Darren Monahan

Update by Josh Sawyer, Project Director Welcome. Today's update is a big one, though not by volume of text. Today we’re showing you our game in action. Specifically, we're showing what we've been doing for our exterior environments. The Infinity Engine games were known for their art, and we wanted to hit the high standard of visual quality established by games like the Icewind Dale series. We also wanted to introduce dynamic elements into the environment that were mostly absent from the classic games, like dynamic water, movement in foliage, and dynamic lighting of the scene. In a 2D game, this required our programmers and artists to come up with some creative solutions. What they came up with surprised us initially and it continues to amaze us. While we are still working on refining some of the dynamic elements, we're very happy with the progress we've been able to make and hope you feel the same way. Special thanks to Hector Espinoza, our lead environment artist, and Michael Edwards, our rendering programmer, who did a lot of amazing work to bring this environment to life. Thanks for reading, thanks for your feedback, and we'll see you next week.

Yep, the five of us (Feargus, me, and the three Chris') own Obsidian 100%. No outside investors or banks or anything.

He's right, I did mention there would be more Arcanum and I didn't add the next "Season 0" continuation in the last update. Thought it was getting too long, but I will get a few more sessions in this coming Tuesday's update!

Update by Josh Sawyer, Project Director We've got a lot of things in progress on Project Eternity right now. As Darren wrote in the last update, we're winding down our first prototype. We just did an audit of the work that remains from the first prototype and where we will be going with the next prototype. Our first prototype allowed us to prove a lot of the basics of movement, character design, stealth, combat controls, inventory, resting, quests, scripted skill interactions, dialogue, status effects, and the ability and spell systems. There's still a lot of work to do on all of those elements, but by the end of the prototype, it really did have "that IE feel". How I organized and moved my characters, how I used them differently in combat, how I explored areas very much captured the feeling of the Infinity Engine games in gorgeous high-res environments. So where do we go from here? First, we're going to try another approach to building interior environments to make sure we can capture as much of the organic feeling of the classic levels as we can. Second, we're going to continue to build up the dynamic elements of environment to make them feel more alive. We already have dynamic water, but we have more work to do on with elements like trees, grass, ambient visual effects, and our day/night cycle. We'll be showing you the results of those experiments in two weeks. Third, we're going to continue to develop more advanced gameplay features like fog of war, character voice sets, crafting, stores, AI patrols, and the melee engagement system. In case you're wondering about the story, we've been working on both a lot lately as well. We really want Project Eternity to strike the right balance of elements: to introduce you to this new setting, to make you feel personally invested in your choices, to engage you with the personalities and factions involved in the conflict, and to give you all of the freedom you've come to expect from an Obsidian RPG. It's a long process, but we're feeling very positive and excited about where we're going, which is always a good thing. Thanks for reading and, as always, thanks for your continued support. I'll be back in two weeks to show you our exterior environment running with all the bells and whistles in place! Planescape: Torment Retrospective Article by Darren Monahan, the Named One Back before Obsidian was a company, many of us worked at Black Isle Studios, the RPG arm of Interplay Entertainment. One of the games a number of us helped create was Planescape: Torment, an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons based RPG set in the Planescape campaign setting. As many of you already know, the guys at InXile recently launched the Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter. They’re getting a lot of the “old band back together” to work on this thematic successor. One cool thing they’re generously offering to all Project Eternity backers (whether or not you back Torment) is a Planescape: Torment Retrospective featuring developer diaries and blogs from many of the original developers, including quite a few former and current Obsidian devs. They’ve got nine days left, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, we encourage you to do so quickly! Please join me in thanking Brian, Kevin, and everyone at InXile! Kickin’ it Forward: Dwarven Forge’s Game Tiles Article by Darren Monahan, level 1 rogue/level 1 swashbuckler So, several of us on the Project Eternity and South Park teams are playing a D&D 3.5E campaign at lunch a few days each week. While they’re short sessions, this is no small production - we’re using a bunch of miniatures and tilesets for the campaign, many of which our DM (and Eternity designer), Bobby Null, has acquired over the years from Dwarven Forge. He came into work Monday incredibly geeked up because the folks at Dwarven Forge launched a new Kickstarter, which we got right into and backed. If you’re in to playing D&D and really want to get immersed, they make some incredible tilesets. Here’s a few samples from our game! (Note, these aren’t the exact tiles they kickstarted, but rather just some cool examples of their prior work.) Go check it out here! Thanks, and we'll see you next week!

Yeah, this is false information (and I think the username speaks for itself as to its credibility ).

RE: Waterfall animation... Sorry for misleading you guys! We'll have an update soon that has a video that shows off all of the little goodies the guys have gotten working. RE: Vertical Slice. Thought about it more at lunch. What I said above about the 'face' of Mona Lisa isn't even quite right. It's more like these kinds of questions we ask (again, using the painting a Mona Lisa example): - So, what do we want to paint exactly? - Do we have a frame? - Do we have enough canvas to stretch over the frame? - Do we have colors and paintbrushes? - Do we have enough colors to make a great painting? - Do the colors layer on top of each other without problems? - OK, so let's prove it by drawing a small test portrait at our final quality level that we're shooting for. That's probably a better way to think of our vertical slices here.

I think Gilbert is profoundly wrong. The key point of the vertical slice is that it tests all your real-time gameplay systems together. It gives you a sense of the player's moment-to-moment experience during a portion of the game. That requires you to prove that all your graphics, audio, gameplay, and possibly networking systems are mostly functional and integrated properly. That, in turn, is invaluable knowledge. You always want to have a running version of your game. The vertical slice is just the first relatively complete portion you get running. Gilbert's spatial metaphor is all wrong -- from a gamer's standpoint, playing the vertical slice is like seeing a significant portion of the whole experience of the game. It's more like seeing just the Mona Lisa's face, or something. The only way this wouldn't be true is if your game consists of many tiny minigames, but even then a vertical slice (a couple of the minigames) is relevant. This is exactly how we look at it. The vertical slice to us is just a way to take a big project and break it down into a small chunk for the team to focus on first. We generally have two questions that we ask: "Are we demonstrating the experience we want for this game" and "Do we have everything we need to produce final assets"? Before we get into Production, it's important to us to make sure we feel the design and tech have those solid foundations. We don't want to start ramping up more employees onto the project if we're not ready. We can end up spending time during Production redoing stuff (AKA "wasting money and time") which either reduces the length of the game, and/or affects its overall quality. The name "vertical slice" does conjure a weird mental visual. That article's image implies this long thin slice, but I feel that is misleading, at least on how we think of it. I agree with RepoMan: If we were to visualize our vertical slice using the Mona Lisa example, it's going to be a rectangle containing her face. We're going to shoot for something small (but meaningful) and see what works and what doesn't so we have information on what to do before we try to paint the whole thing. ...and completely agreed on always having running versions of our games. On all of our games, we do a daily build process and the results of it are vetted by testers, and anything that is going to cause team members issues is fixed ASAP into a build update. It's more in depth than that, but that's the gist of it.

Heh, I hid behind a wall - Feargus opened it up.

We had a box come in today from "A. Backer" out in Pennsylvania. Opening it revealed this in a beautiful box: This is now proudly displayed on our front desk. To A. Backer (and to all of you)... THANKS from everyone here!!! Darren

Hi there! I've joined the Obsidian Order, with special thanks to Pierre and SD from the Kickstarter Comments. They both sponsored $4 ea for me to join, because I am unable to back the project (fraud concerns and all that apparently!) sooo, first off thank you to them, and I am: Dread Lord Grandmaster Chef of the Obsidian Order (I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but if you played Ultima Online back in the day, it'll ring a bell. ) -Darren

HOLY CRAP, that's funny. I practically fell out of my chair. Nice one, Pop.

yay, I win

I'm speaking for myself here, but I really love working on D&D games - even after working on a bunch of multi-year D&D projects (IWD1 [plus IWD1: HoW and IWD1:Trials,] IWD2, BGDA, BGDA2, NWN2.) D&D is near and dear to many of us at Obsidian, and if the planets are in alignment, D&D games are always something we get very excited about working on, and our "master plan" definitely doesn't rule out doing more of them. Of course there's an appeal to work on new, original, and different games too; fortunately we have multiple dev teams at Obsidian, and if Atari's interested in new D&D games and we have people available and can keep food on the table for our devs, we'll try to figure out how to do it. 4th Edition looks pretty frickin' cool too....