We have seen action-RPGs before. What will make Grim Dawn stand out from the rest?

We're not really trying to stand out so much as we're trying to make an exceptional game for an existing audience that improves upon their previous experience. That said, we have added quite a few new features.

For combat we've created a new hit-effect system, added blood and dismemberment death effects for some enemies, and improved the physics. On the questing side we now have a faction system a new quest system that provides the ability for the player to make choices that could lead to different quest paths. We've also spent a lot more time developing the fictional world of Cairn, in which Grim Dawn is set; its history, conflicts, and characters.

We understand there's a crafting system in Grim Dawn. What can you tell us about it?

The crafting system is actually somewhat inspired by Defense of the Ancients or DotA, the incredibly popular Warcraft III mod that seems to have spawned an entire new sub-genre of games.

We actually created our own DotA knock-off mod at Iron Lore, which we called Pirates vs. Ninjas. The item recipe system was simple and fun. My favorite part was how there would be several different tiers of useful items that you might create in the course of building towards a final uber-item. We wanted to capture this same dynamic. Blueprints can drop in the game that require the player to collect a number of other items or components before they can be combined into a single more powerful item. Higher level blueprints may include other lesser-blueprint items in their recipes. Often the items you create will have a mix of fixed and randomly generated bonuses.

What other features do you think are important in Grim Dawn?

The big one would be randomized undergrounds. We haven't finished the tech yet, so it isn't 100% but it is looking very promising so far. Allowing for some "dungeon" areas of the game to be randomized would be a big win for replayability.

I don't know that it is an important feature but I love our new dynamic weather system. It really adds an unexpectedly huge amount of atmosphere and life to the game. The way the system works is that designers paint regions of the world with different climate types. The climates are controlled by climate files where designers can add different weather patterns and set probabilities for each to occur.

I'm actually working on a Kickstarter project right now. It is a fair amount of work to get set up and the biggest thing will be trying to produce a decent video. We're hoping to get it up in the next week or so.

When I initially looked at Kickstarter, my thought was that it seemed unlikely for us to be able to generate much more than a $100k or so based on what other projects were doing. However, given the level of money Double Fine and Wasteland have generated, I think it is definitely worth trying out.

What would we need to do something useful? Well, we could do amazing things with a million or more but even $300k would be enough for us to bring on 2-3 more people full-time, which would be a HUGE help.

We're basically at this point right now where we have the technology mostly finished, the core gameplay is fully functioning and actually quite fun but it is just taking a looooonnnggg time to build out content. Just as an example, we currently have a backlog of 5 monsters that are finished but waiting on animation. Our animator is working as hard as he can but he lost a few weeks crunching on that Warhammer 40k MMO. So, really, just being able to get a few more people working full-time would speed things up tremendously.

I'll share the project link with you guys before I make it live so you can provide feedback.

Kickstarter is up: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crateentertain...