Speaking of which, this week a lot of time was spent on creating the presentations of D & E for our partners, and it was the first time that we saw all of the individual design and graphic components put together in a way that it’s easy to communicate about them. You know – this is the story in four lines, this is the gameplay in four lines, this is why it will work in four lines etc… together with plenty of visuals. It’s quite different from the usual design docs, which are actually quite lenghty texts, and feature things like (for example purposes only)

Decision 389:

A poor man was caught in the streets stealing from a vendor. The vendor deals in illegal goods yet he demands that the poor man be executed. What will you do, sire?

A Have the poor man flogged publically as an example and put the vendor out of business (-5 gold, righteousness +1)
B Tell the merchant to forgive a poor man and compensate him for his troubles (-1 gold, kindheartedness +1)
C Tell the merchant to forgive the poor man and fine him for selling illegal goods (+5 gold, +1 biased)
D No one demands anything in my kingdom; release the poor man and execute the merchant for selling illegal goods (+5 gold for 5 turns, Iron fist +1)

The pitch documents instead need to condense things like the above to “you make choices”, and you then need to hope that the audience of these pitch documents can understand what you’re trying to do.

It turns out that that’s quite hard – Jan, our writer for instance, has a tendency (as you surely saw in DKS) to be fairly elaborate when he writes and summarzing his writing in a couple of sentences, well, it ’s not for the meek. To be perfectly honest, in this case we actually needed external help ;\)

In Bioware terms, the story summary for most of their games would be (shameless rip from hellforge.gameriot.com) – “You hail from humble beginnings – a devastating battle sends your quiet life spinning out of balance – the attack leaves you alone with two companions, of magical and martial prowess – undaunted by the attack, you recover and are swiftly invited into an elite order that places you in a position of power or authority over the rest of humanity – you discover that you must discover to four main locations in order to save the world/galaxy – with your mission well under way, your every effort is twharted by an evil or sinister organization – at some point you fall asleep and there is a dream sequence – further along in your journeys, you discover the ruins of a sprawling ancient civilization” ;\)

Given that we’re makers of RPGs, you can imagine that we scrutinize their every move, and so I’m very happy to say that today we beat them to it ! It is not without a certain sense of pride that today I announce that we managed to summarize the fairly extensive storyline of project E in 4 lines (admittedly aided by some visuals), and people still get it ;\) What’s more – it’s different – AND, a Larian first, you get to beat the bad guy in the end !!!

I see that my next meeting popped up, so I need to go now. But before I dash off, a big thank you to all of you who’ve been writing such nice things about DKS all over the internet, and an especially big thank you to the makers of all those videos – it’s a lot of fun for us to watch them and we’re quite grateful. Makes us a walk a bit straighter.
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