Krondor Confidential - Part VII

Settling In For the Journey

For the first several months of development, John Cutter and I had metaphorically lived on a small island, isolated in the heart of Dynamix away from the rest of our team. In many ways it was a boon because I had a great deal of “think” time to work on the project, unmolested by what would become the daily demands of a leadership role. It was also a time when I remember a fairly steady stream of visitors coming to John’s door, superstars of the gaming industry who’d previously only been names in the credits of much-loved games. I was lucky enough to get a ringside seat as they drifted in and out of his office. 

As pleasant these initial months were, however, it became clear by the early part of 1992 that we couldn’t work effectively as a team with everyone spread across the second floor of the Atrium building. Our programmers were mixed in with the developers for the Aces Over the Pacific , and our artists were similarly scattered between different teams. Meetings involved a lot of walking back and forth between suites to quite literally run down a problem. It was time to come together and get a place of our own.  

Our new digs were a suite located in the corner of the Atrium building facing 10th street. John, and Nels Bruckner, and Mike McHugh all scored offices while I got a cubicle directly outside Mike’s door. In the months since the start of the project, Mike’s rocky relationship with the rest of us had not improved much since our first meetings and putting me in even closer proximity to him did little to ease my discomfort. Nevertheless, although the move did nothing to improve relations with Mike, it did wonders for the communication between the other members of the team. Now when any of us had questions, all we had to do was peek over the walls of our cubicles or convene at the long pair of pushed-together tables in the center of the suite. 

All of us, to one degree or another, were lone wolf personalities, so it suited us to call a full meeting only when everyone was absolutely needed, and even then, we tried to keep things short. More often than not, however, the tables served as a sideboard for our impromptu food deliveries. Pizza, of course, was a regular staple for our team, with pepperoni, BBQ chicken, Hawaiian chicken, or pie-with-everything being the usual choices. On Mondays, carbohydrates were on order with each of us taking turns to bring in donuts, or muffins, or croissants, or bagels. Because I was an Okie kid from the suburbs of Tulsa, these last things were a novelty to me, and at first, I had no clue what bagels were, or how they were meant to be prepared. (Years later, for the brief period in which I lived back in Oklahoma, my father discovered a bag of my onion bagels on our breakfast table. I found him in the dining room chewing one determinedly like he was a dog gnawing on a rawhide bone. He paused in mid-chew, one eye open as he fixed me with a disapproving scowl. “Worst goddamned doughnut I ever had.” Patiently I extracted another bagel, demonstrating that they were meant to be toasted and lathered with cream cheese. Dad was dubious until he had the properly prepared bagel, and then thereafter became quite a fan. On future trips to the grocery store he’d ask me to bring home more of those “weird donuts.”)

The rhythm of the team quickly established itself once we were all in the same place. John was usually the first in, around 9:00 a.m., with the rest of us filtering in between 9:30 and 10. Lunch was pretty much whenever anyone decided, though for me I usually opted take mine at an off time in order to avoid crowds. There were several places within easy walking distance, but I tended to favor Rosewater’s Deli on the downtown mall for BBQ sandwiches and cheese soup. Across the road in another direction was a cheap joint that made a decent Egg Foo Young, but otherwise was a poor substitute for the Chinese restaurants I’d gotten used to in Los Angeles. Sometimes I’d venture a little further out to hit a sports bar that was nearby for fish, or I’d meander over to the the 5th Street Public Market where I discovered the magic of bangers and chips. 

5th STREET MARKET - This fantastic shopping spot in Eugene is still there, though I think my beloved chip shop may have vanished in the intervening years.

As much as I loved most of my teammates, I needed the time during lunch alone so that I could recharge my batteries before the afternoon grind. By our fifth month of production, John and I’s design duties were beginning to become more than we could stay ahead of. Fortunately for us, there was someone at Dynamix who was itching to climb out of the testing pool and was willing to do whatever designer grunt work we handed him. 

Whenever I think of Tim McClure, I always picture him in the same moment. He’s young and frightfully thin, scarcely more than a skeleton. Long, straight brunette hair frames his pale boyish face that’s sprinkled with almost imperceptible freckles. There’s an impishness in his eyes that gleam behind a pair of round John Lennon-ish spectacles. Perched on the top of a desk like a crow, he thoughtfully stares out of our office windows streaming with water. “I f@#%g hate rain,” he says to me. He gives me a look like there’s something I can actually do about it. “It’s AWFUL.” I helpfully point out to him that rain is kind of Oregon’s schtick. “You really shouldn’t hold your feelings in all the time,” I tell him. “Honestly, how do you REALLY feel?” 

Tim was not a man that was shy about expressing his opinions. He had many. After weekends he’d come in to talk about a movie or a TV show or a game he’d played, and we’d all get a critique about everything that was wrong with it. He loved Fist of the North Star and hated J.R.R. Tolkien. He seemed to be passionate about everything he came into contact with, and he was either your mortal enemy or your fiercest friend. Thankfully for me, I fell into the latter category. I always saw him as a little kid who simply hadn’t learned how to lie like an adult. If I needed an honest opinion about something I was doing, I could always rely on Tim for his unvarnished answer. 

TO BATTLE! - Betrayal at Krondor’s turn-based combat system was hugely influenced by chess.

By March of 1992, the team had resolved a great deal about the direction of the project, but there were a few critical issues still up in the air. While John and I had established the basic parameters of the gameplay, some details like the actual functionality of the combat system were still being hammered out as we experimented with different approaches. One guiding principle though remained the same, virtually unchanged since the start of the project. Combat would be turn-based and would feature a chess-like interface. 

Turned-based combat was certainly no great innovation on our part. Every other RPG on the computer gaming market that had come before us was turn-driven, a feature inherited from the turn-based combat of the original Dungeons & Dragons. The real-time combat that would slowly creep into the genre wouldn’t hit full force until Diablo, and even the first popular mass market real-time strategy game, Dune II, was only just hitting the market. Where we decided to innovate, however, was to take a very simple step towards factoring in terrain in a role-playing environment.   

Before Krondor, encounters with monsters in CRPGs were much like early medieval and revolutionary war battles. The player’s party and the monster party were always lined up nose-to-nose, then a simple hackfest would ensue where party members just beat on whomever was in front of them until all the attackers or all the player’s party were dead. “Auto-fight” had become a staple of games like Wizardry and Might & Magic, which largely turned many combat scenarios into tediously undramatic spectator events where the player was employing very little thinking or strategy. Being the bastards that we were, John and I wanted to put a stop to all of that. 

Admittedly, the combat traps in BAK were an experimental oddity. Players had to stop and think about moving their characters around in such a way that they could slip through the mazes formed by the traps. John leaned heavily on inspiration from old-fashioned “slider” puzzles, limiting the player’s options so they’d have to be strategic in their maneuvering. Although it was nothing so sophisticated as dealing with the effects of height differences or even cover, it was a rudimentary way to make player positioning more interesting, and also more dangerous. 

As proud as we were of our various design innovations, our team was keenly aware that we were in a race. Although a number of RPGs were already using pseudo-3D environments (which were really just 2D games using depth-based tiles), we had great ambitions of being the first role-playing game to market with a true 3D engine -- called 3Space -- a factor which we hoped would help set us apart from other computer RPGs. But late on an evening in March of 1992, as most of us were preparing to head home for the night, our lead programmer, Nels, stuck his head out of his door. “Guys, I think you need to come look at this.” So all of us piled in, gathering around his monitor. On the screen was what was clearly a role-playing game running in a true 3D environment: Ultima Underworld. We’d been snaked by one of the best-known RPG developers in the industry. Tim summed up, with his traditional eloquence, what the rest of us had been privately thinking.  

“F%$k!” 

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