Issue #8, August 17th 2015
Breaking Free of Fantasy Tropes
Hey everyone,
Joe here. As we’ve mentioned in our previous update, the team at OtherSide has been feverishly working on our latest demo. While we’d love to give you peeks at all the recent progress, we’d rather hold off for a bit and until it’s ready for the full reveal.
In the meantime, we thought we’d share further details on how we’re approaching Underworld Ascendant’s world building and story.
Part of the challenge in tackling the fantasy genre is there are a few high watermarks that are extremely influential, and a bevy of well-worn tropes. That leads to questions such as, how do you present races like dwarves in new and interesting ways?
I find a good way to start this process is figuring out interesting creative challenges. If you can come up with an idea that you find so compelling that it requires your absolute best work to pull off, then it’ll motivate you to give it your all throughout the long, sometimes exhaustive, development cycle. The thinking is also, if you’re engaged, your audience will hopefully be as well.
Another key part of the process is research. The old maxim of “write what you know” is spot-on but incomplete, since it leaves out the part where you can actually learn new information.
One of the things I learned from working on Irrational’s BioShock series is that research is absolutely essential to good world-building. It’s also incredibly fun. By digging through primary historical sources, you get a real sense of how people spoke, thought, went through their daily lives, and more. You pick up little details that make a world feel real, which then in turn helps make the fantastical elements of your setting seem more believable.
To give an example, the target we’ve given for our Dwarves is that they’re true mountain folk: rugged frontier types who are smart and wary, like early pioneers like Kit Carson mixed with HBO’s Deadwood and Jack London’s White Fang.
I’d since add to that: “Imagine the cast of Deadwood, if they were all members of MENSA.” Essentially raise the entire camp’s collective IQ up to the 98th percentile or higher. How would characters in that intelligence bracket survive and thrive as pioneers in harsh subterranean conditions? Seems like a pretty fun challenge.
That basically means I get to do a lot of reading into newspapers, journals, and correspondences from North America in the 1600s and early 1800s to try to nail a perspective, tone, and canter of speech generally along those lines.
Since it is fiction, you can definitely take certain allowances. In fact, sometimes you’re dealing with your audience’s view of time periods and cultures rather than representing them 100% accurately. (Irrational’s Ken Levine once mentioned the reaction to his initial pass at dialogue for BioShock was that it was unrealistic for the 1950s. His research had shown that while people at the time wrote fairly formally, they spoke pretty loosely, similarly to how we do today. After he adjusted the script to meet expectations, it was judged to be more authentic.) But this kind of legwork gives you an excellent start.
Beyond all that, your societies need a coherent, compelling philosophy… one that’s generally reasonable and relatable, but that actively puts them at odds with others in your game world. That way when conflict arises, each side will have a justifiable viewpoint, no one will come off as bland, generic good or evil, and it’ll ideally be a bit of a tragedy.
I’ll stop just short of detailing our Dwarf faction’s particular worldview, since it’s tied into that aforementioned, upcoming game demo. But suffice to say, we hope their philosophy and character should combines into an original take on Dwarves you’ve never experienced before. That’s our goal, which has been really fun to tackle.
And that’s not even mentioning the Dark Elves and Shamblers…
We can’t wait to show you and hear what you think.
Joe Fielder, Creative Director
Other News
$900,000 Stretch Goal Achieved!
This past week we reached the Language Localization $900,000 stretch goal! We’re now going to localize the game in French, Italian, German and Spanish. We’re also going to add Liches to the game. Huge thanks to all our existing and new fans for the continued support.
Next stretch goal up is the $950,000 Necropolis of the Ancients. Darkness upon darkness; ancient beyond reckoning. Only the stout-hearted enter this accursed underworld city. With your help, let’s bring this city of the dead to life!
We are also adding a mini-goal at the $925,000 mark, the Wailing Haunt. Haunts are a class of spectral creatures that hate all things living. The Wailing Haunt is blind in the conventional sense, but can sense the motion of the living and are drawn to it. If you are still they may pass right by you unawares, but if you make a run for it they are sure to pursue hard. They also have a piercing cry that can deafen and attract other undead. Let’s show our courage and entreat the Wailing Haunt to the Underworld.
Summertime Fun!
Finally, a reminder that the Summer cross-promotion with Bard's Tale IV and Underworld Ascendant is ongoing through September 23rd, where you can receive a $5 coupon for backing both games.
Redeem your coupon or pledge now!
The OtherSide Team
Issue #9, August 31st 2015
25 Years On
It’s been a quarter century since the original Underworlds were released. Yikes!
This seems a good opportunity to reflect on what has changed over the years in game development, and what has remained much the same. First, 3 ways it has changed:
Billboard’s Top Pop Song of Past Year
PC’s Have Come a LONG Way
The original Underworlds were designed to run on 20mhz 386 processor class PC’s. The smartphone in your pocket would crush a PC of that era without breaking a sweat.
These PC’s also lacked any sort of graphics card. You had to do all the rendering in software. That was a huge hurdle to doing real-time 3D texture mapping. Even with some super clever code running in optimized assembly language, we could barely achieve a playable framerate.
In some ways having these performance constraints was helpful, as it compelled us to find creative work-arounds. For instance, there was no way to render fast enough an over-the-shoulder view that would show the player’s character in the foreground and world beyond that. Solution was first-person view, which ended up working well for us, and many games to follow.
Today’s PC’s are ludicrously powerful in comparison. Graphics cards and modern game engines now provide all the building blocks to do sophisticated 3D rendering. The focus has moved from simply trying to get 3D to run, to tweaking the higher end bits of the rendering pipeline to achieve refinements on advanced visual effects. Like getting the fur on that creature to look even more natural than it did in a game from a couple of years ago.
Another notable evolution in the PC hardware is advanced displays and peripherals. The original Underworlds worked with just a keyboard, optionally a mouse if you had one. And the display was a mere 256 colors 640x480 pixels.
Today we have 4K displays. Then there is VR and AR coming into play, which are paradigm shifts in how players get immersed. Not just with their visuals, but with interfaces such as ‘wands’ that enable a more tactile experience in how you reach out and interact with the game world.
This level of incredible fidelity and immersion compels us to evolve our thinking on how we build games. For example, we can now consider mimicking the sort of physical manipulations a thief would do to pick a lock, instead of abstracting it as a mini-game.
Games have become HUGE
Ultima Underworld fit on 6MB of floppy disk space. For a modern PC game 6GB is not uncommon, 1000x bigger.
Where nearly all of the extra space has gone is into making dramatically higher fidelity visuals and audio. Supporting 4K visuals takes a LOT of pixels, as do high-polygon 3D creature models that have fluid animations.
These levels of fidelity facilitate creating beautiful and immersive 3D worlds. But it can take massive effort to build the assets. A modern big-budget 3D game can readily allocate 150 or more person years just to craft the visual assets. That’s on par with the effort it took to build a medieval castle!
Big-budget does not mesh with Indie games, so we’re compelled to be clever in how we get the best visuals without having a small army to throw at the task. It’s a different challenge than what we faced years ago trying to get a primitive PC to doing texture mapping, but it likewise gives rise to creative solutions.
Game Market has become Crowded
Today there are far more new games coming out each month than when Ultima Underworld released. Not just more PC and console games, but a flurry of games for platforms that did not exist in 1992, such as web and mobile.
So much noise to cut through and find the gems!
Many of the big game publishers cut through the clutter by doubling down on their proven franchises. That approach can work fine for the next iteration of Madden orCall of Duty.
This approach is rarely an option for an Indie studio. They lack the resources to do a marketing blitz to reach the mass market, and rarely hold a massively successful franchise to leverage. Indies rely much more on organic discovery. That’s a big challenge in a crowded market. A few Indie games will break out this way, perhaps one in fifty.
With Underworld we do have a beloved PC franchise, which gives us a leg up. There are also an array of social tools to help spread the word, including Kickstarter. Still it’s an everyday challenge to get the word out. You, our fans, can be the biggest help.
Billboard’s Top Pop Song of 1992
Next, 3 ways game development is the same, more-or-less, as it was a quarter century ago:
Great Teams make Great Games
The best way to stack the odds that you’ll deliver a great game is to have a great team building it. A great team is not some collection of ‘super stars’. A great team will have:
- A shared, deep passion for making the game, along with a dogged determination to make the game great. If you set the bar at less than great, nearly always you’ll deliver less than great.
- The skills to pull off the particular game they are building. Genius helps, but no team is filled with super stars. It’s more about having the right mix of competence and creativity among the team members.
- A team that can learn and grow. Making a great games means regularly encountering new challenges thrown your way. To tackle the challenges you frequently need to stretch and try new solutions.
Trust your Vision & Be Open to Taking Creative Risks
Timid teams don’t make great games. You need a strong vision for what you’re building, and have faith in your vision to fight to see it through. With games that stretch creative boundaries, you will encounter doubters who will question a game’s viability. A first-person sneaker… that will never work! Yet Thief worked.
Part of trusting your vision is a willingness to take certain creative risks. To experiment and try features that may or may not pan out. That’s how you have a shot at reaching for something truly innovative.
Iterate & Listen
As much as trusting your vision is essential, this needs to be tempered by keen aware of what is actually working well in the game as the pieces are coming together during development. Regularly testing prototypes of the game to see what is working well, and what is not so much. Then making changes, and testing again, and again.
This takes a critical eye of the team. These days we can also invite in the fans to get their feedback. With Kickstarter and access to prototype and Alpha build, we can get thousands of eyeballs on the game as it’s coming together. Ultimately our fans are going to confirm if we’ve made a great game for them, so we need to listen hard. This was just as true 25 years ago, although we have far better tools to make it happen now.
Paul
Other News
We’re deep in the making the first playable prototype for Underworld Ascendant, which we’ll be ready to share with fans this fall. Ahead of that we wanted to play a fun game with a sneak peek.
Above is a zoomed-in section of a structure that is in one of the areas of the playable prototype. Can you guess what it is? Hint, it’s hot, and something you’d only find in a fantasy underworld. Post your answer on our forums here. We’ll randomly pick one person from everyone who posts a guess and gift them an Underworld Ascendant t-shirt!
I think it's more that they have a playable prototype, while UA doesn't yet. I pledged $1000 to UA, so I'm still in pretty deep.
And Larian has money in the bank, they use crowdfunding just to get extra features.
Brave indeed.
Issue #10, September 14th 2015
Popping Up For Breath
We’ve been extra busy the past 2 weeks working on the next iteration of the playable prototype. So apologies for not having much news to share.
Progress on the prototype is coming along nicely. The creature AI is now solid, with creatures being able to track you, maneuver across a range of challenging terrain, and close in and attack if they are so inclined. We’ve got a fun twist on the sort of stealthy AI we did with Thief, here where it is you being stalked by a stealthy predator.
We’ve been pushing Unity 5 hard, and extending the engine with some new capabilities to handle our particular needs for Underworld Ascendant. Together with the talents of our now half-dozen strong art team, we’re raising the visual bar for sure.
An initial round of voice acting has also been completed, and are doing some cool things with ambient audio, which you’ll hear in the playable. Along with this we’ve been refining the narrative elements.
Lots of activity!
We have a Winner!
In the last newsletter we asked fans to guess what the structure above might be? Some creative guesses, and funny ones, including:
Wyntarr - How about a fiery river of souls? It looks to have a sort of ethereal mist around tendrils of lava like formations.
SocketPop - Clearly, this is two lava giants, from the back, with their arms spread wide. They may be engaged in interpretive dance, but I'd like to think they are pretending to be airplanes, and making the sounds to boot.
7th-key - Luminescent spider webs on a lava tree.
solistide - It's the inside of a gigantic lava worm; those tubes are filled with lava life blood, and the blue is the cooling fluid to prevent the worm from melting into goo.
Wibbleboy - I'm afraid that none of you are even close. This is a picture of the paprika coated chicken which is the favoured snack of the goblins which reside in underworld tunnels.
Many of you guessed close enough. It’s a massive structure composed of flowing lava, formed and twisted into a tree-like shape by a powerful magic artifact, harnessed by the dwarves towards their arcane purposes. More to come on this later this fall…
Does anyone still think this game is going to be good?
