Disciples II: Dark Prophecy Designer Diary #4

By , GameSpotPosted Mar 14, 2001 4:23 pm PT

Lead programmer Frederic Ferland talks about the improvements his team has made to the game in the last few weeks.

Entry #4 - 03/14/01

By Frederic Ferland
Lead Programmer, Strategy First

The last few weeks have certainly been busy at the office. Most of the features on our wish list have made it into the game, and we have now begun the debugging phase of development. For now, we are doing it ourselves within the Disciples team. The designers are currently play-testing the Empire's campaign, which they created a while ago, and, at the same time, they are reporting the bugs that they find along the way. This is a very efficient way of proceeding because we are essentially doing two things at the same time: play-testing/balancing the scenarios while debugging the game. Up to now, this method has worked very well. In fact, a few days ago, the designers told me that the game is now much more stable than it was just two weeks ago and that the "bugs per hour" ratio has decreased tremendously. That is great news because the sooner the game is stable, the sooner we can release a demo--so that you too can try the game!

Once the designers consider the game to be relatively stable, the debugging efforts will be expanded to our quality assurance team at the head office (sorry, no public beta testing program). At that point, intensive debugging will begin with people actually being paid to play the game all day long, trying all possible and impossible ways to do all sorts of things in the game in order to uncover those hard-to-find bugs. This might sound like fun to some of you, but after you've played the same two or three scenarios over and over again for a week, I assure you that you'll look forward to the day the game actually ships!

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Further Improving the Graphics

The fact that all the features have been implemented and that the game is getting more stable every day doesn't mean that we (the programmers) can spend our days playing Minesweeper, waiting for the final graphics and scenarios to make it into the game. In the past two weeks, we have been adding features to the game. First of all, we have made modifications to the graphics engine to support alpha blending, which allows the artists to create translucent graphics. This will be used mainly for the spells on the isometric (strategic) map and during battle. We have also modified the way spells are displayed on the map. The original Disciples' spells let you have simply one animation on top of the party you are attacking, but the spells in Disciples II allow for multiple simultaneous animations. These animations can be placed under all map elements, behind the party being attacked, in front of it, on top of all map elements, or on top of the fog of war, allowing for the creation of more impressive effects. For example, by combining these two new features, we can now create a spell in which a dragon magically comes out from behind the party and breathes fire on it, with the party still being visible through the fire, as if it were really inside the flame. With these two features alone, the spells in Dark Prophecy will be much more impressive than they were in Sacred Lands.

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1 Comments

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jakeboudville
Posted Sep 13, 2006 12:23 am PT

looks good
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