NWN: Wyvern Crown of Cormyr Interview
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Q: How did the jousting system in Wyvern Crown come about?
A: Well jousting was one of those things we wanted to add to give horses more of a high profile in the game and to add to the medieval pageantry of Cormyr.
We had talked about jousting for a long while as being one of the things we could do to achieve that and I remembered playing a jousting system Gary Gygax had devised for Chainmail (the direct precursor to Original Dungeons and Dragons). I contacted him and Gary was very gracious about my inquiries and we talked about how to update and revise the old jousting matrix in Chainmail for use in Wyvern Crown. That revised jousting matrix forms the basis of the underlying rules in Wyvern Crown's jousting mini-game.
In terms of the teamwork necessary to pull it off, I think that jousting was the one thing that showed off DLA's teamwork best. From models, textures, animations, music, sound and an abundance of technical design, code and adventure design and QA - the jousting system forced us to focus all the talents on the team in order to tease gameplay out of an engine that was never intended. That it worked at all was a bit of a miracle; that it worked as well as it does is a testament to a lot of hard work on the team.
