Bloodlines will be an ambitious hybrid action/role-playing PC game played from a first-person perspective using the rules and setting of the popular Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop role-playing game. In the new game, you'll play as a fledgling vampire in a dark and dangerous near-future version of Los Angeles, where the streets are ruled by immoral humans and rival vampires--and worse things. Bloodlines is in development at Troika Games, whose founders include the creators of Fallout and Arcanum. Cofounder and joint CEO Jason Anderson joins us for this edition of our designer diaries to discuss how the development team went about making the Vampire tabletop game work as a computer game.

Putting the Game Into the Game

Having spent the past six years of my life creating the worlds of Fallout and Arcanum, I knew that I would find working with the world of Vampire: The Masquerade a welcome change. No more elves. No more dwarves. Thank you very much. Perhaps in a year or two. I was actually going to get to create a game about vampires. Cool.

But wait...I'm a Dungeons & Dragons fan at heart. I had never played the Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop game. I obviously knew what it was; I'd even read the second-edition source book years ago. I was a fan of the genre but had never actually played the game. It looked like it was time to do a little research.

It was apparent that the first order of business was to figure out exactly what it was that made Vampire cool to play. Not as easy an answer as you would think. I knew that the dark, gothic-punk world was cool, and the overall feeling of the world was similar to those of movies like The Crow and Blade. This, in its own right, would make the game remarkable. But what did the people who played the game take away from it when they were finished? What kept them coming back for more? It couldn't just be the setting, which can be found in plenty of books and movies. There had to be something more.

Luckily for me we had people at Troika who had played the pen-and-paper version of Vampire. We are a game company, after all. This knowledge base was indispensable to my research and came with a full collection of second-edition books to boot.

And so the brain-picking began, along with the reading of all of the second-edition source material. Then it was on to all of the revised editions. By the end of this, my team and I had a fairly solid understanding of the game itself. But even with all of this knowledge, and the firsthand experience some of our employees had playing the pen-and-paper game, we needed more information in order to pinpoint the exact element we were looking for. It was time to brave the Internet.

I searched out fan sites for Vampire all over the Internet. Let me just say this...I have seen things you people wouldn't believe. And though I may be scarred for the rest of my life, I found what I was looking for. Reading the fan sites, I found page after page of fans retelling their role-playing experiences. The main theme on most of these pages seemed to be character interaction.

This guy can get you anything you want, as long as you say the right things and don't make any sudden moves.

Vampire's role-playing seemed to be firmly rooted in character interaction, and stats, items, and powers took a backseat. Fans spoke most often of their characters' associations, whom they had spoken with, and how they had become entrenched in the intricacies of vampiric society. They focused very little on how many character points they had or what item they had obtained. I also discovered that the world itself was very important to the fans' role-playing experience. Unlike many other role-playing games, where the world is static, the world of Vampire is constantly evolving.

Finally feeling like I had a good grasp on the pen-and-paper game, it was time to figure out how to bring that experience to a computer game. Let me begin by saying that I am a firm believer in trying to reproduce as much of the pen-and-paper experience as possible in a computer game. There are two reasons for this. First, it keeps the game familiar to the core fans of the pen-and-paper game. These are the people who will initially buy the game. The last thing I want to do is get a wave of negative reviews from the core fan base. Second, I'd like the computer game to resemble the pen-and-paper game as closely as possible so that those people who have never before set eyes on the setting get an accurate introduction. I want them to be able to experience a true Vampire game--to whet their appetite for the genre. Ideally, the computer game experience will leave them wanting more and thus lead them to the pen-and-paper game.