Disciples II: Dark Prophecy Designer Diary #4

Entry #4 - 03/14/01

By Frederic Ferland
Lead Programmer, Strategy First

The last few weeks have certainly been busy at the office. Most of the features on our wish list have made it into the game, and we have now begun the debugging phase of development. For now, we are doing it ourselves within the Disciples team. The designers are currently play-testing the Empire's campaign, which they created a while ago, and, at the same time, they are reporting the bugs that they find along the way. This is a very efficient way of proceeding because we are essentially doing two things at the same time: play-testing/balancing the scenarios while debugging the game. Up to now, this method has worked very well. In fact, a few days ago, the designers told me that the game is now much more stable than it was just two weeks ago and that the "bugs per hour" ratio has decreased tremendously. That is great news because the sooner the game is stable, the sooner we can release a demo--so that you too can try the game!

Once the designers consider the game to be relatively stable, the debugging efforts will be expanded to our quality assurance team at the head office (sorry, no public beta testing program). At that point, intensive debugging will begin with people actually being paid to play the game all day long, trying all possible and impossible ways to do all sorts of things in the game in order to uncover those hard-to-find bugs. This might sound like fun to some of you, but after you've played the same two or three scenarios over and over again for a week, I assure you that you'll look forward to the day the game actually ships!

Further Improving the Graphics

The fact that all the features have been implemented and that the game is getting more stable every day doesn't mean that we (the programmers) can spend our days playing Minesweeper, waiting for the final graphics and scenarios to make it into the game. In the past two weeks, we have been adding features to the game. First of all, we have made modifications to the graphics engine to support alpha blending, which allows the artists to create translucent graphics. This will be used mainly for the spells on the isometric (strategic) map and during battle. We have also modified the way spells are displayed on the map. The original Disciples' spells let you have simply one animation on top of the party you are attacking, but the spells in Disciples II allow for multiple simultaneous animations. These animations can be placed under all map elements, behind the party being attacked, in front of it, on top of all map elements, or on top of the fog of war, allowing for the creation of more impressive effects. For example, by combining these two new features, we can now create a spell in which a dragon magically comes out from behind the party and breathes fire on it, with the party still being visible through the fire, as if it were really inside the flame. With these two features alone, the spells in Dark Prophecy will be much more impressive than they were in Sacred Lands.

Music to Your Ears...

Another area on that we recently decided to improve upon is the game's sound. We had already stepped up the quality of the music and sound samples by using a different compression technique, but we wanted something more, something different. We thought it would be a good idea to add a few nice touches to the sound system, which is an often neglected aspect of a game. Well, allow me to introduce isometric sound regions! What exactly is a sound region in Disciples II? To put it simply, it's an association between a sound and an object on the map. The closer you are to that object, the louder the sound plays. Get far enough, and you won't hear the sound at all. We're not sure how this is going to be used in the final product since this has been implemented only this week, but it can certainly add a whole new dimension to the game's audio portion.

The battle sound environment has also been modified slightly. Now, your unit on the far left of the screen attacking an enemy on the far right will sound as if it's farther from the enemy. In this particular case, the sound that the attacker makes will appear to come more from your left, and the sound that the enemy makes when hit will come more from your right. Of course, that's assuming your speakers aren't next to one another.

But wait, that's not all! Even the way we handle the mountains has changed. Those of you who have toyed with the scenario editor from Disciples will be more familiar with what I'm about to explain. In Sacred Lands, all mountains occupy exactly one tile. If you put two or more mountains side by side, they will graphically merge, but they won't become larger mountains. They will simply become two small mountains that are connected to each other. In an effort to further improve the visual aspect of the game, we decided to try a new approach. Now, if you put mountains on a 5-by-5 area on the map, you'll get a huge mountain instead of 25 small ones. We haven't completed all the new mountain graphics yet, but even with the ones we have, the game already looks better.

Keep Going...

It really amazes me what can be accomplished in just more than two weeks when you are really motivated. These features are just a few of the improvements that we have made recently. Other than those, we have added a few configuration settings to the options screen (like a separate volume control for unit acknowledgements--something that many gamers asked for), and new conditions and effects for the existing event system. We have also made other smaller but valuable enhancements. Moreover, I'm sure that we'll have time for even more features before we ship the game.

Many of us visit the Disciples forum regularly, so for those who are interested in asking us questions or just saying a few words, visit www.disciples2.com.