Tarthus

How are you guys handling cover? I don't mean tactical cover, I mean buildings and things that the characters walk behind. Do they become transparent when the party walks behind them, or does the player just lose sight of the party? The strategically-placed broken column made me wonder.

Awesome. Thanks for taking the time to respond and for the insight. I'm glad you mentioned pre-production, as I'll be turning in projects soon that will be reminiscent of actual games, and I want to make the process as streamlined as possible. I'm glad to see you guys focus on the player experience. I know that all companies do it to an extent, but I think that many lose their way and end up making something that could have been great but ends up lacking for one reason or another. Two that immediately come to mind are Mass Effect 3's ending and Diablo III's ridiculous difficulty on Hell mode. I asume that ME3's endings were a design choice, but the fans were outraged when the endings didn't pay off for what was a $180 experience for many of them. In their defense, however, Bioware did get the extended endings out quickly. Diablo III's difficulty has since been lowered, I've been told, but I know a lot of people played before the fix and would clear the first room then restart to do it again, as they couldn't kill anything beyond that. I didn't really have an issue with either, as I only played ME3 after the extended endings were released and I stopped playing Diablo III well before I reached the Hell difficulty. It was too repetitive for me. Thanks, again!

I'm a game development student currently attending Westwood College and I've been tasked with tracking down two people involved in game development in order to ask them three questions. The instructor said I could ask more, but I don't want to ask for too much of your time. He even gave me the questions: What game design principles do you think are most important when creating new game? Which area of the design process do you find the most difficult and why? What element of game design do feel gets neglected the most? Thanks for your time. Looking forward to Project Eternity!

In that case, I would like to be "Item Acquisition Specialist of the Obsidian Order." Yeah. That sounds about right.

So, I upped my pledge from $35 to $50--that's my $8 with a little interest. Do I get my fancy title?