Fall from Heaven has been in the making for 20 years. It's probably got several more months to go before it's officially 1.0 final, but it's fully functional and playable now. You can get it here if you've got a copy of Civilization IV and the Beyond the Sword expansion. I've probably spent more time with it than I have with any single MMO (Lord of the Rings Online excepted), and you can read more detail than you'd ever care to know in my series of game diaries.

But unlike most games this epic, you can trace Fall from Heaven back into the mind of a single guy. Not to deny that it's a team effort, as it obviously benefits from a group of talented and dedicated writers, artists, and programmers, who've been working on it for the past three years. But it was Derek Paxton who gradually created it over the course of 17 years before that. Paxton is now 36 and married, with two sons. He has a stable day job as a customer support guy for a big business software company in Ohio. He took nearly two hours out of his Saturday afternoon to talk with me about the mod, about its history, and even about what he might be working on next.

I should warn you that the conversation enters some pretty scary High Geek territory, plus it gets into some rather esoteric nuts-and-bolts talk about the mod itself. Think of it as a director's commentary to the definitive turn-based fantasy strategy game.

Read the interview after the jump.

Tom Chick: This is probably a silly question and I'm pretty sure I know the answer. But you are a gamer? You obviously know Civilization IV very well. You're not just a guy who picked up Civ IV and started playing it, I presume.

Derek Paxton: Right. Not only Civ IV, but III, II, I, from way back.

TC: Are you just a strategy gamer? Or do your tastes range father and wider than that?

DP: Role playing games and turn-based strategy games. I don't have the reflexes any more for the real-time strategy games and the first-person shooters. I was never any good at them. So I stuck mostly to role-playing and turn-based strategy games, which, as you can see, Fall from Heaven is kind of the merger of the two.

TC: How did you get into games?

DP: I grew up that generation. I'm 36 now, so I grew up with the Atari 2600 and the first personal computers, just as I was hitting late high school, college. I started with a Commodore 128 and games like Wing Commander.

TC: Now here's one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you. One of the most intriguing things I've read about Fall from Heaven is that it was originally a Dungeons & Dragons campaign you ran. Is that correct?

DP: Yeah. I ran various D&D campaigns for about 17 years.

TC: You were a DM, I presume?

DP: Yes.

TC: Did you use the purchased modules as well, or when you played were the type of guy who just wanted to create all his own stuff?

DP: I wanted to make my own stuff. But this was not one cohesive campaign over 17 years. It was playing for a year or two with this group, and then four or five years with this group, and as I went through the 17 years, it got more and more customized. I gradually worked up a mythology and a world history. If you were to compare a campaign at one time with five years later, there would be huge inconsistencies between the two.

TC: When you sat down to do Fall from Heaven, were you drawing from a campaign bible you'd written? Was it just old notes? Was all this stuff from your head that you remembered?

DP: I have a lot of Word documents. A lot of the stuff I did for the old D&D campaigns is written down. I went back through those to try to get ideas. But Fall from Heaven isn't an attempt to recreate the D&D games. The D&D games are just an inspiration for it. So if there's something that I think would work out very well for the mod, then I use it. And if there's something that doesn't make much sense, it gets tossed aside. The big things I used were the mythology, the background history of the world, and the way that magic works. A D&D campaign is much more focused on these individual character's actions...I don't know if you're a D&D player?

TC: Oh, sure. Well, was.

DP: So it's not empire focused, at least my games weren't. They're much more about these individuals. So I still had a lot of involvement with thing like, there's a cleric who worshiped this god and that, and how the gods related to each other, and what kinds of powers and spells they gave. That was all detailed really well. But I didn't have anything about the different countries and empires and leaders. There were some leaders who were involved in this game or that game, and I kind of stole these three from this campaign, and these four from another one...

TC: Are some of the leaders and heroes in Fall from Heaven from player characters?

DP: Yes. The big one that surprises people is Orthus.

TC: Ah! How can that be a player character? He's a big ol' mean...what is he? An orc? A barbarian?

DP: I ran a D&D game where all the players were monsters.

TC: That's awesome.

DP: They trashed cities and waylaid caravans and did what monsters do. I still get together with the real life Orthus from time to time. He's always happy to hear that his namesake is destroying cities and causing trouble.

TC: Did he have an axe or was that added after the fact?

DP: That was added after the fact.

TC: What does the real life Orthus do in real life? I would love to hear that he's a car salesman in Toledo or something.

DP: He's a data entry guy, a computer operator. He's the most mild, nice guy you'd ever meet.

TC: What are some of the other notable heroes that were originally player characters?

DP: Yeah, Tebryn. I don't know how much experience you have with the Sheaim civilization, but he is the one out to destroy the world. He was originally a player character. The players went through the campaign and they lost. The character Tebryn was about to get killed. There was another player that was supposed to protect him who didn't do his job. He left Tebryn in a very vulnerable situation. Rather than get killed, Tebryn made a pact for his soul, if he would be saved from the situation. So he got saved and the characters went on. And Tebryn later died in that campaign.

TC: Was this decision something the players came up with or was this scripted as part of the adventure.

DP: No, this was completely player actions. Just like in Fall from Heaven, I set up everything that happens previous to the campaign and the players do whatever they want to do from then on. So in a later D&D campaign, this powerful archmage wanted to destroy the world. And the reason he wants to do it is because he's in hell. He was offered a deal in hell: "Listen we'll let you out of this eternal torment if you help us destroy the world". So he's out destroying the world, the party in the campaign rallies against him, they go to fight him. And in the last game of the campaign, when they get to him, they realize that this was the player from the previous campaign. This was that character, Tebryn.

TC: If this player hadn't made the decision to make the pact, maybe the Sheaim would have never come about in Fall from Heaven.

DP: I don't know. It was my inspiration for them.

TC: So I hear you pronounce Sheaim and one of the things I wanted to ask you to do is pronounce certain words that I'm used to reading, but would have no idea how to say out loud. So for instance, how do you pronounce the elven race that begins with an "L"?

DP: Unless they were in the D&D game, I never pronounce them either. I have my own way of saying them in my head, but I have no idea if it's right. They're the [lo-jo-SAL-far].

TC: You actually get the "J" in there. It's not a silent "J"?

DP: The way I do it. Some of these are Celtic words. It could be pronounced [bob] for all I know.

TC: The development with your team is mainly done over a forum, isn't it? I guess you don't normally talk out loud with these guys. So how do you pronounce the dwarves that aren't the Khazad?

DP: The [LOO-chirp].

TC: Okay. What about the race with the settlements and the blimps?

DP: [cure-ree-o-TA-tays]

TC: The infernal race? What syllable do you hit?

DP: The infernal race?

TC: It begins with an "H".

DP: Oh, [HI-bor-em]. Now Hyborem was a major character in many of the D&D games, so his name I'm very familiar with.

TC: The insane puppet maker race. Which syllable to do you hit there?

DP: [bal-SER-aphs]

TC: Could I go through and ask you to do a brief sort of director's commentary about some of the races? I'm curious about the inspiration for some of them, such as the Balseraphs.

DP: The Balseraphs are a bit unique for a couple reason. One, that they never existed in any of the D&D games. That is the only civilization that's in Fall from Heaven that has no tie back to the D&D games. It was made just for the mod, because when we were making Fall from Heaven and we had lined up, "Here are the civilizations we want to use", we kept having all these cool ideas that never fit anywhere. At some point we said, "Listen, we're just going to create a civilization and they're going to be nuts". They were the home for all the mechanics that we love but that didn't fit into any rational system. That's where the Balseraphs came from.

TC: You have two flavors of elves and dwarves. How did it come about that these stereotypical fantasy archetypes get split into two factions.

DP: There's a lot of value in the fantasy archetypes. People see elves, they know what that means. But I didn't want just another cookie-cutter version of "okay, these are the elves and they like to ride unicorns and they like pretty colors and live in forest and here are the dwarves and they're really dour". So I tried to find a way they could be true to their archetypes with a unique twist that fits the theme of the world. And the theme of world is corruption and redemption. The best way to do that with the elves was put them in a violent civil war where any of the "we dance around mushroom circles and play music under the stars" aspects are all gone. They just don't have the...bandwidth to do that. It's just not the world they live in. These elves on both sides are very rough, very violent, as compared to what you typically see.
The dwarves come from dwarves and gnomes. The gnomes were golem creators. But when I brought the gnomes over into Fall from Heaven, it just wasn't worthwhile to create a new race, so I ended up just pulling them in as dwarves. I also like that people who want to play dwarves have a couple of options.

TC: The Hippus are pretty straightforward. Horse-riding raider types.

DP: We wanted to appeal to a wide audience in having some that were very mechanic-heavy, like the Khazad with the vault system, which is a very stiff mechanic that rules the civilization. For the Khazad, you have to play into that mindset. And we wanted to have other ones that played more like typical Civilization civs. Hippus are one of those. The Doviello are probably the closest to just playing a straight Civ IV civilization, because they don't require buildings for a lot of their units.

TC: Were the Lanun tough to do since they rely on water, on oceans? That must have presented some challenge.

DP: Yeah, the hardest thing about them is that the map types determines how powerful they're going to be. Put them on an island map, and they're a powerhouse. You put them on a great plains map and they're very weak. A lot of players have said that's a fault that needs to be addressed. But in my mind, that's perfectly fine. I have no problem that if you play them on a great plains map, you run into significant challenges, but if you play them on an island map, it's almost like cheating. That's okay.

TC: The Calabim with their vampire mechanic. I know that's something many folks are fond of.

DP: That was one of the first things we did in Fall from Heaven II. People had been asking from vampires ever since Fall from Heaven I. It was one of the most requested features. The Calabim are, "here's one unit, here's what it's capable of doing, with all its vampire abilities". But the really nice thing about the Calabim is that outside of that one unit, they're a pretty standard civilization. That one unit really makes the player rethink about how city population is a new resource. It changed the way the whole civilization felt.

TC: The Sidar lean heavily on a mechanic unique to Civilization IV with the specialist system. How was that a part of the D&D campaign?

DP: They offered power in exchange for the slowly waning life force of the person. We had a player character at one point who became a Sidar. It affected his magical ability and gave him some bonuses, but over time he became less and less emotional and conscious, so he started to suffer for it. So we looked at how we could model that in Fall from Heaven. We have these powerful characters with the ability to become a resource, so it seemed natural to turn them into specialists.

TC: So the Grigori have heroes that can become any unit?

DP: They spawn new Great People called adventurer units. An adventurer is a 0/0 unit who gains one experience point per turn up to 100 experience points and can then be upgraded to anything. So you have a adventuring unit and make it into whatever you want to do with it.

TC: Why were the Ilians so long in coming?

DP: If I was going to go back and change anything about Fall from Heaven, I probably would not have gone with 21 civilizations. It's too much to do at the quality I want to do it at. Doing all of them at once was too much of a challenge, so we spec'ed it out over four phases of the project and the Illians got pushed to the last one. Their mechanics, having a leader who becomes a super god unit, seemed so hard to implement and were so tied into the scenarios we created, which were one of the last stages.

TC: The Kuriotates. How difficult was it to make a civilization limited to only a few cities?

DP: Our original goal for them was that they would only have super cities. So, depending on the map size, they could only have maybe five cities and that was it. So it's fun to play as them because you don't have to get into micromanaging an empire. You have five cities producing things and that's it. But we had to put settlements in because there are so many resources that would never get within your borders. We needed a way for them to grab resources, to spread their borders without building new cities, and that's where settlements - cities that don't produce anything - came from.

TC: I've been playing the Erebus map type, with the mountain ranges as borders between players' starting positions, and passes as choke points. It seems like the Kuriotates, with their blimps, would break that. Are those blimps specifically for the Erebus maps?

DP: Yes, that's specifically why we put those in. On that map type, they would get locked into land based cities.

TC: When someone plays on Erebus map types, are different races put in specific types of land?

DP: Yes, the Malakim start on desert, which is a pretty significant loss for them.

TC: Does this mean, it kind of breaks - and maybe not "breaks", since if people want to do it, you seem fine with that - but does it sort of thwart the design intentions when you take the races out of the Erebus map script.

DP: No, not really. I don't balance the civilizations for the Erebus map script.

TC: The Clan of Embers are sort of your catch-all for orcs and goblins and whatnot. Are they just a standard archetype or is there anything that excites you about those guys?

DP: I like the idea of being in league with the barbarians from the beginning. Fall from Heaven has that initial dangerous exploration stage where it's all about sending your scouts out, but if a scout comes back, you're really lucky. As the Clan of Embers, I thought it was so cool to not worry about the barbarians and to be able to hunt those early civilizations, to start from the beginning attacking, to follow Orthus around as he attacks cities and to maybe try to grab one or two in his wake.

TC: The Amurites are your magic users. Does anyone else tie so much into the magic system as them?

DP: The Sheaim are good summoners. In fact, Keelyn [one of the Balseraph leaders] is the daughter of a Sheaim summoner and Perpentach [the main Balseraph leader]. That's why she has the summoner trait.

[NOTE: Sincere apologies to the civilizations I forgot about once we got onto another tangent.]

TC: All this mythology and the backstory, how do you guys all go about creating this for the game? Three of the folks on the team are credited as writers. How do you come up with all this rich detail?

DP: Fall from Heaven has been in development for three years, but the world history has been around for about 20, including the 17 years the D&D game was going on. From that aspect, it's not surprising that the world history is so deep compared to just the game. But that doesn't mean there aren't tons of gaps. One of the requirements for the team is that they have a lot of reading to do. They've read through all the history stuff, they've asked a lot of questions. In some cases, there's some very specific tie ins. We have a long thread [on the development forums] that's all about world history. But there are a lot of gaps for them to fill in. They do a really good job of writing to the world.

TC: It sounds like a huge part of your job is team management. You've got these talented creative people. There must be a lot of creative wrangling.

DP: I'm a project manager in real life, so that part comes easily to me. But that's something that maybe other mod makers kind of struggle with. For my job, I have a thread for the artists about all of the art assets that have to be created. I keep that up to date so that if they get inspired to create something, they can look at a list of 60 things and they can go, "I'm going to do that one and this one right now" and I don't push them. It's not "Hey, we need this right now, so please make this for me". It's what they feel inspired to do.

TC: That's another question I wonder about. So many mods, especially big ambitious ones like this, fall apart as team members lose motivation or move on. It's almost miraculous that you've managed to keep so many people inspired for so long for something like this that's so intricate. How is it that you've done this when so many other mods fall apart?

DP: I've been lucky. I think a lot of it is that we always had a vision of what the end goal looked like. We never deviated. We never felt like we created something, then created something again next week, and cut out what we'd done the previous week. The list of the work to do was always out there and it was always being whittled away. And I got really really lucky with this team, with their willingness to jump in and do things. Also, we never really relied on any one person. If anyone dropped out or needed to go away and work on something else for a while, that was fine.

TC: Over the course of the years, what have been some of the most hotly debated topics?

DP: There haven't been heated discussions. Part of that is because...well, because Fall from Heaven is such a popular mod, I get a lot of requests to help out. But I only invited to the team people who've already contributed to the mod and I always make sure everyone's okay with me saying, "No, we're not going to do it that way". That's hard to find, and I've been very lucky to find people like that. Because at the end of the day, somebody has to say yes or no.

TC: What are some of the things where you guys finally said, "This isn't going to work, we can't do this"?

DP: There were a couple of things that didn't make it through the initial design document. Wilderness areas that would be, maybe a desert area, that players' culture couldn't go into it, cities couldn't be founded in it, it would continue to spawn creatures until players cleared it out and turned it from a wilderness area into a normal area. We never found a reasonable way to do those kinds of mechanics. Multiple maps was a big one. In the mid-game, instead of having Hyborem appear on the map and start to settle, in the mid game, we would have opened up an entirely new map area full of demons and hellish creatures. We'd give you things to go and fight that were more fitting for your champions and mid-game units. But we never got two maps going, so we had to cut that idea.

TC: Were there any civilizations that were dropped?

DP: No. From the very beginning, we've had 21 civilizations. We've had a lot of requests to add more.

TC: That's insane.

DP: 21 is a huge amount.

TC: Now what now that you're feature complete?

DP: We got some questions from the community about "Why don't you keep going? Why don't you just endlessly keep patching and improving and adding new features?" But I think it's important that we call an end to the project. In my mind, mods end one of two ways. Either they're completed or the creators just drift off.

TC: Is it more boring for you from now on out, now that you're just patching and fixing it up instead of adding new features?

DP: You know, I worried about that. It is really really fun to make up new systems and get into design talks. And some of the people on the team are heavily into design. It's a little bit duller for them. But for my mind, we're going from designing a game to perfecting a game. We're getting into tweaking and tightening all the bolts that it was just impossible to do up until now.

TC: What right now, without necessarily saying how you're coming down on these issues, what are the hotly debated issues with the community about game balance and what needs to be changed. For instance, the game I just played, I can understand people objecting to Keelyn having the summoning trait with the way puppets work. Also, the way Nox Noctis works. What are the big things that people are whining about?

DP: Well, I don't want to say whining, but there's lot of feedback from the community...

TC: Feedback, yeah, that's a better way to put it.

DP: Right now a big discussion we're having is around cottages...there was a significant balance change [based on a bug]. I'm making the early game techs a little cheaper, I want the early games to go by a little faster. And the end-game techs I want to be a little more expensive, because it seems like once you get an empire going, you're just grabbing techs, one, two, three, four, without very much time between them at all.

TC: How about things like Keelyn and the summoning trait and Nox Noctis? Is that something tabled to look at later?

DP: No, they're both open right now. There's a lot of people talking about Nox and the bad side of having your entire civilization invisible.

TC: I know there are debates about how invisibility works. It seems like that's a huge element of fantasy gaming - invisible units - but that's not something that was in Civ IV. Are there other headaches with things that Civ IV wasn't built for that a fantasy mod needs to do?

DP: Civ IV does have invisibility.

TC: Oh, right, like spies.

DP: The thing we did differently was dynamic invisibility. But more towards your question, the spell system was the big one there. If we wanted more of a unit focus than an empire focus, we needed lots of new things for units to do so players had lots of toys to play with. The spell system was the big part of that.

TC: Can you tell me a bit about the AI. What things can the AI not do yet?

DP: We started Fall from Heaven II, we wrote a spell system, and that was all running okay, but it was largely ignored by the AI. When we converted to Beyond the Sword, we rewrote everything from scratch. We started over. No code was copied over. The big change that we made was we rewrote the spell system from the ground up, so the AI would have some idea of what to do. The big place you notice that right now is with damage spells and with summons. The AI knows, "I can summon a demon that can move two steps, and I have an enemy that's two steps away, so I better do that even though I can summon something that's more powerful but only moves one step. I'm going to summon the one that can get to my enemy." So the AI does all those calculations. It looks at if it has multiple damage spells it can cast, it looks at which one will have the greatest effect on the enemies within its range. So it does those things very well. The thing that the AI doesn't do, is that it doesn't consider moving and then casting. So it won't go out and cast Spring on a desert tile to turn it into a grass tile, because it doesn't understand "I need to move out there and cast a spell". It only looks at the unit, where it is right now: "Let me look through my spells and see which makes the most sense to use". From a summoning and damage perspective, it doesn't know "if I move one step to the north and cast Maelstrom, then I'll get a better hit and damage more units". It doesn't do that right now.

TC: Is that a limitation of the system, or is it something that can be fixed?

DP: It's something that can be fixed. It's a pretty big step, which is why it's been that for this long. But it's part of the AI tweaks we want to make.

TC: Is it a bear making the AI handle all the choices involved with the religion system?

DP: Not too much. We ended up cutting some features because there's just no way the AI would understand it. We tried to find systems and mechanics that we thought the AI would have a reasonable chance to deal with. The Kuriotates having a limited amount of cities to work with, it's okay from the AI perspective, it's not awesome at it. It doesn't know that it's only limited to a certain amount of cities, but generally the first couple of cities you create are the ones you want to be big, so that works out all right. The Khazad with their productivity based on the amount of gold they have, we had to go in and make a couple tweaks so that when the AI is playing as the Khazad, there are some things it won't do. It won't buy things for gold, it's a lot less likely to spend gold for events, it tends to hoard it a bit more. But these are all systems that work with the AI we have to work with.

TC: When new people sit down to play Fall from Heaven II, they have no idea what's going on part of the time. Is that something you like, or something you want to resolve? Do you like it when someone see something and later discovers what it means, or is it something you wish was documented the moment it's experienced?

DP: My goal is that a new player can jump into a civilization and quickly learn all aspects of that civilization, which is 8 to 12 things, and be able to learn that during the course of his game very easily, but it's not necessary that he understands all the mechanics that are going on with the other civilizations. I do like that those to be kind of hidden. And when he goes then to play another civilization, he has a new page to turn, and new things to learn and experience.

TC: A lot of game developers get negative feedback. They're routinely told their game sucks, there's a lot of advocacy for different games. Do you get any negative feedback? I can't imagine anyone having anything mean to say about Fall from Heaven. Are you just showered with unadulterated praise?

DP: I did have a guy that wrote me and told me he installed Fall from Heaven II on his computer, and his computer, when he was sleeping, started making these really weird noises, even when it was turned off. He thought it was possessed by demons, so he got up and uninstalled it and it stopped doing it. I do occasionally get some weird complaints. The biggest "you suck" kind of messages I get are usually about some obscure bug. They rant and yell at me because we haven't fixed it yet.

TC: Another thing I figure you might get, in an MMO, when someone's class gets nerfed, people on message boards get angry. With patches that change the balance, do people get attached to a specific race and then get angry when you nerf it?

DP: We have a really really good community. Whenever I go out and read the World of Warcraft forums or things like that, I just am so thankful that the people who play Fall from Heaven are nice about it. Part of that is because it's a mod and they're getting it for free, so most people are pretty reasonable. But, yeah, there are people that love one particular thing, and whenever it gets nerfed, they complain about it a little bit. The one thing I'm kind of surprised to hear negative feedback about, is that some people hate whenever any negative thing happens to their units or civilization. Even things that are supposed to be negative. Like when you explore a lair, there's a chance for a good thing and a chance for a bad thing. And I will forever get people complaining about the bad thing happening to their units.

TC: The event system. I imagine some of those people must get very upset about certain events.

DP: When we were beta testing, there was an event called tsunami that would wipe out a city on the coast.

TC: Whoa. That's still in there?

DP: No, it's not.

TC: Are there other events that you decided had to go?

DP: I keep that in mind, that very lesson. I want events to add a little flavor, maybe make an interesting situation. But events should never strongly influence the game. I shouldn't be going along and just have an event and say, "Boy, I just went from first to last place, or last to first place".

TC: You ask people who want to contribute to the mod to donate to UNICEF. What's behind that particular choice?

DP: That was the idea of one of the members of the art team. We always got requests from people who said, "Hey, I'd like to donate a couple of bucks". But I'm not in a position where I need cash. And this is just my hobby. I don't have any personal reason myself why it's UNICEF. But I like what UNICEF does. It makes sense to me that they're going for helping people out who have diseases that we've already solved. These are five dollars pills or treatments for malaria and smallpox, all these diseases that we can treat cheaply. Millions of dollars to cure cancer and prevent AIDS is worthwhile, but I like the fact of focusing on the diseases we already know how to cure and getting help to people who are suffering from them.

TC: Tell me a little about the press coverage you've gotten. Do you seek it out or does it just stumble onto you? Have you ever sent out press releases, for instance?

DP: [laughs] No, I have not. I think our press coverage is mostly just you.

TC: Do you think Fall from Heaven II should be reviewed as a full game? How would you feel if, like PC Gamer, gave it a rating the same way they would any other release? Do you feel a mod should be covered that way?

DP: Yes. The only thing I would want to do first is get the documentation set up a little better.

TC: Right, finish making the game.

DP: We intentionally piggyback on top of the learning curve in Civilization IV. So if someone comes along and judges us straight out of the box, boy, I can understand how they'd feel like there's a lot of options here and a lot going on and not understand any of it.

TC: Do you still play? Just sit down and play a game normally?

DP: Surprisingly, yes, I do. And I'm kind of surprised at that, after three years, but when I do sit down and play some Fall from Heaven - and I think that's pretty important, as a designer, that you actually are playing regular games - but I'm actually finding myself having fun. It is the game that I always wished someone would make.

TC: What is your favorite race to play these days?

DP: I like the Lanun.

TC: Do you put them on an island map?

DP: I play just random maps or the Erebus map. It's not necessarily about the powers they have. I don't really like naval battles and I've never thought that Civilization was very good at the whole naval war thing. But I like Lanun, their unit graphics look so cool, and I like their history.

TC: Aside from Fall from Heaven, do you play other games? Do you have the time?

DP: Yeah, I'm playing Disgaea 3 right now.

TC: Disgaea 3? That's, like, a hundred-hour game.

DP: I picked it up about a year ago and played it for about a half hour and couldn't figure out all the stuff that was going on. But I heard it was so great, and my son played it all the way through and he kept telling me "it's a great game, it's a great game". So I picked it up a couple weeks ago and now I'm sucked into it. I'm having a great time.

TC: As somebody who's into turn-based games, I can understand why you would like that. Do you play JRPGs?

DP: Yeah, Final Fantasy, all those games. Huge. I was in line for Final Fantasy XII when it came out at midnight.

TC: Ah, in that case I'm surprised you haven't played Disgaea yet. So if I may ask, you're a married fella, you got kids, what does your family think of the fact that you are making a big nerdy game?

DP: [laughs] My boys are 19 and 21. My son's been playing Metal Gear Solid on his PS3. Right now I hear him in the next room playing. I have a PS3 sitting underneath my desk right here. I can switch my monitor over to my computer. We have an Xbox 360 in there. We are a gaming household.

TC: Have you ever gotten into MMOs?

DP: I played EverQuest for a little while. I tend to get really into a hobby. It was Magic the Gathering for a long time. And then EverQuest II, which I played for a couple of years. I was, like, the fifth wealthiest player in the game. And then I decided to go on to something else. That's when I jumped over to Fall from Heaven. I played World of Warcraft just in the beta. But I don't like grouping. I got to the mid-20s and when I felt like I had to group with other people, I dropped out of the game.

TC: Yeah, that's a huge time sink. I wouldn't want you doing that instead of Fall from Heaven. You mentioned in the interview with Soren [Johnson] that you've been approached by someone who wanted to do a Fall from Heaven boardgame. Where do you see this going next?

DP: Right now, just working on getting it finished it up. But, yeah, there's a company that makes boardgames and they offered to pay for the materials and the art and everything. They would pay me a percentage of the money they make if I would just do the design and let them use the name. There's money to be made there, but I don't really have any good boardgame ideas that seem unique or worthwhile enough for me right now.

TC: Do you have other games or mods in the back of you head that you think about making?

DP: Yeah. I keep a Word document on my hard drive of all the game ideas I have. But I'm not going to make another Civilization IV mod. I'm glad I got into it when I did, but it's getting a little long in the tooth now. I'm probably going to wait for the next great mod-able game to come along. But I don't have any plans right now to start another project.

TC: Can you say anything about what kinds of things are in that Word document?

DP: One of them that I've been messing with most frequently is called "Well of Souls". It starts the player off as a gladiator. It's a tactical fighter, kind of like Disgaea, but once you get out of the gladiator arena, there's a world you can explore. You basically set up an adventuring company and you hire and recruit, like a baseball or football game, where you're looking for people with various talents and skillsets, outfitting them, sending them out on quests together. I guess right now, I'm thinking along the lines of a tactical fighting game more than an empire builder.

TC: Were you an X-Com guy?

DP: I've never played it.

TC: What? That's sort of the prototypical tactical combat turn-based game. You know, it's probably because you were busy playing D&D.

DP: Yeah.

TC: Do you still play D&D?

DP: I don't. It shut down a couple of years ago. Now I get together with the same people I used to play D&D with, we play cards and different boardgames and stuff.

TC: What boardgames do you like?

DP: We play WizWar.

TC: That's an old one.

DP: One of my friends has this huge suitcase of obscure card games and stuff he gets from gaming conventions. We just pull out a new game we've never played before and try to figure it out.

TC: Have you tried any of the newer one, like the new Eurogames?

DP: I haven't. We played a lot of card games. We had one called...Banana....or...Monkey War, I think was the name of the game. You choose a different kind of monkey and you're in a cage and you get cards and you throw bananas at each other.

TC: Do you play CCGs with these guys?

DP: We used to, but we all got kids and you need money for college and collectible card games are really expensive.

TC: They really are. You said you went through a Magic phase. Did you try any of the other CCGs?

DP: I did. I have a collection Vampire cards.

TC: Ah, yeah. Vampire is awesome. That was the one I really liked, but that's also one of the toughest to play, because you need a group, and the deck-building and collecting are so important. It's so difficult to get a new guy into Vampire. Hey, that must have been some inspiration for the Calabim. Don't they have Brujah units?

DP: Yes, that is a name stolen directly from the Vampire game. Magic influenced Fall from Heaven quite a bit. Your empire is a mix of: one, the civilization I started with; and two, this religion that I picked; and three, the kind of mana I have access to. The mix of all those things determines what I am. A lot of that comes from playing Magic, where maybe you have a black deck, but you want some green cards in there and some blue cards in there.

TC: So one final question, and it's sort of a broad one. You said before to that this is your hobby, but I'm still wondering why this? Why are you are doing this? Why have you created Fall from Heaven?

DP: When I started, I wanted to learn how to program. I'd never done it before and I'd picked up, you know, "21 Days to Teach Yourself C++" and got bored with that. So I thought, here's a fun way to teach myself how to program and there's this game I've always wanted to play. It's in the back of my head. And I thought originally it would just be me and if a couple of people wanted to download it, so much the better. But I was really making the game I wanted to play. I've just been amazed at how many other people want to play it, too.

(I talked a bit longer with Derek after the tape recorder was switched off. I thought it was interesting that he also asked me a few questions, mostly about what I thought about Fall from Heaven and how it's progressed. I'm not sure how helpful it was for Derek to hear me saying a few different ways that I think it's awesome, but it reminded me that he did the same thing during an interview with Civilization IV developer Soren Johnson. You can read Soren's comments here, by scrolling down about a third of the way, to the point directly under the picture of the swirling black hole spell. It's a great critique of the mod that's also partly an explanation of why some of us old-school turn-based gamers love it so much.)