Here's another one for you, Zack, maybe you can say a bit more about this than about my other topic: :)

I remember reading that you guys were thinking of doing another platformer, or at least that there were some other future projects in store for us. Would you be able to give us a taste for what sort of things you might be doing post-DC3?

AND, a biggie for us here in the forum, are there any more Dark Castle-related games in store for us after Return to Dark Castle? I know the rights are now owned by SHFF, do you if you guys at Z Sculpt *or* Mark Stephen Pierce are planning any future Dark Castle games? I know that we'll never tire of Prince Duncan, Bryant, or the Black Knight over here. :)

Thanks very much for any information you are willing to share.

Hmmm how many secrets to reveal... :P Well, Zack B. and I still feel drawn to good, solid retro games. Zack has always been into platformers, roll playing, and fps's. I'm more into driving and flight sims. I think our next games will fall along those lines. Zack has been dying to make one game in particular since before DC3, so of course, I can tell you absolutely nothing about it :P But it is pure him, if that is possible.

I tend to play around with really abstract stuff like OpenGL and networking, and I think I would like to do an arty game of some sort. Maybe a driving game or a space game like the old Star Wars polygon flight sims on the PC before texture mapping got popular. Retro is a pale shadow of what I always envisioned, so maybe Retro 2. I feel kind of miffed at the industry though for making sequel after sequel, so if Zack and I do one, it will need to go above and beyond just a remake.

I think that there will almost certainly be sequels to Dark Castle. It's just too compelling. I can honestly tell you that we are a bit tired to be starting on one though. To really bring it into present day, it would need modern features that people expect out of games now. I just mean, there is a gap between what's expected of say an xbox 360 game, and xbl arcade. Look at Prince of Persia now compared to the 386 days. But if people could settle for an xbl arcade level of sophistication, then we might be up for it. Up to Zack though, since he's done 90% of the work on DC3. I would mostly be helping with infrastructure, you know, cross platform and behind the scenes stuff.

As for SHFF letting us run with the genre, it would probably depend on if the money is there. Like in engineering, the old saying is "good, fast, cheap...pick any two." We made DC3 the way we always wanted it as kids, on a shoestring budget...and it took a decade. With even modest resources, that could drop to a year or three.

On the other hand, games today...stink. Through and through, IMHO. I have more fun playing flash games shooting Barney than I do playing the fanciest war games on the next gen consoles. So maybe there just isn't a reason to take DC3 to 2.5D or 3D. This is a point of contention between Zack and I though. He's always been a glass is half full kinda guy, whereas I usually see it as half empty. We disagree on the importance of realism and immersion, with him always looking for the next big thing, and me wanting to just play shootem ups. But we both agree that the underlying gameplay of DC3 shouldn't change.

Honestly I could write for hours on this stuff, but I really need to put my money where my mouth is and just do something. When Khufu is done, I want to make a "10 second game" using its networking engine. I also want to put a lot more of my time into social stuff, like an online community at zsculpt.net and maybe some web dev projects of my own.

Well, hope that answers your questions, in a roundabout fashion :P

I guess only time will tell, and I guess we have more quality products coming our way from ZS :)

Wow, you've certainly answered my question, and I certainly understand that you'd want to get away from Dark Castle for a while after spending 10 years working on it. :)

I agree with your comment, though, about how the games of today don't really measure up to retro games. I pretty much stopped playing video games after about the 16-bit generation (Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo), because I just couldn't get into the complex 3-D gameplay and all of the controls which seems a bit overblown to me. I prefer platform games like Dark Castle, Mario, Prince of Persia etc. and puzzle games like Tetris (and Khufu looks cool :) ).

So, you can bet I'll be watching your site for future stuff. Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed response. :)

Yeah, I have a soft spot in my heart for the retro games, but at the same time I enjoy new games, I guess I'm just lucky, most people only go one way.