Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

[Quillon]

Yeah and Boyarski also praised it last week but what I said was "since his departure he finally said something positive about Obs". He was with Obs back in 2012

 

[2house2fly]

Can't muster up any enthusiasm for a single game Obsidian ever made, but that dialogue tool tho

 

[Fairfax]

Chris Avelltwo

 

[Fairfax]

All that talk about PS:T and MCA in the TTON thread made go through some old bookmarks. Here's another example of how deeply involved and passionate MCA was:

5/26/99
I want to talk a little about the wiz, Mr. Chris Avellone. Besides helping us out on the art immensely, he designed a pretty fricking cool game and inspired myself an others to really go the extra mile. Without puffing him up to much I just want to say that if Torment is 99% inspiration and 99% perspiration, it's mostly Chris'.
How does this relate to art? Well, I bet you didn't know the Chris Avellone could draw. I admit, I feel a little like I am showing baby pictures off but, awwww, he'll understand. Anyway, I know you'll like these.

Allow me to preface this by saying that we dove into our vaults to find long forgotten material for you. This stuff is some of the pre-vis art that Chris did to help us see what he was thinking. Now I've had to remove all the little notey notes that would've given you a little too much information about the area. Other than that, they're untouched.

Chris' Concepts...


...the finished product

Personally, I think this stuff rocks. Simple, elegant, to the point. Exactly what is needed.

For the first three sketches I've included the area that was made using that sketch.

More art by Chris.


Tim
tdonley@interplay.com

Artist

And an IGN interview from before launch:

Spoiler

We recently got a chance to sit down with Chris Avellone, the Lead Designer on Interplay's upcoming RPG Torment and look at the bizarre cast of characters that he has created for the game. Chris has a real problem with the predictable cast that typical RPGs feature (elf, knight, troll) and has tried to create a group of believable characters that are vastly different from the standard fantasy fare. While we were looking over the stats and backgrounds for the twisted crew, we asked Chris a few questions about the science of character deisgn, the art of game development and his hopes for the future. As always, the answers were both entertaining and a bit surprising.

IGNPC: Okay, now that we know a little bit more about the NPCs in the game, maybe you could tell us how they came into being. What were you looking for when you designed this rag-tag crew? Was it a case of "we want these stories to be told and these are the characters we need to tell them", or did you come up with the character ideas first and write the game's story around them?

Chris Avellone: Designing characters, especially their personalities, motivations and quirks has always been one of my favorite design tasks. Once Torment began, I immediately sat down and started carving out the allies and important villains of the piece. In most cases, the character's personalities came before their stories; their motivations dictated their roles in the game. Some of the character concepts were ones I always wanted to play around with in a computer game (a puritan succubus). Others were traditional classes from Planescape that I felt should be represented in the game (such as Annah, who in some ways is intended to present the tiefling's point of view of Planescape).

Once the main characters were designed, our concept artist, modeler and animator, Eric Campanella, drew up the character concepts and constructed the models, tailoring their clothes, expressions, and animations to emphasize the character's personalities. Fall-From-Grace's movements, from her attack to her spell-casting, tend to be conservative and reserved, while Morte tends to be more flamboyant in everything from his fidgets to his "running" animation. Watching him head-butt an opponent is something else.

After reading through the Planescape material, it became apparent that while it used the AD&D rules, the setting itself was more relaxed in terms of what was permissible and what wasn't. Given that Planescape was an infinity of infinities, anything was possible, so that affected the types of characters I created. Non-traditional characters were not only "okay" to do in Planescape, they were encouraged... thus, we set about making puritan succubae priestesses, insane geometric shapes, hollow suits of armor, and sarcastic skulls that taunt people to death. It seemed a waste of the setting to have a gruff dwarf fighter, an aloof elven archer, a pug-nosed halfling thief, a wise elderly mage and so on.

IGNPC: It's obviously very difficult in a single player game to come up with characters who can not only act as pack mules or bodyguards, but also as plot devices who can respond to different situations with a certain amount of intelligence. What system did you use to keep your characters from ending up as 2D cardboard cutouts?

CA: It all comes down to initiative... the NPCs taking actions that you didn't tell them to do, but actions that make sense when you know their personalities. It was just a matter of making sure we could check and track certain information and events in the game correctly.

This initiative can apply to combat situations, but there are numerous other actions that we took to give the NPCs a semblance of life. You start with their personality and then gauge every action from there; what would X person do while the player character is performing Y action? Usually, there's a way to pull it off.

As a result, the NPC allies will break into a conversation you're having with another person when it's appropriate, and they will do so frequently. Occasionally, they will ask *you* questions in an effort to figure out what was going on... or won't let you just back out of a conversation after you've said something insulting or something too interesting for them to just let you go. They'll remember what you said and did, and sometimes they hold grudges.

Basically, we took the NPCs, said, "what we would do if we were this PC" and tried to script them to do it. As a result, they don't give up personal mementos, don't want to equip cursed items, and they will be aware when the player is treating them like crap and respond accordingly. Annah can get more sullen, Morte stops offering as much advice, and Vhailor... well, Vhailor takes care of matters with as little speaking as necessary.

We also set up the NPC allies so there are more ways to interact with them. We set up the engine so that you can actually talk with someone in your party, much like Fallout 2. You can ask your party members for advice, suggestions on how to complete certain quests and even their feelings about other party members (or their opinions on you as a leader or as a romantic interest). Furthermore, you can receive training from some of your party members and learn skills from them... some of their insights can prove pretty valuable.

Furthermore, we're using the BioWare Infinity engine for Torment, and they already set up a number of great interaction fields in the engine, which you undoubtedly observed playing Baldur's Gate: everything from the characters complimenting and insulting each other, to reacting to each other's deaths, and so on. All of this is present in Torment, and we have squeezed as much out of it as we can.

Another component to making the NPC allies more real is getting a hold of the right voice actors. After we script out what we want the characters to say, we pass it off to our resident voice acting coordinator, Fred Hatch (Fallout, Fallout 2), who works with Interplay audio on getting the right characters for the part.

One of the most important things you have to do is make the player care about the NPC. That means the NPC has to be useful in some aspects, whether in combat, for healing, or whatever (useless NPC allies quickly get the boot...or they are the target of a misplaced area of effect spell), or the player is going to see that NPC as baggage, no matter what you do to convince him otherwise. Once the player sees the NPC as an asset, you slowly build a back-story around the NPC so that it grows on the player. Include just enough dialogue cues, mannerisms, and fighting styles to round out the NPC for the player. Before the player knows it, the 9th level succubus NPC has assumed a personality in his eyes and become "Fall-From-Grace, the puritan succubus, member of the Society of Sensation, long-time proprietress of the Brothel of Slating Intellectual Lusts and who always knows the right thing to say without offending anyone."

As a final comment, you don't need to flesh out everything about an NPC... chances are, the player will fill in a lot of blanks about the NPC in his own head after he has played with the NPC ally in the game for a while. It's just a matter of making sure there is enough material presented for him to build on.

IGNPC: Morte is a particularly compelling NPC in that he knows more about the player's character than even the player does. Explain a little bit more about how the process, Morte helping characters to learn about themselves, works.

CA: Granted, Morte knows a lot about the player and the Planes, but he has a dilemma in that he doesn't know who the player's going to be when the player wakes up from the dead each time. So he holds himself in reserve until he can get a gauge for who's he's dealing with this time around.

It's purely selfish. Sometimes he won't spill the chant on anything that's going on unless it might inconvenience him or harm him somehow. Fortunately, he doesn't want the character to get into too much trouble, so he coaches him on etiquette, translates local jargon, and answers any questions the player might have ¿ he's there more to help the player understand the strange world he's been dumped into and give him advice when necessary.

Generally, Morte allows the player to explore the world on his own and just observes the results. He's along for the company and the chance to meet female zombies. He pretty much leaves the player's self-discovery to the player.

IGNPC: Another particularly interesting character is Vhailor. Here you have an incredibly powerful hand-to-hand warrior who is obviously a very helpful addition in a combat sense. The intriguing part is that players will soon realize that this character has an agenda of his own which may in fact be dangerous to the player character and the rest of his party. Even in real-life tabletop RPGs, having characters with secret agendas can be hard for a storyteller to keep up with. How do you keep this tension together without having it disrupt the forward momentum of the story you're trying to tell?

CA: It's a real danger, so you have to make sure it reinforces the story rather than running at a tangent to it. In Torment, one of the key elements is that we're trying to make the player feel there is a load of karmic baggage left over from his past lives, and the fact that Vhailor may end up reacting to something the character did in one of these past lives reinforces this theme in a way that has actual consequences in the game world. In many ways, Vhailor's actions revolve solely around the player character and his bizarre state ¿ which is how it should be.

Vhailor's a valuable ally, but his personality insures you have to role-play in order to get the most out of him, rather than him just being a drone that follows the player character around.

IGNPC: There is a rather complex set of love interests for players to sort out. In addition to the ghostly figure that claims a past relationship with the main character, players will also be confronted with Fall-From-Grace, a puritan succubus with loads of intelligence, and Annah, a part-demon guttersnipe, both of whom will eventually find themselves wrapped up in the Nameless One's future. In any story, keeping love interests fresh and interesting can be pretty difficult. How do you keep the tension going in a story where the player may or may not hit certain key moments in the right order?

CA: The love interests are hard for us to sort out as well. The best thing to do is to make sure the key romantic moments are based on events you can actually control, rather than tied to random events that happen in the game world. It's not really as hard as it might seem.

Keeping love interests fresh and interesting... well; you'll have to see how it turns out in the game and judge for yourself. There's plenty of ways upping the tension when necessary, including throwing the characters into awkward situations, adding jealousy to the mix, setting up romantic triangles, and dropping other fun emotional bombs into the game.

IGNPC: The age-old decision to be made with CRPGs is linear vs. non-linear storyline. Linear tales tend to hold together a bit better and allow the writer to choose what happens and when, which improves plot development and theatric impact. Non-linear games are truer to what RPGs are all about as they allow the player to grow and expand his character on his own terms. Which route have you chosen to go with Planescape? If linear, how are you planning to keep the attention of hard-core RPG fans who are more interested in the gameplay than they are the tale? If non-linear, how will you determine when major event between characters take place?

CA: As for which route we took, we cut it down the middle between linear and non-linear. There are certain choke points the player has to pass through in the game, but how he reaches those choke points and how he overcomes them is solely his decision. The choices and actions he takes to overcome them, will, in turn, affect his character's development.

Whether or not major events happen between characters depends solely on the player and his actions. In fact, there's a chance that some of the major events between characters may never happen... it all depends on your actions in the game world, who's in your party, how much you learn about them, and even how much time they've traveled with you. It's possible you could go through the entire Torment game and not realize what's lurking under the surface of some of your NPC allies. Players who pay attention to their environment and their allies will make some startling discoveries.

IGNPC: In earlier interviews we've been told that death in Torment will not always be a bad thing and in many times it will act to move the story forward. Can you give us a little bit more detail on how this might work in practice and how you as a storyteller will be able to pre-determine when the character will die. Will there be situations that are absolutely hopeless for the character or will the revelations wait for a 'natural' death (one that occurs normally during gameplay)?

CA: In Torment, death's not a bad thing at all. At the worst, it'll slow your progress for a little while. In its best moments, it allows you to solve puzzles, transport into locations normally closed to you, and even stir up a memory or two. For example, the Mortuary doesn't allow visitors past its gates... but by dying, you can have your body shipped there past the guards and wake up within their walls.

We can't really pre-determine when a character will die in the game... usually the moment of death is up to the player character, most likely through combat. Usually, the revelations are dependent on a natural death, but there are times when dying a certain way or in a certain place may give you a specific revelation that you may not have had if you died "normally."

IGNPC: Okay, you've got some pretty deep things going on in Torment. It's a dark world and the story touches (however briefly) on ideas of death, theology, and even sexuality. What age group are you going for with the game? Do you feel like you've held back at any point during the game's creation? Did you ever feel like you wanted to have the characters say or do something that you decided not to put in the game? There's been a lot of talk about how much the ratings system that's available now protects kids, how much do you think it protects writers?

CA: There are a few things we wanted to put in Torment that we decided not to do. Personally, I really wanted to dig deep into Fall-From-Grace's psychology and bring out the problems of a inherently sexual creature trying to find new ways of achieving intimacy outside of a purely sexual context, but discussing some of the contrasts between physical and psychological intimacy were pretty risky, so they were dropped.

And there are plenty of times when I really, really, really wanted Morte to say something blisteringly offensive as one of his taunts, then took a deep breath, and put it in the happy box.

Still, there are other themes which I would consider mature that were put into the game, such as the approaches some NPCs take toward death, suicide and immortality. These themes aren't nearly as touchy as sex and violence, but they can get pretty emotionally deep.

I don't know too much about how effective the rating system is with kids. I know as a designer, there's been plenty of times where having these constraints forces us to find other, better ways of presenting an otherwise touchy theme.

IGNPC: One thing that seemed pretty impressive to me was that there are full game (pen-and-paper) stats given for every one of the NPCs. How do you feel about the Planescape universe as a setting? How has TSR reacted to the characters you've created for their world?

CA: I love the Planescape setting, for a lot of reasons. It represents role-playing in the truest sense... the designers of the license made it clear your characters are adventuring in a world where what they believe has a physical impact on the world around them. It's a setting that encourages role-playing rather than roll-playing.

Plus, the locations and characters are just so refreshingly different than most campaign settings... anything you can think of you can put in Planescape, whether it's a pillar of living heads, a pregnant alley, villages buried beneath garbage... whatever you can dream up, it's there.

Planescape also represents a new approach to the AD&D setting... rather than confining you to a world, they make the Planes the character's stomping grounds, giving you several infinities for characters to adventure in (and sometimes infinities within infinities). Furthermore, Planescape is a unification of all of TSR's worlds, which I thought was wonderful. Planescape took Greyhawk, Spelljammer, Birthright, Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft, and said, "all of these campaign worlds are part of a greater whole." It's a setting that reinforces the sense of campaign among these worlds.

As for how TSR feels about what we've created, Monte Cook, Michelle Carter, and the rest of the Planescape crew came down and spent a weekend with us at Black Isle Studios/Interplay many months back. While they were here, we ran them through the story, the characters, the settings, and they seemed to like what we were doing with the game.

IGNPC: Where do you see the future of interactive storytelling headed? What's the ultimate tool/machine that you would need to write tales exactly like you have them pictured in your head?

CA: Our lead artist, Tim Donley, and I were kicking that idea around one day in the office. We came to the conclusion we both want a headset covered with flashing diodes that projects our thoughts and ideas into game code, everything from the gameplay, to the movies, to the interface, and so on.

Not to frighten anybody, including my teammates, but I also sometimes wish I could just download my personality into the Torment game. Upon installation, I would hop on everyone's computers and act as an invisible GM in the game, watching what they do and how they do it, then having the NPCs and the player's allies respond to specific actions the player took. Then when they switched the computer off at night, I would turn it back on, access their porn files, and email them to Chris Avellone Prime.

But seriously, a story is reactive. The ultimate tool would be an information management system that can check almost anything that's going on in a game... and then make sure the game responds to it appropriately. I was really pleased with the Fallout and Fallout 2 scripting system ¿ it could literally check almost anything your character did, knew, or his stats, age, skills, and so on, and then respond to them in a way the player felt "wow, this game knows who I am... and there's something special here for me because I chose the character I did."

I see a lot of the future of interactive storytelling in the hands of the game players themselves; there's a lot of interactive fiction up on the web already, and there's plenty of stories being told in Ultima Online and Everquest everyday. The job of the game designers would be to create game systems where story-telling is a part of the gameplay, and tools where characters are rewarded for role-playing and contributing to the story: such things as creating drama, personal intrigue, and accomplishing secret agendas would earn players as much experience as butchering a bunch of monsters.

-- Trent C. Ward

I like how he defines Planescape:

CA: I love the Planescape setting, for a lot of reasons. It represents role-playing in the truest sense... the designers of the license made it clear your characters are adventuring in a world where what they believe has a physical impact on the world around them. It's a setting that encourages role-playing rather than roll-playing.

Plus, the locations and characters are just so refreshingly different than most campaign settings... anything you can think of you can put in Planescape, whether it's a pillar of living heads, a pregnant alley, villages buried beneath garbage... whatever you can dream up, it's there.

Planescape also represents a new approach to the AD&D setting... rather than confining you to a world, they make the Planes the character's stomping grounds, giving you several infinities for characters to adventure in (and sometimes infinities within infinities). Furthermore, Planescape is a unification of all of TSR's worlds, which I thought was wonderful. Planescape took Greyhawk, Spelljammer, Birthright, Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft, and said, "all of these campaign worlds are part of a greater whole." It's a setting that reinforces the sense of campaign among these worlds.

And he was already favouring systemic storytelling even back then:

IGNPC: Where do you see the future of interactive storytelling headed? What's the ultimate tool/machine that you would need to write tales exactly like you have them pictured in your head?

CA: Our lead artist, Tim Donley, and I were kicking that idea around one day in the office. We came to the conclusion we both want a headset covered with flashing diodes that projects our thoughts and ideas into game code, everything from the gameplay, to the movies, to the interface, and so on.

Not to frighten anybody, including my teammates, but I also sometimes wish I could just download my personality into the Torment game. Upon installation, I would hop on everyone's computers and act as an invisible GM in the game, watching what they do and how they do it, then having the NPCs and the player's allies respond to specific actions the player took. Then when they switched the computer off at night, I would turn it back on, access their porn files, and email them to Chris Avellone Prime.

But seriously, a story is reactive. The ultimate tool would be an information management system that can check almost anything that's going on in a game... and then make sure the game responds to it appropriately. I was really pleased with the Fallout and Fallout 2 scripting system ¿ it could literally check almost anything your character did, knew, or his stats, age, skills, and so on, and then respond to them in a way the player felt "wow, this game knows who I am... and there's something special here for me because I chose the character I did."

I see a lot of the future of interactive storytelling in the hands of the game players themselves; there's a lot of interactive fiction up on the web already, and there's plenty of stories being told in Ultima Online and Everquest everyday. The job of the game designers would be to create game systems where story-telling is a part of the gameplay, and tools where characters are rewarded for role-playing and contributing to the story: such things as creating drama, personal intrigue, and accomplishing secret agendas would earn players as much experience as butchering a bunch of monsters.

 

[Beastro]

Tolkien was heavily influenced by Romanticism and LotR is impossible without the Western Canon, fantasy doesn't always mean shitty low-brow entertainment for the masses.

The Reaction to his work shows it though. Instead of inspiring others to try to create their own worlds that are a take of tradition and uniqueness people (including a reflection on ones own time, his work encapsulates the conundrum, hopes and fears of the 19th Century on a deeper level than most) just rehashed his shit and rehash the rehash ala WoW and all its clones.

The whole "recreate '99" thing makes me remember a lecture I heard in college in which the professor pointed out that Picasso was actually a prodigious traditional painter before he started doing the weirder stuff we typically associate with him.

If only he'd stuck to that and kept producing decent shit than what he went on to make.

 

[Shin]

http://kotaku.com/we-talk-to-the-designer-of-planescape-torment-and-alph-1793124329



Chris says in the beginning that someone said that "if you are well liked on the codex, it's the death of your game"

chris y u make me sad

EDIT:

context
some guy praises chris in the introduction and says 'i think you're the only person who the rpg codex forums actually like', chris replies 'oh that is so untrue jason, ohmygod it is so not true. nobody is liked for long on the rpg codex. actually, somebody said that if you are well liked on the codex, it's the death of your game.'

obviously the comment was made in jest... or wasn't it? DISCUSS!!1

 

[Alienman]

What does that mean?

 

[Sensuki]

Context?

 

[Alienman]

Even with the edit I still don't get it.

Spoiler

 

[Kem0sabe]

He's obviously being self depreciating.

MCA clearly enjoys being the darling of the codex admiration, who wouldn't?

 

[Fairfax]

Even with the edit I still don't get it.

Spoiler

He's just mentioning something another developer told him. If I had to guess, probably David Gaider (who's asked Chris why the hell he still posts here) or someone from the TTON team (for obvious reasons). I don't think he meant anything by it, and like Kemosabe said, the rest was self-deprecating humour.

 

[laclongquan]

We love flawed gems.

Unfortunately, flawed gems generally mean little sale, especially at 1.0 state. it need shitload of bugfix.

He's not wrong in that statement.

 

[Fairfax]

• MCA feels like LucasArts pushing the deadline is "an easy excuse", and that ultimately the studio was responsible for it. He also thinks publishers often get a bad rep for doing things they're supposed to do. Says devs sometimes go "we're the poor underdogs", but they should take responsibility as well.
• "Because the publishers often can't talk about the exact circumstances, often the developer comes across as the wounded or wronged party, when in fact there's probably some very pragmatic things they could've done to ship the title on time".
• About AP's mixed reception: he says people liked some of the things they did, but overall when it came to game mechanics, layout and pacing of the game it didn't quite succeed. Says it was an RPG genre they didn't have a lot of experience in and there were other RPGs or stealth games like Splinter Cell that did these mechanics so much better.
• He was worried about the time-sensitive dialogue at first and thought it might create a bit too much urgency, but watching a lot of 24 made him realize it fit the game.
• SEGA didn't care about what kind of RPG it was, they just wanted one in their portfolio. Thinks it was Feargus and Chris Jones who came up with the idea for an espionage game. "And then they kind of vanished within a year, so we're like OK, I guess we're doing an espionage game (laughs)".
• He loved Invisible Inc's art style and character design.
• He talks about his routine again (waking up, turning messengers off, etc). He's been working from LA, San Francisco, Seattle and sometimes Europe, and visits his family in Virginia. Goes to the studios when he has to, but doesn't happen very often because most of the stuff can be handled remotely.
• One of them asks MCA about the return of CRPGs and the appeal of PoE's writing. Chris thinks that's not why they came back, "people missed a number of things about the isometric RPG experience". Says some of the descriptive stuff was just pragmatic, they didn't have money to animate or do some things back then, but people really liked it. The only challenge is mixing prose with VO and the VO is just dialogue, he says that throws people off while they're reading.
• Says the Prey team has a strong writing focus because Ricardo Bare and Rafael Colantonio put a high priority on writing. They were able to use RPG reactivity techniques that people working in that genre may not be familiar with. Mentions an example of a simple variable tracking that seems very complicated to those unfamiliar with RPG design, but once explained it's very simple to script.
• Chokepoints allow you to do a lot of reactivity very efficiently "without spreading it across the entire game just pell-mell everywhere".
• Kirk (?) brings up Telltale's TWD as an example of how it can go wrong, and Chris agrees. He says Season 1 really bothered him, "because the one core choice the motivates the antagonist got my hackles up. I'm like I tried to do the right thing and you wouldn't let me."
• Jason Schreier mentions PS:T as the game people keep going back to because it gives "seemingly infinite number of choices and it pays off at the end". Chris says that's another good example of a simple technique. "A lot of the responses in PS:T actually always went back to the same node even though there were 4-5 responses, but it was how the players said the node. Because the system allowed that to manipulate the alignment, that made every single response important. So that's one way of adding value to responses without necessarily adding more prose."
• When it comes to different tools, the main difference between the studios he's working are the management tools they use to communicate. A lot of them use Slack, others set up separate google accounts and run everything through google, "which actually works pretty well". As for dialogue tools, a lot of studios don't have proprietary dialogue engines, so it's mostly Excel and Word.
• InXile used Obsidian's dialogue tools for WL2 and TTON. Says the tool is very voice actor and scripting friendly, "because they know exactly what they want out of the system and it really shines".
• He's been able to do interface design (didn't mention which project).
• He says TTON's reception has been "pretty positive".
• He got useful feedback from Nathan Grayson regarding TTON. Apparently there's an area in it where they're "broadcasting a certain theme about having a lot of castoffs in that area, and you may decide to bring a companion that you know is castoff-focused even though you don't necessarily want that companion to come with you, and that's something designers should keep in mind when designing areas. Sometimes if they front-load the foreshadowing too heavily for an area, even if that character who isn't a castoff may have cool things to do there, the player may think they have to choose somebody."

 

[Goral]

He says TTON's reception has been "pretty positive".

lol

 

[Fenix]

lol

I think he meant "good for what it is".

One of them asks MCA about the return of CRPGs and the appeal of PoE's writing. Chris thinks that's not why they came back, "people missed a number of things about the isometric RPG experience". Says some of the descriptive stuff was just pragmatic, they didn't have money to animate or do some things back then, but people really liked it. The only challenge is mixing prose with VO and the VO is just dialogue, he says that throws people off while they're reading.

That's what I always talked about - isometric RPG are different from 3D, and gives different expierience.

Jason Schreier mentions PS:T as the game people keep going back to because it gives "seemingly infinite number of choices and it pays off at the end". Chris says that's another good example of a simple technique. "A lot of the responses in PS:T actually always went back to the same node even though there were 4-5 responses, but it was how the players said the node. Because the system allowed that to manipulate the alignment, that made every single response important. So that's one way of adding value to responses without necessarily adding more prose."

Smart.

 

[Rahdulan]

• He's been able to do interface design (didn't mention which project).

This is the same guy who couldn't find a glowing blue map button in Arcanum.

 

[2house2fly]

who wants to bet he did interface design on TTON

 

[Fairfax]

Panel with MCA, George Ziets, Leanne Taylor-Giles, Colin McComb, Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024206/Everything-s-on-Fire-and

Everything's on Fire and No One Knows What to Do is about developing a common knowledge base for game writers, narrative designers, and cross-discipline communication. This panel focuses on the day-to-day aspects of game writing and working within a team, namely problem-solving, clear communication, and uncovering constraints after all the dialogue has already been recorded. Five industry experts share their experiences working on everything from AAA to indie and tabletop, discuss their strategies for remaining creative on varying budgets, and define common terms that may just result in you not needing to set everything on fire after all.

The writer Q&A video is for members only.

 

[Jedi Exile]

This is the same guy who couldn't find a glowing blue map button in Arcanum.

Don't be so hard on MCA. I liked his Arcanum videos. Too bad he abandoned them.

 

[Roguey]

Don't be so hard on MCA. I liked his Arcanum videos. Too bad he abandoned them.

He still says he's going to do them when he has time.

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Do you guys really hate MCA so much that you wanna see him suffer unending pain and boredom in the BMC mines?

 

[Murk]

http://kotaku.com/we-talk-to-the-designer-of-planescape-torment-and-alph-1793124329



Chris says in the beginning that someone said that "if you are well liked on the codex, it's the death of your game"

chris y u make me sad

EDIT:

context
some guy praises chris in the introduction and says 'i think you're the only person who the rpg codex forums actually like', chris replies 'oh that is so untrue jason, ohmygod it is so not true. nobody is liked for long on the rpg codex. actually, somebody said that if you are well liked on the codex, it's the death of your game.'

obviously the comment was made in jest... or wasn't it? DISCUSS!!1

Hollleeeee sheeeiiitttt... is that what Jason Schreier sounds like? Dear god...

 

[ga♥]

Here's another example of how deeply involved and passionate MCA was

 

[Harold]

Panel with MCA, George Ziets, Leanne Taylor-Giles, Colin McComb, Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024206/Everything-s-on-Fire-and

Everything's on Fire and No One Knows What to Do is about developing a common knowledge base for game writers, narrative designers, and cross-discipline communication. This panel focuses on the day-to-day aspects of game writing and working within a team, namely problem-solving, clear communication, and uncovering constraints after all the dialogue has already been recorded. Five industry experts share their experiences working on everything from AAA to indie and tabletop, discuss their strategies for remaining creative on varying budgets, and define common terms that may just result in you not needing to set everything on fire after all.

The writer Q&A video is for members only.

I like how the professionals and the clowns are neatly separated to two different sides of the screen by the awkward, blue-haired cow.

I like how overly intimidated she is whenever she has to tell MCA he has to answer one question or the other.

I like how MCA is wearing a Nirvana t-shirt, like he's some 90s teenager.

I like how Gavin Jurasdfgh is drinking water from a little pussy bottle, and can't contain himself enough so that, when Ziets or MCA are talking, he just has to crack another private funny with his twitter buddy.

And I just plain like George Ziets, because he's a cutie.

 

[Q]

Panel with MCA, George Ziets, Leanne Taylor-Giles, Colin McComb, Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie:

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024206/Everything-s-on-Fire-and

Everything's on Fire and No One Knows What to Do is about developing a common knowledge base for game writers, narrative designers, and cross-discipline communication. This panel focuses on the day-to-day aspects of game writing and working within a team, namely problem-solving, clear communication, and uncovering constraints after all the dialogue has already been recorded. Five industry experts share their experiences working on everything from AAA to indie and tabletop, discuss their strategies for remaining creative on varying budgets, and define common terms that may just result in you not needing to set everything on fire after all.

The writer Q&A video is for members only.

It's interesting how they praise Kevin Saunders in light of how he left TTON.

Also I want Avellone+Ziets porn now.