Chris Taylor on Dungeon Siege
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1080
Hey Everyone, I don't know if I can answer all your questions, but perhaps I can answer a few. In the coming weeks I'll try to spend more time talking about some of the details of making an RPG that I have learned since we started Gas Powered Games. Sometimes I just tell people that I must have been crazy to do an RPG, because seriously, it's an outrageous amount of work. Here are some thoughts of mine that may help you get your head around our release date slipping.
First, we decided to make a 3D game, and to make it really interesting, we wanted a huge continuous 3D world with no loading screens. Seemed like an easy enough thing to do... ha!! I am so amazed at the engineering team, and what they have been able to achieve... they actually did it! The technical details to make this work will simply blow your mind, the math routines, the multiple-threads, the pathfinding, lighting systems, editors, it literally goes on and on. And it runs on four different versions of windows, including XP.
Second, we wanted to have a multi-character party, but we didn't want to force people to have to play with all eight if they didn't want to, we wanted to give the players a choice to be able to play the game anyway they wanted to. We are in the process of tuning and balancing this... it means we have to play the game with one character all the way through to the end, and then with another skill, and then with two, and then with all eight... mixing and matching the combinations making sure that we cover most of the cases to our satisfaction. Almost an impossible task in and of itself (I am sure one of you guys can run the numbers). And the world is huge!!!
Third, this naughty little feature called Multiplayer! Yikes, this game is not played in little 'areas' or on fixed tilesets that we can load into memory, it's completely 100 percent dynamic and can have all eight players running around anywhere in the world. The Host computer has to keep track of it all, and loading up to eight player's
"frustums" on the fly, to insure that each person has the same seamless experience that they would have if they were playing the single player game. Yes, setting up the code to get this working is one thing, but getting it optimized and debugged is another. It only takes one glitch and we have to set up all the machines in the multiplayer test lab to duplicate the problem. Testing and fixing these is time consuming to say the least.
The next thing is we built a single player world because we wanted to tell a story, but this world wasn't going to be the ideal world to play a multiplayer game in, or so we thought. So we set out to build an additional world, just to support the multiplayer game. You can still play the single player world in mutiplayer, and it's a blast, but it's a different style of game. We wanted to have both of those worlds available to play right out of the box, and this is no small feat, as you can imagine. More testing (in the case of our game, double), more play balancing, more of everything. Doh! Who's idea was this?!! :)
When we started Gas Powered Games we shot for the moon. Ironically we never actually got all the things into the game that we wanted, far from it, but we got the real important stuff in and now we are trying to finish it all, and it's a huge task, much bigger than anything that any one of us could have imagined. Around the office I joke by saying, who's idea was this? They should be shot! I am actually glad we are doing an RPG, especially now that we are past all the hard stuff. Our days are spent fixing bugs, playing the game, talking about little things that we could do to make the game better. Studying playtest reports to see what confused people, or got them lost, or anything at all that interfered with them having a fun time, and then set to work to get those changes incorporated into the game for the next build. It's really the best time of the project, it's just taking way longer than we thought.
Lastly, and this is the part that has most people scratching their heads... Why did we slip the game and not provide a specific date? First, it's because we don't want to release another date and then change it again. We are sure that we need to come up with the final date and stick to it. In reality this is very hard to do despite the fact that the concept is simple. While we are cranking away fixing bugs, tuning and balancing, and doing all the usual stuff each day, we are compiling all of our bug data to figure this new date out. Press releases are usually short and don't go into this detail, so it probably worked out better in the end that I talked about it here.
I enjoyed reading all the conspiracy theories, there is some funny shit up on this forum. You are a great bunch and it pains me to put you through this sort of thing, believe me, I wish this business wasn't like this. If any of you want to send me email expressing yourself more freely, please send to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. I can't guarantee a quick response, but I will absolutely give you a response sooner or later. Back at Cavedog I replied to absolutely every single email I received and I will continue that tradition here at GPG (it just might take me a while to get through them all!)
I read all the posts on this thread today and will continue to read as much as I can. You guys don't need me to tell you that I work seven days a week, spend very little time at home with my family, and am packed with stuff to do from the minute I get to the office till I leave for home, but that's my choice, I still love this business!!
