Dungeon Keeper

Dungeon Keeper is a a strategy game developed by Bullfrog Productions and published by Electronic Arts in 1997. In it you are in command of the evil forces of a dungeon, which is always under attack by annoying heroes. The goal of the game is to conquer the world by destroying the over world and rival keepers. To mine gold, build up your dungeon and combat your enemies you can either control all units like a traditional strategy game or one unit in a shooter like direct control.

A few month after the release the game got an expansion pack, called: The Deeper Dungeons. It included 15 new levels for the single and multliplayer, an updated AI and improved graphics.

In 2010 the community released the first verion of a fan expansion, KeeperFX. With it came fixes for modern systems, widescreen support and for the multiplayer a TCP/IP support.

Where can I get it?
The game was re-released for Windows in a gold edition on GOG in June 2011 and a little over a year later for Mac OS. Alternative you can buy it since 2016 also on the Origin platform.

How to play this game in multiplayer?
The original game only uses the ipx protocol, but with the KeeperFX project the game got also a TCP/IP mode. With that you can play the game via direct IP or any VPN service like Radmin or Zerotier.

Trivia

 * This game arch-enemy is the Avatar from the Ultima game series
 * Each creature has an unique view in first person mode, for example a hellhound see only in black&white and a fly in a hex like view
 * The german verison as the torture animations replaced with generice animations

Dene Carter
For our review of the game I had the chance to talk with Dene Carter via mail. He was one of the developers of Dungeon Keeper. Here are the questions and answers:


 * Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
 * I'm Dene Carter. I was one of the core team on Dungeon Keeper. I went on to create Big Blue Box - a Lionhead sub-studio - and the creators of the Fable Franchise. I've been in the industry since 1985 and I still love games as much today as I did when I was 15.


 * How and when did you get involved into the gaming industry?
 * My first game was for the ZX Spectrum, and it was called Rockman. It took me 2 weeks to write and - while it wasn't amazing - it taught me a lot!
 * Do you play any video games in your personal life? If so, which ones?
 * I'm a huge fan of the Souls games, and am currently addicted to GRIP -  a futuristic racing game.
 * What was your inspiration for the game?
 * Peter wanted to make a game where you were the Dungeon Master for a D&D game.
 * How many developers worked on Dungeon Keeper?
 * It varied. The core team was me, my brother Simon, Peter and Mark Healey. Jonty Barnes arrived a little later, and various others joined or left as the project went on.
 * How long did the development of the game take?
 * Hmm. I think it was about 18 months.
 * Based on an existing engine, how much effort was it actually? What were the challenges?
 * The engine was something Glen had adapted from High Octane, and handed over to me in my first month of working there! I had to add working doors, ceilings and shadows to the sprites. Martin Bell took it over after I moved to UI work and added things like alpha lighting and nice particle effects.
 * What is the programming language for the game?
 * Pure Ansi C.
 * How difficult was the project and what was your biggest problem?
 * It was a difficult project largely because navigation was not a 'solved problem' back then. We had to restart the entire project at one point because the tech team had told us we couldn't change the world at all - or at least not more than once per 5 seconds. We created that version at which point Peter want 'Yuck. Let me go talk to the tech guys.' and forced them to allow partial, quicker updates of the map. We restarted the game with that tech in mind and the rest is history!
 * Why a did you work on a DOS version parallel to a Win version? It's 1997, most players have Win 95 and having two versions parallel seems like a lot of effort. Was Win 3.11 still such a big deal?
 * I think I was coding on a DOS system for a good 50% of DK. Windows came in pretty late for us all.
 * About the multiplayer, did the Windows IPX ever work properly and why no TCP/IP?
 * No idea. Mark Lamport was the guy behind the multiplayer.
 * Dark Mistress, Hand of Evil, Horny, the inter-mission narrator's attitude, the game concept itself,... That's a lot of pretty unique stuff for the time. Where did all those many good ideas come from?
 * Peter wanted the inter-mission map, but the writing was probably James Leach. The hand was an idea Peter originally had for a spell, and I decided to make into the general cursor for the entire game. The Dark Mistress and Horny etc were all the ideas of Mark Healey (now of Mediamolecule) who was reading a lot of fetish-magazines at the time. Ideas come from all kinds of places - usually reactions to the game you are playing!
 * Is the hole-in-the-corner-until-reinforced problem a bug, or intentionally?
 * Not sure what you mean. You mean walling up your dungeon to slow down the incursions? If so, yes - they were intentional.
 * Was the hand of evil and the direct control of units always a core feature or was it added later?
 * Direct control of units was something Simon made work in the original 'no map updates version'. The hand of evil was my taking a spell Peter wanted in and making it the general way of interacting with the game.
 * Were there any features, which did not make it into the release version?
 * Yes. The ability to fill in holes (which broke the game completely), and Heroes Vs Keeper multiplayer. We ran out of time on that last one.
 * Any chances of a face lift remake?
 * If someone decides to make it, sure!
 * If possible, what would you like to see in a new Dungeon Keeper game?
 * Humour. Quirkiness. Easter-eggs. Fewer bugs. Apart from that, I didn't ever really want it to be 'bigger' just for the sake of it.
 * How is the relation to newer approaches to the game type (e. g. Dungeons 2 & 3)?
 * I've spoken with the guys who made them at GDC and they were really cool. I'm more than happy that DK had such a wide influence!
 * What other projects did you work on?
 * I created the Fable franchise with my brother, Simon.
 * What would you tell somebody, who would like to go into the game industry?
 * Don't expect a design position just because 'you're an ideas guy/girl'. Learn to make yourself useful in some other way, first. Everyone thinks they can design a game well. It takes experience and humility to design - especially in a team context - so learn to do something else while you're becoming a better designer!

YourMaster
Also for the review I wrote with YourMaster, the current lead developer of KeeperFX on Discord. Here is the transcript:

Capt.Sedaris (V): Since I always include a history segment in the videos, could you maybe write me some key notes about KeeperFX? Stuff like when did it start, what was the original intent and where it going now?

YourMaster: Well, sure. I'm not the original author, Mefisto was. He wrote a piece on that, which can be seen here.

Then his prediction came true, and after several years he had large and positive changes in both his personal and professional life causing him to spend serious time away from KeeperFX development, and eventually found a new hobby stating it unlikely for him to ever get back to it. Before he left, I was helping him out with testing for the changes he was making, but I'm not a programmer myself. When he left, the work-in-progress version he was working on had some great new functionality, but also some partial features that had game breaking bugs in them. I found that a waste, so I tried to make a new version, an 'unofficial' release where I only took the working new features and left out the stuff that was broken.

That was going to be the final version. I kept active on Keeperklan though, and over a year later a new developer decided he wanted to help out. He did not know much about Dungeon Keeper though, and could not do the reverse engineering of original Dungeon Keeper into new open source KeeperFX code. He did not stick around for long, but by getting him up to speed I figured out how to make some changes myself and continued to work on it, albeit slowly and basic changes. At some point I had opened the Discord server for Keeperklan and through that, more people got into contact, the occasional developer sticking around for a shorter or longer time, and my main role on the project shifted to be the maintainer, deciding which features I would allow into the project and how, testing them, designing functionality and occasionally doing some development myself. Mefistotelis' focus was on making the game open source, allowing others to improve on it. I cannot do that myself, so my focus is on those improvements, to make sure the game plays well on modern machines with a modern interface. Also, the original DK had limited mechanics, and making a good map for it was really, really hard design wise (see deeper dungeons, which are not universally praised), so a key focus of mine has been to give mapmakers more possibilities and mechanics to easily have good maps. This is the current state, and also for the foreseeable future.

There have be several contributors over the years, this page paints that picture well: https://github.com/dkfans/keeperfx/graphs/contributors

Many of them highly skilled to, but nobody willing to put in the dedication to work on basically everyday like mefisto did at the start, and with very little reverse engineering. There will probably be future releases and great new features and gameplay improvements, but as it looks now, the full rewrite will never finish, and as such KeeperFX will always share some limitations with the original game.

Links

 * KeeperFX a fan expansion for modern systems
 * Keeper Klan a community for Dungeon Keeper 1+2
 * Keeper Klan - Discord