Zork Grand Inquisitor

April 28, 1997

Intro

Welcome to the second installment of the Zork Grand Inquisitor Designer Diary. In my last entry, I took you through a day in my life as a Director. This month, we'll talk about the ups and downs of making an art intensive game such as Zork Grand Inquisitor. (By the way, thanks for all of the positive mail I received regarding the first entry - I really appreciate the feedback.)

"An art house, an art house, my kingdom for an art house!"

Beautiful graphics are key to any adventure game. Considering that gameplay is often paced at a slower tempo than an action sim like Interstate 76 or our new strategy game Dark Reign, it is even more imperative that every image we display be of the highest quality possible. And, unlike the two games mentioned above, which use a relatively small set of assets to create a tremendous amount of variation, every screen you will see in Zork Grand Inquisitor is a separate art asset. Each asset has to be rendered, processed, and compressed. Plus, we have to keep track of screens that will need to be localized (translated) for foreign languages.

In Zork Grand Inquisitor, we have a variety of different environments, ranging from the heights of Flathead Mesa to the depths of Hades. One of the greatest joys I have in directing is setting up the views that the player will see. This is particularly enjoyable when working with the cut scenes and live action components because that is when the spaces come alive as characters move through the environments we created.

Further, when we start to put images together in the game, and the game becomes playable, it is almost like magic. Art begins as a collection of ideas, rough sketches, and storyboards (see more on this below). To be able to pop in a CD and navigate through these spaces, cast spells, and experience wickedly cool animations is an indescribable high. Just last night we finished Build 5, and those who have seen it are already extremely impressed.

To create these large quantities of art, we contract with outside firms who have lots of artists and lots of rendering stations. We are currently working with Pyros Productions here in Southern California, Silicon Knights in Canada (near Niagara Falls - which I saw for the first time when I went to visit them), and Creat Studios in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Yes - former Leningrad, USSR, and No, the producer would not let me go there.) We are also working with two independent artists who live close by.

Finding the correct art house is not an easy task. In fact, we were dealing with another art house during development and the beginning of production. We had to make the hard decision to not continue working with that company.

How does a decision like this get made? In evaluating our relationship with an art house, we need to look at three different aspects of the process. The first and foremost is quality. You, the game player, expect a level of quality that is quite high. This level has been set by games such as Myst, Zork Nemesis, and Obsidian. The very nature of the Zork Series*, with its origins in Text Adventures, further makes us demand the highest quality graphic look because we are upholding the intense visuals that people's imaginations created from the written descriptions of the earlier games. As a game player myself, I will only accept the best images for the game.

(*If you have never played a text adventure, or Zork I, it is available from our web site for free: http://www.activision.com/zorknem/zorki.html.)

The next important aspect of working with a company is budget. Often an art firm will tell us what we want to create will cost more than we can afford. At that point, we can try to scale back the work or look for another firm with lower overhead or that works faster so we can spend less money for more artwork.

Finally, we look at the schedule. On Zork Grand Inquisitor, we are balancing art houses that have environments that need to be put together, a live action crew that need backgrounds to shoot against, and a sound house awaiting animations. If any one component of this system breaks down, we run the risk of disrupting the entire process, and that can cause schedule delays and more expense, both of which raise our budget.

Fortunately, our Producer, Elizabeth Storz is a pro at negotiating and keeping us on schedule. As I write this, all of our art houses are steadily producing the following environments: the Castle, GUE Tech Rotunda, the White House, the Grue's Lair, Port Foozle, and the Inquisition Headquarters.

"Once more onto the storyboards, my dear friends, or fill the paper with our broken pencils!"

As mentioned above, part of creating the art is storyboarding. Storyboards originated in the film industry where directors would create images of scenes before they were photographed so all members of the crew knew what to expect. They are especially invaluable for special effects, which is the majority of our shots due to combining live action with CG backgrounds and the use of computer generated characters.

Well, guess who had to do the storyboards. Yep, me. Now, let's see, who in my family has art skills? My grandmother used to paint portraits during the depression. My sister, Beth, has a fine art degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. My wife has been taking art lessons. Notice that my name is not on the list. (I can't sing either.)

Undaunted, I began the task with a smile. The first thing to do is read through the script and decide each shot. Then, I take pencil in hand and try to draw what I want to see. As you can view from images we've included in this column, I'm no Picasso or Matisse or Renoir or Da Vinci's eighth cousin once removed.

Response to my latest work has been a resounding laugh riot. We almost had to hospitalize some of the team. Anyway, this prompted the following top ten reasons why we don't tease the director about his storyboards:

10. He's sensitive
9. Really talented in a prior life
8. Tries hard, but he's #200022221
7. Wants to be a Photoshop artist
6. "You do them, then!"
5. Picasso's early stuff isn't very good either
4. Knows the producer, who signs the checks
3. Has a sketchpad and neat pencil
2. If they were better, there would be a risk that some of the other art could be worse than his and....
1. He's the director


"I am but jazzed north-northwest."

As I alluded to above, the payoff for all the hard work of managing art houses and doing storyboards is the in the final renders.

The totemization sequence (which is the punishment for disobeying the Grand Inquisitor) is totally cool and trippy. Our Hades boat ride is extremely neat and casting magic spells is a lot of fun.

The excitement I feel is further magnified by the fact that I see all of the team's hard work paying off when other people, outside the team, respond to the game positively. One of our goals is to make the game humorous and fun to play. Virtually everyone we show the early version to laughs in the right spots and compliments the work to date.

Ultimately, we are making the game to entertain players and to transport them outside of their homes, down into the Underground of the Great Underground Empire of Zork. Doing that successfully is the greatest reward.

Until next month, don't get caught in the dark without a lantern, and keep playing.

Laird