I was one of the graphics team for this game. All in all, I worked on Daemonsgate over a period of 4 years (though did work on other games in that time). The play area on this game is mentally big and I can understand why players got frustrated over the long haul. In hindsight, shrinking the cities and the areas between them would have served the game well.
The game also suffers from sloppy design in places, and insufficient play-testing (mainly because it took so bloody long to play the thing even if you knew the solution). It was a loooong time ago though. The way the graphics were implemented (i.e. a lack of transparencies on wall-corners, lack of animation frames for the NPCs/PCs etc.) was largely down to memory restrictions - their just wasn't room for the code. Other games we worked on at the time (e.g. Nightbreed) handled this better because the maps weren't so demanding. The maps were constructed in a unique hierarchical way that meant we could do an aweful lot of play area with a very small amount of bitmaps - each city was built from only about 1024 carefully chosen character bitmaps. This did tend to make the cities a bit samey, but each city had it's own character-set so they did at least all have their own character. I think this was the first game I'd seen where the roofs of building came off when you went inside.
The original design had called for more interaction between on-map objects (handles and things on tables etc.), but in the end we were able to add so little to the landscape that it was wasn't possible to add things to interact with, so in fact there's very little you can do other than talk and fight. For similiar reasons, all fighting takes place on one of a set of small pre-defined combat maps, as we didin't have the RAM to instantiate fights in the main game maps. You had to do some creative work-arounds for RPGs in those days
The video that came with the game actually had very little to do with the game itself - the style was completely different, and made little reference to the plot of the game. It was filmed in Australia by a friend of the publishers pet dog or something, not by the game development team.
A lot of the PC characters in the game were digitised faces of the development team, that were then touched up. The one in the screenshots on this site is the ugly mug of Nigel Kershaw, the game's senior designer.
Over the development time, the development team for Imagitec came and went, but the key players as far as I can remember were: Senior Coder - Lee Garnett, Design - Nigel Kershaw and Martin something, Graphics - Jules "Jolly" Holtom, Colin Jackson, Steve Lodge and some other people, Music probaby by Barry something or other. Heh, it WAS 20 years ago.
Cheers
Colin Jackson