Lionheart Designer Diary #3
Reflexive designer Bryce Baker discusses the final stages of Lionheart's development and what it's like to design content for an expansive computer RPG.
Entry #3 - 01/30/03
By Bryce Baker,
Reflexive Entertainment
Lionheart will be an unusual computer role-playing game in which players will explore an alternate-history version of medieval Europe. Players will be able to learn to wield swords and sorcery while consorting with the likes of William Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci. The game is being developed by Reflexive Entertainment with direct input from Black Isle Studios. In this designer diary, Reflexive Entertainment designer Bryce Baker discusses the final stages of the game's development and looks back at how the game started out as a series of ideas and is now coming together as an actual game.
Somewhere along the line, all the hours I spent as a kid playing Dungeons & Dragons and classic computer games like Adventure and Telengard all the way through to modern games like Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale made me employable. Yeah, it doesn't sound very likely, but somebody has to win the lottery, so call me Mr. Lucky. I'm a designer here at Reflexive Studios, where we're finishing up work on Black Isle's next role-playing game, Lionheart. My involvement with the project began last summer as a contract writer. I joined Reflexive full time in October, just in time for the final crunch to finish the game.
For those not yet familiar with the title, it's a role-playing game set in an alternate-history version of 16th-century Spain on the eve of the armada's departure, when monsters and magic are more than just stories told to scare kids and the Inquisition has real heretics and demons to fight.
Being a designer is a lot like playing with Lego blocks all day, which is OK, since we have some seriously cool blocks to play with. The artists and programmers do all the real work--they make the blocks--and all we designers have to do is invent stories and situations to put them in. All the scripting and artificial intelligence routines are hooked up through a high-level programming language the real programmers have invented, so that telling a monster, "Do this and this, but not that," is simply a matter of connecting a few logic blocks to whatever you're working with. It's like magic, really. You ask the programmers or artists to make an asset or invent a behavior and it just sort of appears out of nowhere a few days or weeks later. At this point in the project, we've already made the castles, cathedrals, and dungeons, and we are going through the game-balancing process and applying polish.
For developers, role-playing games have to be a labor of love, because at the end of the day, no matter how much time you spent playing D&D as a kid, making RPGs is a lot of work. Not only do you have to generate massive amounts of content--monsters, spells, plots, subplots, dialogue, locations, items, and so on--but you also have to invent an expansive game system through which players interact with everything you've made. Because RPGs have a rich pen-and-paper heritage where the action was limited only by the imagination of the DM, players are accustomed to playing them as any of a number of different character types. A good RPG has to be fun for a player who likes to wade knee-deep in the blood of his enemies but still be fun for the player who likes a sneaky character, or a diplomat, or a wizard.
Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader Quick Links
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- Interplay
- Reflexive Ent.
- Computer Role-Playing
- Release: Aug 13, 2003 »
- ESRB: Teen
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