04/07/99

Alex Garden, founder of Relic and director for Homeworld

In the last diary, I talked a little about how we started Relic, where the idea for Homeworld came from, and how we ended up working with Sierra Studios. There is a vast amount of history on this project. When I was thinking about what to write in this second installment, deciding on a topic was the hardest part! After some thought, I realized that the best topic would be "The Homeworld Single-Player Game: What the Hell Happened?" From the very beginning of this project, I've had a clear vision of how I wanted the game to be and how I wanted the story to flow. What I was lacking was a clear idea of how the story should be told. This translated into a lack of direction for the team that ultimately led to a lackluster first effort on the single-player game.

At the beginning of the project, our direction for the single-player game was a fairly simplistic overview along the lines of "a classic Western soap opera set in space." We wanted a storyline that drew the player along using traditional story elements with a sci-fi twist, in the same manner of Star Wars. Throughout the project, we had been able to produce overwhelming amounts of content in a very short time. Naturally, we thought we would be able to continue this pace when we set about doing the single-player stuff. We originally expected the single-player game to take two to three people one to two months to complete. Our thought pattern at the time was "Well, the multiplayer is 90 percent complete. We have all the ships and galactic areas pretty much done. The game engine is very stable. We're almost done! How hard could the story-based missions possibly be?" The thing we (mostly I) failed to take into account was the sheer volume of items that were specific to the single-player game.