Project Diary

Date of Release : Friday, January 09, 1998

We're busily churning away towards an internal prototype next week,
where we plan to have two reasonably playable (if still rough) missions. On the
big checklist we've got:

• locks and keys (and basic lockpicking)
  
• working door-and-lever systems in the prison mission
  
• prescripted voice-over hints and color commentary by the player-character
  
• a bunch of new speech samples for NPC chatter
  
• basic swordfighting, with several attacks and a block
  
• better-polished weapon art for the PC's bow
  
• our first cut at inventory, with items you can pick up (since, after all,
  you're supposed to be stealing stuff) and use
  
• new mockups for interface art and the in-mission maps

and no doubt
a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting.

Eric's
got us a bunch of new sounds from our recent recording sessions, while Josh
has been working on our mission briefing movies. In general the programming
effort has been geared towards tools, mainly in developing the game services
available to the object scripting language. The designers have been all working
madly on the aforementioned missions, editing levels, writing scripts, writing
dialog and documents. I've been motivating them by stalking around the design
pit imitating Bela Lugosi in Glen or Glenda, shouting "Pull the
strings!"

Okay, I made that last part up. -Tim