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| 11/10/99 |
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It's been a little quiet around here update-wise. Don't mistake it for a lack of activity on our part. It's pretty much been late nights and play testing. I can't tell you what has or hasn’t been finaled or a small group of men would tuck me away in a cold place but I can tell you I think Torment looks and plays really great.
My perspective is a little skewed due to the fact that the majority of artwork was finished a while back. This allowed the majority of us artists to spend some time playing and tweaking the game. Brian Menze went in finessed quite a few of the interface screens to punch out details and make the whole she-bang more readable. MC Campy Campanella tweaked a couple of characters who had some fairly minor graphics glitches on em. (mostly he went through and made sure all the characters were consistent looking across their animations). I've been putting out minor fires like interface buttons being slightly misadjusted and prepping graphics for any of the foreign language versions. Addionally we've been finagling the graphics to maximize the speed of the game. As you’ve heard, we've got serious animation in this game. Good news, I saw the game on the min-spec machine (I believe it was a 200mmx with 32 megs but don't quote me, HAHA) and it ran surprisingly well. As a test, we LUA'd (magical de-bug word for teleport) to a marketplace in the Hive (very busy area). The results were quite amazing considering the fact there were about 15-20 people in the area, all of them floating text and running their little merchant AI routines. The game seemed very playable. Happily, the game is very rich in content. I'm not talking just talkin’ graphic-wise, I'm referring to the writing and design. There are innumerable cool things going on that really throw Torment over the top and if you indulge me for a second I’ll share with you. First off, people really react to you depending on your stats and the way you've played. High charisma characters tend to play a different game than fighter types. Different responses and quests are available throughout the game depending on your play style. Additionally, multiple ways are available to complete many of the quests in the game. I want to also hit on some pretty cool design points you may be interested in. Did you know that you can actually talk a character out of existence? Seriously, you can actually get in a conversation with someone and convince them they don't exist. (and this is not red shirt throwaway flunky either). DJ McComb says that you can actually talk another character into existence. Geez. Finally I want to tell you that through the magic and trickery of Dave Maldonado and Adam Heine you can actually have a Lim Lim as a pet. Heck, he's better that a freaking Pokemon. You can have one of these little guys, carry him around, and pet him. You can put him on the ground and he will follow you around and even attack someone who attacking you.
Till next week. I'll see if I can get Lil Danno to share some more cool facts with you tomorrow. (Maybe eyeballs as useable items? tattoos as protection? disguises in the game?)
Tim |
