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Because of the tight production schedules, the level design and art ended up looking like this in 1997. |
Deciding to forgo the Christmas 1997 target date in order to add 3D card support, the team regrouped to work on all the game's content, hoping it would be able to seamlessly switch to the Quake II engine in early 1998. The plan was to ship the game in March. So while an immediate release date might not have been looming over the heads of the employees, even a March ship date would make the game only a 12-month project. With so much creative content to develop, the latter months of 1997 involved level designers, artists, and musicians working hard to sculpt the four distinct worlds of Daikatana.
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In late 1997 John Romero realized that Ion's company culture was non-existent. |
As production continued, it soon became clear that the team was starting to feel the pains of being brought together overnight. The words "company culture" were no doubt lingering in Romero's mind as he realized that a number of the artists, hired from nongaming companies like Marvel Comics, had limited experience working on an interactive game. "What I didn't predict was that the artists didn't understand the technology," says Romero. Artists normally used to working with a complete rainbow of colors were told they had to limit the character artwork to 64 colors at a relatively low resolution. This problem was highlighted in late 1997 when Romero received a huge piece of art for the small arrow that is fired from the bolter weapon in the third Episode, the Dark Ages.
"We had a skin for a little arrow," remembers Romero, "and it was 1300x960 pixels. It was out of control." An artist inexperienced with games had drawn the arrow, which would never take up more than a few pixels on the screen, at a higher resolution than most monitors could display at the time. While mistakes are always common, the artists who worked on the project cite such an example as a clear indication of where the development team was headed. "A mistake was made by an artist," Daikatana conceptual designer Jim Daly admits, and "the level design team jumped at the opportunity to embarrass the art staff." Instead of working together to fix the problem, Daly claims it felt as if the level design team wasn't interested in working toward a common solution. Instead, Daly felt the level designers used any mistakes as ammunition against the artists on the project. "This was an early sign of how their cliquey, club-house attitude would help later divide the team," he states.
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