The Bard's Tale Developer Diary
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We have tackled several technical challenges in developing The Bard's Tale in order to make the game play and look as good as possible. One thing we pride ourselves on is putting in interesting moments that may or may not have anything to do with completing a quest but are entertaining for the player to experience. These aren't afterthoughts and we got to great lengths to make these moments detailed and polished. For example, there are a several scenes in The Bard's Tale where NPC's break out into song. Some are just for laughs while some also have helpful clues in the lyrics. In either case the game design called for the classic yellow karaoke ball to bounce across the text of the lyrics in time to the singing. While this is far from the bigger technical hurdles we have leapt in making the game, I was a bit concerned about this feature since it meant we would have to create the timing data for each of several songs across several languages. That is a lot of grunt work for some poor sucker and I had a feeling it would end up being me since I'm primarily responsible for our language localization system.
