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Chapter Twenty-One



For the last week of preproduction my section of the schedule read write TDR document. It turned out this meant “technical design review,” and I tracked down the one Darren wrote for Realms of Gold VI and set it to print, which resulted in a stack of printouts four inches high. The TDR was the universal blueprint for the entire game, the almighty spreadsheet of creation.

It listed every object, every feature, every level, every scene, every character—everything from the Save/Load screen to the closing screen. When I was done with it, the other teams would take it for holy writ. Gabby would take it and break down every texture they had to draw, every 3-D model they had to build, every animation they had to script, and assign it all to somebody, and estimate how much time it would take and put that in the schedule. Don would take the schedule information and track everybody’s progress and figure how many people we’d need and how much money all this would cost.

Lisa would do the same thing—break down all the functionality, systems, and subsystems for the programming team, including all the process-oriented stuff—tools for the designers, the mechanics of taking raw graphics files and importing them into the game engine, etc., etc., etc.

I would do the same for the designers, who would then build the levels, spec the interfaces, write the dialogue, and place the objects, traps, and monsters.

It occurred to me to read through Darren’s TDR in case he’d listed “crazy black sword of insanity” anywhere. He hadn’t, which only added to the mystery. If you didn’t put that on a list, how did it get in the game?

At the top of a fresh legal pad I wrote:

Technical Design Review: Realms of Gold VII: Winter’s Crown

“The World Is Everything That Is the Case”

For example: What is every possible action you can ever possibly take?

For example: Walk, run, jump, crouch, pick up, drop, throw, stab, chop, slash, parry, shoot, cast a spell. Talk. Sneak. Get on a horse, get off a horse, open a door, close a door. Lock a door, unlock a door. Light a torch, snuff out a torch. Fall over. Die. Was that everything?

Next there was, oh, God, every single object in the entire world.

door

horseshoe

catapult

tiara

bucket

stone, large (4′)

stone, medium (2′)

Stone, small (1′)

Stone, tiny (1″)

Oh, God. Maybe if I worked by categories. I started with foodstuffs.

Turkey leg; pint of milk; seedcake (the contents of Black Arts’ refrigerator).

What next?

Weapons? Light Sources?

What about Light Sources That Are Also Weapons? A glowing sword? A wooden club that has caught on fire? Oh God. Could you even contemplate an ultimate game unless you had an infinite list of possible objects? And were there by any chance foodstuffs that were also light-emitting weapons?

The sun was long down by the time I was done with every inanimate object I could imagine us needing in a fantasy universe. By then I was starting to realize I couldn’t just list nouns and verbs. I was making a system; the world was a space to play in. The objects related to each other and to the game system that ran the world; they were more like clusters of adjectives, properties. I would need to specify how much everything weighed, cost, how durable it was, whether it damaged an enemy, what it was made out of, whether it burned, floated, emitted light, harmed werewolves, drained levels, or damaged the undead.

And how much it cost! At the start of the fourth century, the Roman Empire was having a lot of trouble with inflation. Nobody understood economics back then, so Emperor Diocletian simply issued the Edict on Maximum Prices. He made a list of the prices of every possible thing you could buy in the empire and how much it could cost. An egg cost one denarius, no more. The two most expensive things in the empire could cost, at most, 150,000 denarii each. With that much money you could either buy a pound of purple-dyed silk, which no one ever needed except Diocletian himself, since the emperor was the only one who wore purple. Or you could buy a lion. Up to you. But game designers had as much luck controlling prices as a Roman emperor did. WAFFLE had its own ideal about economics and adjusted prices by the whims of its scheming elves and greedy dwarves. We had to built an “appraise” skill just so players could keep up with them.


Later that night I wandered the office trying to think of reasons to leave, to go home and get some sleep. I saw that Lisa’s desk light was on. She was playing the last Realms of Gold game. I’d never actually seen her or anyone else playing it in the office. I stopped to follow the action. The game was in isometric view—not true 3-D, but as if the player is looking down at the world from above, at an angle. The characters looked like colorful, delicate paper dolls. I watched while Lisa carefully, patiently murdered everyone in the entire world.