Temple of Elemental Evil Wrap Report
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 793
Key Strengths
As I've stated in other sections here, our art schedule was handled very well (except for the Hommlet map as noted), and all the artists were able to meet their monthly milestone goals and finished ahead of schedule, which allowed them a lot of extra time to add more animations, polish up existing work and help us test and balance the game. From reading comments and reviews, it also seems that the art is one of the best-received elements of the game, so not only was it scheduled well and remained on time, but the quality was outstanding.
The other area of the game that has been best received is the incredible combat system, which of course stems from the original 3.5 D&D rules, but had to be implemented to work well in a computer game. Although all the programmers strongly contributed to elements of the system, this became the pet project of Sean Craig, who embraced the combat system passionately (along with his Barbie dolls on his monitor), and added in the die roll history system so players could monitor their every die roll and click on hypertext to get a full understanding of them. All the little things that are so seamless (like the initiative bar) and seem obvious resulted from much trial and error and long meetings. In the end, for such a complex system, it's pretty smooth, which can be made as simple or as complex as you want it to be depending on your understanding of the rules.
