Anachronox

May 30, 1997

Well, the design doc for Anachronox is finished, and I can now start plowing full steam ahead on the project. Perhaps I should back up a bit. A design document (or "doc") is a huge, thick bible where every single thing in the game is documented: the story, the characters, the NPC (non-player characters), the enemies, the areas you explore, the music, the sound effects, and the suggested textures for everything. Once this huge document is done, you go through a listing of assets (every single graphic, sound, or bit of information) necessary to complete the game. Then you do a time estimate, given the number of people assigned to your project, to see how long you'll take to complete it. You may be early, or you may be way over-budget time-wise and need to either scale down your project or scale up the number of people on it.

I may have a little difficulty making that estimate as two of my mappers (Steve Rescoe and Rich Carlson) have been kind of borrowed for Daikatana for a while. (My idea.) Todd Porter is doing the lion's share of the asset calculation and setting up the whole thing in Microsoft Project. I always had a bunch of lists, but this is, like, The Big List. So big, in fact, that keeping track of it is the main job of my associate producer, Jake Hughes. This is an awesome setup, because the bible is always up to date, and I can concentrate on making sure everything is implemented the way I want and that it's consistent with the Anachronox universe.

Squirrel Eiserloh is busy making the camera work with our chosen perspective - that and contemplating purchasing something with a raised horizontal surface for his apartment.

Dave "Cleaner" Namaksy and Larry Herring are making maps for the main city of Anachronox, which is, of course, cleverly named "Anachronox." I just had an epiphany about the main town, and Cleaner had an awesome idea off that, and now it's going to be the coolest town in any game ever.

I just finished the Rogue Quake pack, The Dissolution of Eternity. Pretty fun. Those floating magician dudes were scary. I liked the last boss room. The boss could've been scarier, but the room and the effects in it were kind of scary.

After meeting Tim Schafer at LucasArts, I got really nostalgic for Day of the Tentacle, so now I'm playing it again at home. One of my games, Rise of the Triad, kept its initials as a tip of the hat to DOTT. It rocks. (Tim actually mentioned the coincidence in one of his recent e-mails. I never thought that "the guy that made DOTT" would ever notice. Hee.)

I'm starting to get on fire again. I haven't been that way in a long time. Really, not since Keen has a universe been so clear in my head. It feels really good. Sure, I won't have much of a life again, but it's great to be dragged on by a world that knows what it has to be, especially when you've just started it rolling. The clarity of things is so wonderful when that happens.

It's hard to explain, but buildings and races and little scenes are just kind of introducing themselves to me. Some of them come at night, as I'm going to bed or just waking; some of them come to me in the bathroom (though I'm oddly not embarrassed when they do); others come to me in the shower. I have notepads everywhere. I take my Pilot with me wherever I can. If you don't write the ideas down, no matter what you do, they're gone in a couple minutes. I didn't write anything concrete down about the universe until it sort of formed in my head fully. The universe's structure had to coalesce before I felt comfortable putting stuff in it.

So, this week I will be working with Todd and Jake on the assets and time estimates then diving in for our next deadline - E3. As Jake says, "Later fa you."