Darklands designer Arnold Hendrick Q&A on Steam forum

[DeepOcean]

Honestly, I don't want to see a sequel to Darklands if it needs this kind of budget, it is obvious that if something came out of it would only carry the name Darklands on the name but the gameplay would be full of retard pandering "features" that developers think sell games to supposedly offset the risk associated with those 10 million. I say supposedly offset because to this day there is no definitive proof that retard pandering is able to make niche games sell more, actually there is alot of proof on contrary, especially if you don't have shiny graphix and a huge marketing machine that you won't have at 10 million. Fuck, this is 1/4 of the budget for fucking Mass Effect.

Many developers have this supposedly "realistic" view that budgets should be this size or that size only considering the production side of things and ignoring the demand side of things, if your 10 million dollar game despite your pandering only sells 100.000 copies on Steam, you are royally fucked my friend. So instead of trusting that your pandering will bring you a magical audience that would on a magical way start caring about your game how about you realize that despite the technological barriers having gone, the money barrier is pretty much alive and will kick your over ambitious ass on the dust. Remember, people that don't like RPGs may not start liking RPGs because you've made them easier, maybe it gets on a point that pandering bring diminishing returns. How about you start thinking on what you are bringing of new instead of copying fads and trends that will only ruin you?

Do you think the masses will think your darklands MMO is better than a korean F2P one? Keep dreaming.

Look around, there is only one Blizzard, one Activision, one Riot, why? Do you think this is coincidence? Because there are alot of foolish developers that think because there is alot of money going on a market, that money will go to them. No, the money will go to the first ones that discovered the market and you will ever be the first one if you are a reactionary that follow trends blindly.

Big publishers can try to chase markets based on their marketing strengh and survive the failed attempts, you don't have this luxury so stop thinking you are a AAA developer when you are not. This idea that you should always make your next game have a bigger budget or your creative juices will be frozen will lead you to bankrupcy and the ambitious bigger budget will be exactly what will kill your creativity.

 

[MRY]

Two thoughts:

(1) 2,400 illustrations seems crazy to me. You really only need one image per text adventure, maybe two, and plus another fifty or so to cover generic events. Even at three per text adventure, you'd still be talking 700-800 text adventures, which would be a very, very heavy writing and design load. Even the <300 we're doing in Fallen Gods has been extremely taxing.

(2) I think people's view of what games should cost to produce has gotten very skewed by indie developers (though I agree that $10M sounds high).

For example, Ron Gilbert just said on Twitter that Thimbleweed Park would've cost $3M if people had been paid industry standard salaries. That's probably true. It's true that Primordia was made for about $3,500 (what WEG paid voice actors, marketing, production for boxes), but that's only because Vic (art), James (code), Nathaniel (music and audio), Dave (casting, recording, slicing voice acting, business and accounting, etc.), and I were paid only in back-end royalties, the beta testers were entirely unpaid, the voice actors were paid a tiny fraction of what such people normally make, and we used a free engine where we could leverage support from other developers when we hit coding snags.

I always think it's kind of silly when, for example, people try to quantify what a homemaker should be "paid" for her labor around the home, looking to the cost of a house keeper, a butler, a personal chef, a nanny, etc. And there's something comparable going on with what I'm about to say, so take it with a grain of salt. But I have to think that if the Primordia team had been paid something close to the low end of industry standard, the game would've run at least $300,000 to make, which means it would've turned a profit, though not much of one. (And that is still assuming we'd all be working from home as contractors, not on-site as employees.) The fact is that Primordia was possible to make because we loved making it -- not every moment of it, some parts are like scrubbing toilets -- but basically it was a dream project for us. Since no one other than Dave was truly supporting himself on Primordia, it was totally fine for us to take no money or back end compensation or whatever, with no expectation that we'd be adequately compensated for our time.

On Fallen Gods, I am on the other side of the ledger. I pay everyone who works on the project, but I pay them a tiny fraction of what their work is worth. No one else involved has any established game industry experience, so part of it is a "foot in the door" thing. I also called on favors with lots of friends, and I'd like to think the project offers an interesting opportunity. But the fact is, they aren't being paid enough. And I, of course, am being paid negative thousands of dollars for my role in the project. Maybe I'll recoup it, maybe I won't.

I'm sure a similar thing is going on with Battle Brothers.

One consequence of this kind of development is that games take a really long time to make (because people aren't working regular schedules), people often quit or disappear for long stretches, and it is hard to enforce quality control in some instances because you're largely without a carrot or a stick. It is rare that you can find someone who is (1) talented; (2) diligent; (3) sane; and (4) cheap. Not impossible, but rare. Also, it kind of sucks because you're all scattered across the globe, not in one office, so you can't hash something out over a beer, or go up to a whiteboard and sketch out an idea, or model something with a board game and dice or whatever. I mean, there are tools like Skype that make it easier, but at the end of the day, the experience of making Primordia with one of us in California, one in Australia, and one in Greece (of the core WWS team) was frustrating -- the best we really mustered was about an hour a day when we might overlap on GChat.

I think what A.H.'s cost estimates reflect is basically, "If I were to make Darklands 2, I would make it with a real company, with real offices, with real employees, who get real pay, with real benefits." Based on what I've heard from talking to Brian and others, $10M is not a crazy estimate for how much that costs to do.

From our perspective, it's all madness -- no one will pay $10M to make Darklands 2 (especially now that Kickstarter has turned sour), the kind of "real" stuff he wants is unnecessary, but if he wants to make Darklands 2, Battle Brothers and AOD and Serpents in the Staglands and Fallen Gods (if it is ever made) prove he could do it. But I think the answer is, the upside of just "making Darklands 2" as an abstract notion doesn't outweigh the downside of having to manage a project like that for him because, unlike the developers behind all those other listed games, he's already had a long and successful professional career that already includes Darklands 1. He's a semi-retired man enjoying his retirement; taking on the stress of managing a group of international flakes via Skype and Trello is probably about as appealing as his next colonoscopy.

 

[DeepOcean]

We need an stable RPG company that doesn't depend on kickstarter and don't pay people with peanuts, it may not be an Interplay, an Origin or a Black Isle or anything but if it is able to release games on a decent schedule and we don't have to fear the developers may just follow the next trend of the next week and throw us under the bus to make money, why God, is that hard? Are RPG fans the jews of gaming? Always to be fucked up?

 

[Axe Father]

since he made two games that independently have been huge influences on my understanding of game design (Darklands and Barbarian Prince)

Holy shit, I thought Arnold Hendrick's name looked familiar. Barbarian Prince was an obsession of mine as a kid, and Darklands became one of my favourite RPGs when I first played it a few years ago. It's only with your post that I even realised they were designed by the same person. I suppose I never payed much attention to the credits on Darklands.

I guess it really makes sense. Barbarian Prince kind of plays like I'd imagine a Darklands boardgame would play. If you men haven't played Barbarian Prince you should think about printing it out and playing it when you can spare some free time alone, it's free here:

http://dwarfstar.brainiac.com/ds_barbarianprince.html

 

[Barbarian]

I think he just doesn't want to make a new Darklands. That is the impression I got from the old codex interview and that is what I get now. The man knows how things work, asking for 10 million bucks to develop a remake/sequel to a niche cult game which failed commercially back in the day is pretty much the same as just saying "I won't make it unless a miracle happens". He could very well make a great game with 1 million, and it would already be difficult to crowdfund that amount as things are.

I find his devotion to CK2 intriguing though, specially bringing to mind the (very)superficial similarities with Darklands. If the game had been designed and developed by Hendricks instead of swedish leftist cuckolds with no sense of direction I think the game could have been a timeless masterpiece.

 

[LESS T_T]

Some more techie things:

question

Arnold, I'm reading your ideas about storing game data.

Have you seen how Bethesda did that in Oblivion? Taking out all the game bugs, it seems extremely powerful and flexible, to not talk either about plugin support.

Basicly they have resources like model (including textures), sound, environment, clothes, hair, etc as object, and each object has an ID. Each object is instantiated and has its attributes (color, hair, position, etc) set. That's all done on a esp file.

Then the game is run. All objects instantiated on the esp are created, and then gravity is executed on them. As we play the game these attributes are stored on save files, with the same structure of the esp. New objects are instantiated and stored on save file as well.

When a save file is loaded and the game is started up, save file has precendence over original esp file.

This is very similar to what you described, but more powerful. I agree that not being a flat file is a down vote. But there are official and fan-made apps that can read and edit esp and save files and are much more powerful than excel.

Hikan,

ESP sounds like very useful way to import and export art data files in a uniform manner. I agree that using one, standardized system to represent as much art data as possible is VERY useful. It pays dividends many times over when someone wants to change things, be it dev artists or post-launch modders. Of course, in development, the system you describe requires an art manager to either memorize all the ID values for the colors, hair position, etc., or have a custom tool that automatically displays the combined values together using the game graphic engine. The art director will want to line up all the characters, (or objects or whatever) side by side for comparison and review.

Incidentally, in my experience, getting all the artists to follow the same system takes an art director with the patience of a saint and the tact of a global diplomat!

When it comes to scanning through data, I know of nothing better than a nicely formatted spreadsheet to make a lot of data easy to view and review.


EXAMPLE OF DATA DRIVEN DESIGN

I use Excel for design data, not art data. My goal is to make the data "easy to compare and understand" by designers, and have a fast, easy, bullet-proof method of giving the data to the programmers. When the programmers find data consistencies (and they will), the programmers need to give "fixed up" data back to the designers without hurting the designer's ability to compare and understand the new data, with the changes. In reality, this easy back-and-forth between dersigner and programmer is surprisingly difficult to achieve.

Let's take a Darklands example. The cities data (Clubeook pages 28 through 31) table could be one simple Excel chart, with each row a different city, just like the table. I would have the "live" game designer data in that one big table, with color coding as needed to highlight the good and bad values for each city. The designer could quickly scan the table and its coloring to make sure there were no "super cities," and with reference to the map, insure that players are enticed to visit a wide area to get the best equipment, see a variety of quests, etc.

This very same chart, with NO CHANGES, coiuld be saved as .csv file and given to the engineers. The engineers' (programmers) code just needs to read a the csv format for the city encountered, and use the appropriate data as needed. If the engineers make changes, you can take their .csv, save it as .xls, again with no changes, and compare it to your original work to see what they changed. In fact, you can even highlight and data copy the values onto your spreadsheet to make sure all their "fixes" are now in your latest edition of the spreadsheet. This is because excel automatically interprets the commas (the "C" in CSV - for comma separated values) as vertical cell separators, and the carriage returns as horizont al cell separators.


DATA DRIVEN DESIGN IN ACTUAL PRACTICE:

A few years ago, while building a multiplayer Star Wars fighter spaceship game that never saw the light of day, we data spreadsheets to control all the data about each spaceship, from weapons to aerodynamic values (an airplane-style flight model made the spaceships "fly" right). We could playtest ships in the afternoon, review each ship's pros and cons in a post-test conference with designers, engineers, playtesters, come in the next morning, spend an hour or two tweaking values, give the .csv to the engineers, and make new build over lunch. With a couple weeks (ten rounds of testing and data tweaking) we had a rather fun system. The only thing that delayed development was when the "tweak" required a change in code. Rewriting code took a full day or two, including unit tests to make sure it didn't break something else.

Later in the project, we had to bring in another designer. He had never worked with data-driven design before, despite almost a dozen years in the industry. However, he was a sharp fellow (most designers are). Within a week he was able to understand the values and edit the tables instead of me. It took him a little longer to understand how the data affected the flight model. Since that required understanding of calculus-driven physics. This is becasuse most values in flight sim models are "rate of change" or "change in the rate of change" values (first and second derivitives, respectively). It takes a while to internalize this and get a "feel" for the effect of a value change.

 

[LESS T_T]

So, after more exchange about software project management, and then fluent shilling Watch, the thread's topic goes back again to possibility of the sequel and the supposed budget:

Spoiler

I firmly believe that Mr. Hendricks would and could get Darklands 2 (or similar) financed and developed with a bit more "indie" approach. A game like this doesn't need very complicated environments - heck it would be great just to have more depth in a game like Battle Brothers (which reminded me of Darklands). It could quite easily be good looking and even in 3d if there weren't too much of different content.

Maybe the dev costs in US&A are sky high, but here (in Finland) you would easily fund a team of 10 people working for three years for a million bucks. A dedicated indie crew would do it for half the cost. Of course, I'm counting in some government grants, etc. but it's totally plausible.

If I could get someone like Hendricks to work on design, I think it wouldn't be huge a challenge to fund a project with that kind of scale...My long time dream has been a Darklands style game set in the ancient Rome

I'm speaking as someone in the games industry and worked on several published games. Currently, I am a part of a six-person team working on a Jagged Alliance -style TBT game called End State (www.endstategame.com).

I'm sorry, your link to the game "End State" (previous post, above) isn't working for me. By the way, Yasha is the Steam persona for Arnold Hendrick, designer of Darklands (i.e., me).

Although I've only worked with people in Finland once or twice, I don't think your math quite works for Finland. Below is the typical "back of the napkin" calculation that game industry professionals might do at a long lunch...

For this exercise, let's look at the feasibility of a one million dollar budget for three years, with a ten person team.

A one million dollar budget for three years means 1/3 million each year. With a ten person staff, that's $33,333 budget per person. In the software industry, overhead for computer hardware and software, government taxes and similar financial requirements, working space, etc., is typically one third of the overall cost, leaving two thirds for salary paid to the worker. This means $22,222 annual salary (20,667 in Euros, using the latest exchange rate).

The average, ordinary software engineer in Helsinki earns 38,700 Euros, a bit less than the national average of 40,000 Euros, as of December 2016 on Glassdoor ( see https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/helsinki-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,8_IM1005_KO9,26.htm ).

The cost of Finnish game industry people is higher. For example, Supercell currently averages 42k Euros for a lowly customer service person ( https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Supercell-Finland-Salaries-EI_IE511675.0,9_IL.10,17_IN79.htm ). Game industry skilled engineers, artists, designers and producers are certainly higher.

In reality, the calculation of "you need 50% more, on top of salary, for overhead in software development" comes from software industry experience in the Bay Area (San Francisco), USA. The computer hardware and software costs do not get smaller if salaries are smaller. Working space and basic equipment (like desks, chairs, lights, etc.) might a bit less, but only the government fees and taxes scale with salary levels. Therefore, with small salaries, overhead will be higher, forcing you to pay even less than the $22k/yr (20k Euros) calculated above. In our case, we would only have $111,111/yr (103k Euros) to give the ten workers with EVERYTHING they need to do the work, and pay all the government fees needed by an ongoing business.

In the USA, I can say with complete assurance that even a salary of $22k has zero chance of attracting ANY engineers, artists, designers or producers with even the smallest industry experience. You might find people who are young, still living at home and desperate. The chances getting the product to the finish line in three years with such talent is super small.

In the USA in 2016, game programmers with under 3 years of experience averaged $72k/yr. Very experienced or lead/senior level engineers (of which you need at least one) cost over $100k/yr (see http://www.gameindustrycareerguide.com/video-game-programmer-salary/ ). Experienced producers are equally costly. Artists and designer are typically paid about 70-80% of an enginner's salary

It is possible to exploit a person's love of building games to get them to work WAY below normal industry wages. Even if the person is willing to do it, I consider it unethical to exploit people in a such a way. After all, this is three years of ten different lives that we are discussing.

If some can put together the funding and part of a core team, I would be happy to be hired on as the designer for a sequel Darklands, either solo or MMO.

If someone has a serious business proposition, leave an email address so I can get in touch.

While it's fun from a fandom standpoint to argue about the "best way" to do something, what really matters is finding the people to make it happen. As I mentioned earlier, I can plan and build games, but I don't have the entrepreneurial skill set to organize its funding. In all honesty, saying that "somebody could do this..." is much easier than going out yourself and actually doing it.

Man, time to start bugging anyone resembling a potential "angel investor" about it.
Paradox? Starbreeze? Obsidian? Dracogen?
Someone out there MUST want a new Darklands and be willing to at least set up a Kickstarter for it, if not fund it directly.

On a side note, I have to admit I'm not sure how a "Darklands MMO" would retain anything of what made the original a cult classic.

An interesting news article appeared yesterday that illustrates while you need a CEO with fund-raising skill. TL;DR summary is: knowledgeable investors won't give you 10 mil to make a game. Companies like Paradox hire companies like Obsidian to make a game only after Obsidian invests some of their own time and money to create an early prototype. The whole business of making games is WAY more complicated then the 30,000' view I've tried to give here.

Nevertheless, setting up fan threads in discussion areas, lobbying companies as fans, etc., will have some effect. Rather than turn this thread into a "Darklands Sequel" thread, I suggest those interested in it create a separate thread about that subject.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

You're correct that you could do a low budget Darklands. Isometric. Maybe even in the Pillars extension of Unity, since that's already built for isometric RTwP gameplay and has those story-board like screens that remind me a lot of the core "what are we doing in this fucking town?" gameplay loop from Darklands.

The real money hog would be if you wanted to change up the original to have fully interactive cities that you walk around in and find NPCs in. The way it was built originally could be done on a shoestring, if you wanted to blow it out into a full 3d game that's obviously going to cost a fortune. If you wanted to make it into a Pillars-level game with pillars-level cities, even then you're still talking about a mid-sized budget, and either way you're going to lose the "90 billion cities in Germany" type simulation. If you care about that.

 

[LESS T_T]

Now some good Q&As:

Wow, I've been such a huge fan of Darklands since I bought the original as a teenager. I can't believe a conversation with THE Arnold Hendrick has actually been going on here!

First let me thank you for the detailed work you put into the game. It's a testament to your design that it still holds appeal after all these years. As you've mentioned, I'm sure with a less rocky launch this game would really have inspired a franchise. After reading through your posts, I just have a couple of questions for you:

1) How did the actual research phase of the historical period work in the development of the game? It's clear that locations, names, weapons, armor were quite thoroughly researched. At a time before the availability of the internet I can only imagine this required long periods in the library. I'm not sure if the budget of MicroProse at the time would have allowed for travel to Germany as part of the research as well?

2) There's been a lot of talk of a sequel to Darklands in this thread. While I wholeheartedly add my support to that here as well, I'm wondering what your thoughts would be on a simple remake of the original? There's been a few attempts at such a remake - just something preserving the feel of the original with modern mouse interaction and higher resolution support. This could even be an opensource initiative such as FreeCiv or other successful 'remakes' of popular games from the past. The thought of this has been driving my own interest in game development/design for years (sadly with no result).

(A) HISTORY & GAME DESIGN

Regarding research, I already knew a great deal about military history due to (a) my academic background (European history, specialty in military), and (b) being heavily involved in the paper game industry during the 70s and early 80s (RPGs, wargames, miniatures). It would have been impossible to build the character creation and combat systems without a detailed background in both fields. After all good designers, like good historians, stand the shoulders of their predecessors.

I had only general knowledge of late medieval Germany. Of all the books quoted in the game's bibliography (pages 100-103 in the manual), about a dozen were constant companions as I constructed the map, economy, quests, saints, enemies, etc. All books I either already had, purchased, or got through interlibrary loan. To do decent research like this, you need one or two good histories (like Du Boulay's "Germany in the Later Middle Ages") with a good bibliography, and follow the book-sized breadcrumbs. It took a about three or four months of reading to get a good feel for the history and fit it to the game. Then there was constant referencing as I designed this and that for the game. People were used to seeing piles of books in my office. I also had access to Sandy Petersen's library, which was second to none when it came to mythology and creatures (Sandy was/is the designer of Call of Cthulhu). I think (and hope!) I returned all his stuff afterward.

In short, if you're going to do a game based on a historical period, academic training in history is incredibly helpful. It takes a practiced eye to scan dozens and dozens of books for the bits that will be useful. You also need to not get lost in the details. For example, the game info about German cities is very much "once over lightly." The art of "realistic" game design is knowing what details to include, and what to not bother about.

(B) SEQUEL, REVISTED

In short, there is no such thing as a "simple remake" for a game from 1992. The concept and a lot of basic design thinking can be taken from the original, especially from the cluebook charts. After that, everything from code to art is just too old, and too hard to extract, and pretty worthless anyway. You have to redo the art and rewrite the code. It would be faster in the long run.

I have tried to explain this multiple times earlier in the thread, and how the cost ends up being roughly equal to building a new game. Furthermore, if you want the game user mod-able, you absolutely must rework code and art from scratch to permit that. If anyone can put together a strong, professional team for this purpose, I'd be happy to help. However, the usual problem with volunteer virtual game dev teams is that they lack the depth needed in "skill positions:" programming and the more technical art aspects, such as building, rigging, and animating characters, building the battlefield terrain, then texturing and lighting everything. And that doesn't even start to talk about UI, sfx, music, unit and automated testing, much less PR and marketing.

Nice question, framnk.
While I'd kill for a worthy sequel, I would honestly pay with a big smile on my face even for a modest revamp of the original (i.e. exact same game with a slightly improved UI/mouse integration and higher resolution art here and there).

Assuming no official project of that sort could be funded, I wonder if Nightdive may ever consider releasing the source code to the community.
I bet modders would gladly do the rest.

Working with the code will be extremely difficult. It's all C++ compiled code, deliberately obfuscated in multiple ways (for copy protection). The C++ compiler package, and its libraries, was from the 1988-90 DOS era. It allowed inline C code, which was used in a few places. The compiler turned out to be poor with memory allocation and deallocation, a classic C++ problem. No self-respecting engineer would touch it today with a 20 parsec pole.

The original art was created by a legion of artists using Deluxe Paint (published by EA), a pixel-by-pixel painting program. Some art was nothing more than scanned-in sketches, with or without DPaint retouching. All characters were laboriously created and animated in eight cardinal directions, as pixel by pixel sprites. Creating anything of higher resolution from that is well neigh hopeless.

Of course, if somebody CAN work with this, that would be great. I would love to be proved wrong, because I enjoy playing historical sandbox RPGs. Seeing other people's take on history is fun.

 

[hello friend]

Is that his roundabout way of saying they're releasing the source code?

 

[LESS T_T]

Heh, he dabbled in PoE last month: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198022734065

Only 5.4 hours, but that's half an hour more than HuniePop!

Anyway, couple more Q&As:

I've always wondered Xcom got it's battle engine idea from Darklands or if there was some type of crossover.... there.

I remember when I first bought this game, I couldn't finish it do to a game stopping bug. It would freeze up when fighting a specific boss/enemy (think it was red, with goat legs and horns....). And at the time patches were unheard of. Wasn't until about 5 years later when I finally was able to contact a PR guy on AOL's forums, and completely by accident (who knows it may have even been you...) and was snail mailed a patch on a 3-1/2 floppy that I was finally able to continue playing this game. I later asked for patches on other Microprose games and received those as well (think I owned just about all of them, in that if Microprose's name was on the box, I'd generally would just buy it)... and they sent them all free, of charge) Soon after, internet took over and I was able to download patches from their site... then AOL and all the others died out.

Paid over 50 bucks for the game, back then and bought it mainly due to it's box art. I still have the box and all the material that came with it. Think the game is on 3-1/4" floppies or maybe 5-1/4"?

The original Xcom games were created by MicroProse's UK group, totally independent of the "home office" development team in Hunt Valley, Maryland, that built Darklands. Furthermore, Darklands used a real-time-with-pause combat system. In contrast, the original Xcom used a turn-based system where you spent "action points" character by character to move them, shoot, take cover, etc. The Xcom system was very closely related to paper wargame tactical combat systems of the 70s and 80s, from companies like SPI (Simulations Publications Inc).

I'm glad you finally got the patch disks. During the first year after release, Darklands underwent at least nine revisions of patches before all the big game-stopping bugs were found and killed. I believe the Steam edition uses the final, best patch. I'm glad it also distributes both the manual and the hint book with the game.

The original game was shipped on ten 1.4 MB 3.5" "floppy" disks. In the early 1990s the old 5.25" floppy disks were obsolete. Virtually all PCs had converted to 3.5" drives. However, first generation CD ROM disks (the 600 MB version) and drives were not in common use (that didn't occur untl two or three years later).

A unity personal addition would not cost 10's of millions

I have worked on multiple game development projects using Unity since late 2009, and like it a lot, despite certain drawbacks. However, if you build a game with a significant number of assets, like an RPG, you run into the size limits in the "freebie" version of Unity. There are other good reasons to purchase Unity licenses for programmers, technical artists and designers in game development.

However, the overall cost of Unity licenses is TRIVIAL compared to the cost of the development talents's time to remake Darklands using Unity, or any other modern game development engine. Maybe you can get a dozen or so good programmers, artists and designer(s), supported by QA, music, production and marketing staff to work free of charge for 12-24 months. Unfortunately, I've never figured out how to do that!

I have gone through costs at some length in earlier replies to this thread, and don't want to rehash them in detail. Are my estimates realistic? Well...I have over three decades experience in the game dev industry, and maintained professional certifications in project management (PMP) and software development (CSM). I also have hands-on experience in designing and/or producing over two dozen published titles (and quite a few other ones that never saw the light of day), including responsibility for both estimating projects and tracking costs.

Indies can work wonders by cutting lots of corners while working 80+ hour weeks for peanuts. It's one way to get your foot into the door of this industry on a "first project." But I will not ask professional programmers/designs/artists/etc to grossly overwork and underpay themselves. A couple weeks of "crunch time" is undesireable and unpleasant, but once in a project its bearable. Months of crunch is something else. It represents inhumane exploitation of people who love game making by incompetent and/or unethical management.

 

[LESS T_T]

Hey, gameplay Q&A: http://steamcommunity.com/app/327930/discussions/0/1290691308587415461/

Impact of weapon and armor quality on penetration

I'm looking at the information in both the manual and the cluebook for this game. The manual states that:
"every ten points of quality difference yields one level change in penetration or protection."

To me, this means that a 35q short sword ("normal" penetration value of 4) will match 25q plate mail ("normal" protection value of 5), because the sword has a 10-point quality advantage.

On the other hand, the cluebook states:
"Finally, damage is adjusted for quality differences. For every 10 points of difference between weapon quality and armor quality, damage is increased or decreased by 1 point."

Further on, it states:
"However, for every 10 points (fractions dropped) of quality advantage, damage after penetration is increased or decreased by one."

This would indicate that penetration is evaluated WITHOUT looking at quality difference, and quality difference only matters for damage - so, for example, a 45q quarterstaff will still never penetrate a 5q plate armor (which makes sense), but it will knock the armor-clad warrior a bit more.

Now, does anyone know for sure which is it?

In situations where the manual and clue book conflict, consider the clue book to be more accurate. When writing a manual, brevity, clarity and completeness imposed competing demands on the writer (in this case, on me). The clue book had no such restrictions. The clue book reveals as much as possible about data, algorithms, etc.

In the case of quality differences affecting just damage, or something more (such as penetration), I am unsure. The difference between weapon quality and armor quality DEFINITELY modifies damage. I remember playtesting to insure that. Of course, a later bug fix could have "broken" that feature, but I don't think so.

Weapon and armor quality does NOT affect penetration. Since quality affects damage AFTER penetration, a non-penetrating hit by a high-quality weapon against low--quality armor still does damage (ouch!) In effect, quality trumps penetration - because quality difference damage is applied after penetration calculations.

For example, with a quality 40 club against quality 10 plate armor, even though you don't penetrate, you still do three points of damage. If you only had a q10 club, the non-penetrating club hits would do no damage at all. Since combat against armored enemies is mostly about wearing them down, a quality advance is a HUGE benefit. Notice that high quality bows have a simiilar effect - you can actually damage heavily armored targets.

Similarly, even a great penetrating weapon of low quality ALWAYS does less damage against high quality armor. So that crappy military hammer might penetrate high-quality plate armor, but it's spike doesn't go in so far.

 

[Luckmann]

- I don't have 10+ million of dollars to invest in making a new version. If somebody were to offer me a decent budget,I could do it. I've built and led teams many times in the game industry. However, I don't think that's going to happen for Darklands in what's left of my natural lifespan.

Natural lifespan, eh?

 

[LESS T_T]

I just came across this thread a few minutes ago, and I want to thank you for putting so much time and effort into this game so long ago. Not just fighting to get the concept made, but taking the time to research the setting and include such a tremendous amount of content. The crafting, saints, lore and all the little political details of life in the towns and cities, you could have cut corners but you didn't. Darklands was the first RPG that I ever played and I've been waiting for someone else to even try to build something like it ever since. An open world RPG set in medieval Europe seems like such a no-brainer to me, and games like the Witcher or the Mount & Blade series are comparable, but each misses something essential. Mostly I just wanted to thank you for making Darklands, the blend of folklore and hard reality is so perfect and it's been setting my imagination on fire since I first played it as a kid. If you are still answering questions, I'd like to ask you if you've come across any games that strongly reminded you of Darklands or any you might recommend to fans?

Thanks for the kind thoughts. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I think my research was pretty up-to-date for when the game was released. However, there have been some advances in historiography since then. Most noteably Peter H. Wilson ("Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire" - a book truly for the professionals in the field), and Jonathan Sumption ("The Hundred Years War" - five volumes, four of which are now complete - will probably be the mostr detailed history of the period in English for the next hundred years). Of course, historians are constantly debating with each other and overturning past theories (just as John Beeler and R.C.Smail in the 1960's and 70's destroyed the previously well-regarded medieval military history of Charles Oman from the 1880-90s).

Oddly enough, the part of the game's "real" history that has best stood the test of time is the presentation of weapons, armor and combat. I've been surprised that more designers haven't picked up on the idea that heavily armored troops succumb to exhaustion, or morale loss, in far greater numbers than to their wounds. To my knowledge, Darklands is the only game that attempts to represent this on level of personal combat.

When it comes to games, I have not yet encountered anything that attempts an RPG with a strong historical setting and significant attention to historical research. Oddly enough, a great many designers in the computer game industry know about past games far better than world history. I think that's why fantasy is so commonly as an RPG topic, while historical settings are extremely rare. Of course, that was/is true of paper-and-pencil RPGs also.

The secret to putting history in a game is to not confuse the player too much with historical details. The players should NOT have to know any history to play. Instead, the more history they know, the better they will understand and appreciate the fine points of the game.

There are a number of games that I haven't tried yet, such as "Life is Feudal." Unfortunately, I don't think it's rooted in a real place or historical time period. I've been looking around Steam for them as well, but the only thing I've found that attracted my attention for its presentation of medieval history is Crusader Kings II. Although it's a grand strategy game, and has a few flaws with its map (marshes are missing), the game is an astounding tour de force of scholarship applied to gaming from the late 700s to the early 1400s AD.

Can Sawyer's historical RPG change his mind?

 

[LESS T_T]

Looking through the game's data files, I found a lot of cut content. There were going to be wars between cities, Hussites, satanic infiltration of guilds and other organizations, and more buildings in cities like hospitals and barracks. It was even going to be possible to lead revolutionaries to overthrow a city's government. Do you remember anything about that? Did very much work go into that before it was cut? Was it just too ambitious, or were there other reasons for cutting it?

Darklands was WAY too ambitious. I understand how to seriously plan and estimate a major software project yet.

The game consumed WAY too many people, and too much budget at MicroProse. Some stuff you see snuck in from my text and data,. but got no further because the costly work (art and programming) was still struggling to just make the core gameplay work, and complete the core storyline. All available resources had already been used, 60-80 hrs per week, for months, to get the "must have" parts of the game finished. I'd already begged for nearly a year's worth of extra time (with all the associated costs). I was unable to beg for a week more. In fact, as many know, the game shipped with significant bugs that took over a half year after publication to track down and fix.

Most of the events and stories in Darklands were inspired mythology and history of Germany between the Rhine and Elbe - "western" Germany. The more eastern themes of persistant pagan religions and rituals, the unique place and culture of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), and the rich, sophisticated Germany of the upper Danube (Bavaria and Austria) into the northern slopes of the Alps, were barely touched. There were and are huge opportunities for new stories. The Hussities, as you point out, are just one of them.

The internal project management failures of this game taught me the difference between big dreams and competently leading a group of people to achieve something. It wasn't just my personal problem. The 1980s and 90s were the "dark ages" for software projects - where everything always seemed to be late and over budget. Thinking back to 1998-1999, when I used the advice of a NASA project manager to build a different game, at a different company, things only worked marginally better.

The first definitive guide to project management (from the accreditation organization PMI) didn't appear until 2000 ("A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge" 2nd Edition), and the seminal book on Scrum ("Agile Software Development with Scrum" by Schwaber & Beedle) appeared in 2001. This was a full decade after Darklands was created. The Seminal GDC talks by Clinton Keith didn't occur until 2005 or 2006. One of my big efforts from about 2004 was to learn how to properly lead game software projects. I am a stronger believer in PMI's principles and Scrum methodology.

Big game design dreams are worthless if you can't execute them in a competent fashion. It still amazes me how many game companies lack rudimentary skills in that field. Game developers still dream impossible dreams, grossly over-promise and are shocked to discover they can't deliver. Darklands was one of those fortunate few "big dream" games that managed to stagger out the door into the hands of the public.

 

[LESS T_T]

I really enjoyed this game when I was a kid. I am sure you have heard it before but I will say it anyway. Remake!, re-master! Give us something!

@ everyone - thanks for the very kind words. I'm glad Darklands provided memorable entertainment for so many, for so long. It definitely makes me smile.

@ cmcm - I would love to do something, but I am not gifted at sweet-talking investors on a multi-million-dollar scale. The reason why a ground-up rewrite is needed (for code and art) have been posted earlier in this thread. The resources to redo Darklands into a worthy successor are significant, even as a solo PC RPG, much less an MMORPG (which I think would be significantly more profitable).

Working as a designer and producer at a software company long enough to get a chance to make a game like Darklands is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Most software companies don't last long enough to offer such an opportunity to their senior members. If the company does last a while, you must be in the right position at the right time.

For me, that chance happened in 1990 at MicroProse. It hasn't come around again. Since then I've been a mercenary - hired by companies to make their games happen. Nobody really wanted me to make games from my own ideas, despite a lifetime of experience in game creation and a fair number of awards. The only exception was if I could promise them a big dollar winner on a shoestring budget in just a few months. Nobody with a shred of rationality and honesty can promise that.

I'm 67 and semi-retired now. I've managed to successful defeat the age bias in the game industry for decades, but my time is running out. I'd be happy leave retirement to do Darklands II, but nobody with sufficient resources has contacted me. I don't think anyone will. Sorry.

And from another thread I missed, about modding possibility: http://steamcommunity.com/app/327930/discussions/0/1318836262665139174/

Unfortunately, none of the game data files are easily accessible for modification, much less compatible with the Steam workshop. Modern structured code was not being used at the start of the 1990s, when the game was written.

Making the game modifiable, with or without Steam workshop support, would require a ground-up rewrite.

Back in 1990-1992, games were coded to make it insanely hard to modify, because piracy and copy-protection was top priority for publishers. Now, 25 years later, the opposite is true.

Well, despite MicroProse's leader trying "to squeeze every bit of profit they can out of something," the company was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1995, and only rescued by a merger with Spectrum Holobyte. Spectrum installed new management, laid off a lot of people in a series of staff cuts, but ultimately failed to turn around the company, which gradually faded away. Frankly, it was that leader (Bill Stealey), and his willingness to occasionally allow his creative staff a chance to try radical ideas (such as Sid Meier's Civilization) that allowed the company to thrive. Personnally, I think Stealey just took too many risks, of all sorts. It would be easy to argue that Darklands was one of them. The computer game business is extremely difficult and unforgiving.

The first significant game that permitted modding of any sort was Quake (1996). The first time I remember seeing the more "modern" philosophy of "easily" readable data files (ASCII, CSV, XML, JSON, etc.) in a game was Space Empires IV (2000). Neither game was released by a major publisher. It wasn't until the mid 00's, when digital/downloadable distribution replaced store-bought copies, that major publishers embraced the "mod-able" game concept.

I was involved the development of Darklands all the way, as producer and lead designer (to use the modern terms for those jobs). There was NO scripting engine. The text screens and options were prototyped in Apple's long gone Hypercard. However, there was no easy path from Hypercard to the PC, so the programmers had to rewrite everything in the flavor of C/C++ then popular at MicroProse.

@VA Trevelyan - I agree that Doom (1993) was the first game that was heavily modded by the gaming community. However, from the standpoint of game development and publishing, I think it wasn't until Quake (1996) that the ability to mod was built into the product at launch. Major publishers were very slow to get onto that bandwagon, probably because they were run by executives who had experienced huge financial losses due to boxed product priracy.

This actually happened to MicroProse in 1990. After the final code ("gold master") for a game had been delivered to the disk duplicators, those very same files appeared on one or more pirate BBS sites. Since the game was already in production, MicroProse decided to "gut it through" - finish production and ship the game to stores, which took another couple weeks. While the stores accepted it, the returns a few months later were huge (in those days, if a store didn't sell a game, it could return it to the publisher for virtually a full refund after 30-60 days). Ultimately, sales were about 25% of original projections. The company lost money on that game.

To Bill Stealey (the CEO of MicroProse) and most people in the company, this was literally the "smoking gun" that proved the ability of piracy to bankrupt product development in the era of boxed games. That is why Darklands had a manual-based copy protection scheme, as well as the usual software protections (for that era).

Doing post-launch support after all these years: http://steamcommunity.com/app/327930/discussions/0/133263024015779222/

Lowering the resolution

How does one go about doing it? It's kind of hard to read the text at modern resolutions.

I have accumulated various notes about running the game (which runs under dosbox), which might help you also. I tried various things, some of which refused to run, and some of which improved things slightly. A dramatic improvement is not possible due to the age and technology of the game's programming.

----------------------------------------

HINT: make your game run smoother and look better

1. go to your Darklands\dosbox_windows folder (for me it's C:\Steam\steamapps\common\Darklands\dosbox_windows)
2. open dosbox_darklands.conf with a text editor

edit line 60:
scaler=advmame2x
(this is the display type, this one smooths out big pixels into smaller ones, game looks a bit like an oil painting but I like it much better than giant jagged VGA pixels. Try experimenting with others from the list at line 56)

edit line 82:
cycles=fixed 36000
(this is how fast your game is being played in Dosbox. Default value was 4000 for me, which was VERY low and laggy. I have an i5 @ 3,6 gHz so 36000 works like a charm for me, try it and if the game is laggy or too fast edit this value 2000 at a time till you reach nice smooth gameplay)

----------------------------------------

Bauer Lobart has Darklands May 1 @ 6:35pm :

mate, try scaler=supereagle

it is perfectly smooth

----------------------------------------

DOS BOX controls
Speed Adjustment
CTRL + F11 decrease speed
CTRL + F12 increase speed
Change Configuration
CTRL + ESC
CONF values
cycles = ??
auto, max, etc.
386 = 7800 cycles
486 = 26800 cycles

 

[LESS T_T]

@LokitheWeaver - Your question is so long and multi-faceted that I was tempted to start a separate thread, but ultimately decided it belonged here, since it fits well with questions from many others. I've divided my response into three posts immediately following this one:

- Darklands Successor Game - Title & Topic
- Crowd Funding & Group Development
- Games As Teaching Tools


DARKLANDS SUCCESSOR GAME - TITLE & TOPIC

Generally, choosing direct sequels vs spiritual successors favors the direct sequel, even if a very different group purchases sequel rights. For example Railroad Tycoon II and III were done by a totally different company than MicroProse. They purchased the name rights for $50,000, and considered it money well spent. Despite various technical issues, Railroad Tycoon II was profitable enough for the company to invest in Railroad Tycoon III.

Spiritual successors can succeed, but primarily when the original game was super-famous (such as the Diablo or Everquest), or the original game designer has become a famous name (such as Sid Meier, Chris Roberts or Brad McQuaid). I would argue that neither Darklands nor I fall into that category.

SEQUEL: The attributed publisher for Darklands on Steam, Retroism and Nightdive Studios, could be contacted. Both have a lot of experience with outdated game rights and might be willing to talk. Obviously, monetary consideration would be needed, either up front or on the back end, or probably both.

Incidentally, I believe only a trademark right would be needed for a sequel. Copyrights do not cover "ideas" or "concepts." In game design, you violate copyright when you exactly copy the data tables and/or equations, or text in the manual. In programming, you violate if you exactly copy the exact code. Personally, as a designer, I would want to reorganize the game data and equations, adjust the cities and map, etc. I'm positive coders would want to write all new code. However, if you're buying the sequel rights for the trademark, buying "protection" from a copyright suit should be part of the deal at no extra cost.

Overall, sequels make marketing and sales easier, because customer affection and name recognition directly translate into more sales faster.

SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR: When it comes to spiritual successors, I would favor an historical setting over a fictional post-apocalyptic one. Similarly, an historical RPG seems more original and "striking" than another survival game. Personally, my recommendation is mid to late 14th Century France, when the country had fallen into semi-chaos during the Hundred Years War. The French King was in captivity in England (1354-60) after he was captured in battle. The pope was a "captive" at Avignon in France (until 1377). Along France's eastern border, the Duke of Burgundy was beginning his bid for power in France and/or Germany. Meanwhile on France's western border, for dozens of miles deep on both sides, raids large and small routinely crossed for personal profit and/or power.

I originally considered this as a setting for Darklands, but in 1990 too much primary research in France was necessary. Since then, however, the absolutely superb multi-volume history by Jonathan Sumption has erased that problem (his first four volumes cover the war to the early 1420s, with the last volume in the works). There are many famous and controversial historical characters that could appear in cameo roles!

However, spiritual successors are harder to sell because there is no name-recognition in the title.


CROWD FUNDING & GROUP DEVELOPMENT

I hate to be a wet blanket, but I have bad news about this. I freely admit that my 33 years in professional game development does make me biased. I would love to hear from people with different experiences, and how it worked out.

CROWD FUNDING: First, crowd funding isn't as easy as people think. You need a good sales pitch. For a game, this should include the same kind of demo you'd show a prospective publisher - concept art, feature list, and a video demo of 3D characters moving around in a world, preferably fighting. You'd also need a concrete vision of the finished game. This means you need to do serious planning, some coding, some artwork, and if possible, mock up parts of the GUI (graphics user interface). You also need a video producer to splice it all together with some suitable music and various "talking heads" clips from the developers. You also need a PR campaign. This usually means hiring a PR group to help you find and blanket appropriate online sites worldwide on day one of the crowd funding effort.

With this kind of campaign, you have a CHANCE of raising $500k to $2mil. However, some friends who tried this a couple years ago for a Railroad Tycoon spiritual successor got less than $50k, even though the lead designer was the same as Railroad Tycoon II and III.

GAME ENGINES: I have multiple years experience building games using the Unity engine. They make a great sales pitch for their off-the-shelf assets, from art to code, as well as a "store" full of low-priced stuff. The engine does give a great development environment and a good 3D engine. They keep trying with their UI tools, and maybe, someday, it will be useable. As of 2015 (last time I checked) their third (or was it fourth?) try for a UI system was so bad that you were better off writing your own. In addition, many of the third party code plug-ins will create as many problems as they solve. Again, as of 2015 the art assets for animating 3D characters were hopelessly insufficient. Finally, for any game with significant assets (such as an RPG), the free license version of Unity is insufficient for efficient builds and release packaging. You need Unity Pro, which is priced for industry professionals. Of course, you need a powerful PC, that is easily as costly. To get good results, you need decent tools.

Overall, I still recommend Unity, with paid developer packages for all the key team members. However, it's not a universal panacea. You still need good programmers, including one who understands the 3D graphics system, another who is gifting at building GUIs, and a third who can work with artists to build a good art pipeline. Then, of course, you need character and "world builder" artists to build all the 3D assets, with the appropriate art tools knowledge and experience. Oh yes, don't forget some game designers, QA people (preferably those good at automated test systems), process managers (scrum-masters, producers, etc.) and a big cheese to make final decisions.

DEVELOPMENT TEAM: Long, long ago in the software industry, companies discovered that adding more people does NOT help a software project. IBM was the first to discover this in the 1970s (see The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks). Nine women can't team up to make a baby in just one month.

In software, be it art, design or programming, I feel the following equation generally holds true:

2 experts = 10 knowledgeable = 50 novices

Some management "experts" argue the equation is more like

1 expert = 10 knowledgeable = 100 novices.

Obviously, coordinating those ten knowledgeable (but average people) is way more work, and takes longer, than the two experts just talking to each other. Remember, since the best size fror a "Scrum" team is 4-9 people (with 5-7 preferred), including testers, designers, and maybe artists (artists often work best in separate teams). Ten programmers alone creates an unworkable team using the best software development process on the planet (Scrum).

This is why a company full of "just average" people is a recipe for disaster in software. You want expert, highly intelligent people who work well together. It takes a team about 6-8 weeks of working together daily (that's eight hours a day) to become a highly efficient and productive unit.

THE FRATRICIDAL LEGION: Now, imagine working with large numbers of novices, especially novices with little vested interest in the result, and whose work ethic is randomly overriden by hormones gone wild (i.e., students). Trying to coordinate a half dozen to dozen teams of novices, working only a half dozen hours a week, would be impossible. The different groups would be merging code (or designers, or art) constantly, and each person's work would inevitably clash with other group's work, quite possibly within the same group as well. The bugs and fixes would be endless. If you doubt me, talk to some of the staff in the computer science department, especially those who have multiple years of experience working on teams in the software industry.

EXPERTS & NOVICES: The few times I've been in highly productive development groups that had summer or semester interns, the only people who benefited were those interns. The project itself got virtually nothing of value. What little valuable work was produced occurred when the experts walked them through the job step by step. The interns learned a lot, but the experts invariably could have done more work, faster, without teaching the intern. Sending an intern off on his or her own to perform a task was a sure recipe for failure. As novices, they simply didn't have the knowledge to be productive on their own.

I suspect this is why so many "Early Access" Steam projects languish uncompleted. Successful indie efforts tend to be small and well-focused, requiring a small team that the leader has "at hand" from the start. Furthermore, the team members are rarely raw novices. Instead, they have prior experience from multiple personal efforts designed to help them break into the game industry.

THE DIRTY DOZEN CONCEPT: As for bringing experts out of retirement to produce a labor of love, that requires multiple things: (1) knowing such people, (2) having the charismatic leadership to get them to buy in, and (3) the group having the necessary mix of skills to cover the needs of the project. I've kept an eye on this thread for the last nine months, in hopes such people might appear. So far, none have appeared. A lot of people have said, "somebody ought to..." but nobody has said "here, I have this professional experience, I could help..."


GAMES AS TEACHING TOOLS

From 2005 to 2009 I was designer and project manager at a company called Forterra (it's now defunct). It created training games for the US Army (during the height of the Iraq War) and various medical teaching environments. They were MMOs, so multiple people could work together doing something, like a mass casualty disaster triage simulation, or practicing tactical precepts in an IED-laden environment. Although this was not the educational lessons from "fun" games that you have in mind, I DO have experience in making games with educational goals. In all cases, the Forterra "games" were designed to replace some, but not all, real-world exercises. An MMO exercise was cheaper and easier than an army platoon taking vehicles onto a training course, or sidetracking an entire ER department for a half day. The games couldn't teach everything, but it was amazing how much learning happened, especially when participants watched the "after action" recording of the "game" and discussed "lessons learned." Of course, the students were all adults. Furthermore, they had a professional interest in making sure activities happened correctly, since in real life situations lives were at stake.

Personally, when using commercial games in conventional classrooms, I'd consider the following. I use history as an example because it is the academic field I know best.

Create custom scenarios in the game Civilization to support various lessons in ancient, medieval or modern history. Older copies of Civ are relatively cheap (Civ III is $5, Civ IV is $10), and modding tools are well documented. There may already be mods that are perfect for illustrating the Ancient World, the Crusades, the Age of Napoleon, the 20th Century before either of the World Wars, or the Cold War. Students could be assigned to teams that represent the leadership of various powers. It's a great exercise in geography, political realities, peace and war. It gets even more interesting if all alliances, declarations of war, etc. must be communicated as written documents, both within the team, and to the appropriate other team. Players quickly learn the importance of careful wording. For advanced classes, the students could be assigned to become specific historic characters or groups, given tools to research their policies and viewpoints, and expected to faithfully represent that group within each team.

This exercise is probably best for a High School AP History class, or maybe a Freshman history or international politics seminar. (Do collegiate history or poly-sci departments even offer seminars to freshman these days?)

Lesson plans and real learning is less obvious at the "man on the street or field" level of an RPG. For example, if I was using Darklands as a history teaching aid in a late European medieval history class, I'd ask them to play the game before class until they encountered witches. I'd ask students to come to class with three things in the game they considered "realistic," and three "unrealistic," and be prepared to defend their opinion in the class. I'd have my own list as well, in case the discussion required a jump-start. I'd make sure at least one issue was about cultural relativity - e.g., witchcraft as "fake news." Historians love to argue. A history student who doesn't want to argue historical issues is not headed for success.

This classroom exercise might be good for one seminar in a semester class. The rest of the semester (another dozen classes) would be spent on all the other topics I'd want to cover for that period.

Since medieval alchemy gradually developed into modern chemistry, a chemistry teacher might find something to work with in the Darklands alchemy system. However, I suspect it would mostly be introductory, high school level. Philosophy and religion might apply, but since Darklands depicts pre-reformation Christianity, it's a long way from there to any modern religion or theological philosophy.

 

[YES!]

We need an stable RPG company that doesn't depend on kickstarter and don't pay people with peanuts, it may not be an Interplay, an Origin or a Black Isle or anything but if it is able to release games on a decent schedule and we don't have to fear the developers may just follow the next trend of the next week and throw us under the bus to make money, why God, is that hard? Are RPG fans the jews of gaming? Always to be fucked up?

Yes, look at inXile who went from making shit for shitheads to making real rpgs and look at the hate it has garnered. Or look at Troika, or SSI, or Sir Tek, etc. Whenever a real rpg maker comes along the "rpg" fans attack like wild animals.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Yesterday Arnold Hendrick posted this in the (public) Darklands Yahoo group:

Hello, I'm Arnold Hendrick, designer and producer of the original Darklands game from MicroProse in 1992.

We're at the 25th anniversary of the game's publication, and there is STILL interest! Geesh! Now that I've retired from 50-70 hr weeks in the game industry, I actually have the opportunity to consider projects that would have been impossible earlier.

To be specific, I am looking into the possibility of using volunteer labor from game industry professionals to redo Darklands for current generation PCs. There are no Angel investors involved, so this is NOT a paying proposition. If you need a job, look elsewhere. I am also trying to contact current rights-holders to see what is and is not possible. Without legal rights to a rework or sequel, the project would need to morph into a different sandbox-style CRPG based somewhere else in late medieval Europe.

If you are a industry veteran computer programmer or artist, and interested in contributing work, contact me at ajhendrick@... . Again, this is NOT a job opportunity. I'm simply checking to see who might be available.

If you're simply a fan of the game, I'm happy to collect your email. If a project does materialize, and gets sufficiently far to start any promotions, I can get in touch with you.

This project is NOT a sure thing. I'm just making initial investigations.

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/darklands/conversations/messages/9778

It's obviously very vague and tentative and looks more like a fan project (by industrial professionals) than, for example, a Kickstarter in the making.

 

[The Wall]

It seems to me that (as he himself literally says) this is for now just testing waters and trying to build a team which will attempt to make foundation for either sequal or spiritual successor and then they might seek further support on Kickstarer for example.

I really don't know what can more be said right now then - time will tell...

 

[vonAchdorf]

I don't think there are enough "industry professionals" willing to work for free on such vague terms and are fans of the game. Or he's lucky and there's a bunch of bored fresh retirees who are willing to join for ol' times sake.

 

[Invictus]

I don't think there are enough "industry professionals" willing to for free on such vague terms and are fans of the game. Or he's lucky and there's a bunch of bored fresh retirees who are willing to join for ol' times sake.

I dont agree, many moders and students have started with projects like this and used it as springboards for their careers. He IS still respected and his game is arguably a top ten RPG pf all time and he hasn't fucked up his rep with daikatana or might number 9

 

[Tigranes]

He's looking for 'industry veterans' / 'professionals' to work on his pet project for free. He won't get a lot of takers that match his stated expectations.

 

[vonAchdorf]

A couple of years ago, it might have been easier for him if he had tried to recruit people with a clear vision for a Kickstarter, but I think that's now a bit more tricky.

Maybe he should try a Figstarter. That's currently the place to go.

Spoiler

 

[LESS T_T]

From the Steam thread:

Thanks for the book recommendations, did you have any for the Hansa of that time period?

There is a title Codex Guide to the Medieval Baltic on drivethrurpg.com The publisher is bringing out a pen and paper rpg supposedly in Fall called The False Facade. The blurb for the Codex sounds exciting but it actually is just a big collection of notes.

The blurb has some elements similar to Darklands. If a DL remake used a data/event-driven construction kit design then it might be possible to expand the scope of the game.

Spoiler

"The year is 1456. The place is the Southern Baltic. The Free City of Danzig is in rebellion against the Brother- Knights of the Teutonic Order. Privateers flying the Danzig colors patrol the waters of the Baltic all the way from Reval to Denmark. Bearing letters of marque they will intercept any vessels attempting to reach the Ordernstadt: the Monastic State of the Teutonic Order. Their crews are armed with crossbows, firearms, and cannon, and wear the armor of Medieval Knights. Gunboats, similarly armed with swivel guns, crossbows and breach loading cannon, patrol the Vistula river, engaging any enemy forces they encounter.

Professional contractors do most of the fighting in this war... Bohemian heretics fight as mercenaries on both sides, and today they are preparing to sell three captured towns to the highest bidder. They are joined by Austrian, Scottish, Dutch, Swedish, and Italian mercenaries, each with their own small private armies.

The burghers of Danzig plot their strategy over chess games they play this evening in their merchants Guild hall named for King Arthur. Safe behind the mighty walls of their city, the city council composes a letter to their ally King Casimir IV Poland, seeking to coordinate a new offensive. Nearby, burghers drink beer with their wives in the public baths, taking a break from their long day of guard duty on the city walls, or working the foundry in one of the cities water powered mills. At the river front, the seven story high automated crane unloads gunpowder, salt, pickles, and two hundred kegs of beer from an ocean going carrack just arrived from Bruges in Belgium, having crossed the multiple blockades under the safe passage of the Prussian Confederation and the Hanseatic League. The citizens will celebrate tonight, for tomorrow is the feast of St. Vitus.

A few hundred miles to the east in nearby Lithuania, the eerie primordial groves of a vast forest called the Grauden echo with the chants of pagan priests of the wild Samogitians, who still practice their ancient pre-Christian faith. This night they will give sacrifice to their heathen god Kupolė by bathing naked in the river in the moonlight. They will dance the wild primal dance around the fire without fear of interference. The Teutonic Knights invaded this land annually for two hundred years in a vain attempt to convert the population to the rule of Christ. Eventually they gave up, and the Samogitians are their own masters this day.

Meanwhile in his impregnable three level castle of Malbork, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Ludwig von Erlichshausen consults with his mercenary captains and brother-knights. His castle is surrounded by enemy forces who occupy the town of Marienburg, but he has plenty of cannon and sufficient supplies to hold out for years, and 100 iron-hard Brother Knights of the Teutonic Order beside him. The rebels dare not try to storm the walls, nor to even confront the armed river boats he is preparing to carry his orders to the other great fortress of the Order at Konigsberg. They are gathering their forces, raising money, and preparing a mighty counterstroke against the enemies of St. Mary and the righteous Teutonic Knights.

Further to the East, Mongol horse-archers of the Golden Horde check their saddles and water their horses as they prepare to make a slave raid deep into Poland. This is what they call ‘harvesting the steppe'. Their vassals in Muscovy not far away, give prayers to St. Vitus as they forge new gun barrels and build up their city walls for the inevitable next violent encounter with their overlords. Further to the south, escaped Ukranian slaves in an outlaw Cossack band are making preparations of their own, planning their own violent night time raid into the land of the Mongols, to steal horses, women, and gold.

In the north, Swedish and Finnish fur trappers hunt a wounded wild boar on skis, eager to bring food back to their trapping camp where they have been collecting beaver pelts. Little do they know, a pack of wolves is stalking them, and the alpha male waits patiently for the men to become separated. Not far away on a hilltop, armed Druzhina from Novgorod watch the drama unfold, not sure yet if they will rob the Swedes, or save them from the wolf attack.

This is not the familiar fantasy world of orcs and elves, it is a place you have never been before. This is the historical reality of life in the 15th Century Baltic. It's a tough place, a place where high technology and sophisticated urban life exist only a few miles away from primitive tribesmen, struggling for survival. It is a land of many ethnicities and language groups, religions and social classes, where adventure, honor, and wealth beyond the wildest dreams of fantasy can be won by the daring, but swift death awaits both the foolish and the unlucky."

A fantastic blurb that captures the essence of late medieval strife throughout western Europe. A king's peaceful rule only extended as far as his military power, while local lords, mercenary captains, bandit leaders and religious zealots sought wealth and power by any means possible, often with scant regard for peace.

The historian in me feels obliged to mention that Peter Wilson, in his fantastic "Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire," often paints an alternative view. He explains how the institutions of the HRE worked to prevented many big wars. It providied a system of politics and courts for non-violent resolution of disputes. Nevertheless, it's clear that a lot violence was part of life when you read between the lines.

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I am continuing to investigate the possibilities for a spiritual successor to Darklands, and would like to talk with any artists (especially) and engineers who (a) have professional experience in the computer game industry, and (b) are willing to invest their time in return for a percentage of the game's once it launches - contact me by email (ajhendrick{at}aol{dot}com).

For those who want to debate the hows and whys of building new games, costs, staffing, goals, etc., spiritual successors or otherwise, this is NOT the place. The primary goal of this thread is to discuss the design of Darklands.