stra-te-gy! [laughs] Right? 

Brotuzak: [laughs] 

Milko: Because it’s a strategy game, I think anyone who loves strategy will love it, but we don’t want to alienate people who don’t want to think too much, right? So the difficulty for us is to make a game that rewards people for being clever and strategic, but also a game that is playable by people who don’t want to think too much, and think and... 

Brotuzak: ...Give it some like, casual aspects to it, right? 

Milko: Right! So for example, tower defense games are pretty niche, right? And by us adding story and a main character, we’re making tower defense more mainstream, and that’s kind of what we’re trying to do for tower defense, is have tower defense be introduced to people who wouldn’t normally play it. And that’s why we think a lot of people are going to get hooked by the story, and within time, they’re going to learn to love tower defense. 

Brotuzak: Yeah, I mean I love playing tower defense games, but it was just so like, black and white. So I’m glad to see that you’re kind of coming out with a story, main characters, and like—is there like a central hub area? 

Milko: So there is a village that you will visit several times, and that village will change over time, but the story takes place in a mountain, you’re a dwarf, right? And the dwarves used to live in the mountain, and they discovered power stones. And power stones are—you can think of them as batteries, they’re kind of like the magic in this game—and they created an entire society around this, and it’s how you power the towers and turrets, right? But they dug so deep that they discovered that trolls live in the mountain. And there was a war between the dwarves and the trolls, and the trolls drove the dwarves out of the mountain. And I don’t know if you know any mythology about trolls, but trolls are supposed to turn to stone in the sunlight, which is why the dwarves are safe outside of the mountain. I don’t want to ruin too much of the story, but you end up going back into the mountain, and you discover how the trolls are now surviving in the sunlight. And in regards to the story, since we know that that’s going to attract people to the tower defense aspect of it, we didn’t want to neglect the story either. After we had a successful Kickstarter, we hired a writer, an artist, and a musician, because we want this to be one of those indie games that had a professional touch in all aspects, we don’t want to neglect an aspect of the game. The story is going to have several mysteries in it that you’ll be able to try to figure out before they’re revealed to you in the game, right? I also love stories that have mysteries that you can sort of theorize about, right? When you can figure out things yourself. The story will be great for people who create theories about the lore and stuff like that. We leave a lot of clues that people can put together without making it super obvious for people who love story. 

Brotuzak: I mean, I could just tell so much from just this interview that you’re the designer. You’re very creative on everything that you’re talking about, so I love it. I guess just finally to end things, if you want to talk about any...

Milko: I don’t— Sorry, I had to interrupt you because I don’t want you giving me credit as the designer or whatever, right? I’m designing the levels right now, but my business partner is the one who came up with the tower defense. His name is PJ—Percy. And he’s the one that came up with the tower defense RPG idea. 

Brotuzak: OK. 

Milko: Yeah.  

Brotuzak: I mean, but you’re saying you’re designing the levels? [laughs] 

Milko: I gotta give him credit. Yeah, I just had to give him credit, man. If he hears this interview, he’d be like, “Dude, what the heck?” [laughs] “You got all the credit for that idea, but it was my idea!”

Brotuzak: You just gotta take it. Just take it all in. 

Milko: [laughs]

Brotuzak: So I guess if you want to just shout anything out, give us any last little tidbits about your game, feel free. 

Milko: So, I think that everyone should go and play this demo. Like, there are some indie games that you don’t know what they’re going to be like on release, and this is one of those games where we want people to play this demo. That’s like—It’s like 45 minutes worth of gameplay. You’re gonna know whether you like the game or not by the end of the demo, right? 

So we hope that there’s no one that’s wishlisting it that’s surprised by the gameplay! So please play the demo. It’s Dwerve: Prologue on Steam. 

Brotuzak: Perfect. Awesome.

Milko: Oh. Oh one more thing, one more thing, this is me shouting out myself. I started a YouTube channel where I teach pixel art, and that’s helped us grow a fanbase around this game, because if people are fans of pixel art, they’ll probably enjoy playing Dwerve. And that pixel art channel is Peter Milko, or Pixel Pete. 

Brotuzak: Perfect. Awesome. Thanks Peter, I appreciate it.