John Comes: What was your inspiration for Demigod? How long have you been kicking around the idea for this game?

A: Bob Berry (Demigod's producer) and I spent a lot of time playing RTS mods. We looked at all the popular ones, like Defense of the Ancients (DotA), Footmen Frenzy and even some tank mod for WarCraft III. Each of the mods circled around the idea of playing as a single hero in a huge battle. That was our starting point.  From there, we combined those ideas with my love for team-based first-person games like Battlefield and Team Fortress, then we added in the principle that we wanted the game to be quick and fun, something you can play for a short time and then quit. The Supreme Commander engine was the final piece of the puzzle because it allows for a fantastic sense of scale. I first got the itch to create a fantasy game with the Supreme Commander engine about a year before we started the concept phase of Demigod. Moving away from the strict RTS model is something I've wanted to do for a long time, and Demigod has given me the freedom to do just that.

John Comes: How did "white boxing" (creating the game with minimal art assets) Demigod in the early stages help shape its design?

A: If you were to look at the original design document, the original maps or play an early version of the game, you wouldn't recognize the game we have today. White boxing gave us a luxury most game makers don't get-we could drastically change the gameplay when something wasn't working without spending any money on redoing art assets. "Find the fun first" was our motto. The first few months were crazy. We ripped out and replaced entire systems over and over again, but each iteration just got better and better. We finally got to the point where the game was an absolute blast to play, and all it was a bunch of white boxes. That's when we knew we really had something special. By the time we ramped up the team, Demigod was already completely playable, had a ballpark balance and people were playing it every day because it's fun. White boxing also gave us an intangible benefit in that everyone on the team could just pick up and play the game-they didn't need to read through a big design doc in order to understand what we were doing.

John Comes: Demigod takes several different genres and combines them into a new experience. Is that the future of gaming?

A: It's hard to say what the future of gaming is, but sticking with the same model over and over again has proven to wear out over time. I do believe there are a lot of in-between-genre areas that we still have to work with. How much of each genre to put in a game is the tricky part. You don't want to alienate your RTS players because it's too RPG-esque and vice versa.