You had me at Heavy Metal.
HEAVY METAL!
I'm really looking forward to this. As ZicherCZ said, the different ways of progressing through the game seems interesting and it's really intriguing.
While I feel there might be a Jupiter Hell questions thread popping up soon, there's one important thing that was touched upon, but not expanded upon during the interview:
We want to keep the game relatively short, but introduce complexity by increasing the possibilities in a single playthrough — expanding the game horizontally, not vertically.
What appealed to me about DoomRL is the different levels of complexity added simply by difficulty levels and challenge modes - not tedious, repetitive gameplay that's drawn out forever (Think of it as every game NOT being AAo666, or even Ao100). You can sit down in a 1-2 hour break between classes or at work or something and pump out a gold badge (or a bronze/silver if you're newer), and play a couple of fun games during that time. To do the Platinum or Diamond challenges requires a little bit of planning, thought, and careful slow play (or grabbing the chainsaw and running really fast), and the Angelic badges give you something to strive for - all of this simply being the change between difficulty levels and challenge modes.
The games are long enough that permadeath is a pain in the ass, but not on the scale of something like Sir-Mc-Pimped-out-9000d9000-mofo died after 20 hours of play because of a shitty RNG roll. In addition, there's also a lot of player skill involved, such as knowing when to tank a hit or go for a dodge, when to use XYZ, timing your attacks, cornershooting (While it's rather second-nature to most of us, it's not really intuitive to a newer player) - as opposed to simply "standing in a doorway and tanking mobs 1 vs 1", as I heard it before. It's these things that i've been able to sell DoomRL to friends on to get them to at least give it a go, even if they're not the type of turn-based person.
As you said, the team's focused on expanding the game horizontally, not vertically. Does that mean that you're going to keep most of these features of DoomRL at least in mind when developing Jupiter Hell? And I don't necessarily mean the game mechanics - more the style of keeping the games
relatively short (As in, perhaps give or take 50% on a standard DoomRL game), with harder achievements and harder modes taking progressively more time/skill, and always giving the player something to strive for in terms of skill not sheer RNG luck?
I might have made the question a little bit longer then it needed to be, but it's still something that I feel has appealed not just to me as a DoomRL fan but also a reasonably-sized, if not huge part of the fanbase - and you'll probably get a lot more support/publicity for Jupiter Hell if it's that way inclined (Because not everything is Dwarf Fortress, an MMO, or Dark Souls.)