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The following is an excerpt from an almost complete edition of Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II – Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels, now funded in ebook format and paperback on Kickstarter. Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II recounts the creation of StarCraft and Diablo II, and reveals details never before known about canceled projects and the history of Blizzard Entertainment and Blizzard North.
Chapter 8: A commercial approach to showers
If you could show initiative and break your butt and find something? Hell, yeah, he came in. -Ben Boos, Artist, Blizzard North
One of the most awesome things about skill trees is that they show the player how he can develop his avatar, what his avatar is able to become at the highest levels, from the beginning of the game. -Stieg Hedlund, Designer, Blizzard North
At one point, people started to joke, "Oh, no, do not tell me that he took a shower this morning. I would come to the people's office in the morning and say, "Oh no, I'm ready, what did you think? -David Brevik, Co-Founder, Blizzard North
The biggest gaming company I'd seen up to here was Origin. They had their own building with offices on several floors, a cafeteria. When you walked in, there was a receptionist, there were TV screens, they had a gift shop. They seemed to have acted together. Blizzard North was nothing like that. -Philip "Phil" Shenk, artist, Blizzard North
From Tristram's dark lighting to walls worked in bone and ash-covered floors of hell, critical and commercial success of Diablo is due to the personalities of his small team. Every developer of Blizzard North had touched it. Their fingerprints can be found on each monster, each spell, each procedurally generated element, each step of the character's journey of the condemned player in the dark. The tests that the players faced during this trip were difficult, but the mechanisms of this trip were exactly the opposite
Click to move. Click to attack. Click to pick up objects.
Simplicity formed the dark heart of Diablo. This vital organ would be transplanted into Diablo II. All other organs – monsters, environments, heroes, loot – would be rebuilt from scratch. "There was a list of characters and abilities that we knew we wanted in the game, so the systems were designed to try to be capable of these features," said Steven Woo, programmer at Blizzard North. "Many times artists, programmers and designers would have discussions about the functionality they thought they should do, and just do it."
Diablo's hero classes stood near the top of the team's must-haves list, second only to the rampant cheating that had tarnished the game's online experience. For several months , the team is installed on five classes. The Amazon, a muscular fighter, was the first. "The team of characters decided that they wanted to work on a hot chick first, and that's what they did," says Brevik.
The Amazon did not start as a "hot chick". Kris Renkewitz, the original artist of the hero, drew a tall and fearsome woman who wore armbands that wrap her arms, animal skin boots and mummy wrappers that covered her most intimate parts, leaving the rest of his skin exposed. Her hair was short and spiky, her face dark and wild. "I've designed the character to be, like an amazon," said Kris. "She was a giant chick, her helmet looked different, her armor was different, her arms were weird, it was not just a girl with a ponytail and leather," he adds. he referring to the shape of the hero. Dave, Max, Erich and Stieg decided that a Xena-like appearance was too wild for their likes. One of the new Blizzard North artists, who joined the company in August 1997, paused in his revisions. "Do you know what it was?" remembers Phil Shenk of his time at Blizzard North. "As if you were playing games with the kids playing Dungeons & Dragons in their basement, it was like we were in the basement with all those cool tools, just to create weird and mysterious stuff.
David L. Craddock above, is the author of the three-part series Stay Awhile and Listen, which tells the story of Blizzard Entertainment, developer of World of Warcraft, and Blizzard North , developer of Diablo and Diablo II. His second episode is now crowdfunding on Kickstarter.
He started in the industry creating graphics for pinball games, including the Full Tilt! Space Cadet Table, integrated with all versions of Windows, starting with Microsoft Windows 95 Plus! Complementary package and ending with Windows XP – at Cinematronics, a studio based in Austin, Texas, and acquired by SimCity developer Maxis. Champing listening to draw something other than pinballs and springs, Phil himself is taught 3D Studio Max and is associated with two other creators to create Crucible, a game of 39, action-role and one of the motivators of the decision to acquire the studio in 1996. [19659009] In June 1997, at E3, Crucible drew Matt's attention Householder, who distributed business cards to developers to demonstrate the game. Phil dropped the card. He was optimistic about Crucible's prospects. The same month, Electronic Arts buys Maxis in a $ 125 million exchange and announces its intention to close Cinematronics and relocate the Austin team to Silicon Valley, where they would be working on SimCity games. Disinterested in modeling roads and buildings, and aware that Crucible still had a long way to go, Phil unearthed Householder's map. "We did not know what we were doing," he admitted of his action-RPG project. "We probably could not have done this multiplayer game [persistent] We had not even started the multiplayer component.
On the day of his interview, Phil entered the sacred halls where Diablo had been made and needed a beat digesting reality. The water has sunk dark spots on the ceiling. The carpet underneath them stank of mildew. Fans spread the stench more efficiently than dried puddles. Equipment had been stacked on the desks so that computers, keyboards, speakers and drawing boards were not wet. Cells of cubicles formed barriers in the corridors. "It looked like an air operation, but it was very busy," he said. "It was very lively, everyone was active, it was energetic, but it was not at all what I thought it would be, it was not a good machine. oiled.
He landed and showed up on the first day, ready to dig. Pulling the newest prototype of Diablo II, Phil's enthusiasm has given way to worry. The prototype was barebones, consisting of a single small dungeon built from gray tiles. The game ran at 640×480. Phil was surprised that Blizzard North is not pushing to reach 800×600, the next resolution rising. What really marked it, it is Amazonia. She was moving slowly, slowly, as if she was wading in the water, and she was too scary for Phil's tastes. Lighting 3D Studio Max, he turned the hero into a bombshell: always big, fierce and powerful, but with long golden hair pulled into a ponytail, and a buxom chest and a round figure that filled a leathery body armor.
When the rest of the guys exclaimed from his drawing, Phil breathed a sigh of relief. He had feared that any team capable of designing a game as brilliant as Diablo rejects the ideas of the lowest members on the totem of the company. Over time, his first impression of the somewhat squeaky environment of Blizzard North has changed. A game as inventive, dark and quirky as Diablo could not be invented in a clean and sterile office. "I thought Diablo was the quintessence of conscious art direction: everything was planned, Tristram had that kind of strange, gray and stormy color scheme," he said. "It was not the day, it was not the night, and I was wondering," How did they come up with that? " "It's not the night, but it does not look like the day." I thought these guys were geniuses, but when I got to know them, I discovered that everything was done by the seat of their pants. "
While the kind of amazon was closed to a female, players could change its appearance by equipping armor purchased from vendors or driven out of the cold, dead hands of monsters.This was also a system postponed from Diablo. the first game, the player characters were displayed on the screen in light, medium or heavy armor depending on the category of equipment they were putting on. Limit the screen performances to the ############################################################################ 39, one of the three appearances had lightened the burden of the works of Carried by the team arrived from Blizzard North, but also reduced the style. A ragged Warrior looked like another warrior leather armor with spikes, since both types of armor fell into the "light" category.
There were other limitations. Gear such as helmets, swords and shields were also depicted according to the category of body armor, so that a short sword appeared chipped and unadorned while it was held by a character wearing light equipment, to become more adorned when the player wore a coat of mail) or mail plated (heavy). The team's decision to limit player interpretations to three visual styles is also born from the resources. At the time when Diablo had taken off, Blizzard North – then Condor – had operated on a small budget with a small team of untrained and disconnected artists. They simply could not afford to reflect every ring, amulet, ax, club and piece of armor that the players wore.
Thanks to the studio's success, the artistic reservoir of Diablo II was much deeper than that of its predecessor. "We started thinking about how to put the characters together like a paper doll," says Kris Renkewitz.
"The characters were rendered as GI Joe figurines, so you can tear them up: right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg, torso, then individual hands," added Robert Steele, l & # 39, one of the game's artists.
The Diablo II paper doll system was led by Jon Morin, still disappointed that the voxel engine he had developed with Dave Brevik and Doron Gartner had been a bust, he was looking for ways to contribute.When a rendering system that worked like paper dolls floated in a meeting, Jon volunteered to code it.Working with Phil Shenk, he wrote a tool that allowed artists to model specific body parts, and each hand could hold a different weapon, and any number of components could be mixed and matched. "I ended up writing the module system that sorted out any s the pieces, so that when you put that particular sword and this particular armor, it would look almost exactly like those of a character, "he explains
. Phil tested his component system on a monster, a test bench easier than a player character, because the equipment pool for heroes would be much deeper. For the first outing of the system, they have decked out a corrupt thug, a dead-life Rogue hero from Diablo. "I believe that corrupt thieves were the only monsters that were classified as completely as [heroes]," said Phil Shenk. "They could hold all types of weapons, I believe, all the others were more fragmentary, just to provide variety, if anything had a weapon, the weapon would be a component. arm, a left hand, a right hand, legs, shoulder pads. "
On the other hand, fewer options of paper dolls simplified the order of operations when rendering characters.Each character was loaded into a queue of rendering.Because each hero could make e faced with sixteen directions, an artist had to render each animation of attack for each direction possible. Monsters, who could only cope with eight directions, were easier, but only relatively. Building any character was a huge task. "We had a tool that helped us sort all the different parts of the body from all angles so that the picture 5 displayed correctly and the left arm was not behind the torso," said Anthony. Rivero. "It was a pain in the ass to do that, you had to make sure that all that stuff was in the right order."
"You'd do those queues, and there's there might be 500 things in a queue, "added Kelly Johnson. "It was only an hour or two to make that queue."
"Because we had to make the entire system of components from different parts of the body, sometimes their order was screwed up," adds Pattie Tougas. "So you would have a head for one leg, an arm torso, an arm for the body and you could walk around like that."
Armed to the teeth, the growing bestiary of the Amazon and Diablo II was in need of a battlefield. The game would feature abandoned rooms and dark corridors, but in a twist, would not be the most common type of terrain. The Blizzard North escape game had been vertical: Start at the surface and venture through a stack of sixteen dungeons increasingly dark and dangerous as the players descend. Instead of a stack of dungeons divided into four themed regions, Diablo II would unfold over four acts, each bearing a unique look and décor, and each setting consisting of expansive outer regions.
The first act of Diablo II out of their comfort zone. "Tristram's setting at Diablo was what we called the Irish campaign, and in fact, the first act of Diablo II was going to take place in the Irish countryside again," said Max Schaefer. "We started Diablo II in the desert to take you out of the city-and-dungeon format below Diablo. You say immediately," It's different "when you start the game. We open the world, and things work. It was different from the vertical design of the first game. "
In a clear deviation from the darkness and cramped cells of the first game, Act I stretches across fields and meadows. and fortresses in ruins, but these are pit stops, players can go down to a cave to kill monsters for the experience or to solve quests, and inevitably they will reach a dead end and return to the surface to continue. to explore
The back-pla They would consist of mosaics assembled according to algorithms. Painting tiles that consisted of green backdrops required a tool as versatile as Jon Morin's paper doll sorter. Max Schaefer organized the environmental artists, first a team of one: A cool developer called Ben Boos. "I think the first job for me was Dave Brevik saying," We need grass, we need an outdoor scene and weed, "said Ben, who painted and cut tiles before teaming with Kris Renkewitz. form the Blizzard North film team. "And I said to myself, oh my god, I do not know where to start, I had no idea where things were tiled or technology, so I plunged myself, j & # 39; I painted and I went crazy.
Shortly after, Ben was looking at a bunch of tiles, like pieces of a 1000-piece puzzle that had not yet joined an idyllic scene. To assemble this scene and countless others according to the algorithms, Ben received a helping hand from Tyler Thompson, a programmer hired a few weeks before Phil Shenk. "I went to SIGGRAPH [Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques] in New Orleans in 1996," said Tyler. "I saw a black-and-white advertisement with a monster that said," Do you want to work on games? "Wow!"
Tyler rushed into his dorm room and spearheaded the gambling industry, firing over three hundred job applications by email and mail. copies of his resume. For months he heard nothing but silence. A week before graduation, he received three offers: one from Sony, one from a little known studio called Holy Grail Interactive, and one from Blizzard North created by a job recruiter. . Matt Householder took over and organized a two-part interview for Tyler. The first stretch consisted of a programming test. Tyler completed it at home and faxed his results. For the second part, he skipped a plane to Redwood City and made a quick tour of the office. After that, the guys asked him to answer other programming questions.
Before leaving, the Blizzard North programming guru launched a quiz. "David Brevik took me into a frantic, fast and terrifying race in his 911 Turbo, I think it was, while asking me tough questions," recalls Tyler. He said "What do you think about working on a game like Diablo?"
"I like to test my legs on my sports cars, and I'm a pretty fast driver." Dave Brevik recalled. "It was a white-fingered experience for him, it's Certainly, I think his pants were a little wet Test number one: How do you behave under stress? "
Two weeks later, on April 19, 1997, Tyler at Blizzard North and undertook his second challenge. It was great, although less of a white-knuckled experience than doing a crank turn with Dave Brevik, he had to simplify the process of creating tiles for Ben Boos, who still carried the full weight of creation. from the environment.
"I said to Tyler:" Do like a paintbrush. "will paint a path.Then you load one of the variants, and if I clicked on Grass, it would be automatically random and choose one, "said Ben. "So, I was kind of the only one to do it, and it's become a crazy job and very patient." What they did with this little crazy tool is amazing, they deserve a lot credit, we had very basic tools to work.
Tyler had turned his tile cutting tool in record time. His next task was even more Herculean.
Read the full chapter in Stay Awhile and Listen: Book II – Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels, now funded in ebook and paperback formats on Kickstarter.
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