Titan Quest Designer Diary #1 - Remembering the Titans

Iron Lore Entertainment is still working on its debut game, Titan Quest, but odds are that you'll be familiar with some of the games that the people at Iron Lore have made at other studios. With talent drawn from noted development houses such as Ensemble Studios and Papyrus Racing Games, Iron Lore has members who worked on the hugely popular Age of Empires games, as well as the acclaimed NASCAR Racing series. With a pedigree like that, it's a bit surprising that Titan Quest is neither a strategy nor a racing game, but rather an action role-playing game along the lines of the venerable Diablo series. In Titan Quest, you'll control a hero in the ancient world, battling mythical creatures, such as mummies and medusas. The game looks absolutely beautiful, too. Unfortunately, Titan Quest isn't due until next year, but for now, we kick off our designer diary series with Iron Lore president and lead designer Brian Sullivan.

Remembering the Titans

Brian Sullivan
President and Lead Designer, Iron Lore Entertainment

After working as a designer and executive producer on the Age of Empires games, and having played real-time strategy games almost every day for more than five years, I was ready to take everything I had learned and apply it to something new. In addition to strategy games, I have always loved role-playing games and thought it would be great to take the design sensibilities and production quality of Age of Empires and apply them to role playing. So that's why I started Iron Lore Entertainment: to create great role-playing games.

I have always wanted to work with Paul Chieffo, one of my best friends from grade school. Paul is a successful entrepreneur who had already started, run, and sold a high-tech company. At the time I left Ensemble Studios, Paul was looking for a new opportunity. I convinced him games were the way to go, and together we started Iron Lore. We hired a few people, created a demo, and finally got a contract with THQ in January 2004. After getting the contract, we were able to finish hiring a fantastic team, including Jeff Goodsill, who was previously the general manager at Ensemble Studios and studio manager for Papyrus Racing Games. Many other team members came from top-flight developers. With this team, we believe we have been able to raise the bar in almost every area of game development.

On the technical side, we decided to develop our own technology after determining there was no third-party tech that would allow us to create the game we wanted to. Our first programmer, Max McGuire, spearheaded the development of our graphics technology, enabling the great visuals we have in the game. He also developed an incredibly sophisticated terrain system that allows streaming worlds, and that combines tiles with a height-map system, along with a realistic-looking texture-blending system. To go along with the terrain system, we developed a powerful level editor that is incredibly easy to use. We will ship this editor with the game and expect it to be very popular among modders.

Our artists developed a very effective process that lets them really take advantage of the technology and deliver breathtaking art. We have a full-time concept artist who is able to conceptualize almost every piece of art before it is built digitally. We have several artists who are great modelers and texturers, for both unit and environment art, and all units and vegetation are given to our animator, who brings it to life. The environmental artists work closely with our level designers to define the art we will need to make the worlds look great, and the unit artists work closely with our gameplay designers so that the monsters work well for gameplay and look fantastic in combat. The whole process is orchestrated by Michael Sheidow, our superb art director.

Our level designers are working hard to create a breathtaking and realistic looking world. Our editor is so powerful and flexible that the level designers must have a fair amount of artistic and aesthetic ability in order to do this. It is not easy for most people to sculpt the terrain and place trees and rocks in a way that looks natural. A large reward for players in our game is seeing new areas of the ancient world, and the level designers have taken this to heart, crafting a virtual world that we expect will take your breath away, location by location and scene by scene.

The main objective we have tasked our gameplay designers with is finding out what makes an action RPG fun. Our first step was to get rid of a lot of things that are not fun, such as spending a lot of time traveling to and from town to sell your wares and micromanaging inventory, and instead focusing on the action and adventure elements that really drive action RPGs. We created flexible character classes and modifiable skills to let players really customize their characters to match their play style. To make the loot-collection part of the game even more exciting, we added a lot of unique equipment, each with hand-entered stats and art. And we kept the action and combat fast-paced and visceral, because that is what fans of this genre love about these games.

Everything is pulled together by play-testing and polishing. Everyone in the company--and many outside of the company--continually play the game and provide feedback on the gameplay, levels, art, user interface, sound, music, and other areas. We use this feedback to continually revise the game so that it is as fun and beautiful as possible.