4. Moving onto Daggerfall: what made you decide to port it into Unity? Why that specific game?
It has been a long process. At first, I just wanted to know more about how the game worked. I started with information on the file formats from UESP and created tools to view the graphics, explore the layouts, and listen to the sound and music. I did this on and off from around 2000 to 2013, gradually building tools and expanding on my knowledge of the file formats.
Daggerfall became this interesting puzzle-box I’d pick at every now and then.
In 2014, I started learning Unity and wanted to find something more interesting to do than the basics. While kick around ideas, my wife suggested porting some of my
Daggerfall work over, as it was something familiar I could use to ground myself while learning an unfamiliar tool. And because most of my tools after 2009 were written in C#, the code translated fairly seamlessly into Unity. This is how
Daggerfall Tools for Unity came to be. At the time it was just a toolset for importing textures, 3D models, and map layouts into Unity scenes.
This re-sparked the general idea of recreating
Daggerfall, something I was already interested in personally by that time. I could see the potential for a free commercial-grade tool like Unity with millions of users coupled with an open source project to create something people could remix and expand on. There’s a concept called “network effect” where once enough people get involved in a something it becomes bigger than the sum of its parts.
For all the criticism people like to throw at Unity (some of it’s deserved but a lot of it isn’t), it’s the first game engine with a commercial feature-set to truly hit global adoption while being free to start using. I’d argue that it’s still one of the most accessible game creation tools for communities, despite not being open source itself. Hopefully that will change someday.
Anyway, by late 2015 I felt ready to start recreating the whole game. I had lots working in about a year or two, then things really started kicking off. By 2017, we had several contributors helping to push the game towards completion every day, and there was lots of excitement as it became clear this project actually had some legs. That network effect I wanted had finally put some wind in the sails. Development accelerated as did the modding scene around the game.
5. What was the biggest challenge in porting Daggerfall?
Rebuilding a big complex game without any source code or internal documentation is rife with challenges. So much of the game is a big black box, and a lot of the information out there was either incorrect or only partially helpful. The amount of detail needed to play a system vs. recreating it from the ground up are orders of magnitude apart in difficultly. I particularly give thanks to Allofich and Ferital who can really break down a DOS exe the hard way and helped rebuild some of the more arcane parts of the game.
But other than reverse engineering formulas and behaviours, the game had to be built from scratch. We all wanted
Daggerfall Unity to have mod support like a modern
Elder Scrolls game, and that involved compromises between how the game worked in 1996 on XnGine and how it works today in Unity.
And because users have to provide their own copy of the game assets for copyright reasons, we also inherit all those old 1996 formats and structures. This often involved gluing together the old with the new: marshalling data between formats internally, hardcoding some things that had to link with static data, and layering down new systems on top of old that supported the classic data while still allowing for modding and flexibility. It’s sometimes messy and chaotic, like a new house built around the shell of an older one, but it gets the job done.
One of the most difficult systems to implement (and arguably still the most challenging) was the quest system. This involves many small interlocking systems and not all pieces were well understood. I often had to take a best-effort guess and make several passes as new information came to light, usually through bug reports. Building the initial quest system was like a second job for around 18 months of my life.
And because it was mostly data-management and state progressions, it was difficult to show progress in screenshots. I spiraled a bit into depression and seriously considered giving up for a while. If the community wasn’t so established and supportive by that stage, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far. I really need to thank
Jay_H here for his early interest in building quests and all his feedback as those systems developed. Without having someone else to bounce off at that time, I really might have stalled or given up.
An unexpected social challenge was how
Daggerfall Unity would be perceived by people learning about it for the first time. Depending on the screenshots they saw first, I received feedback that it looked nothing like
Daggerfall or looked too much like
Daggerfall. People tend to either love or hate the graphical mods, and not everyone understood these were mods created by community members, not part of the base game.
It also doesn’t help that people’s memories of the game vary depending on how and when they first played it. MIDI songs sound different depending on your sound card, Cursor and View modes provided very different experiences, and movement and jumping in classic were affected by CPU speeds. That last one means people who played on a 486 had a drastically different moving and jumping experience to people playing on a Pentium or in DOSBox today. No amount of reserve engineering can overcome this stuff, it’s tied to the hardware platform they actually played the game on. So while recreating, we’re also trying to feel out how most people want the baseline to play.
6. What are some quirky/interesting things that you noticed about the original when making Daggerfall Unity?
So many things! I actually made a thread about this on Twitter and add to it when I think of something. One of the quirky/clever things is how
Daggerfall generates building names from a single seed number. That one took a little time to work out. Link to my Twitter thread with some more is below.
7. What’s your favourite Elder Scrolls and why? (If it’s Daggerfall, what’s your second choice?)
It would have to be a tie between
Daggerfall and
Morrowind, which grabbed me just as much as
Daggerfall. As a developer though,
Daggerfall wins out because it’s a quirkier and filled with more mysteries to explore.
Morrowind by comparison was a lot more sensible, and probably the better game of the two. But as a puzzle box,
Daggerfall is still king for me.
Credit: IGDB
8. What’s your typical playstyle when it comes to Elder Scrolls game?
I like magic-heavy classes. I played Bretons and Dark Elves a lot in
Daggerfall and tend to stick with that in later games. I also like the idea of Khajiit and will play one as a secondary character with a thief-styled build once I’ve finished the first playthrough.
My playstyle is generally peaceful and explorative. I usually get more of a kick discovering a new summoning date in the library than fighting something in a dungeon. I love peeling back mysteries the game doesn’t lead me to.
9. Do you have plans for anything similar in future?
No plans for any other remakes or ports. I’m now going to shepherd
Daggerfall Unity towards 1.0 while working on my own games. This is what I wanted to do back in 2014, but I had to get
Daggerfall out of my system first.
10. What are you working on besides Daggerfall Unity?
I’m now working on a small and fast indie game using concepts I’m familiar with from
Daggerfall Unity and iterating them into something a bit different and a lot smaller. A kind of distillation of
Daggerfall mixed with a few other things I enjoy. I have something larger in mind, but I’m feeling a bit burned out from working on such a huge and complex game like
Daggerfall. For now, I just want to create something smaller and densely fun.
11. What are your thoughts on the indie genre right now?
Indie games are the best they’ve ever been, but it’s also the worst time to be in the business of making them. There are so many quality games to play but only a few can bubble to the top. Discoverability is at an all-time low and platforms like Steam appear to be groaning under the weight of incoming titles.
With most of the revenue consolidated to a small percentage of developers, I fear there’s a time coming where very talented indie devs will stop finding it a viable business. Everyone needs to feed themselves and their family and the current atmosphere makes it very difficult to earn a living wage from indie development.
12. What are your thoughts on Triple-A games right now?
I’m very disappointed with the focus on microtransactions and gambling in modern games. Ditto for slicing the experience up into smaller pieces to portion out later through an in-game store. Fortunately, a few big studios are still making complete experiences, so all hope isn’t lost yet.
13. Are you a fan of modern Bethesda?
The last Bethesda game I played was
Fallout 4. I generally feel that modern Bethesda is in a holding pattern, keeping the business side running with games like
Fallout 76 and
Blades while working on something epic. At least, I hope that’s what’s happening. I’ll wait until
Elder Scrolls 6 before I form an opinion.
If you haven’t followed
Gavin Clayton or played
Daggerfall Unity yet, I highly recommend doing so. He has made it amazingly accessible to get into
The Elder Scrolls 2 which is one of the best games in the series. He also posts very interesting game development tidbits which is fantastic if you’re an aspiring developer or even if you’re just a passerby who wants to see what goes on behind the curtains.
