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People News Torment Kickstarter Update #30: George Ziets joins inXile full-time as Lead Area Designer

Infinitron

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Tags: George Ziets; InXile Entertainment; Torment: Tides of Numenera

Today's Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter update came quicker than expected. It's a special message from George Ziets, who has finally been hired to work on Torment full-time!

Hello, all. It’s been a while (almost exactly a year, in fact) since I last spoke on Kickstarter. Last time, I was announcing that I’d be working as a contractor on Torment. This time, I’m announcing that I’m joining the team full time. Or at least, I will be joining the team full time, just as soon as I move back out to Orange County.

My new role on Torment will be Lead Area Designer. Until now, this position hasn’t really been necessary, but with production starting soon, area creation will become a major focus for our team. We’re in the midst of detailing our plans for area design in Torment (including aspects of pacing, layout, and reactivity). I’ll be making our approach more concrete, establishing standards for our area designers to follow, and then leading the area design team for the remainder of the project.

My role might be surprising to those of you who know me as a narrative designer, but in truth, a lot of the things I’ll be doing on Torment will be similar to the things I did on Mask of the Betrayer. I’ll be making sure that you have multiple ways to solve quests, that your choices are meaningful, and that the repercussions of those choices are felt in many places throughout the game. I’ll be designing characters and quests to reflect both the themes of our story and the fundamental weirdness of the Numenera setting. And I’ll be working with our art team to create cool and bizarre locations to explore, like the floating corpse of Myrkul from Mask of the Betrayer.

So what convinced me to come back to an in-house job? After all, I’ve been a freelance designer for the past two years, and that’s not a bad gig, especially when my commute consisted of walking up the stairs to my (not at all creepy) attic.

First of all, I love the Infinity Engine games – they’re still my all-time favorites – and this is a chance to work on a thematic successor. While it’s satisfying to contribute to a game like Torment from afar, nothing beats the hands-on experience of designing areas on paper, blocking them out in the engine, working directly with artists to make them look great, and seeing the game world take shape before your eyes.

What’s especially great about Torment is that it combines the design sensibilities of the classic Infinity Engine games with a setting that’s weird and unpredictable. As designers, we’re not bound by the conventions of reality. The original Torment could have a giant anarchist golem, a brothel of intellectual lusts, and a pregnant alleyway. Buildings and levels could come in all shapes and sizes. Characters were never conventional archetypes, and inspiration could be drawn from almost anywhere. Numenera gives us the same kind of creative freedom, and that’s typically the sort of environment where I function best.

Another big incentive: we’re putting a part of the old Mask of the Betrayer team back together. That includes Kevin Saunders and me, of course, but also Jesse Farrell, who was a content designer (and our QA lead) on MotB. Notably, he was responsible for the awesome “soul contract” dialogue in the Chamber of Dreamers. At present, Jesse is blocking out levels and implementing basic quest mechanics for the first zone we’re fully implementing – the Bloom (the one I described in my Kickstarter video).

Oh, and the InXile studio is a block away from the beach, so there’s that too.
Awesome news. The update also has a short overview of what George has been up to since we last heard from him:

In January, I completed this documentation process for the Bloom. It took longer than it ordinarily would – partly because we were running through the process for the first time and ironing out the kinks, and partly because I was only working part-time on Torment. When the document was finished, I ended up with about 150 pages (47,000 words), which surpasses even my infamous 100-page design document for the Mulsantir module in Mask of the Betrayer (modules in that game are analogous to zones in Torment, though on average a Torment zone is larger). I don’t expect all the ZDDs to be that long, but for the first zone, we wanted to be sure to document everything we would need to build a zone in Torment. (And admittedly, I had a lot of ideas I wanted to include in the Bloom.)

Not all of this content will necessarily be implemented. Most of it will be, but some of the design is B-priority, which means that we can safely cut it (if we need to) without greatly impacting the area. And some is C-priority, which means that we don’t plan to include it, but we can consider adding it later if we’re able to make the time. It’s important to us that the content we include in the game is of high quality, and accounting for possible adjustments to the scope helps us keep the quality bar high.

Not long after I completed the high-level design, Jesse used my design document to create blockouts for all the critical path locations. The blockouts are rough layouts in the Unity engine (powered by Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity Technology), with simple cubes and spheres standing in for important features. They don’t look pretty, but they give us a sense of gameplay space, and they allow us to place entrances and exits, NPC locations, encounter locations, and so on.

Now that the initial blockouts are done, Jesse has moved on to implementing bare-bones versions of the quests. These won’t include any dialogues (which will be written later), but they’ll allow us to get the basic scripting and functionality into the zone. It’s an exciting moment – the first time the Bloom will begin to come alive.
See the full update for an example of concept art of an area within the Bloom and the "blockout" of that area.
 

Duraframe300

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Great. :)

Also avoids writing dialogue. Still a shame though he doesn't enjoy it.
 

Bluebottle

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This is actually beginning to more and more appeal to me as a successor to MotB, than as a successor to PS:T. Of course PS:T is the bigger name, and pulls in more attention, and MotB was very much in the same vein anyway, but still, Ziets and Saunders is more of a pull than any amount of cashing in on the Torment name.
 

Infinitron

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This is actually beginning to more and more appeal to me as a successor to MotB, than as a successor to PS:T. Of course PS:T is the bigger name, and pulls in more attention, and MotB was very much in the same vein anyway, but still, Ziets and Saunders is more of a pull than any amount of cashing in on the Torment name.

You also have Colin, Adam and Monte Cook on the Planescape/Torment side though, so

Tumblr_inline_mm163uHay91qz4rgp.gif
 
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Easily my most anticpated Kickstarter project. I don't care about Wasteland 2 that much, PoE will probably be competent but a bit bland, this however...they're bringing the band back together and the project looks more promising with every update. I really hope they can create something as brilliant as MotB again.
 

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Judging from the feeback that W2 has been getting, a talented and experienced designer is exactly what InXile needs.

Really looking forward to Torment now.
 

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There is such a dream team working on this, I can't see how it could go wrong.
 

Duraframe300

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Judging from the feeback that W2 has been getting, a talented and experienced designer is exactly what InXile needs.

Really looking forward to Torment now.

Who works full time on the project and doesn,'t live halfway around the world.

Much more confidence in TTON now.
 

Duraframe300

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There is such a dream team working on this, I can't see how it could go wrong.

Ehhhh, in good codex transition always be a bit sceptical. Kevin Saunders project management in highest regards, but for example there isn't actually someone with a great gameplay record. Which matters less in Torment, but still...
 

tuluse

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Ehhhh, in good codex transition always be a bit sceptical. Kevin Saunders project management in highest regards, but for example there isn't actually someone with a great gameplay record. Which matters less in Torment, but still...
Sure but involved with RPGs does have a good track record with gameplay?
 

Dr Schultz

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There is such a dream team working on this, I can't see how it could go wrong.

Ehhhh, in good codex transition always be a bit sceptical. Kevin Saunders project management in highest regards, but for example there isn't actually someone with a great gameplay record. Which matters less in Torment, but still...


Adam Heine has a good gameplay record, leaving alone the fact that in my book Torment HAS a great gameplay, in all but combats (which are almost entirely avoidable, thank god).
 

Infinitron

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I don't know that Adam had much to do with the gameplay design in PS:T - he was a scripter. He's obviously talented, but he hasn't worked in games for a very long time.
 

Dr Schultz

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I don't know that Adam had much to do with the gameplay design in PS:T - he was a scripter. He's obviously talented, but he hasn't worked in games for a very long time.

He worked in Obsidian till KotOR2. Avellone praised his work during that time.
 
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I keep feeling this should be coming out soon, but it's years away.

There is such a dream team working on this, I can't see how it could go wrong.

I didn't until you said this out loud. Way to ruin it for everyone.
 

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I still have not played MoTB, but I'm guessing Goerge joining full time is a good thing.
Wasteland 2 shows that there is much room for improvement in inXile, so hiring talented people is the way to go.
 

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