The Dream Vision

Dare to dream - you never know when they will come true.

“You have to dream before your dreams can come true” – Abdul Kalam

School reports often labelled me as “a daydreamer”. To them, it was a bad thing, as it meant that I was not giving the teachers 100% of my focus, but to me it was to become a badge of pride. During these times, my mind was never blank – instead I was off creating worlds in my imagination, populating them with all kinds of weird and wonderful people and places.

Often, these worlds were related to the games I played, and there are countless examples on the internet of my dreams being made manifest as short stories on various forums. One of these dreams – a meeting between Leif Erikson and Christopher Columbus at sea was to become the basis for my earliest concepts for the Vinland books and games.

Dreams are I believe, one of the most important assets that a designer can have, and this is the philosophy that I embrace when creating new things. When I was young it was only fantastic worlds that sprang forth, but now it can be anything from game mechanics to mentally play-testing and discovering new nuances that I would perhaps have missed. I will lay awake at night, often for hours mentally going through my experiences of the day, filtering through anything valuable and locking it away. I always sleep with a notebook by the bed in case something very important or inspirational pops up, and write it down.

When working on Prophesy of Pendor and Vinland: Arctic Assault I used to lay out the “Dream Game”. For this I used to write out my plans on the development forum, purposefully ignoring all limitations of budget, manpower and resources. This was the very best design that I could come up with, and the sheer scope of this used to drive our programmers mad when they first read it.

Note the highlighted “I” there. My dreams are just that – mine, and while I may once have believed that I was some sort of genius, experience has taught me that the insight of others is often extremely valuable. I will frequently discuss my “Dream Visions” with friends at the pub, or post them in full on our development forums. I want, no need input from others – this is the only way to improve them.

This is where the evolution part of the design process comes in. With the initial concepts aired in public, I then encourage a discussion of the elements, including most importantly a reality check from more cynical members of the team. It is during this that the ideas are refined; the possible expanded upon, and the implausible rejected (or put aside). The dreams will evolve with each iteration, becoming less a vision and more a design, being polished and developed during each pass until it is in a form most suitable for implementation.

A great example of this process in action is in Prophesy of Pendor, when we were working on the Order of Dawn. At first there was a very black and white relationship between them and their arch rivals, the Eventide. One was good, one was evil. Very simple... very boring.

During discussions it was then questioned whether the very principles underpinning the Dawn could be corrupted in such a way as to make them possibly even more evil than the reviled Eventide – and if so, how to include the Eventide into this story. This is where the fanaticism of the Dawn came into play, their very dedication to good and justice to the exclusion of all else led them to becoming fanatics blind to any other outcomes.

A branch of the Order awoke to the danger and decried the zeal of their brethren, pushing for a more pragmatic approach – resulting in a massive schism and the formation of the Eventide. Unfortunately this very pragmatism would then go on to corrupt the Eventide in its own way, but the outcome for both orders was vastly more complex and interesting than the initial dream. The design evolution had done its job.

Ironically it was a programmer who called me out on this process, tired of the continual conceptualisation and evolution of the ideas. He demanded that we designers only present fully formed ideas, straight from our minds. While it is entirely possible to personally polish the vision I have; this was a problem I struggled with during work on Vinland: Arctic Assault, as the dreams I had underwent far less refinement than they do on say, Starium with its much larger team. I am under no illusions that it is the input of others that allow it to reach their full potential and thankfully the other designers on my team backed me on this and the programmer conceded on how things were developed over time.

I would encourage fellow designers, to post / air / discuss / debate their Dream Vision, and then collectively revise it until it shines. Restrictions of the internet, and the nature of much of my work being virtual means that much of this must be done online (though this means there is automatically a log of any suggestions), though some of the most fun discussions I have are with friends at the pub, hammering out the concepts over a beer. The more relaxed the environment, the better it is for this. There is never a “right” answer to this exercise, but the more angles it is explored from, the more refined the dream will become.

It can be useful to have a thick skin for this, because sometimes it behoves the project throw it out as impractical. Even then, it should never be deleted, as in my experience a rejected idea would become the basis for some of our most important and popular features.

So don’t stop dreaming, and never stop sharing them because you never know; it could be the next Big Thing.

Image courtesy of http://www.worth1000.com/entries/488412/fantasy-planet

Playing games to making them – how perspectives change

Once long, long ago, I was just a gamer and I simply consumed the digital entertainment provided by others. Explosions? Awesome. New guns? Sweet! At that time I put most of my energy into thinking about how great the experience was, and that I wanted more of it.

After a time I became curious though... was this the best that could be made? Those little areas that irritated me, could they be improved? If I had unlimited time and incredible skills, what could I make myself? What would be the perfect game?

The answer this would change on a daily basis depending on what I was doing at the time. Warcraft II made me convinced that the “perfect” game was a real time strategy. Shadowbane determined that the true path lay in an MMO. Mount and Blade led me to believing that the future lay in medieval simulations. Now I am sure that this is not an experience unique to me – I’ll bet that many other gamers will spend the rainy days at the office dreaming of their perfect game. Playing scenarios through their head of each awesome scene, shaped always by their own experiences.

My version of Warcraft II had no unit caps and a more expansive tech tree. Gareth’s Shadowbane, removed the money farming grind, and replaced it with automated farms and peasants who provided an hourly income. Battlefield 1943 introduced factories and an upgrade tree for unlocking new items and tanks.

I then started working as a game designer, first for the Mount and Blade mod, Prophesy of Pendor, and then later as the lead designer of my own studio, Zatobo, and now most recently as a freelance game design contractor.

This collective experience changed everything.

Just playing games changed my perspective of imagining my perfect game to analysing those products and working out precisely what I liked and disliked about them as I played. I took them to pieces in my mind, bemoaning bad design decisions (I cannot play Diablo III anymore, its core design simply ticks me off too much now), working out how they solved problems, and rarely getting excited by clever mechanics. Some games left me wondering about the future of the industry (the aforementioned Diablo III), and declaring its imminent demise, while others left me with a sense of wonder at what they had achieved (Mount and Blade).

Over the weekend I had something of a unique opportunity. I found myself playing “Game Dev Tycoon” by Greenheart Games, with some friends. While the game itself is good fun, it isn’t revolutionary, nor does it do much that is truly innovative but its subject matter is fascinating. A game about making games (with an achievement for making the game, in the game...).

This made my think about my own process of making games – how did I do it? Why did I do it this way? What had I learned during my three years as a part of the industry?

Well this is a subject for next time. Stay tuned! 

Image courtesy of; deborahtindle - http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/change%20perspective

Game Dev Tycoon - http://www.greenheartgames.com/

How do you like your eggs?

So, it has been some time since my last post, over a month in fact, however it has been an insanely busy one for I took part in this year’s NaNoWriMo (or National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated). This is a writing challenge in which you have 30 days to write 50,000 words.

This, as the studious among you will recognise is the same length as five dissertations, all written in a single month! Not even to mention all the research required for a good historical-fiction novel (of which I am quite sure I have done more of, than in either of my dissertations... Vikings > Politics / Management. Who’d have thought?!) Some of this research has really helped the tale to progress, like much of the work I did on the flora and fauna of Newfoundland, including the discovery that flax grows natively there, a particular fibre that one of the crew is very skilled at processing and which becomes vital to their survival.

Other bits of research had less of an impact, for instance I found myself trying to find out whether the Vikings like their eggs fried, scrambled, boiled, poached, etc. I never did find out the answer to that. 

Since NaNoWriMo, I took a couple of days out to recover (25 hour writing stints are NOT good for the health!) but am back now, writing in full swing. My word count has finally topped 80,000 out of my target of 100,000 (though I am sure that will be over run; current expectation on completion is roughly 120,000 now)

I have several projects going on, the book, Pendor and one more which is very much linked to Vinland and I hope that I will be able to reveal more about it in the coming weeks.

Tales of a land far, far away.

So this week my writing has taken a rather different turn to the usual, rather than concentrating all of my efforts on Vinland or even direct development on the mod I am working on, Prophesy of Pendor, I have been working on something related, yet very different. We have a large and very active community of fans at the Tale Worlds forums, and one of them asked me if it would be OK to run an RPG based on the lore of Pendor. This was something of a nice endorsement for the team, as I know that James Landes and I (along with a plethora of other writers and contributors) have invested a massive amount of time into producing the backstory for Pendor and fleshing out the world in which hundreds of thousands of characters live in.

One of the hallmark features for Pendor are the “Knighthood Orders” which are essentially organisations inspired by the Knights Templar or Knights Hospitaller. The reason I joined the Pendor Team after the release of Prophesy of Pendor 2 was to flesh these Orders out, and give them a real sense of being and belonging in the world, because before they were simply normal knights pimped out in some rather sweet gear. Part of my work on joining the team included creating a rivalry and conflicts between the various Orders of Pendor, and generally bringing them to life, they now act as non-state military forces, each with their own story, goals, objectives, heroes and of course a political agenda.

The result of this was a nice range of different Orders, each with their own personality and individuality. A few examples follow below;

The Order of Dawn : A fanatical Order dedicated to the ideal of justice and to the mission of destroying the evil cult of Heretics that plagues the realm. Over time their execution of this sacred duty has turned them into zealots and they will punish anyone for even the smallest of crimes or even by the tiniest affiliation to the heretics. This is truly a story of evil encroaching on even the best of intentions.

The Knights of Eventide : As the Order of Dawn becomes increasingly paranoid over the effects of the Heretics, there remained a small faction who believed the way to fight the heresy was to understand them properly. However as part of Dawn’s slide into zealotry, they banned any manuscripts or items considered heretical in order to stave off corruption. A schism occurred and the Order of Eventide was formed by those who sought to use their knowledge of heresy against the perpetrators. The irony now being that the Order of Dawn’s greatest fear seems to be realised as there are rumours that the heretical corruption has spread to the inner circle of Eventide, and threatens to undo all the work they have done to destroy the heretics.

The Order of the Ebony Gauntlet : There is an ancient race of beings that live just outside of human society known as the Noldor, or more colloquially as the elves. The Ebony Gauntlet believe that the Noldor want only the complete destruction of humanity and fight to promote human supremacy in the world, using any tools at their disposal to achieve this goal; xenophobia, racism, genocide. After all, the Noldor are not human, which makes them mere animals that deserve to be trodden under the iron-shod feet of humanity.

Now the players of this RPG have taken on a role from the various Knighthood Order’s that both appeared in Prophesy of Pendor 3, and will be appearing in Prophesy of Pendor 4. The setting is immediately following the events of Prophesy of Pendor 3, where the one hero prophesied has risen to power and united Pendor under one sovereign. Prophesy of Pendor 4 is occurring in another war torn continent which is home to Pendor’s greatest enemy, the Snake Cult.

Not much work had yet been done connecting the events of end of Pendor 3 to those in the beginning of Pendor 4, but now the results of this RPG could well bridge the gap, and better yet it has been done by the community itself so that they have more of an emotional tie to the game; it is even possible that their characters may appear in Pendor 4, who knows?

Oh, yeah and in a little aside, they made me play the King...

Conflict of... Conflicts?

During the creative writing course at university, and while working as a writer in various games something has been rammed into my skull over and over, this is that there needs to be conflict or drama in a story to make it really interesting. Although most people like a happy ending, no-one would read it if that is all that it is. People want to see the characters facing down problems and overcoming them (or not), and this is something I had partially left out in the first rendition of Vinland.

Now that I have completed the character overviews that I had started some time ago (curse you Pendor, for taking up so much time!), I am going through and devising every kind of conflict that I can dream up between the characters. Things are currently going from greed to humiliation, jealous love to lovers being spurned, regicide to mutiny and everything in between. That is not to say that the book with be a cacophony of conflict, as many of these problems will not be introduced. My aim is to take the most interesting and then devise ways in which these problems transpire and see how the characters deal with the situation.

Some authors sell books based on the mantra “whatever can go wrong, should” (with George R. R. Martin being the classic example. Just beginning to like a character? Great, he dies soon). I do not intend to follow this trend, if something is always going badly then it does get a little predictable, it also prevents you from getting too attached to the characters, as the cast is continually changing because they keep dying.

Instead, my plan is to create an overview of each character which lists their personal traits (height, hair colour), general personality (practical joker, warrior, merchant, monk), and what they want to gain out of life (power, happiness, love, money). They are then pitted against a number of problems, the solutions however will devise themselves organically – I can only plan so much, for the characters to really be believable the way that they handle themselves should evolve as the character does. What might be a good solution when first planning the character maybe completely unrealistic in 100 pages when their personality has been bent and twist by other issues.

Once I have the character drama in place, I can create a rough time-line and begin writing once again.

ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL

Well these past two weeks have proven to be far more busy than I had anticipated, yet I have very little to show for it Vinland-wise. Because this would make a very boring blog post, I am going to focus more on the exploits of Pendor this week, and I hope you find it as interesting as the usual book-related stuff.

First I’ll give you a little update on Vinland, at the moment I am hashing out the various characters and their interactions with the rest of the cast. This is all quite classified, so I cannot really show you much of what has been happening. Once that is done, my intention is to draw up a timeline of events, including all the problems and challenges which the characters are due to face (the trials and tribulations are after all what makes a book interesting!) from there I can then get back to writing, and will be able to tell you more about Vinland again.

As you know I am the lead designer for Prophesy of Pendor, and I find a lot of my time is diverted to that. Because of the new time constraints, I am going to move the blog entries to only twice a week. One will be published on Tuesdays, and one on Thursdays. This week has been more about Pendor so the majority of this update will be focused on that.

I love my work there, but lately it has been testing the limits of my management skill. For example I recently promoted one of the programmers to the Lead position, however two days later he dropped off the face of the earth. Whether something has happened to him, or he found the new role overwhelming, I simply do not know. This is one of the problems facing virtual teams – you do not know the people with whom you work personally, and if they do not reply to emails there is little that you can do.

Never the less, this left the programming team without direction so I decided to take the plunge and become more hands on with what they do.  This began with an email to the team telling them the situation, and then setting a number of tasks for them to do. As my mentor once said, “Align then raise.  Validate then suggest.” Oddly this is not one of the things they taught us at Brighton, so I am grateful for that advice. Now the plan is to have a working alpha version in place so that we can try out the various factions we have introduced, and get a feel of the world. From here we will be able to add in the features that the design team have been discussing.

Speaking of the design team, we have settled on releasing a preview for Pendor 4, every two weeks and this week was one of those weeks. You can find the latest here : PoP4 Preview. Even if Mount and Blade is not really your interest, you can see quite a bit about how we develop the various factions in that post. First you have the lore (the dialogue between a Knight of the Radiant Heart and the Mercenary Commander), followed by some of the concept art. It then goes to explain in more detail about the faction, and because this is primarily a combat game, how they fight. The descriptions of the units are what was actually given to our coders for use in creating those specific soldiers, and their job is to convert those words into the numbers which will become the attributes of each unit.

Random ramblings and a shameless plug

Some of you may know that I am an active member in a modding community for the game Mount and Blade, working on a very popular mod called “Prophesy of Pendor”. Now the team took a couple of hits, with the lead designer wanting to step back a little in order to devote more time to his family and work. As such a search for a new lead designer was begun, and after days of frenzied discussions and nervous breakdowns I was chosen to head up the team and bring Pendor forward into its fourth iteration. This is both a great honour and opportunity, the mod is massive; being the most downloaded item on the M+B Repository with over 350,000 downloads. But just how does this link into things I was talking about before, and my plans to create Vinland in multiple mediums?