1. Tell us about yourself, Gabor. Why are you making S.C.O.U.R.G.E.? What inspired and motivated you? What are your goals?

For me writing S.C.O.U.R.G.E. is a diversion from my usual duties as a beast handler of the citadel. (We live behind the Matachin tower, for those of you acquainted with Serverian and the torturers.) I develop the game after the animals have been fed and cleaned, usually in the late hours of the night. When my candles have burnt out and the generator imps of the Arcanum Mobile are exhausted, I pray that enough power is left still to be able to commit the changes to cvs.

I've always been fascinated by immersive rpg-s like Ultima, Wizardry, etc. As a teenager I used to try to make DOS games, but it wasn't until I found out about Linux and the Open Source movement that my hobby was given an ideology and a community. There is a lot of good code out there and S.C.O.U.R.G.E. would not be possible without the help of others. Writing the game is a hobby, but it's a serious one and (according to Linus) it's the best kind of hobby possible.

The goals of making the game is to create an off-beat, interesting, dungeon crawler that may eventually become a full-blown rpg (with non-random outside areas.) I found that my projects were often bogged down in details, so I focused on a feature set that enables fast development while skipping over (for now) areas that may take a long time to complete. A lot of the features commonly associated with roguelikes work for my advantage. For example, using random dungeons instead of having to write a "dungeon editor" or using md2 (quake) models instead of creating custom animations saved me a lot of time.