Interview done on June 22nd 2024
When I created DCDL, I announced that I’d try to include interviews of video-game developers to my articles about indie games. Well, here is the first one! Lee Williams, who created Cryptmaster with co-developer Paul Hart (see article here), a fascinating dungeon-crawler based on word puzzles, has been kind enough to agree to answer a few questions. Enjoy!
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Hello Lee, thank you so much for agreeing to answer a few questions. First I’d like to know a bit more about you and your partner in crime Paul Hart. What are your respective professional backgrounds? What were your individual roles in the process of making Cryptmaster? Where are you from and how did you end up partnering to create this game? Was it a two-man job?
A pleasure! I’m from the UK and Paul is from New Zealand, so there is a lot of juggling of time zones when we work, but we’ve been doing this for a while now and have it down to a fine(ish) art! Paul does all the coding and art and I do the writing (also, for Cryptmaster, the VO (voice-over acting)). We collaborate on the design. We both have a good deal of experience in our respective fields and we’ve worked together in the past on a number of smaller projects. The core team was the two of us and our amazing composer Surrashu, but later in development we had lots of assistance from our publishers at Akupara.
If I’m not mistaken, Cryptmaster is first and foremost a dungeon crawler. A combination of retro and very original mechanics, with the fluidity expected from modern games. Why did you choose to revisit this old genre? What about the black-and-white art style?
I think for both of us it was a genre that allowed us to sneak in lots of influences from our formative years. The artstyle grew from this too – it’s intended to be reminiscent of the sort of illustrations found in old gamebooks and D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) manuals.
You’re obviously both very much attached to the kind of games that were very popular among PC gamers in the 80s and 90s. What is your gaming history? What games have influenced you the most and what recent games did you particularly enjoy playing?
For myself, I’ve been playing games since Pong and Pacman and while I’ve had whole careers that are completely unrelated to gaming, it’s always been a keen interest for me. The one game that really blew my mind was David Braben’s Elite back in 1984. The game I’ve enjoyed most in the past year would probably be Chants of Sennaar.
I’d like to hear your take on the state of the industry. As a seasoned player, I’ve grown quite bored of playing mainstream triple-As and prefer exploring the thriving world of indie games. What do you think will happen in the near future? Will indie games become the new standard, if overproduction doesn’t kill them?
I’m also generally turned off by AAA games in recent years. I think the only two I’ve sunk any time into and enjoyed lately have been Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring. I’m far more passionate about smaller, weirder games but I’m not sure that they will become mainstream, although certainly they’ll continue to drip ideas into the mainstream. Lots of players and journalists are very vocal about wanting more creative games that push the boundaries but the reality is that making a roguelike or metroidvania is always going to make you more money than trying something entirely new!
About AI, as an independent writer, I fear that its growing use in the artistic field will quickly smother human creativity and destroy many jobs (scriptwriting, graphic design…). What is your opinion on the matter? Have you turned to AI tools at some point in the making of Cryptmaster? Is there no way around it these days?
Although no AI was used in making Cryptmaster and we have no intent of using any in the future, I’m personally not so concerned about generative AI and I’m interested to see what applications it might have. It is still very far from being able to replicate human creativity, and of course can create nothing on its own, merely recombine human content. When I appreciate an artwork in any medium, what mostly intrigues me is the authorial intent behind it. What is the artist trying to say? What experiences are they drawing from? What connection can be made between myself and them, as two human beings on either side of the work? For AI-produced content, these questions will always be moot and the work doesn’t really interest me as a result.
To conclude, Lee, could you tell me about your next projects? Are there some in the pipeline? Will you continue to collaborate with Paul, maybe to add some new content to Cryptmaster?
Yes, we will certainly continue to collaborate! We have a planned update for Cryptmaster which will hopefully be out later this year and then it’s on to the next thing. We have no idea yet what that will be!
Thank you so, so much for your time and for the very interesting behind-the-scenes glimpse. Can’t wait to play your next games in the coming years and, before that, to immerse myself again in the intriguing world of Cryptmaster!
Florian Baude (Des Clics & des Lettres)
CRYPTMASTER (article about the game)