 
|
|
|
| 10/19/99 |
|
“You don’t get a tan like this for nothing…” - New Order Hello Everyone, Well, I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a “proper” topic for you today, and unfortunately my brain is elsewhere (see bugs.) So, I’ve decided to talk about something tried and true: the things that are currently consuming the majority of my time in the Torment development process. There’s a small mountain of tasks that have accumulated on my desk, and hopefully I can detail some of them for you in a relatively interesting fashion. First and foremost is certainly BUGS. Our QA team is currently working around the clock to break, smash, and otherwise discover all the things that could cause a potential gaming nightmare for you. A majority of the bugs that are en route to me at the moment involve dialogues either a) not being attached to a creature, or b) existing in the form of our ever popular DSHELL.dlg (a temporary dialogue that we have so that we can place and test creatures and their behaviors before the actual dialogue is written for them.) These bugs are ridiculously easy to fix, so seeing hordes of them on my buglist doesn’t frighten me that much. There are a couple bugs of “concerning” stature that we’re currently looking into, but unfortunately I cannot detail them for you other than to say I sure am glad we have wicked programmers around here. Restocking and balancing the stores within the game has been added to my schedule as well, which is actually pretty fun to take care of. Balance is the key issue here, and careful attention has to be used in determining what is available, what will be bought and sold, and for how much. Obviously, you don’t want a store near the beginning of the game to be selling the Holy Axe of Right Ear Severing +57 for a couple of gold pieces. Likewise, players are likely to be pretty bummed out if they’ve traveled quite a ways through the game, visit a local store, and only have the option of buying a dagger or some bandages. Another large chunk of my time is currently being spent on an area I designed towards the later portion of the game. Without saying something that would give pieces away, I will say that there is a LOT going on and without Adam Heine involved, I doubt that it would have even materialized. Time and time again he manages to amaze us by solving the problems with what we design, and often times improving on the original ideas. Thank you Adam! Well, that’s all from me for now, and I hope this little window into my current workload was somewhat interesting. I’m off to fix more bugs before Ken Lee starts slapping us around again. He’s a relentless taskmaster and will accept nothing but our best efforts (unless you bribe him with the latest Square product, which will quell him for at least a few minutes.)
Scott Warner |
| Planescape: Torment & Design: © 1998 Interplay Productions. All Rights Reserved. © 1998 TSR, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Planescape, the Planescape logo, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Torment, the AD&D logo, and the TSR logo are trademarks of TSR, Inc. and are used by Interplay under license. TSR, Inc. is a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. Interplay, the Interplay logo, Black Isle Studios and the Black Isle Studios logo are trademarks of Interplay Productions. Exclusively licensed and distributed by Interplay Productions. All other trademarks and copyrights are property of their respective owners. |