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We caught up with Konfa Games' Nikolai Kuznetsov in Barcelona to learn more about his new roguelike resource manager after Despot's Game: Dystopian Battle Simulator. While the project doesn't have an official title, there's been a lot of progress to its development, as you can see in the video.
"Hi friends, this is my final day at the Barcelona Game Fest and I'm checking out a game that I've been hearing a lot about.
So thank you for joining us, Nikolai, which is a beautiful sort of tower defence, space station defence, roguelike, room building mixture.
So what can you tell me is the elevator pitch for this project?
Okay, it is a resource management game about evil AI who control humans and fight with aliens."
"And we don't know who is on the right side this time, but we are playing an evil AI and control puny humans in a spaceship.
This is like that.
Okay, and this is within the Despot universe?
Yeah."
"This has no title as of yet, so how can you tell me it plays into the wider universe, the role it plays into that universe?
Yeah, our first game, Despotism 3K, it was started when Despot, how to say, they started to control humanity.
And now it is much later when Despot already, how to say, control all the Earth, but Earth was destroyed by aliens."
"He took some humans, made very fast spaceship and he moved to fight with this union of aliens who are smart and why they destroyed Earth?
Because they are afraid of evil AI.
Yeah.
They have a reason for it."
"There is a reason for it.
And what is the main gameplay loop like?
So, you come here, I've seen you have like sort of empty or hidden rooms and then you can strategically start building them around to defend your station, right?
Is it how it works?
Yeah, yeah, it is how it works and it is roguelike, it's important and every build your spaceship will look differently."
"I mean, one time you will have a lot of energy, but you will struggle with other resources and other run you will have very many humans and you will move all of them to bioreactor, but you will have some problems maybe with energy and you need to defend your base, create towers, how you say, it is a little tower defense element.
And you need to create some towers for defending and on one run you will have many rockets, in another run you will have many lasers, it looks like that."
"And how does it work with a bigger metagame? What do you take for the next run when you finish a run or if you die, what do you take for the further progression?
It's only unlocking, it's unlocking new spaceship, new artifacts, new modelers for spaceship, but it's not about meta progression, I mean, you cannot be, how to say, you can't increase your health or increase your damage between runs, only different modes, different spaceships, yeah, like that."
"We like more meta progression like in FTL or Ballad or Central Elite when you have very many content and you instantly can replay and beat the game again with different, how to say, different things.
Okay. What's the status of the project? What is this? A vertical slice? A demo? And you told me that perhaps in the near future we're gonna learn more about it?
We are moving to open demo, we will announce game soon and right now it is closer to vertical slice because we have a tutorial and we have all our content from the start, you just press play and you have very many many things what is hard to understand and our next step it will make a smooth start for the players and after we'll finish with it, we'll make announce and public demo."
"And if I'm correct, you guys come from Russia and you're in Barcelona as of late, so how are you enjoying the Barcelona Game Fest? I think it's the first one for you.
Yeah, I like it so much. I thought that this event will be much smaller, I was not prepared and it's so big, so beautiful event, yeah, it's perfect.
I will be much more prepared next year."
"Okay, thank you so much for your time Nicolai, I'm looking forward to learning more about No Title.
Thank you."
