Thief Game

TES4 = Thief 4?

2006-04-03T07:12:00.000Z

Eidos Mobile: Thief 3 Mobile

2005-07-29T09:15:00.000Z

STORY

Thief makes its mobile downloadable debut in Part 1 of a 2 episode single player, action stealth game. Play as Garrett, a Master Thief, who is without question the best in his field; seldom seen and never caught. Garrett is able to use the shadows to his advantage. Sneaking past adversaries, stealing precious items and concealing any evidence of his presence is second nature to this creature of the night.

* Raid the City’s rooftops and pick locks and pockets on looting missions in hallways and homes.
* A huge arsenal of Thieves’Tools is at your disposal, including a mechanical eye, water arrows and gas bombs to name but a few.
* Trade your spoils for equipment to enhance your thieving skills.
* 8 gripping missions to complete.

SCREENSHOTS

Typical Controls

Action	Keypad	Joypad or joystick
LEFT	4	Left
RIGHT	6	Right
CROUCH	0	-
ACTION	5	Click (push in joypad/stick)
INVENTORY UP	8	Up
INVENTORY DOWN	2	Down
PAUSE GAME	*	-
UPPER LEFT	1	Diagonal Up + Left
LOWER LEFT	7	Diagonal Down + Left
UPPER RIGHT	3	Diagonal Up + Right
LOWER RIGHT	5	Diagonal Down + Right

Note: The above controls apply to the majority of phones. Some phones have slightly different keypad layouts. The control layout for the phone can be found in the in-game Instructions menu.

Icons

Action Icons

Icon	Name	When does this icon appear?
	Look/Go through door	Indicates when Garrett can look/go through a door, archway, etc
	Climb stairs	Indicates when Garrett can climb up or down stairs.
	Interact	Indicates where it is possible to interact with the environment – includes picking up objects and picking pockets.
	Pick Lock	Indicates a locked door or chest that can be opened with the lock-pick.
	Item/Objective required	Indicates when an item is needed to unlock a door or chest, or when an objective needs completing before proceeding.

Weapons Icons

Icon	Name
	Blackjack
	Water arrow
	Noisemaker arrow
	Broad head arrow
	Health potion
	Flash bang
	Gas grenade
	Mechanical eyes

Miscellanous Icons

Icons	Description
	Examples of loot found in the game including the map (top left).

Commands

Walking and Running

You can make Garrett walk by pressing the LEFT or RIGHT keys. To switch to running, double tap the appropriate LEFT or RIGHT key.

Crouching

You can make Garrett crouch by pressing the CROUCH key. While crouching, he will not be able to move around. However, he will be able to pick pockets and select inventory items. He will also be less visible to his enemies.

Hiding

Garrett’s only sure defence is to avoid being discovered. He is safest moving from shadow to shadow, progressing undetected.

If Garrett is spotted out in the open in bright light, he may be discovered. Any civilians who see him will alert the nearest guard to his position, and any guards who find him will draw their swords and attack immediately. The entire screen area behind the inventory / health panel at the bottom and the status panel at the top will change from light to dark to reflect how much light Garrett is in.

Additionally, there is a light gem in the middle of the bottom panel which indicates the amount of light in the area that Garrett is in. There are 3 different states of light that Garrett can be in, namely

Darkness
In darkness, when Garrett is crouching, he cannot be spotted, even by a character that is alert.
In darkness, when Garrett is standing, he cannot be spotted, unless another character is alert.
Semi-darkness
In semi-darkness, when Garrett is crouching, he will be in darkness and completely hidden.
In semi-darkness, when Garrett is standing, he can be spotted by an alert or a non-alert character.
Light
Garrett can be spotted by any character, alert or non-alert, whether he is crouching or standing.

If Garrett is spotted and cannot hide in complete darkness, it is best to run away to a different room until the alert status has been cancelled.

Climbing Stairs

There are 2 methods to enable Garrett to climb up or down stairs. On most phones, diagonal movement keys are defined so that pressing the UPPER RIGHT key will move Garrett to the right in the same way as the RIGHT key does. However, if Garrett comes across a stairway leading up to the right, he will automatically move up it. The UPPER LEFT, LOWER LEFT and LOWER RIGHT keys work in a similar way. Some phones have joystick diagonals enabled and these can also be used to traverse stairs (see Typical Controls).

The other method to climb stairs is to press the ACTION key when the CLIMB STAIR icon appears, and then press the appropriate RIGHT or LEFT key to move up the stair.

In some locations, Garrett will automatically climb stairs. This is typically the case in areas where there is nowhere besides the stairs for Garrett to progress too.

Doors

Making progress through the level will frequently require the need to move from room to room by means of doors. These doors might be the end point of the level, or they may lead to a new area of the existing level. To use a door, move in front of it and when the LOOK/GO THROUGH DOOR icon appears, press the ACTION key.

Garrett will then look into the room before entering, giving you the chance decide if you wish to go in. By pressing the ACTION button again, Garrett will enter the room. Pressing any other button will cancel this process, and Garrett will remain where he was.

Picking Pockets

Garrett can pick anyone’s pocket as long as they haven’t spotted him. To pick a character’s pocket, Garrett must first crouch behind them while the character is stationary. If Garrett is in the correct position, a PICK POCKET icon will appear. When the PICK POCKET icon appears, press the ACTION key. Garrett will then attempt to pick the target’s pocket. For a pick pocket attempt to be successful, the target must stay still long enough for Garrett to clean out their pockets before they walk off!

Locks

Some doors or items will be locked to prevent access. Some of these locks will need a special key, but many can be picked using Garrett’s special thief lock-picks.

To pick a lock stand in front of it and press the ACTION key when the PICK LOCK icon appears. A number of tumblers will appear representing the locks barrels. A lock that has a greater number of tumblers is more difficult to pick.

Use the UP, DOWN, LEFT or RIGHT keys to pick each lock barrel in turn. When you get the right direction for a tumbler it will turn white. This process must be completed correctly in sequence for each barrel of the lock for it to be successfully picked.

If you can’t work out the combination, or if someone is coming and you need to run and hide, press the ACTION key to exit the Lock Pick mode.

Characters

There are two types of character in the game that Garrett will encounter, Civilians & Guards. Either can carry important items or have vital information that may help you in your quest. The Civilians will run away as soon as they spot Garrett. If they run toward a Guard, they will raise the alarm and the Guard will move to attack Garrett. Guards will automatically attack Garrett if they spot him, or are alerted to his presence and then find him.

Picking up Items

There are numerous items strewn throughout the game. Some of these items may be immediately useful, such as arrows or bombs, while some are vital mission items that must be found to complete the level, others are classed as ‘loot’ and can be sold at the Shop to buy supplies for Garrett’s next mission. Some items may be held by one of the Guards or Civilians in the level, so be sure to pick their pockets.

To pick up items in the game, simply walk Garrett over the item and he will automatically pick up anything that is of any use to him.

Pick up Characters

When Garrett knocks out a guard or civilian using one of the weapons at his disposal, the character’s body will remain in view if they are in a well lit area. If another character spots the body, the alarm will be raised. To prevent this from happening, it is necessary to hide the body in an unlit area. If Garrett is able to move a body, the PICK UP icon will appear above the body when Garrett stands over it. Position Garrett over the body and press the ACTION key to pick up the body. Use the LEFT or RIGHT key to carry the body to an unlit area. Drop the body by moving Garrett in the reverse direction using the LEFT or RIGHT key. Garrett can only carry the body in the direction he is facing. If he changes direction, he will drop the body.

Rooftops

Escaping the scene of your last crime and reaching safety is vital to Garrett’s progression. Using the Rooftops is the quickest route and provides the least chance of being spotted. Garrett knows several paths across the Rooftops to the Shop where he can pawn his loot. Start Garrett running by pressing the LEFT or RIGHT key. Once running, use the ACTION key to leap over damaging steam vents and the gaps between houses. If Garrett fails to make a jump, you will need to back up and start him running again. Depending on your performance in the Rooftop section, you may get a Loot Bonus to spend in the shop.

The Shop

Garrett will visit the shop after escaping from his last mission across the Rooftops. In the Shop, Heartless Perry will buy the collected loot at a fixed price and offer you the chance to restock your supplies. Select the items that you think will be useful, or save your money to get one of the more powerful items on sale at a later time. To select items, use the LEFT, RIGHT, UP or DOWN keys to move around the menu, and press ACTION to buy the highlighted item. To exit the shop, move to the Exit Shop icon and press the ACTION key. You will then progress to the next level of the game.

Interacting with the environment

Some areas may not be as they seem, so be sure to search each level carefully, as there may be secret rooms, or hidden doors to find.

Inventory

You have access to your inventory at all times. Pressing the UP and DOWN keys enables you to change the selected item displayed as an icon in the bottom left of the screen. Alongside the icon is a number that represents how many units of each item are left. To activate the selected item, press the ACTION key.

Blackjack

The Blackjack is used to knock out enemy characters before they are alerted to your presence or hinder your progress. You can use the Blackjack as many times as you want, but you will have to creep up behind a character to knock them out. If you use the Blackjack successfully, you will only need a single blow to knock out and disable a character. If you are discovered before you can use the Blackjack, you will need to hit them more than once to knock them out, and they may attack you or run for help before you can do this. Some guards may not go down with one hit, so do not rely on the Blackjack to solve every situation.

To use the Blackjack, press the ACTION key once to equip it, then again to swing it. While it is equipped, Garrett will sneak very slowly. To put the Blackjack away, simply double tap a direction to break into a run or choose the blank item in the inventory.

Arrows

You have 3 different types of arrow, namely the Water Arrow, the Noisemaker Arrow and the Broad Head Arrow.

To use an arrow, scroll to it in the inventory and press ACTION to draw Garrett’s bow. The bow will be aimed at the closest target in the direction you are facing. Press the LEFT or RIGHT key to select a different target. Once the correct target is selected, press the ACTION key to fire.

To cancel firing an arrow, press the UP or DOWN key, or alternatively wait a few seconds and Garrett will put the bow away.

Water Arrow
The Water Arrow is used to extinguish light sources such as wall torches and exposed lanterns. When a light source is extinguished, the area it was illuminating will now be in darkness, enabling Garrett to sneak through unseen. Nearby guards may become suspicious when torches go out, so be cautious.
Noise Maker Arrow
The Noise Maker Arrow is a non-combat arrow used to distract guards or civilians. The arrow will distract anybody close to its point of impact.
This arrow does not have a target. You can only fire it to the left or right, by pressing ACTION when the scrolling target sight is in the desired location.
Broadhead Arrow
The Broadhead Arrow is a combat projectile used for ranged sniper attacks, and can be used to knock out any target. However, a target must be stationary for it to strike home correctly, so you will need to time your shot carefully.

Bombs

You have 2 different types of bomb, namely the Flash Bomb and the Gas Bomb.

When a bomb is selected using the ACTION key, it will immediately initiate the throwing sequence. A target sight will move across the screen away from Garrett in the direction he is facing. The target will move until it reaches the maximum throwing distance at which point the throwing sequence will automatically cancel. Pressing the ACTION key during the throwing sequence will throw the bomb to the point the target sight has reached.

Flash Bombs
This is an explosive device that temporarily blinds your enemy.
Gas Bombs
This is an area-effect explosive that creates a large cloud of poisonous gas. Any characters in the vicinity of the bomb explosion will be knocked out.

Health Potion

This is a liquid potion that you can drink to heal any damage you have taken during combat.

Selecting and activating the Health Potion by pressing the ACTION key will restore any health that Garrett has lost.

Mechanical Eye

This is an artificial eye that Garrett possesses. It allows you to scan ahead of Garrett’s position to check for any potential dangers. It will also show different areas of light and dark by highlighting the background in the same manner as if Garrett was walking through the area himself. Activate the Mechanical Eye by selecting it with the ACTION key, and use the LEFT or RIGHT keys to scan ahead of Garrett’s position.

Hints & Tips

Blue message boxes or white dialogue boxes will frequently pop up at the base of the screen to give you information on items you pick up, clues to solving puzzles, or hints on how to play, etc. Pay attention to these hints, as they may help you solve the mysteries of the Keeper’s quests.

Pausing the Game

The game can be paused at any time by pressing the PAUSE GAME key. When the game is paused a menu will be displayed that will give you the following options

Resume Game

Select Resume Game to go back to the game and continue from where you paused.

Map

Select the Map to view the layout of the current mission.

Objectives

Select Objectives to review the list of objectives you must complete in order to successfully complete the current level.

Restart Mission

Select to restart the current mission. Items and lives will be reset to the level they were at when you entered the level.

Quit

Select Quit to return to the main menu. From here, you can choose Quit again to exit the game completely. The game will be saved up to the beginning of the level you quit from.

Credits

Eidos
Producer:	Paul Sheppard
QA Project Manager :	Ghulam Khan
QA Lead Test:	Alex Holroyd
QA:	Wayne MacDonald
	Allison Archer
	Liam Hill
	Nick Wong
	Dean Ollive
	Sean Carter
	Daniel O'Ferrall
	Gareth Mills
	Tim Rust
Localisation Manager:	Caroline Simon
Localisation QA PTC:	Joaquin de Prado Garcia
Localisation QA Testers:	Matthieu Chollet
	Jacques Galon
	Andreas Gschwari
	Angelo Rocca
	Pablo Trenado
	Marco Vernetti

IOMO
Producer:	Jonathan Eardley
Programmer:	Steve Longhurst
Art:	Jon Davies
	Marvin Hill
Audio:	Paul Zimmer
Design:	Nik Bowen
QA:	Chris Lipscombe
	Dave Gumble
	Jon King
	Mark Rodgers
	Anthony Read
	Dan Smith
	Ron Jackson

Source: Eidos Thief Mobile

Thief: Deadly Shadows Release

2004-05-26T07:20:00.000Z

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Iomo: 'Thief: Constantine's Sword'

2002-10-10T18:44:00.000Z

IOMO AND iFONE TO DEVELOP A J2ME GAME BASED ON PS2’s NO 1 STUNTMAN FOR MOBILE HANDSETS
IOMO, developer of entertainment content for mobile devices has announced it is teaming up with wireless entertainment publishers, iFone, to develop a J2ME version of the PS2’s No 1 game, Stuntman, for mobile handsets.

John Chasey, Managing Director of IOMO commented “With access to the wide range of brands in the Atari portfolio, iFone are an ideal publishing partner in the mobile sector.”

The player will be able to play in four of the film stunt sequences from the original PS2 version including "A Whoopin' And A Hollerin'", "Blood Oath", "Scarab of the Lost Souls" and "Live Twice for Tomorrow".

Senior Producer at iFone, Paul Hilton commented, “We selected IOMO to develop Stuntman because of the company’s experience in creating digital interactive entertainment products across multiple mobile devices and its structured approach to pre-production.”

Have you got what it takes to grip the wheel, hit the gas and chase the glory?

IOMO
IOMO is a leading independent developer of entertainment content for mobile devices, based in the south of England. Since the company was founded in April 2000, over thirty titles have been developed to date and high profile projects include Wentworth Golf, Thunderbirds, Thief: Constantine's Sword and TxtDating. In-house technical expertise covers SMS, MMS, WAP, J2ME and Symbian OS. Clients are from all areas of the mobile industry worldwide including manufacturers, portals, wireless publishers/aggregators and traditional game publishers. They include Nokia, Vizzavi, Digital Bridges, In-fusio, Aspiro and Eidos. IOMO are founding members of TIGA (The Independent Game Developers Association, www.tiga.org.uk).

iFone
iFone is backed by Marlborough Holdings, a technology investment firm, and is a preferred partner of Infogrames Entertainment. The management team combines expertise in games’ publishing, wireless games development and consumer marketing. The team brings experience from Sony, Psygnosis, Infogrames, IXL, Diamond Multimedia and Agency.com. www.ifone.com - For more information, please contact Mandy Sharpe on 0161 827 8200 or m.sharpe@ifone.com

For further information, please contact:

John Chasey, Managing Director, IOMO Ltd
tel: +44 (0)23 8065 3301
email: john@iomo.co.uk

Thief: Constantine's Sword
Iomo and Eidos Interactive announce 'Thief: Constantine's Sword', an original title for WAP mobile phones, based upon characters and locations created in the first installment of Eidos' critically acclaimed PC title "Thief: The Dark Project".

'Thief - Constantine's Sword' is a fiendish combination of puzzle solving, strategy and recollection; and throughout the game the player is also told, in words and pictures, of the story of Garrett's journey through the mansion.

Each level is deceptively simple at first glance, nothing more than an easy maze, but as the player starts to navigate they will soon discover just how tricky the task at hand is. Time is of the essence and the otherwise straightforward routes through the corridors of the mansion are littered with obstacles, which must be avoided or negotiated. If the player were to tread carefully, constantly checking for the dangers that might lay before them, they would likely come to no harm; but time is pressing and they must make bold moves. The further the player can travel each turn the better, but this increases the chance of them making a mistake

Source: Iomo

Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem On Looking Glass Studios

2000-05-31T04:58:00.000Z

James Sterrett

We�ve all been shocked and saddened by the sudden demise of Looking Glass. It seemed that Looking Glass was riding high, with System Shock 2 and the Thief series finally getting it the public acclaim and sales Looking Glass has always deserved. Suddenly, Looking Glass turned out to be dead. Why did this occur? The more I have learnt about this, the more complex the answer has become.

However, the quick answer is this:

Looking Glass died because a series of problems compounded each
other into a financially lethal situation. No single factor is to blame. No
single person or entity killed Looking Glass. No one problem was enough, on its
own, to kill the company. Nonetheless, the problems were deadly when combined.

A hard fact of the world is that software development companies are rarely in a very good financial situation. The company enters a contract with a publisher to produce a specific game with a given set of features. The contract usually specifies that the publisher will provide the producer with money when the producer achieves agreed-upon milestones in the construction of the game. If the producer fails to achieve a milestone before the previous dollop of cash runs out, the producer has to find more money, or go out of business. Getting more money now almost inevitably means borrowing it in some manner, which leaves the producer with a debt to pay off in the future, reducing the net profit from royalties - payments the producer gets as a percentage of the publisher�s profit from sales of the game - the producer gets once the game
is finished. Those royalties are only a small fraction of the actual revenue gained by sales of the game, and, furthermore, the payments the producer got during development are considered as advances against the royalties.

As a result, the producers are in a bind: they have to make a very complex product, on a tight schedule. If the schedule slips - and, because of the complexity of the product, the schedules nearly always do � the producer begins to get into trouble.

One of the ways that a producer can reduce their exposure to this risk is to have several projects running at once on an offset release schedule. If all goes very well, each product�s royalties then provide the operating expenses to get later products through their troubles. If one product fails to make money, the revenue stream from the others cushions the company from the blow. A producer needs to have a minimum of three or four active projects for this to work.

Inevitably, there are some catches in this plan. The biggest catch is that nothing guarantees the income cushion: no game is guaranteed to do well. If several games fail to do well at once, the scale of trouble is proportionately worse. It takes a large company to conduct multiple projects at once. Thus, when the company does have to search for extra funding, it needs a much larger
infusion of cash than a smaller, single-project company. The risk involved is reduced, but the consequences are worse when things turn sour.

All in all, producing games is not for the risk-averse. Lots of things can go wrong. Many game projects never get to the point of being sold. Many of those that are sold do not make enough money to repay the cost of their production. Since the games cost several millions of dollars to produce, and more millions to publish, a lot of copies have to be sold just to break even. Consider that Thief II cost $2.5 million to develop, and probably, at the very least, another million to publish (and probably more). At a price of $40 per box, it needs to sell a minimum of 87,500 copies just to break even. And at 100,000 copies sold the profit margin is still only half a million dollars, which isn�t enough to fund the next game.

Keep in mind that this doesn�t all mean that the publishers are the evil villains of the game industry for failing to support obviously good companies and ditching the bad ones, and for failing to split the profits equitably with the producers. Publishers are, in fact, in the same binds as the producers, except on a much larger monetary scale. Bigger publishers are better able to
offset losses with a few hits, which is why there are so few publishers around:
most of them have died or been bought up.

The third link in the chain of getting a game into your hands, the game retailers, is also under immense financial pressures. Yes, retailers do some pretty amazing contortions that introduce big problems for the publishers. But when was the last time you saw an independent game retailer? All of their strange tricks (see The Retail Game) are designed to try to insure that the store won�t fold when it bets wrong on which products to stock. Game retailers have wound up in large chains because the greater mass of money allows a single store to survive mistakes
better; the parent corporation may bail it out if it founders, while an independent retailer would simply fold.

The entire computer games industry is high-risk. Vast amounts of money are spent in the hopes that a few games will sell well enough to make up for the losses incurred on all the others. (If you want to know more about the perils of computer game development and publishing, there are several good articles about this on the web. I suggest beginning with these three: Staying in the Black; The Retail Game; and Why Being a Computer Game Developer Sucks .)

When we look at things in this light, Looking Glass was actually a remarkably successful and long-lived independent developer. It survived all of these pressures for eleven years and produced at least 12 titles: Ultima Underworld I & II; System Shock I & II; Terra Nova; British Open Championship Golf; Flight Unlimited I, II, & III plus a Windows �95 version of Flight Unlimited I; Thief I & II, Thief Gold, and, if the bankers permit it, Jane�s Attack Squadron. In addition, Looking Glass did conversions of various PC games to console systems, and at least one original console game: John Madden �93 for the Sega Genesis, which sold over one million copies and was their greatest single hit.

Of all these, most were successes. Terra Nova was a disaster, not least because Looking Glass decided to publish on its own. Exactly why Terra Nova failed on the market is not clear. Possibly the gaming public saw it as a Mechwarrior clone and thus ignored it. If Terra Nova had been a success, this would have allowed Looking Glass to reap far greater profits, as they had done
with the self-published Flight Unlimited 1. When Terra Nova was a commercial disaster (despite selling over 100,000 copies), Looking Glass was left holding all the publication debt. Looking Glass might have folded at this juncture, but was bailed out by Averstar, Inc.

Terra Nova would have killed most companies. Looking Glass, probably because of its previous string of successful titles, was able to find creditors and stayed afloat, but in debt. Over the next several years, the company appears to have led a troubled existence. Nonetheless, Looking Glass nearly died again in 1997. British Open Championship Golf experienced a difficult birth, and then bombed when released, as a third self-published game, in the spring of 1997. The
company saved itself, in part by closing a studio in Austin set up by Warren Spector. While it reduced overhead, this closure was a serious loss. Not only did it cost Looking Glass staff who were important to ongoing projects, such as Thief, but the team involved comprised no small net talent: many of that team formed the group now completing Deus Ex. Moreover, the stress of not knowing if the office would be open from day to day caused many of the Looking Glass staff
to leave, slowing projects while replacements were found and trained. In and around all these troubles, a project for a Star Trek: Voyager game foundered and eventually died. All told, Looking Glass incurred a significant quantity of long-term debt in this period, though it improved its financial situation at the end of the summer through a merger with Infometrics, a subsidiary of Averstar.

Yet Looking Glass survived. Flight Unlimited II appeared late in 1997 and eventually broke even. Nonetheless, the debt incurred in this period - from Terra Nova through Flight Unlimited II � comprises the precondition for Looking Glass� eventual demise. If all went well, Looking Glass could control the debt, pay it off, and survive. If trouble occurred, it was not as well-placed financially to deal with it.

Thief appeared in late 1998 and was a major hit, eventually making millions of dollars for Looking Glass. Had Thief not been a big hit, Looking Glass would almost certainly have folded. Instead, Thief appeared to revitalize the company. Thief Gold sold well, and System Shock II sales were passable. Thief II is currently on the way to being an even bigger hit than Thief I. However, Flight Unlimited III (released in 1999) sold quite poorly and ate the gains from System Shock II due to an agreement with Electronic Arts to pay off advances for both projects with the royalties from both projects.

Furthermore, there is extensive circumstantial evidence that Thief�s success, great though it was, may have done little more than plug the holes that debt had left in Looking Glass� budget. Thief ensured that, if all went well, Looking Glass could survive 1999 and 2000.

Unfortunately, a series of problems came together, and ensured that a lot of things went very badly wrong.

The fourth game in the Flight Unlimited series, Flight Combat, ran well over schedule. Worse, Flight Combat (Janes� Attack Squadron) was knowingly undersold to Electronic Arts: Looking Glass apparently gambled that it could get the game out the door faster than the budget actually called for. The gamble failed: Flight Combat was instead slower than the planned budget, in part because of a major redesign insisted on by Electronic Arts. This redesign appears not to have
been accompanied by a sufficient change in the budget and schedule for Flight Combat.

The multiple project system depends on each product coming out essentially on schedule. Since Flight Combat went over time, Looking Glass was not only losing money on the project, but also failing to get the income from it that was supposed to support its other projects.

In theory, multiple offset projects allows the developer to survive a failure. Thief was profit that plugged holes in short-term debt. System Shock II more or less offset the failure of Flight Unlimited III. Flight Combat was thus a financial problem that strained the multiple project system and put Looking Glass in danger again, and cash in hand began to run critically low in early autumn of 1999, despite the royalties coming in from Thief (in addition to, presumably, milestone payments for Thief: Gold.)

Work began in early 1999 on a modern-day stealth-based game called "Deep Cover". This was a joint project with Irrational, similar to the System Shock 2 project. Looking Glass was to provide a version of the Dark Engine while Irrational would provide the bulk of the game design. Unfortunately, finding a publisher for this project took 9 months.

As a result, Looking Glass� cash shortage began to catch up with it. Payments to Irrational were affected, placing Irrational in danger of extinction. As a result, Irrational informed Looking Glass that it was looking for other work, and eventually found it in November 1999 in the form of a contract for a Playstation 2 game. Shortly after Irrational signed onto its new project, Looking Glass came to an agreement with Microsoft to publish Deep Cover in conjunction with Irrational - but Irrational felt it had to pull out of the Deep Cover project to honor its own recently-signed contract elsewhere.

The rights and materials to Deep Cover reverted to Looking Glass, and Looking Glass was allowed to continue to hire the services of the Deep Cover design team from Irrational. Microsoft, however, was unhappy that Irrational would not be involved in the manner originally intended. Despite negotiations, Microsoft pulled out of the deal in February 2000.

This apparently subtracted at least one million dollars from the cash that Looking Glass had expected to use to cover its operating expenses. That�s a lot of money, but keep in mind that one million dollars is almost certainly less than Looking Glass� payroll expenses for one year: Looking Glass employed some 60-80 people, and even if all of them were paid a spartan salary of around twenty thousand per year, its salary costs per year would be around one and a
half million dollars. Even that figure ignores all its other operating expenses of, probably, at least another million dollars a year. In other words, the failure of this contract could only be a mortal threat to Looking Glass if its finances were already in bad shape. Furthermore, had Irrational remained in the contract, a substantial fraction of the money from Microsoft would have gone to
keeping Irrational afloat, instead of to Looking Glass.

Thus, Flight Combat�s cost overruns, earlier debts, the failure of Flight Unlimited III, and the failure of the Deep Cover project with Irrational and Microsoft, all combined to leave Looking Glass in a perilous condition.

Looking Glass sought new sources of funding. In particular, it tried to get itself bought by a company with enough resources to keep Looking Glass solvent.

A deal was in progress with Sony when Sony hit economic troubles. Sony reorganized, and the executive who had been in charge of the deal with Looking Glass was replaced. The replacement canned the deal, terminating this possible rescue.

Eidos then stepped into the breach and firmly intended to buy Looking Glass, presumably intending to protect their projected income stream from Thief II Gold, Thief III and other potential future projects such as Deep Cover. The deal was agreed upon, and, while the paperwork was processed, Eidos began to keep Looking Glass afloat. It seemed that Looking Glass had been saved.

However, the economic instability sweeping the entertainment industry slammed into Eidos, which found itself with insufficient funds to complete the purchase. Eidos asked its bankers for more money. The bank was itself in a period of difficulty, and thus the bankers said no.

Left with only enough cash in hand to pay off its employees, Looking Glass was forced to shut down.

Looking Glass had a long run; it survived eleven years in a business where all too many companies have a lifespan a mayfly would not envy. It consistently produced superb games, most of which were commercial successes, in an industry where many games are second rate and many fail to make a profit. It repeatedly survived disasters that would have killed most companies. All in all, Looking Glass was a spectacular success as a games producer.

But the games industry is a high-risk environment of speculative capital. Looking Glass beat the odds for eleven years. Eventually, the odds caught up with it.

Several conclusions can be made from this:

First, as mentioned before: No one factor killed Looking Glass. A number of attempts have been made to blame various single parties. While all of these accusations have a small grain of truth, all of them fail to appreciate the wider picture. To debunk some of the more prevalent myths:

Eidos did not kill Looking Glass. True, the final word came from Eidos. However, Eidos was deeply involved in trying to keep Looking Glass afloat. Blaming Eidos is like claiming that a drowning victim was killed by the person who attempted the resuscitation.

Eidos� bankers did not kill Looking Glass. True, the final blow was dealt by Eidos� bankers. But without an enormous chain of events beforehand at Looking Glass, Eidos� bankers would never have been involved. If Eidos itself had not hit financial trouble, the bankers would not have been involved. Had the bank been in good shape, there is a good chance it would have approved the
rescue.

John Romero did not kill Looking Glass. True enough, Eidos� finances might have been much healthier if Daikatana had been on schedule and on budget. But Romero�s flaws would have had no bearing on Looking Glass� survival, if Looking Glass had not already been in deep trouble for its own reasons - including games that went over time and over budget.

Irrational did not kill Looking Glass. True, pulling out of the Deep Cover contract hurt Looking Glass. But this single failure could not have been mortal without the severe problems that already existed in Looking Glass� budget.

Flight Combat did not kill Looking Glass. True, the cost and schedule overruns were very harmful, and the cost gamble turned sour. Yet without the other problems that came before and during this project, it would not have been lethal.

Poor sales of Thief did not kill Looking Glass. This hasn�t even a grain of truth. Thief sold well and, according to Tim Stellmach (Gamespy interview), Looking Glass made millions of dollars from it. If Thief had failed to be a hit, Looking Glass would have died. Instead, Thief kept the
company going.

Poor sales of System Shock II and Flight Unlimited III did not kill Looking Glass. Obviously, better sales would have helped. Flight Unlimited III was not a success. However, System Shock II did not sell poorly and, according to Tim Stellmach (Gamespy interview), should break even or better in the long term. In any event, had other things gone right � Flight Combat, Deep Cover, the Sony deal, or the Eidos deal � then the multiple project system would have covered for the failures.

Neither Terra Nova, nor the Austin studio, nor Star Trek: Voyager, nor British Open Championship Golf, nor even Elvis killed Looking Glass. Looking Glass survived the worst moments of all of these. True, the damage these caused helped to drag it down in the end. But the damage itself was insufficient to actually cause Looking Glass to keel over.

So what can we blame? If you must blame something, blame the system as a whole. The games industry is extremely volatile. Millions of dollars must be spent to design, test, and manufacture a product, and as often as not the products fail to repay that investment. The whims of the buying public are quite difficult to predict. Companies whose products fail to pay off rarely get a
second chance, because nobody is in the business to lose money.

Looking Glass, in retrospect, did a stunningly good job in this harsh environment. If we discount the Windows �95 version of Flight Unlimited 1, Thief: Gold, and its console conversion, it produced 11 titles in about 11 years (if we start counting from the late 1989 inception of Underworld 1). Of these, three were commercial failures (Terra Nova, British Open Championship Golf, and Flight Unlimited III), and another one might fail to break even (System Shock II has not yet broken even, but is expected to do so). Two thirds of its titles were commercial successes. Some of its titles are legendary as creative achievements; all have received critical acclaim.

That�s no mean feat. Surviving for a decade, through shocks that would have killed lesser companies, without compromising its design principles, and producing many of the greatest games ever to grace a computer, is a legacy to be proud of. While we may be saddened by its death, we should also be grateful that Looking Glass had the tenacity and agility to survive so long.

Finally, the Looking Glass legacy does not prove that deep, complex gameplay is a recipe for market failure. If that were the case, Looking Glass would have died long ago. Ultima Underworld would be cult hit known to few, instead of consistently being praised as a seminal computer game. Thief and Thief 2 would not have been hits. If anything, Looking Glass� long survival proves that deep, complex, immersive gameplay tends to be commercially successful. Only one of Looking Glass� clear-cut money losers, Terra Nova, resides in its "core competence" of first-person action-adventure titles. The other two major commercial failures � Flight Unlimited III and British Open Championship Golf � went head to head with established powerhouse titles (Microsoft Flight Simulator and Links, respectively) on those title�s home turf. That�s a daunting and risky course of action, and in both cases it failed to pan out. Arguably, Terra Nova suffered from the same fate, being seen as a "big robot game" and thus a competitor to Mechwarrior. By contrast, Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Flight Unlimited 1, and Thief all broke new ground and were rewarded for it.

In other words, where Looking Glass innovated most, and provided a game experience that was most different, it did best commercially. This, and Looking Glass� longevity, strongly suggests that in the long run, good innovative games are good profitable business.

James Sterrett ~ 31/5/2000

The Thief II: The Metal Age level editor

2000-05-11T09:52:00.000Z

Do not install this version unless you have already patched Thief II: The Metal Age from v1.07 to v1.18.

The Thief 2 patch patches only the thief2 executable. It does not patch the editor. There may be some incompatibilities when using a mission generated in the previous version of the editor and trying to run on a later version of the main game program. A version of the editor concurrent with the patched game is available for download. If you have already set up the editor, simply replace the dromed.exe from the cd with this one: Dromed for use with Thief II v1.18

The patch also changed many of the missions. The unstripped missions provided with the original editor release do not reflect the changes made in the patch. The updated versions of the unstripped missions can also be downloaded. These should be used in place of the unstripped missions available with version 1.07.

All
the above mission files in one file
(52.5Mb)

Thief 2: The Metal Age FAQ

2000-04-14T10:10:00.000Z

Q: What is Thief 2: The Metal Age?
A: The sequel to the critically acclaimed "first-person sneaker," Thief: The Dark Project. Thief 2: The Metal Age continues the story of Garrett with all-new missions, improved graphics, and expanded gameplay that emphasizes stealth and problem solving over mindless killing.

Q: When will it be released?
A: Spring 2000

Q: What new graphical features have been added?
A: Look in the Study under Features for a complete list.

Q: What kind of new tools are there?
A: Among the new tools in Thief 2:

Flares that allow you to see in the dark

You can "listen at doors" by leaning into them

A slowfall potion that slows your fall from high jumps

An invisibility potion that will get you out of trouble fast

A Remote Camera that will let you stake out an area without having to go there - and be detected - yourself.

Q: What other improvements have you made for Thief
2?
A: Some of the new improvements in Thief 2 include:

Improved AI

The game's design is more focused on stealthy gameplay

Richer sound environment

Improved user interface

A: The primary reason is that once we started seriously thinking about multiplayer for Thief we realized that we had an opportunity to come up with some interesting new gameplay that we hope will be as unique as the single player gameplay in Thief is. Unfortunately, given the schedule pressures we are under we knew that we didn't have time to explore and tune the multiplayer gameplay possibilities without sacrificing some tuning and polish on the single player game. We feared that we would end up shipping a single and multi player
experience that would not live up to their potentials.

So we decided to concentrate on building a triple A single player game, and then turn our focus to a triple A multiplayer game. This way we can focus all of our attention on making the best gameplay experience for both single and multi player.

Q: Will Thief II run on Windows 2000 Pro?
A: Thief II was developed and tested under Windows 95/98. While you may be able to run Thief
II under Windows 2000, it is not officially supported.

Q: Will Thief II require a 3D Card?
A: Yes, Thief II will require a 4MB hardware accelerator.

Q: Does Garrett's new mechanical eye involve a zoom feature like rumors say?
A: Yes.

Q: Will there be more of those brilliant movies in "The Metal Age"?
A: Oh yeah!

Q:Will Thief 2 support mousewheel binding? (unlike Thief 1)
A: Yes!

Q: Will Thief 2 feature an annoying sidekick constantly pestering you with his/her horrible one-liners? Will it feature goats? If so, how many, and will one be able to set them on fire with fire arrows? If not, why?
A: What, are you psychic? It was a secret, but Garrett's going to have a sidekick who's a goat with flame-retardant fur! So besides all those guards, you'll also have to deal with "Billy" always trying to eat your cloak and giving away your position with his constant bleating.

Q: You're kidding about that goat-sidekick thing?
A: Of course.

Q: Will there be an option to turn off or at least turn down the ambient music in the game?
A: Yes.

Q: How many new levels will be introduced in Thief 2?
A: 15

Q: Do you still have the (excellent) Steven Russell as the voice of Garrett?
A: Yes, Of course!

Q: I've read in some places that Garrett's mechanical eye will give him different vision modes (such as infra-red). Is this true?
A: No. The mechanical eye allows Garrett to zoom/magnify and view remote areas using the Scouting Orb (a separate device), but the mechanical eye does not allow Garrett to see in the dark.

Q: How will the mechanical eye be retrieved if it is dropped off a building or something?
A: To clarify: It's not the mechanical eye that you're pulling out of Garrett's head and dropping. It's a remote Scouting Orb that sends images to Garrett's mechanical eye. If you lose the Scouting Orb, you have to find a new one.

Q: Right next to the visibility gem is a very small rectangle, its changes colors perodically--sometimes red, sometimes yellow. Whats this mean?
A: This is sort of a simplified version of the Visibility gem. When it's red, you're at or very near maximum visibility. When it's dark green, you're practically invisible. Everything in between is yellow.

Q: Why doesn't Thief 2 have an option to turn up brightness?
A: Thief2 does have that option. There are bindable commands to raise & lower Gamma (brightness), and there's a slider on the Video options screen. Most people keep them bound to + and -, as this allows the
convenience of changing gamma in-game.

Thanks to everyone who
posted questions to the FAQ. Now that the game has shipped, most of the
questions we have received have been tech support or game hint related, which
wasn't the focus of this FAQ.

Thief 2: The Metal Age ��

2000-03-23T08:12:00.000Z

�� Thief - Thief 2: The Metal Age �� . �� Dark Engine 3, �� , �� AI, �� .

"On the streets and rooftops of a darkened city, where magic and technology mingle and the forces of a corrupt sheriff lurk just beyond every shadow, it takes someone with a soft touch and even softer step to stay ahead of the law, and steal enough to survive. For an honest thief like Garrett, the choices are clear - profit or perish.
Welcome to Thief 2: The Metal Age, Looking Glass Studios' highly anticipated sequel to the hit "first-person sneaker" Thief: The Dark Project. Players once again occupy the weathered boots of Garrett -- master thief, expert in stealth, and unlikely victor over the mad nature god the Trickster. It's been over a year since the events portrayed in Thief: The Dark Project, and Garrett's life has returned to a kind of chaotic normalcy, marked by daring independent thieving runs and lucrative "jobs". But the cost of business has just gone up, and Garrett may end up paying with his life.
Enter Gorman Truart, newly elected sheriff and bane of the city's underworld. More than just an elected official sworn to uphold public office, Truart is a man with dark, unknown intentions. The poor and desolate are snatched from the streets, never seen nor heard from again. "Semi-legitimate" operations run by well-known wardens are raided and shut down. The increase of guard patrols has lulled the residents into a false sense of security, while corruption, graft, and treachery run rampant through the sheriff's organization. To a certain master thief, these events could probably be overlooked if not for one disturbing fact: Sheriff Gorman Truart wants Garrett dead, and will stop at nothing until he succeeds. It's your job to keep Garrett alive, and discover the reason for the sheriff's vendetta.
The action in Thief 2 is set against the intrigue and mystery of the well-established city, where several factions struggle to satisfy their own, often opposing, agendas. Foremost are the Mechanists, an offshoot of the Hammerites that came into being after the Order's nearly disastrous run-in with the Trickster. The Mechanists are just as fanatical as their Hammerite cousins, but far more technologically innovative. They've been supplying the Sheriff with high-tech toys, like mechanical beasts specifically created to hunt and kill. Directly opposed to the Mechanists are the Pagans, an underground movement with an anti-technological message and a quiet yet persistent presence in the city. Is their love of nature as innocent as it would seem, or are they somehow connected to the Trickster and his seemingly insane teachings? And then there are the Keepers, the enigmatic holders of knowledge who observe all of the city's events but never actively get involved. Instead, they continue to persuade Garrett to act on their behalf, as their warning rings in his ears: "Beware the Dawn of the Metal Age". As an ex-Keeper who abandoned the Order and its secluded, monastic lifestyle, Garrett wants nothing to do with prophecies or portents of evil. He's played the hero once, and wants nothing to do with his former associates' no matter how persistent -- or right -- they may be.."

Thief 2: The Metal Age FAQ

2000-02-24T10:59:00.000Z

Flares that allow you to see in the dark
You can "listen at doors" by leaning into them
A slowfall potion that slows your fall from high jumps
An invisibility potion that will get you out of trouble fast
A Remote Camera that will let you stake out an area without having to go there - and be detected - yourself.

Q: What other improvements have you made for Thief
2?
A: Some of the new improvements in Thief 2 include:

Improved AI
The game's design is more focused on stealthy gameplay
Richer sound environment
Improved user interface

Q: What's going on with the story?
A: It's been over a year since the events portrayed in Thief: The Dark Project, and Garrett's life has returned to a kind of chaotic normalcy, marked by daring independent thieving runs and lucrative "jobs". Enter Gorman Truart, newly elected sheriff and bane of the city's underworld. More than just an elected official sworn to uphold public office, Truart is a man with dark, unknown intentions. The poor and desolate are snatched from the streets, never seen nor heard from again. "Semi-legitimate" operations run by well-known wardens are raided and shut down. The increase of guard patrols has lulled the residents into a false sense of security, while corruption, graft, and treachery run rampant through the sheriff's organization. Look in the Study under Briefing for a more complete disclosure.

Q: I'm trying to find a Tech Support contact...
A: Look in the Study under Requirements for technical support contact information.

Q: You don't really answer questions people send in.
A: Uhm, yes we do.

Q: Will Thief II ship with a level editor?
A: Yes, Thief II will include the new revision of Dromed.

Q: Why was the decision made to drop multiplayer?
A:
The primary reason is that once we started seriously thinking about multiplayer for Thief we realized that we had an opportunity to come up with some interesting new gameplay that we hope will be as unique as the single player gameplay in Thief is. Unfortunately, given the schedule pressures we are under we knew that we didn't have time to explore and tune the multiplayer gameplay possibilities without sacrificing some tuning and polish on the single player game. We feared that we would end up shipping a single and multi player
experience that would not live up to their potentials.
So we decided to concentrate on building a triple A single player game, and then turn our focus
to a triple A multiplayer game. This way we can focus all of our attention on making the best gameplay experience for both single and multi player.

Q: Will Thief II run on Windows 2000 Pro?
A: Thief II was developed and tested under Windows 95/98. While you may be able to run Thief II under Windows 2000, it is not officially supported.

Q: Will Thief II require a 3D Card?
A: Yes, Thief II will require a 4MB hardware accelerator.

Q: Does Garrett's new mechanical eye involve a zoom feature like rumors say?
A: Yes.

Q: Will there be more of those brilliant movies in "The Metal Age"?
A: Oh yeah!

Q:Will Thief 2 support mousewheel binding? (unlike Thief 1)
A: Yes!

Q: Will Thief 2 feature an annoying sidekick constantly pestering you with his/her horrible one-liners? Will it feature goats? If so, how many, and will one be able to set them on fire with fire arrows? If not, why?
A: What, are you psychic? It was a secret, but Garrett's going to have a sidekick who's a goat with flame-retardant fur! So besides all those guards, you'll also have to deal with "Billy" always trying to eat your cloak and giving away your position with his constant bleating.

Q: You're kidding about that goat-sidekick thing?
A: Of course.

Q: Will there be an option to turn off or at least turn down the ambient music in the game?
A: Yes.

Q:
How many new levels will be introduced in Thief 2?
A: 15

Q: Do you still have the (excellent) Steven Russell as the voice of Garrett?
A: Yes, Of course!

Q: I've read in some places that Garrett's mechanical eye will give him different vision modes (such as infra-red). Is this true?
A: No. The mechanical eye allows Garrett to zoom/magnify and view remote areas using the Scouting Orb (a separate device), but the mechanical eye does not allow Garrett to see in the dark.

Q: How will the mechanical eye be retrieved if it is dropped off a building or something?
A: To clarify: It's not the mechanical eye that you're pulling out of Garrett's head and dropping. It's a remote Scouting Orb that sends images to Garrett's mechanical eye. If you lose the Scouting Orb, you have to find a new one.

TTLG's massive interview with the Looking Glass Studios' Thief 2 dev team

1999-11-18T08:44:00.000Z

TTLG's massive interview with the Looking
Glass Studios' Thief 2 dev team

Welcome to TTLG's massive interview with the Looking
Glass Studios' Thief 2 dev team. The interview was so long that we had to divide
it up into one page per question, 17 in all, which also allows our guests to
browse through the questions at will, via the main menu.

Ten members of the team, mostly designers, took time out of their busy
schedules to answer a list of questions that TTLG prepared in order for the fans
to get a feel for the type of team that is working on the game, as well as get
some inside information on details of the gameplay. When writing this interview,
our contacts urged us to not focus the interview on gaining "the latest scoop"
on Thief 2 information, mainly because all that they are allowed to say has
already been said. In fact, some of the questions we asked were declined,
because the information was still classified. Instead, as I said before, this
interview is focused on the talents, inspirations, and goals of this awesome
team. We hope you enjoy it!

Choose A question from the list, or simply
go page-by-page.

A big thanks goes to
Steve Pearsall, Alex Duran, Mike Chrzanowski, Laura Baldwin, Tim Stellmach, Rich
Carlson, Rob Caminos, Emil Pagliarulo, and Rafael Jabulani Brown for doing the
interview, and a huge thanks goes to Randy Smith for making it happen at
all!

Interested in discussing what you've read? Hit the TTLG Forums!

LGS announces Thief 2

1999-11-03T08:40:00.000Z

Press Releases
LGS announces Thief 2

Thief Gold has gone GOLD

1999-11-02T07:57:00.000Z

Thief Gold has gone GOLD...shipping November 2, 1999 with a rebate...for owners of Thief: The Dark Project.

Thief: The Dark Project revolutionized the tired first person genre by using a complex environmental simulation, coupled with a sophisticated artificial intelligence system to create a rich, immersive game world which supports its core gameplay - stealth, strategy, and suspense.

In Thief Gold we've further fine tuned the original missions to reflect some of the customer feedback we have received since shipping Thief: The Dark Project. Additionally, we have included 3 all new missions that will support the back story with more detail and allow us to further develop the principal characters.

NEW FEATURES INCLUDE:

3 all new missions, woven into the original 12 missions. These are not just slapped onto the end!
Better tuned game play in all missions.
Challenging new opponent that will test your skills: The Mages
Includes EAX and joystick support.
Also includes the original documentary:
The Making of Thief II: The Metal Age
Behind The Scenes at Looking Glass Studios

Thief: Gold ��

1999-10-29T07:10:00.000Z

�� Thief The Dark Project - Thief Gold.

"In Thief Gold we've further fine tuned the original missions to reflect some of the customer feedback we have received since shipping Thief: The Dark Project. Additionally, we have included 3 all new missions that will support the back story with more detail and allow us to further develop the principal characters."

Download DromEd, the Thief: The Dark Project level editor

1999-10-12T09:32:00.000Z

The only file you need to get the editor up and running is DromEd.zip. After you have downloaded this file you need to unzip it in a pre-existing Thief install directory (for example C:\games\thief - or wherever you have installed Thief to). When you unzip dromed.zip, you will be asked if you want to overwrite some files, answer "Yes to all". This will insure that all of your config files are set up right. You will need a Thief CD to get all of the resources - the art, sound, mesh & mocap files. You will also find a new subdirectory in your Thief directory called "docs". A tutorial and some other DromEd reference files can be found there.

If you want to see some examples of pre-existing levels or you want to change one of the levels that shipped with Thief you can download the individual mission files below. Please note that these are special versions of the mission files. When we shipped Thief we "stripped" some information that only the editor uses out of the mission files in order to make them smaller and save space on the CD and your hard drive. So if you want to edit a mission file from Thief, you have to download them from here, you can not use the ones from the Thief CD. (Don't worry if your using a
German or French version of Thief, these mission files will still work ok).

It is also important to note that you should create a different directory from your Thief directory to unzip the "unstripped" mission file in. If you unzip them in your Thief directory then the Thief patch will not work correctly and Thief may even fail to run if you just try and play the game instead of using the editor. Anyway here are the "unstripped" mission files:

miss1.zip
- Training Mission
miss2.zip
- Lord Bafford's Scepter
miss3.zip
- Break From Cragscleft Prison
miss4.zip
- Down In The Bonehoard
miss5.zip
- Assassins
miss6.zip
- The Sword
miss7.zip
- The Haunted Cathedral
miss9.zip
- The Lost City
miss10.zip
- Undercover
miss11.zip
- Return to the Cathedral
miss12.zip
- Escape!
miss13.zip
- Strange Bedfellows
miss14.zip
- Into the Maw
Theiflev.zip
- All the above mission files in one file (35.7 megs !)

Postmortem: Looking Glass's Thief: The Dark Project

1999-10-09T04:44:00.000Z

By Tom Leonard
Gamasutra
July 9, 1999

This article originally appeared in the July, 1999 issue of:

Editor's note: This Postmortem appears in the July issue of Game Developer magazine.

Thief: The Dark Project is one of those games that almost wasn't. During the long struggle to store shelves, the project faced the threat of cancellation twice. A fiscal crisis nearly closed the doors at Looking Glass. During one seven-month span, the producer, project director, lead programmer, lead artist, lead designer and the author of our renderer all left. Worse still, we felt a nagging fear that we might make a game that simply was not fun. But in the end, we shipped a relatively bug-free game that we had fun making, we were proud of, and that we hoped others would enjoy.

The Concept

The Thief team wanted to create a first-person game that provided a totally different gaming experience, yet appealed to the existing first-person action market. Thief was to present a lightly-scripted game world with levels of player interaction and improvisation exceeding our previous titles. The team hoped to entice the player into a deep engagement with the world by creating intelligible ways for the world to be impacted by the player.

The central game mechanic of Thief challenged the traditional form of the first-person 3D market. First-person shooters are fast-paced adrenaline rushes where the player possesses unusual speed and stamina, and an irresistible desire for conflict. The expert Thief player moves slowly, avoids conflict, is penalized for killing people, and is entirely mortal. It is a game style that many observers were concerned might not appeal to players, and even those intimately involved with the game had doubts at times.

The project began in the spring of 1996 as "Dark Camelot," a sword-combat action game with role-playing and adventure elements, based on an inversion of the Arthurian legend. Although development ostensibly had been in progress on paper for a year, Thief realistically began early in 1997 after the game was repositioned as an action/adventure game of thievery in a grim fantasy setting. Up to that point we had only a small portion of the art, design, and code that would ultimately make it into the shipping game. Full development began in May 1997 with a team comprised almost entirely of a different group of people from those who started the project. During the following year, the team created a tremendous amount of quality code, art, and design.

But by the beginning of summer in 1998, the game could not be called "fun," the team was exhausted, and the project was faced with an increasingly skeptical publisher. The Looking Glass game design philosophy includes a notion that immersive gameplay emerges from an object-rich world governed by high-quality, self-consistent simulation systems. Making a game at Looking Glass requires a lot of faith, as such systems take considerable time to develop, do not always arrive on time, and require substantial tuning once in place. For Thief, these systems didn't gel until mid-summer, fifteen months after the project began full development, and only three months before we were scheduled to ship.

When the game finally did come together, we began to sense that not only did the game not stink, it might actually be fun. The release of successful stealth-oriented titles (such as Metal Gear Solid and Commandos) and more content-rich first-person shooters (like Half-Life) eased the team's concerns about the market's willingness to accept experimental game styles. A new energy revitalized the team. Long hours driven by passion and measured confidence marked the closing months of the project. In the final weeks of the project the Eidos test and production staff joined us at the Looking Glass offices for the final push. The gold master was burned in the beginning of November, just in time for Christmas.


Stealth is one of your best weapons in Thief. The game's designers made sure that expert players would have to make effective use of silent weapons such as the blackjack and the bow and arrow. zoom [left] [right]

In many ways, Thief was a typical project. It provided the joys of working on a large-scale game: challenging problems, a talented group of people, room for creative expression, and the occasional hilarious bug. It also had some of the usual problems: task underestimation, bouts of low morale, a stream of demos from hell, an unrealistic schedule derived from desire rather than reality, poor documentation, and an insufficient up-front specification.

However, Thief also differed from a number of projects in that it took risks on numerous fronts, risks that our team underappreciated. We wanted to push the envelope in almost every element of the code and design. The experimental nature of the game design, and the time it took us to fully understand the core nature of that design, placed special demands on the development process. The team was larger than any Looking Glass team up until then, and at times there seemed to be too many cooks in the kitchen. Reaching a point where everyone shared the same vision took longer than expected. A philosophy of creating good, reusable game engine components created unusual challenges that didn't always fit well with schedule and demo pressures. The many risks could have overwhelmed the project, if not for the dedication, creativity, and sacrifices of the team.

Throughout the life of the project, more than 50 people worked in one way or another on Thief � some as part of the "Camelot" project, others as part of the Looking Glass audio-visual and technology support staff, some as helpful hands from other Looking Glass projects. The core team consisted of a number of veterans of previous Looking Glass titles (Underworld I and II, System Shock, Flight Unlimited, Terra Nova, British Open Championship Golf, and the unpublished Star Trek: Voyager), as well as some new industry arrivals. The project had a number of very talented people and strong wills. Although it took some time for the team to unite as a tight-knit creative force, the final six months were incredibly productive, spirited, and punishingly fun.

What Went Right

1. Designing data-driven tools. Our experience on previous titles taught us that one of the impediments to timely game development is the mutual dependence of artists, designers, and programmers at every development stage. One of the development goals for the Dark Engine, on which Thief is built, was to create a set of tools that enabled programmers, artists, and designers to work more effectively and independently. The focus of this effort was to make the game highly data-driven and give non-programmers a high degree of control over the integration of their work. Media and game systems were to be easily and intuitively plugged in and edited by the team members responsible for their creation, without requiring the direct involvement of programmers.

The Dark Object System stood at the heart of our strategy. Primarily designed by programmer Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc, the Object System was a general database for managing the individual objects in a simulation. It provided a generic notion of properties that an object might possess, and relations that might exist between two objects. It allowed game-specific systems to create new kinds of properties and relations easily, and provided automatic support for saving, loading, versioning, and editing properties and relations. It also supported a game-specific hierarchy of object types, which could be loaded, saved, and edited by designers. Programmers specified the available properties and relations, and the interface used for editing, using a set of straightforward classes and structures. Using GUI tools, the designers specified the hierarchy and composition of game objects independent of the programming staff. In Thief there was no code-based game object hierarchy of any kind.

Hand-to-hand combat is sometimes necessary.

Although the implementation of the system was much more work than we expected, and management of the object hierarchy placed significant demands on lead designer Tim Stellmach, it turned out to be one of the best things in the project. Once the set of available properties and relations exposed by programmers was mature, the Object System allowed the designers to specify most of the behaviors of the game without scripting or programmer intervention. Additionally, the relative ease with which variables could be made available to designers in order to tweak the game encouraged programmers to empower the designers thoroughly.

The second major component of our strategy was our resource management system. The resource management system gave the game high-level management control of source data, such as texture maps, models, and digital sounds. It helped manage the game's use of system memory, and provided the data flow functions necessary for configuration management.

Looking Glass's previous resource management system provided similar functionality, but identified resources by an integer ID and required a special resource compilation step. This technique often required recompilation of the game executable in order to integrate new art, and required that the team exit the game when resources were published to the network. The new system referred to a resource by its file name without its extension, used a file system directory structure for namespace management, didn't leave files open while working, and required no extra compilation step. Developers simply dropped art into their local data tree and started using it. To expose art to the rest of the team, lead artist Mark Lizotte just copied art into the shared project directories. Compound resources were treated as extensions to the file system and were built using the standard .zip format. This allowed us to use off-the-shelf tools for constructing, compressing, and viewing resource files. The system facilitated content development by allowing programmers, artists and designers to add new data to an existing game quickly.

The data-driven approach worked so well that through much of our development, Thief and System Shock 2 (two very different games) used the same executable and simply chose a different object hierarchy and data set at run time.

2. Sound as a game design focus. Sound plays a more central role in Thief than in any other game I can name. Project director Greg LoPiccolo had a vision of Thief that included a rich aural environment where sound both enriched the environment and was an integral part of gameplay. The team believed in and achieved this vision, and special credit goes to audio designer Eric Brosius.

As an element of the design, sound played two roles in Thief. First, it was the primary medium through which the AIs communicated both their location and their internal state to the player. In Thief we tried to design AIs with a broader range of awareness than the typical two states that AIs exhibit: "oblivious" and "omniscient." Such a range of internal states would be meaningless if the player could not perceive it, so we used a broad array of speech broadcast by the AIs to clue in the player. While very successful for humanoid AIs, we feel the more limited expressibility of non-human creatures is the heart of why many customers didn't like our "monster levels."

Second, the design used sounds generated by objects in the game, especially the player, to inform AIs about their surroundings. In Thief, the AIs rarely "cheat" when it comes to knowledge of their environment. Considerable work went into constructing sensory components sufficient to permit the AIs to make decisions purely based on the world as they perceive it. This allowed us to use player sounds as an integral part of gameplay, both as a way that players can reveal themselves inadvertently to the AIs and as a tool for players to distract or divert an AI. Moreover, AIs communicated with each other almost exclusively through sound. AI speech and sounds in the world, such as the sound of swords clashing, were assigned semantic values. In a confrontation, the player could expect nearby AIs to become alarmed by the sound of combat or cries for help, and was thus encouraged to ambush opponents as quietly as possible.

In order for sound to work in the game as designed, we needed to implement a sound system significantly more sophisticated than many other games. When constructing a Thief mission, designers built a secondary "room database" that reflected the connectivity of spaces at a higher level than raw geometry. Although this was also used for script triggers and AI optimizations, the primary role of the room database was to provide a representation of the world simple enough to allow realistic real-time propagation of sounds through the spaces. Without this, it is unlikely the sound design could have succeeded, as it allowed the player and the AIs to perceive sounds more as they are in real life and better grasp the location of their opponents in the mission spaces.

3. Focus, focus, focus. Early on, the Thief plan was chock full of features and metagame elements: lots of player tools and a modal inventory user interface to manage them; multiplayer cooperative, death-match and "Theft-match" modes; a form of player extra-sensory perception; player capacity to combine world objects to create new tools; and branching mission structures. These and other "cool ideas" were correctly discarded.

Instead, we focused in on creating a single-player, linear, mission-based game centered exclusively around stealth, with a player toolset that fit within the constraints of an extension of the Quake user interface. The notion came into full force with two decisions we made about seven months before we shipped. First, the project was renamed Thief from the working title "The Dark Project," a seemingly minor decision that in truth gave the team a concrete ideological focus. Second, we decided preemptively to drop multiplayer support, not simply due to schedule concerns, but also to allow us as much time as possible to hone the single-player experience. In the end, some missions didn't achieve the stealth focus we wanted, particularly those originally designed for "Dark Camelot," but the overall agenda was the right one.

Concept sketch of a burrick [zoom]

4. Objectives and difficulty. One of the Thief team's favorite games during development was Goldeneye on the N64. We were particularly struck by the manner in which levels of difficulty were handled. Each level of difficulty had a different overlapping set of objectives for success, and missions were subtly changed at each level in terms of object placement and density. Relatively late in the development of Thief, we decided such a system would work well in our game. Extending the concept, we added a notion that as difficulty increased, the level of toleration of murder of human beings decreased. We also allowed players to change their difficulty level at the beginning of each mission. The system was a success in two ways. First, it made clear to the player exactly what "difficulty" meant. Second, it allowed the designers to create a very different experience at each level of difficulty, without changing the overall geometry and structure of a mission. This gave the game a high degree of replayability at a minimum development cost.

5. Multiple narrow-purpose scripting solutions. Although the Object System provided a lot of flexibility, we also needed a scripting language to fully specify object behaviors. Rather than create a single all-encompassing scripting system, we chose to develop several more focused tools for scripting. This tiered scripting solution worked well.

In creating our core "high-end" object scripting technology, we wanted to allow designers with moderate programming skill to create complex object behaviors easily. Scripts were event-driven objects attached at run time to game objects, and contained data, methods, and message handlers. The game provided a selection of services to allow the script to query the world state and the game object state, and also to perform complex tasks. Our goal was to create a scripting language that offered source-level debugging, was fast, and was dynamic. The solution was essentially C++ in .DLLs, compiled by the C++ compiler, using a combination of classes and preprocessor macros to ease interface publishing, handle dynamic linking, and provide designers a clear programming model. Though used by both programming-savvy designers and programmers, the fact that it was a real programming language prevented widespread use by all of the designers.

Most designers were interested in customizing AI behaviors. For the AI we created a simpler scripting system, "Pseudo-scripts," that were implemented as properties within the Object System. Pseudo-scripts took the burden of coding scripts off of the designers. The AI provided a stock set of triggers, such as "I see the player near an object" or "I see a dead body"; the designer provided the consequence of the trigger. Each Pseudo-script was edited in a dialog box presenting parameters to tweak the "if" clause of the trigger, and space for a list of simple, unconditional actions to perform when the trigger fired. In this way, the custom behavioral possibilities of the AI at any moment were described by the aggregate of Pseudo-scripts that were attached to that AI. This approach had three benefits. First, it was simple enough so that designers with no programming experience were comfortable using it. Second, it narrowed the range of triggers a designer could use to a good pre-selected set, rather than giving them an open-ended system that might not have worked as well. Finally, when and how to evaluate AI triggers, a potential run-time expense if not carefully constructed, could be custom built by a programmer.

Concept sketch of Hammer
[zoom]

The final scripting system built into Thief was the Tagged Schema system. When the game required motions and sounds, it requested them as concepts modified by optional qualifiers, rather than directly. For example, an AI who had just heard the player would request the concept "moderate alert," qualified with an optional tag like "+sense:sound." A potential set of resources was then chosen using a pattern matcher; in this example, it would choose all samples in that AI's voice expressing a generic "something's not right," all samples expressing "I heard something fishy," but no samples expressing "I saw something fishy." From this set, the specific resource was then chosen using a weighted random selection. The tables used were specified by the designers using a simple language. Specifying motion and sound selection this way, designers created an interesting variety of randomized environments and behaviors without changing the code of the game.

What Went Wrong

1. Trouble with the AI. If one thing could be called out as the reason Thief's gameplay didn't come together until late in the process, it would be the AI. The AI as a foil to the player is the central element of Thief, and the AI we wanted wasn't ready until late in the spring of 1998. As lead programmer and author of the final AI, I take full responsibility for that.

The original AI for Thief was designed by another programmer before the requirements of the revised stealth design were fully specified. Six months after it was begun, the project director and overseer of the system left the team, and the most of the programming staff was temporarily reassigned to help ship another game that was in trouble. During the following months, development on that AI continued without any oversight and without a firm game design. Soon after, the programmer working on the AI also left. While the core pathfinding data structures and algorithms were basically sound, the code that generated the pathfinding database was extremely buggy. The design of the AI decision process was geared towards an action fighting game requiring little designer customization, rather than a stealth game that needed much more customization. Even worse, the high-level decision process in the AI had drifted away from a rigorous design and the code was extremely brittle. The whole situation was a disaster.

These might not have been serious issues, except for one key mistake: I didn't realize the depth of the problem quickly enough, and despite concerns expressed by programmer/designer Doug Church, I didn't act fast enough. I think highly of the programmer involved with the initial AI and wanted to avoid the natural but often misguided programmer reaction within myself that I should just rewrite it my way. So, I took the position that, while buggy, the system as a whole was probably sound. Several months and many sleepless nights later, I concluded that I had been sorely mistaken.

By November 1997, I had the basics of a new design and began working on it. But all work had to stop in order to pull together an emergency proof-of-concept demo by the end of December to quell outside concerns that the team lacked a sound vision of the game. This turned into a mid-January demo, followed by an early February publisher demo, followed by a late February make-or-break demo. During this time the only option was to hack features as best we could into the existing AI. While better than losing our funding, constructing these demos was not good for the project.

In the end, work on the new AI didn't begin until mid-March. Despite the fact that our scheduled ship date was just six months away, we threw away four-fifths of our existing AI code and started over. After a hair-raising twelve-week stretch of grueling hours, the AI was ready for real testing. Had I committed to a rewrite two months earlier the previous autumn, I believe the AI would have been ready for real use three to five months sooner.

2. An uncertain renderer. The project was started because of the renderer, rather than the reverse. The basic core of the renderer for Thief was written in the fall of 1995 as an after-hours experiment by programmer Sean Barrett. During the following year, the renderer and geometry-editing tools were fleshed out, and with "Dark Camelot" supposed to ship some time in 1997, it looked like we would have a pretty attractive game. Then, at the end of 1996, Sean decided to leave Looking Glass. Although he periodically contracted with us to add features, and we were able to add hardware support and other minor additions, the renderer never received the attention it needed to reach the state-of-the-art in 1998. The possibility that we might not have a point programmer for the renderer weighed heavily on the team. Fortunately, Sean remained available on a contract basis, and other members of the team developed sufficient knowledge of the renderer so that we shipped successfully. In the end, we shipped a renderer appropriate for our gameplay, but not as attractive as other high-profile first-person titles.

One of the featured weapons is the fire arrow.

This may prompt the question of why we didn't simply license a renderer. When the project started a few months into 1996, the avalanche of Quake licenses hadn't really begun and Unreal was still two years away. By the time licensing was a viable choice, the game and the renderer were too tightly integrated for us to consider changing.

3. Loss of key personnel amid corporate angst beyond our control. Midway through 1997, Thief was just starting to gather momentum. We were fully staffed and the stealth design was really starting to get fleshed out. Unfortunately, Looking Glass's financial situation was bleak. Few emotions can compare to the stress of heading to work not knowing who might be laid off, including yourself, or whether the doors would be locked when you got there. The company shed half of its staff in a span of six months, and while the active teams tried to stay focused, it was hard when one day the plants were gone, another day the coffee machine, then the water cooler.

Some of the Thief team couldn't continue under these conditions. We lost two programmers, including the former lead programmer, and a designer. When we were forced to close our Austin office, we lost our producer, Warren Spector, as well as some programmers who made valuable technology contributions to our engine. All of these individuals are now on Ion Storm's Deus Ex team. Although it took some months to fully restore the spirit of the rest of the team, we held together and the company eventually rebounded. Perhaps it bestowed a stoicism that comes from knowing that however bad things might seem, you've already seen worse.

4. Undervalued editor. One of the boils never lanced on the project was our editor, Dromed. Although it was sufficiently powerful and provided the essential functionality we needed to ship the game, Dromed was a poorly documented and sometimes disagreeable editor. Dromed was first developed as a demonstration editor when the target platform of the game was DOS. As a demo, it never received the kind of formal specifications and designs one would expect for the central experience of the design team. As a DOS application, it lacked the consistent and relatively easy-to-use user-interface tools of Windows. An early mistake was our failure to step back and formally evaluate the editor, and then rebuild it based on our experience constructing the demo editor. We also should have designed a proper editor framework, and hired a dedicated Windows user-interface programmer to support it through development. In retrospect, the time lost cleaning up the editor probably would have been saved on the back end of the project.

5. Inadequate planning. Although it is a cliche in the software industry to say our scheduling and budget planning were woefully inadequate, the Thief project suffered greatly from this malady. There were several elements to our deficient planning.

During "Dark Camelot," and continuing through the first half of Thief, we staffed the team before the design and technology was sufficiently mature. In Thief, this led us to rush towards finishing the design, when we didn't necessarily understand the design and technology. With insufficient specifications of both the code systems and mission designs, we ended up doing lots of content that was essentially wrong for the game we were making. Code was written and spaces were built that weren't well directed towards the goals of the project.

To make matters worse, we failed to reassess core scheduling assumptions carefully once the schedule began to slip. Captives of a series of unrealistic schedules, we didn't leave enough time for the sort of experimentation, dialogue, and prototyping a project like Thief needs. Late in the winter of 1998, many of our scheduling mistakes had been corrected. Still, during the remainder of the project, the legacy of our earlier missteps required cutting missions that relied on technology we didn't have, and reworking missions not focused on the core gameplay.

Stepping Back from the Project

Thief was constructed as a set of appropriately abstract reusable game components designed for creating object-rich, data-driven games. Although increasing the cost of development, this approach allowed Looking Glass to leverage various technologies across disparate types of games, from the first-person action game System Shock 2 to our combat flight-simulator Flight Combat. In our next-generation technology, some of the systems, such as the AI and the Object System, will merely be revised, not rewritten. We intend to continue with this development philosophy in our future games.

The next time around, our approach to constructing the engine will differ. The engine will be scheduled, staffed, and budgeted as a project in its own right. The editor will be treated as more of a first-class citizen than was the case in Thief. Finally, a content development team will not be geared up until the technology is sufficiently mature to allow for an informed game design process.

Oh, and we'll get our schedules right � really.

Info Box:

Thief: The Dark Project
L ooking Glass Studios Inc.
Cambridge, Mass.
(617) 441-6333
http://www.lglass.com/

Team size: 19 full-time developers. Some contractors.

Release date: December 1998
Intended platform: Windows 95/98
Project budget: Aproximately $3 million
Project length: 2.5 years

Critical development software: Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0, Watcom C++ 10.6, Opus Make, PowerAnimator, 3D Studio Max, Adobe Photoshop, AntimatorPro, Debabilizer, After Effects, and Adaptive Optics motion-capture processing.

Tom Leonard was the lead programmer for Thief: The Dark Project, writing the AI and core architecture of the game. He lives in the Boston area. Tom has been at Looking Glass for three-and-a-half years, prior to which he spent seven years working on C++ development tools at Zortech and Symantec. He is currently working on next-generation technologies, and can be reached at toml@lglass.com.

the Dark Project - the Games we Play

1999-10-07T08:57:00.000Z

What we've been playing lately

MAHK runs a GURPS Illuminati campaign he calls "Gedankenspiel," set in a version of the
Over the Edge universe. He has used Final Fantasy 7 to force Tim to concede that there are good PlayStation games. He wants you to play Settlers of Catan today. Mahk got 70 stars in Super Mario 64.

Tim plays in Mahk's Gedankenspiel run as Angus MacAllan, the world's most charismatic performance artist. If only his real-life minions displayed the slavish and suicidal devotion of his Gedankenspiel followers.

Tim wants you to know, despite the fact that its combats are actually interesting, Final Fantasy Tactics is really a CRPG at heart. Play it. Tim got 90 stars in Super Mario 64, and is getting a wee bit impatient for Zelda 64.

Doug presents the illusion of buying lots of games and leaving them in shrink-wrap on the shelves in his office for lack of time to do anything but work, then every once in a while surprises you by revealing that he actually does play games in the 25^th hour of every day. Plus he and Rob "Xemu" Fermier of Irrational Games have a standing weekly appointment to play Wave Race.

Tim, Doug, and a few other Looking Glass folks (such as Flight Unlimited's own James "Jaemz" Fleming) also play in a long-running Dungeons & Dragons game run via road trip by an old schoolmate of theirs now living in Washington, D.C. For reasons lost to the mists of time, the campaign is called Zen Jihad. Doug and Tim are currently the party's front-line fighters, Voodelmar and Yeenthra. Voodelmar does damage; Yeenthra takes it.

Dorian GM's one AD&D run (in which Kate and Peggy play) and plays in another. On the machines, he's been playing Warlords III and HOMM II; on the wood slab, he's been playing Settlers of Catan and Robo-Rally; and on the green carpet he's been playing ultimate frisbee. He doesn't remember how many stars he got in Super Mario 64, but it's an embarassingly small number (in the 20's or 30's).

Greg doesn't play anything much other than his bass gee-tar. That's why he's the boss.

Misty-eyed Reminiscences

We fondly remember vanquishing the Wizard of Frobozz, fulfilling the Quests of the Avatar, and yes, we can name all three artifacts to be found in Dungeon Module S2: "White Plume Mountain."^* In recent times we've flown to Cydonia to fend off the alien threat, we've blasted Archviles and Vores, we've even spent some time in the Lonely Planet of Somersaults and Wolves. We know what our THAC0s are, we've failed a few SAN checks, and we've seen almost every use and abuse of a Variable Power Pool.

* Which, by the way, are a sword called Blackrazor, a trident
named Wave, and a hammer named Whelm.

Thief: The Dark Project Release

1998-12-02T08:04:00.000Z

Thief: The Dark Project
"Stalk through the silent corridors of a sleeping city and ambush its unsuspecting guards. Eavesdrop on your foes as they coordinate their man-hunt in real-time digital audio. Infiltrate and explore mission areas, from sewers to an abandoned cathedral ... even plunder the Lost City of the Ancients! Prowl in the shadows, scale sheer walls, leap over chasms, and dive beneath the rushing waters of the city's aquaducts."

Eidos British Official Game Site
Eidos American Official Game Site

Project Diary

1998-07-21T08:21:00.000Z

Well, whether they intended to or not, Saam Taraverdi and Dan Todd have shamed me into making time for the project diary again. They did this by force of their ardent boosterism. Check out their Looking Glass Action RPG fan page Through the Looking Glass and you'll see what I mean. Saam's a longtime supporter who maintained his System Shock page (now The Trioptimum Corporate Network) for years while never giving up hope that we'd finally do
System Shock II. Making Saam, right about now, a very happy guy.

On a related note, our publishing friends at Eidos have their own Thief section now up on their website. Check it out.

Two forces kept me away from the web diary lately. One was anticipation of a whole new major revision of the Thief web site by LG's own rockin' audiovisual department (who do better web pages than a lot of guys whose business is web pages, in my opinion). The other was sheer load of work as we try to slam this puppy home into beta. Here's where we are:

We've got about 80% of our training mission done, with the rest waiting on some AI scripting services for the spotters in the sight and hearing stealth lessons. "Lord Bafford's Mansion" is essentially at the spit-and-polish applying stage. "Breakout at Cragscleft Prison" is undergoing some revision based on our alpha test experiences. And we're pushing hard on "Assassins,"
"The Forgotten City," and "Window Shopping." The redoubtable Doug Church is now taking point of final mission design revisions, bringing a fresh perspective and leaving me free to implement gameplay elements (sort of a refreshing role reversal for us, really).

Rope arrows are now in, and noisemakers are back in under the new content-rich AI/sound system. We've got pressure plates and a variety of other "triggers" based on door and lock state, proximity and such. There's an increasing selection of things to get thrown, swung, dropped, or pressed on the player by traps to go with them for those "Raiders of the Tomb" sort of
missions. Land mines and magic trigger glyphs are about halfway there. Holy water arrows are in, and a lot more effective against zombies than poking arrow-sized holes in them. We've got healing potions and air supply potions. Knockout gas arrows are prototyped but don't have an area effect yet.

Falling damage is in and we're discovering all those places where physics was exerting a lot more force on things than we thought (ouch!). We also discovered just how little water was cushioning your fall (ouch again) and have now got it turned up to a more realistic amount to drag. Physics for rope climing is in, and ladders have been considerably tuned.

There's a bunch of important new AI behaviors coming on-line. AI's can know what territory they're guarding and only react with hostility if you violate that boundary (so they don't attack you when you're just walking down the street casing the joint). There's a variety of new conditions under which AI's will flee, so servants (for example) won't attack you at all, but just run away raising a ruckus. AI's can be blind or deaf (security cameras, for example, will
be AI's who can see and look around but not hear or move about, so the usual "hide in shadows" tactics will work exactly the same).

Various kinds of new "loot" objects are in, and are set up to show you a running total of how much swag you've snagged, though you can't spend it ... yet.

Basically, we're motoring towards beta at a dizzying pace, so stay tuned. -Tim

Project Diary

1998-06-29T08:24:00.000Z

Greg's back from England. Apparently the press tour went well. This is good, since it was the first time since the relatively-controlled circumstances of E3 that we've unleashed people other than our own playtesters to play the game. I tell you, they love us in Europe.

Of course, we made a lot of advances on the way to the press tour demo, too. Flash bombs are in, and seem to blind AI's just long enough for you to either jump in and carve them up, or get out of sight. Just don't expect that trick to work on fire elementals. We've finally got the climbing maneuver where the player-character can pull himself up over ledges, and now we can start finding all of the strange, broken places this allows you to go, and fix them. Chris' explosion physics code is in. Just remember, when you shoot a fire arrow into a stack of crates, it's not a clean break unless two of them bounce off the walls. Meanwhile, Kate, Mark, and Laura are getting new creatures' meshes and animations integrated faster than I can set game statistics for them.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, AI's can hear arbitrary sounds now, and we can tag any sound we want with different types of "significance." So, when you have a near-miss with an arrow now, the jig is up. And if you feel compelled to blow stuff up (and everybody's got to blow stuff up once in a while) the jig is extremely up. -Tim

Project Diary

1998-06-21T08:26:00.000Z

Kate's got in our new weapon art and attack motions for the blackjack attacks. Mahk has been working, among other things, on the drowning mechanics. This has been immesurably aided, I'm sure, by the fact that our swimming movement is broken right now, making it just that much easier to drown. Also on Mahk's list was a new revision of our terrain properties code and environmental sounds code, which is at the core of what sound (and how loud) you make when walking on different types of floor. In order to allow the player to affect those floor types, Doug
and I have been getting our terrain-changing "earth arrows" into the game.

Playtest proceeds apace; surprisingly enough, I'm told that there are bugs. -Tim

Project Diary

1998-06-12T08:27:00.000Z

We're putting the final post-demo touches on some of the missions we took to E3, and it looks like we're going to go into serious alpha test next week. We actually started testing a while ago, but it's been limited and mainly oriented around E3. Now that we've got some missions, we can unleash our ruthless cadre of gaming fiends.

So, we're pushing ahead to our looming Beta milestone, magazine cover-mount demo deadline, and our upcoming whirlwind European press tour. Kate, Mark, and Laura are busy in their Frankensteinian workshop, making new creatures out of nothing but electricity and the parts of other creatures. The new Crayman, Bug-Beast, and Spider skeletal types should be integrated soon. And as soon as that happens, you can be sure of screenshots. The design crew is working on mission areas, of course, which are looking good. Meanwhile, I've been stealing time from the usual post-demo schedule meetings to work on scripting object behaviors, starting with doors you can break down (not stealthy, but effective), and alarm gongs that ring when you shoot them (a great diversion).

We've just got another really good reaction to our E3 presence, this time from Emil Pagliarulo, Editor-in-chief of The Adrenaline Vault. In his E3 roundup he says of E3 in general "I wasn't impressed...all the true-3D, polygonal-based action games are starting to look alike," but despite this picks Thief as one of his best of the show. "I can't even begin to express how much I've been looking forward to this latest Looking Glass project." Thanks, Emil.

In print, we've got a really nice spot in the new issue of PC Gamer, in their "Hot 100" feature on upcoming games. Instead of the usual 1/9^th-page blurb, Thief has a big half-page frame. The phrase, "happier than pigs in slop" was used. So, go pick up a copy of this obviously fine magazine.

Today's diary, you may have noticed, was printed with 50% recycled information. We're going green. -Tim

Project Diary

1998-06-08T08:29:00.000Z

Hey, we're back. As Dorian would say when he writes this thing, Tim was on vacation last week. Soon I'll get around to our backlog of reader feedback mail.

We got our E3 demo done in time to put Doug and Greg on a plane, but without much time to spare. So we all got a good night's sleep, then Tom, Dorian, Chris and I marched right back into work to polish up everything that Greg and Doug were pointing out from the show floor. Such is the measure of our devotion.

I suppose it worked, too, because we got some really positive reactions at the show. We had several machines running, at least one of which was set up for random walk-ins to play, and people seemed to enjoy the game. Chuck Miller, writing for ogr, gave us a nod in his picks for E3's hottest titles.

The real buzz at E3, however, was generated by our announcement of System Shock 2! Anyone remember on the Frequently Asked Questions page where I said "If we were to do, for example, System Shock 2, it would have to be a deal with (Electronic Arts)?" Well, we made a deal with Electronic Arts. I don't need to say too much about that here, since soon enough (I'm told) System Shock 2 will have its own web presence here where you'll be able to learn much, much
more. To answer one question I saw being asked about on the net, though: yes, System Shock 2 will be using an updated version of our own "Dark Engine." Those advances are being worked on right now, and since some of them may be things we can use for Thief, we're especially happy to
have another Dark Engine game in production.

In unrelated news, be sure to pick up the July issue of Computer Games Strategy Plus, which
features an excellent preview of Thief. We're fond of journalists who highlight the gameplay and engine features we can't really show you with a screenshot, like our realistic physics, acoustics, and AI. Read and enjoy. -Tim

Project Diary

1998-05-26T08:31:00.000Z

We're in the final push to get our demo ready for E3, which I'm sure some of you will have noticed has resulted in our being less than dilligent about updating the web page. I've got what I can pretend to be a free moment, though, so ...

Tom has integrated a whole new controller level on our AI, basically replacing all of their senses and higher brain functions. This is our biggest current thing to get shaken down for E3, obviously. But we felt it was necessary given everything we've learned about our stealth scenarios, how we want our creatures to act, and the options we need for tuning and varying AI behaviors.

Meanwhile, Sean
has got in his brand-spankin'-new particle effects system, which will replace a number of the temporary and relatively unsatisfying special effects we had before (not that we're ever satisfied with such things). And Mahk and Doug have reworked our inventory system to respond to some playtest comments on the interface, and get in our actual creature inventory system. As a direct consequence we have our first version of pickpocketing finally in (but still pending lots of testing).

Other developments are doubtless too numerous to mention, or comprehend for that matter. -Tim

Project Diary

1998-05-13T08:32:00.000Z

Well, we're back from CGDC. Mahk, Tom, and I went to the conference, while Doug was there as a speaker. Thief was being shown at the 3DFX booth, which got us a preview in the show coverage at OGR.com.

The show was very educational, I'm sure (the people who paid for us to go like to hear things like that). We also got to hang out (and, of course, play Settlers of Catan) with old friends, industry luminaries, and Looking Glass alums such as Warren Spector (our longtime pal from Ultima Underworld days, now at ION Storm), Ned Lerner and Art Min (now of Multitude),
and Matt Toschlog (still working on those Descent games of his, and apparently enjoying himself tremendously).

But enough of the misty-eyed reminiscences. Back here at what Mahk likes to call "the bubbling cauldrons of game design," we're entering our final push to prepare for this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E³) in Atlanta. Mission production continues. Naturally, since we're not done with all the missions, and I won't let people stop. In related work, we're getting a bunch of new object models in the game, and preparing mission-related texts like briefings, hints, and
background fiction. Yesterday we had our first big recording session with our voice actor for Garrett, our protagonist.

Our motion-capture processing for new creatures is underway, but since we were able to get a lot more captures than we expected, we're having to put extra people on actually processing the
data. So, we had several people over at our mo-cap studio, Adaptive Optical, earlier this week to train up on the process. Thus does our toil translate into tasty gaming quality for you, the player. Just doing our jobs. -Tim

Thief: The Dark Project to Steal Show at E3

1998-04-22T07:11:00.000Z

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Contact:

Brian Fichtel
TSI Communications
212-696-2000 ext.
205
bfichtel@tsipr.com

Mike Malizola
Looking Glass Studios
617-441-6333, ext.
239
mmalizola@lglass.com

Gary Keith/Tricia Gray
EIDOS
Interactive
415-547-1200
gkeith@eidos.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Looking Glass Studios' Thief: The Dark
Project to Steal Show at E3

The Shadowy World of Thievery and Deception Will be
Illuminated in Atlanta

Cambridge, MA, April 22, 1998 - Looking Glass Studios, a leading entertainment software developer, today announced that it will be showcasing Thief: The Dark Project at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), May 28-30, 1998 in Atlanta, GA. Looking Glass Studios will be conducting press interviews and demonstrating Thief: The Dark Project at the EIDOS Interactive booth (booth #7345) located in the Georgia World Congress Center.

Thief: The Dark Project is a first-person 3D action/adventure game where players assume the role of a master thief relying on stealth and cunning. Utilizing the revolutionary new Dark Engine, Thief: The Dark Project transports players into a mysterious and immersive techno-fantasy world of intrigue, deception and combat.

In Thief: The Dark Project, players embark on a series of adventures that are woven into a compelling story of seduction, betrayal, and ultimate revenge. In order to survive, gamers must use sly, evasive maneuvers to progress through a world where the shadows are your only allies, trust is not an option, and confrontation usually results in death.

"Looking Glass Studios' role-playing game roots were a driving force in the creation of Thief: The Dark Project," said Paul Neurath, managing director of Looking Glass Studios. "By combining multiple gameplay elements, we have achieved a fresh, unique approach to the first-person action/adventure genre."

Looking Glass Studios is a leading developer of entertainment and simulation software distinguished by its expertise in 3D immersive technologies. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the talented team at Looking Glass has created some of the best-selling and highly acclaimed titles in the interactive entertainment industry, including the Ultima� Underworld� series, System Shock�, Flight Unlimited�, Flight Unlimited II�and Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri�.

To See the Light As Thief: The Dark

1998-03-30T07:21:00.000Z

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact:

Brian Fichtel
TSI Communications
212-696-2000 ext.
205
bfichtel@tsipr.com

Mike Malizola
Looking Glass Studios
617-441-6333, ext.
239
mmalizola@lglass.com

Gary Keith/Tricia Gray
EIDOS
Interactive
415-547-1200
gkeith@eidos.com

Looking Glass Studios' Upcoming Action/Adventure Game

To See the Light As Thief: The Dark
Project

Highly-Anticipated Game of Stealth and Deception
Scheduled for a Fall 1998 Release

Cambridge, MA, March 30, 1998
- Looking Glass Studios, a leading entertainment software developer, today announced that the 3D action/adventure game previously known under the working title of The Dark Project, has been named Thief: The Dark Project. Thief: The Dark Project is scheduled for a Fall 1998 release and will be published by EIDOS Interactive.

Thief: The Dark Project is a first-person 3D action/adventure game where players assume the role of a master thief relying on stealth and cunning. Utilizing the revolutionary new Dark Engine, Thief: The Dark Project transports players into a dark and immersive techno-fantasy
world of stealth, intrigue, deception and combat. Players embark on a series of adventures that are woven into a compelling story of seduction, betrayal, and ultimate revenge.

Looking Glass Studios is a leading developer of entertainment and simulation software distinguished by its expertise in 3D immersive technologies. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the talented team at Looking Glass has created some of the best-s elling and highly acclaimed titles in the interactive entertainment industry, including the Ultima� Underworld� series, System Shock�, Flight Unlimited�, Flight Unlimited II�and Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri�.

Project Diary

1998-02-12T21:00:00.000Z

We're now going over reactions to our prototype, cleaning up some things that
were getting a bit neglected in the deadline rush, and getting geared up on
mission production. Dorian
and Mark
have been further sprucing up Lord Bafford's mansion, our most ancient level
(and aside from a training mission, the first one anyone will see in the game).
Sara's
trying her hand at a mockup of the Sewer level, which is starting to come along
pretty well. Mike
is bending his mighty will to rough drafts of the Lost City, Nate has done a
good architectural mockup of Boss Ramirez' villa, and Randy
is just about ready to start polishing up his Cathedral and Cloisters.

All of which means, a lot more variety of screenshots
soon, at long last. All the better, our technology group is polishing up our D3D
support, so we'll have screenshots in lovely 16-bit color and that signature 3D
card fuzz-o-vision. Stick around. -Tim

Project Diary

1998-02-06T09:00:00.000Z

Our first playable mission brought with it this week our first real pre-alpha
playtest. Sara
and her minions did a super job of helping us polish up our demo mission to put
on a plane with Greg
to go present to the publishers. As Tom
put it, "Although it's still quite rough around the edges, we believe it is
truly playable. And fun!"

Now we're just 20 missions, several more game mechanics, one serious overhaul
of the AI system, and who knows what else away from being done. Oh, you say you
want that figure in months? Sorry. -Tim

Project Diary

1998-01-30T21:00:00.000Z

People sometimes wonder what game designers actually do. Well, the
team had a flurry of email the other day which captured a design flame in text
for a change, so

Mahk
suggested we put it up on the Web page. The whole thing is much too big for
that, but I think I can offer some coherent excerpts. Good idea,
Mahk. -Tim

Randy: Another comment concerns the ability to sneak around. A
spiderman-esque walking-on-walls-and-ceilings power-up was suggested, which
seems like a fine idea on one side and a monstrous can-o-worms on the other.
More realistically, it was suggested that we could get the invisibility potion
working which seems much simpler to implement and perhaps can demonstrate the
visibility elements in the demo in some powerful ways. But without AI's having
the ability to hear, this seems a bit rocky as well.
Tim: I agree, though for "monstrous can-o-worms," read "total madness." An
obvious idea to consider, but only until you think about it a bit more. Extra
physics and biped animation work for a power-up that destroys our ability to
keep the player in the mission area, extra work to keep him from walking on the
sky, etc. Consider the restrictions we put on the rope arrow precisely to
control where the player could and could not use it, then think how much worse
Spider Climb would be.
One cool thing that this would get us is cool, odd perspectives, which brings
us back to Doug and my idea to let you hang upside-down from ropes, maybe as a
way of freeing your hands while climbing. The main fly in this ointment being
complicating the problem of sorting the rope and the PC together during
climbing.
While we're on the subject though, it seems like a good time to advance Tom's
Shrinking Potion idea. Potentially relatively lightweight work to implement
(feasibility comments anyone?) but it profoundly affects your visibility and
access to certain spaces in a straightforward and constrained way.
Randy: What happens if you are in a small space and the potion wears off? Do
you die? Are you effected by gravity to the same extent or less? Do you suffer
absolute falling damage or relative to your size? IE - lots of little issues
need to be considered, none of them seem too difficult to handle.
Tim: I don't really have a problem with having (shrinking) just not wear off
until you've got clearance. You can't stay stuck in a hole forever.
(Are you effected by gravity to the same extent or less?) Ask Galileo.
(Do you suffer absolute falling damage or relative to your size?) We're the
kind of people who would make you take less, but only 0.5% of our players are
the kind of people who would notice.
Dorian: I wonder how hard to would be to have small rodents who scuttled
about in certain parts of the game...small, mindless AI's who generally ignore
people. But when you're shrunk, the rats become actual monsters to worry about.
You could lure them away with cheese, use your tiny rope arrow to flee up to the
undersides of tables...
MAHK: Invisibility is just as huge a can of worms, because you can never
really be sure whether it's working. We've done (and will continue to do) a
whole lot of work to make the AIs tell the player ("Is someone there?") when
they've not quite been seen/heard. I'm wary of unleashing a mechanic that
completely emasculates all that yummy feedback.
Chris: Well, hopefully their feedback will be of the sort that they convey
not only how much they've detected you, but also the means by which they do so.
So they'd say "did you hear that?"-type things if you were invisible. It seems
to me that this could really illustrate how the AIs are perceiving the player...
so you'll know that you don't have to worry about being seen, but still have to
pay attention to noise you make.
Randy: Whatever was the UI for informing the player about being shaded or not
could be used to inform the player about being invisible or not.
Tim: Ding! Point to Chris. The point isn't that there won't be UI feedback to
the player that he's invisible, it's that he'll be invisible and guards will
detect him anyway because they hear him, and the player will then say "this
invisibility potion doesn't work. It's a bug." This is exactly what happened
with the invisibility spell in Underworld 1, where we had a very plain icon on
your spells-currently-in-effect bar which told you you were invisible. Which is
why the invisibility spell in Underworld 2 (as I recall) also made you silent.
It's been our hope that the AIs' broadcast (speech) feedback about sense
information would obviate this problem, but in the presence of
non-sense-specific broadcasts, the problem remains. We can hope but not
guarantee that we'll have trained our players sufficiently in the existence of
different sense modes that the mere fact that they were detected while invisible
means that they were heard.
All of which suggests that if a player is detected while invisible, AI's
should use their hearing-specific (speech) schema exclusively if they have them.

Erin: Perhaps this has already been considered/taken care of, but if your
invisibility runs out while you are standing in front of (a) guard(s) will they
react appropriately, or will thier usual "they've spotted you" reaction just
come off as canned...? I guess I'm saying perhaps there is a large surprise
element that might be lacking...
Tim: Aha, and yet there is a notion of "surprise" in the AI spec which is
being implemented even as we speak, so that in any case where you reveal
yourself to an AI too suddenly, he'll be surprised.
Ha HA!
Chris: Another problem with being tiny is object interactions. I know that if
I suddenly became a foot tall (in the game, not in real life) one of the first
things I would try to is is hide under a table, or under other such
things...which won't work with the table's current physics model.
One of the reasons we can get away with using sphere or bouding-box physics
representations is that most of the objects are relatively small compared to the
player. If we suddenly cut the size of the player by a factor of 3 or 4, we've
decreased the apparent fidelity by which we physically model objects by the same
amount.
Overall, I'm not too keen on the shrinking potion...it seems like a neat
idea, but the more I think about it the more I'm unsure about the interactions
(both technically and gameplay-wise) that it will cause to become problematic.
Does it really fit into our stealth gameplay? Are you effectively both invisible
and inaudible while shrunk (or just nearly so)? If guards can detect you, can
they step on you?
The implications of having objects interacting of wildly different scale seem
pretty unexplored, and is certainly not just as simple as changing the player's
scale.
Tim: It's not clear to me that "wildly" different scale is called for. I
confess to not knowing about the shrinking effect in Duke Nukem, but it seems
like even going down to 1/2 size or 1/3 size is potentially pretty relevant.
This may still raise some of these issues (like walking under tables, ugh), but
it doesn't make you "invisible and inaudible" nor raise the prospect of guards
stepping on you.
(Regarding rats, even if you're not shrunk): And fish. Doug and I have been
craving fish.
As to whether I could "interact with them directly," I'm sure I'd still want
to kill the little buggers every once in a while, and find it pretty
satisfying... 8-)

And so on.

Project Diary

1998-01-23T22:00:00.000Z

Well, technically it's January 23, since it's 1:00 am. We're
pulling an all-nighter in preparation for a company demo tomorrow.
We had the first project-induced suicide this week. It was one of our AI's.
He'd just got his shiny new physics model on his sword, and provoked by the
appearance of the player-character, wound up and swung with mighty abandon.
Following through less than adroitly, he managed to hit himself and
promptly keeled over.
I love this phase of a project, because your bugs get so much more
entertaining. -

Tim

Project Diary

1998-01-16T07:43:00.000Z

We're still churning away on our prototype, which looks like it's slipping out into next week. I'm popping a Peter Gabriel CD into the hopper, and Peter is gonna sing:

I know something about opening windows and doors

I know how to move quietly- to creep across creaky wooden floors

I know where to find precious things in all your cupboards and drawers

And that's gonna be pretty damn inspirational.
We're in the home stretch on a bunch of our goals, having all the systems implmented and just needing to set a bunch of data. So I'm going to go do that.

-Tim

Project Diary

1998-01-09T21:00:00.000Z

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

Project Diary

1997-12-30T21:00:00.000Z

This was a quiet week for the Dark team - many of us were off
visiting family and friends for the holidays - but some of us continued to make
progress.

Tim
spent the week analyzing scripting needs, and working on script language
implementation of the jailbreak mission. Doug,
Tom,
and Mahk
have been coordinating on implementing object scripting services, including
animations, object usage, and AI decision-making.

On the design and art side, Mark
and Greg
continued to improve the aesthetics of the Bafford Mansion while I was on
vacation.

All of us on the Dark team hope that you had a pleasant time celebrating the
wintertime festival of your choice. -Dorian

Project Diary

1997-12-19T21:00:00.000Z

Looks like pretty much all the code we wanted in before Christmas
break is getting in, including the scripting language and door physics stuff I
mentioned last week.

Doug
is back from a brief vacation and beset by a backlog of consultations as usual.

Dorian's
been burning the midnight oil at both ends (as it were) working on a much-needed
radical reconstruction of our first demo level, which we finally decided had
acquired just a few too many demo barnicles, especially considering that we know
much more about the tools at hand than we did at its inception. As good as that
level was, it was becoming hard to work with, and I must say the new version
looks like it'll be even better. Mike
and Randy's
mission work also proceeds apace (some hints for the curious out there; the
missions in question are "Lord
Bafford's Mansion," "Cragscleft
Penitentiary," and "The Haunted Cathedral," respectively).

Mark
is getting a bunch of new objects in and doing a fine job of putting up with me
telling him whenever an object which should be "flat" shaded is "phong" shaded.
Art's been a bit short-staffed since the departure of long-time LG stalwart Robb
Waters, who's moved on to greener pastures. Now subbing in for Robb is the
newly-acquired rookie known only as "Nate."

We had our first big recording session today, for our prototype's voice
actors. Not to malign what is otherwise a kick-ass game, but I've promised
myself that our voice talent is going to be better than in Castlevania: Symphony
of the Night (which I only mention because I've been playing
it lately). -Tim

Project Diary

1997-12-12T21:03:00.000Z

First, I must apologize for the irregular updates lately. With
intensive work going on for a major proof-of-concept prototype next month, the
Dark joint is really jumpin' lately. Likewise, I haven't been keeping up on our
reader email, so if you've written in the last month or so, rest assured I
haven't just snubbed you; I'll dig through it all "real soon now," as they say.
Plenty of stuff going on since the last update.

Mark
has started working up some new interface screens, with cool clunky-looking
steam-punk machinery. Doug,
Mahk,
and I are strategizing about inventory, using objects, damage models, and
suchlike gameplay goodness.

Chris,
in his guise as physics guy is getting doors in this week, much to the joy of
designers everywhere. Tom
is in the final stages of getting our scripting language together, which will
really unblock our upcoming (mid-January) gameplay prototype. Many
correspondents have noted that our current "gameplay" movie is heavy on bow
combat and light on thievery: the simple reason is that bow combat is just about
the easiest part of our game to implement. The next month or two will be when we
really get into the meat of the gameplay, with lockpicking and pickpocketing
mechanics coming on line, plus hand-to-hand combat, and AI and scripting support
for more interesting creature behaviors.

We've got two missions now pretty firmly in development for the January
prototype, with architecture and concepts being developed on the side for
several more. With twenty-odd missions ahead of us, I'd say it's none too soon.

In other news, Josh,
Dan
and company have put together our first between-acts movie, and I must say that
even at this early stage, with much editing still to be done and real voice
actors yet to be cast, it looks pretty cool. We're trying to get away from the
all-computer-rendered look that's so common these days, and I think you'll
ultimately agree that the mighty artwork of Mr. Thron more than justifies
the decision.

That's all for now. Until next week (no, really, I mean it this
time). -Tim

Project Diary

1997-11-16T21:00:00.000Z

You know what it's like when you talk to someone you haven't seen in
a while?
"Hey, what's up?"
"Oh, not much. You know."
"Ah, come on, it's been months."
Well, that's what it's like
writing the team diary sometimes. Especially when you kind of copped out on the
previous week's entry and you're late with this one (I admit it all).
So, let's see.

Randy
and I have been working with Doug,
Dorian,
and Greg
on planning tuning strategy for our AI's, to try to make sure they're just
competent enough to constitute a continual threat of capture, that the player
always knows what's going on, and such. Laura
did such a good job of orgainizing our AI speech plans that she's now got the
same job with respect to motion captures. I promise Randy and Laura that
there'll be plenty of mission design for everyone (which there will be) despite
the fact that only Mike
is currently working on missions.

Dorian and Mark
have been working on interface mockups for our metagame UI, like splash screens,
main menu, options and save/load panels. This is a job with no glamour. Mark's
also working on the map of the city in which most of your adventures take place,
coordinating the aforementioned motion capture tasks with Laura and Kate,
and God only knows what else.

Meanwhile, Tom's
been out the last two weeks, claiming to be on his honeymoon or something, but I
think it's just his secret plot to prove that we need him. Similarly, we just
got Doug
back from being requisitioned onto Flight 2.
Infer what you will from the fact that we just got Doug back and from last
week's "demo movie for the Flight 2 CD." I will neither confirm nor
deny anything that the actual Flight 2 team doesn't seem to have announced
yet because of their all having gone home. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-11-06T21:00:00.000Z

All I got to say is,

Greg took a bunch of us to go see Starship
Troopers this afternoon. I love this job.

Oh, and we got a promo movie on the Flight
Unlimited 2 CD, which I guess those among you who buy Flight 2
will get to see.

Okay, I admit it, it was a shameless plug. Gimme a break; those guys've been
working pretty hard, you know. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-10-30T21:00:00.000Z

Things are really gearing up around here. I'd like to welcome a new
member of our design team,

Randy
Smith. Like Laura,
Randy's new to the games industry, but he brings much-appreciated programming
skills and a background in AI to the team. (In the credit-where-credit-is-due
department, I might note that Laura has an impressive background on the amateur
scene with the MIT
Assassins' Guild).

Production of our early-alpha prototype is proceeding apace, based on
Mission 3: The Haunted Mines & Hammer Prison. Mike's
been doing a bang-up job on the prison factory in particular. This also means
we're finally getting to use a bunch of cool industrial object models produced
by Mark
Lizotte, and there's more on the way. Thanks to Dorian
for taking charge of integrating our backlog of Mark's work.

Meanwhile Laura
and Dorian have been polishing up the design of our NPC speech systems with
input from me and Greg.
We've already got some pretty cool search-and-pursuit chatter out of our guards,
and it looks to be getting better. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-10-23T20:03:00.000Z

The other day,

Dorian
told me a little story about something that happened to him while he was tuning
the game.

He was working on AI parameters, trying to get get it to the point where you
could sneak up on the AI's, but only if you were really careful. This is clearly
a basic premise of a game about thievery, and specifically we need things tuned
that way before we can test our prototype game systems for back stabbing and
pick-pocketing.

So, waiting in the shadows until a guard passes on a patrol, he slips into
step behind the guy, being careful not to go too fast so he doesn't make too
much noise or bump into the guy. After following him for a bit, trying to get a
bead on his belt (where anything worth filching off the guy would be), he notes
the guard turning slightly ... just enough to catch a subconscious glimpse of
the thief shadowing him.

"What was that?" says the guard. He stops. Listens.

Dorian freezes. Seconds pass.

"Huh. Must'a been rats," says the guard, and continues on his way as Dorian
finally exhales.

I can't tell you how gratified I was to hear about this. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-10-16T20:00:00.000Z

We've gotten into that aforementioned follow-up on our December
prototype plans, with some feedback from LG Studios head honchos Paul and Eric.
In general, work proceeds apace, with everyday work too varied to mention it
all.

Mat has in some new special particle effects for flames, and much-awaited hooks for
associating light sources more easily with objects. Mahk
has new, hip object-editing tools in that finally give us better hooks into
Windows library UI in the editor without "contaminating" (his word, not mine)
the portability of our game-only compiles. Hey, it may not sound like much to
you, but you're not the one editing levels. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-10-09T20:00:00.000Z

We've been planning our short-term gameplay prototyping goals (short
term in this case means December).

Greg and I did a great deal of fleshing-out of the gameplay in the Prison Breakout
mission. Now we just need to compare that to what we think we can actually get
done in two months. Either way, Mike
is off and running on the mission architecture based on our working assumptions.

Meanwhile, I'm finally cooking up what I think is a decent lockpicking system
after a long dry spell on said topic, much to at least my own relief. Dorian
is refining the design for AI speech.

Kate
and Mark
continue to work on the touchy matter of creature animation, ironing out the
matter of getting different skeletal frames looking right. Robb
finally showed off a bunch of creature models at a much-belated review, and now
everyone worships at his sandalled feet. Robb also did almost all the creatures
for System Shock, so it's not like anyone's surprised. Danno
is working on more movies in general, and mission briefings and maps in
particular.

Everyone else, well, it's all a big blur to me. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-10-02T20:00:00.000Z

It was a hectic but productive week. We had a big project review
earlier this week with our corporate masters, and there was a lot of enthusiasm
with what we're doing both with Dark and planning for future games.
Meanwhile, Mark and Kate have been getting together a new round of creature-animation refinements, so everyone moves much more fluidly, and we're starting to get interesting
variations in skeletal proportions among creature types.

On the design side, we've brought on a new designer part-time in the person
of one Laura
Baldwin. She's getting started on mission design, just as Mike
is transiting from his multi-player prototype mission onto a single-player
mission. Dorian
and I have been working on finalizing the mission structure and plot, and have
some pretty good ideas for the endgame which we've yet to spring on an
unsuspecting Greg. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-09-25T20:00:00.000Z

Mark's busily tooling away on more object models, mostly of zany steam-punk gizmos.
Some of them, I even know what to do with. Tom
is optimizing our AI, which is performing much more speedily now. Chris
continues to refine and optimize our physics. Dorian
and Josh are working on our NPC speech system. When Dorian's not being siphoned off by
the Flight Unlimited II team to proofread their manual, that
is. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-09-18T20:20:00.000Z

Hmmm. Clearly I should be reading our own web page more often. I'd have noticed
earlier that none of this stuff had actually been uploaded to our web server
since September 3 (thanks to Mr. Yaus for pointing it out). Heads will
roll.

Mind you, it makes it a lot easier to do this week's web page update, since
everything's already done from previous weeks except for this diary
entry. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-09-08T20:21:00.000Z

The final touches are now up on our new look for the web site, and we've got a
cool promotional CD out to the press using the new (much better, thievier)
concept art. Not that we ever entirely stop revising the web site, but here's
our big revision push for ECTS.
Dorian makes fun of my new promotional copy on the main page.

Speaking of ECTS, it turned out that Greg
had to do the first day of the show without our patch, which is certainly
something that could have gone better. Still, we got in a bunch of new special
effects and a good part of a new level (thanks to the brilliant work of Steve
Canniff), plus new creature types and one new magic arrow type, which is
good. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-09-06T20:00:00.000Z

(Special ECTS crunch Extra!)

Well, it's 4:00 am in Cambridge as I write this, which means it's
9:00 am in London. And, worse luck, that means that we're still
here stoking the smoky furnaces of game development, getting some final touches
ready to upload to Greg at ECTS.
Looks like it's coming together pretty well, though. Still, we had a lot more
breathing room back at E³.

You can tell we're segueing out of design and into production, because our
bugs are getting more entertaining. Like when killing a creature shuts off its
AI but not its biped handler, and it just kind of staggers around very much not
thinking, until it runs into a wall. That's entertainment.

Everyone's been pitching in like crazy, which is great. Doug's got animating textures in and has of course been putting out everybody's fires. Kate's got our mesh-rendered bipeds in, with several new creature models courtesy of Robb. Mat's
got new special effects in ... well, new to Dark anyway. If you
played Terra Nova the special effect on our fire arrows will be strangely familiar to
you. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-09-02T20:24:00.000Z

You will note that we've fallen off our web page update schedule. The reason for
this is good news and bad news. The bad news for this are that our ECTS
demo crunch hit harder than I expected, leaving me with no time to get new
screenshots, keep up with everybody's work, and such. The good news is that part
of our ECTS plan involves publicizing a new revision of the web site, so there
should be loads of fresh new info come next week. Next update'll be Tuesday,
September 9. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-08-20T20:24:00.000Z

Mark and I are getting ready to enter mortal combat with the final creature list. Earlier this week we suffered the battering of the inventory panel and the eternal truth that there's never as much space as you would really like.

Several efforts on the special visual effects front are gearing up for our ECTS demo. Mark, MAHK, Doug and I have been brainstorming techniques for representing fires and explosions, and Mark and Matt have been working on refining our water animations.

Josh has cooked up a cool new gameplay demo movie (warning: it's a whopping 9.9 megabtyes) that gives a much better sense of our game dynamics (such as they are at this stage) than you can get from a screenshot. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-08-14T20:26:00.000Z

Of course, the big news this week is LG's merger with the games division of Intermetrics.
Obviously, there's a lot more to be said about such a thing than I can say here, and really the only relevant thing is that through the whole deal everyone was really psyched about both The Dark Project and Flight Unlimited II, which is gratifying.

Having caught up on our backlog of viewer mail, I noted we actually had some frequently-asked questions, thus giving rise to a new section here on the web page.

Briscoe's back in town this week to consult on our AI. This has meant intensive design work by yours truly and lots of technical design and system architecture mind-melding with Tom and Doug.
The system we're planning on will give us pretty realistic coordinated behavior among the NPC guards, and highly distinctive AI behaviors for about a dozen of our creature types.

Kate and Mark are back from SIGGRAPH and are all fired up over techniques I don't understand. Kate does have the mesh renderer now to the point where it's drawing a whole motion-capture-animated single-skin biped model, instead of just an elbow. As soon as said biped is actually texture-mapped, maybe we'll get some screenshots (for what it's worth
when you can't see them moving). -Tim

Project Diary

1997-08-07T20:28:00.000Z

First, let me apologize for our not getting a web page update up to the net last week. It actually got written but Customer Service and I got our wires crossed and it was never published. So we're putting up the screen shots that should have gone up last week, and putting up two weeks' worth of diary entries.

The `Project got a really nice feature this week on The Adrenaline Vault. "Nice" first in that it's favorable, but also in that they're really into the thieving, sneaky, commando-style game we're putting together, and they're up-front about how this is different from the mainstream "shooter" genre. Getting that across in the press is something that really vexed us with System Shock.

Kate and Mark are away at SIGGRAPH this week. I suspect it's just a ploy to enhance their professional mistique. I'm digging myself out from under a backlog of reader mail, so if you've written lately and wondered whether your mail disappeared into the void, I'm reading it now. While I type this diary entry with my other hand. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-07-31T20:30:00.000Z

Level-building for the shipping missions has officially begun. We had our first level review in a while this week. Eric's work on the catacombs for mission four is starting off nicely. Looks like Steve is going to get started on "The Lost City" for mission eleven, hopefully in time to have it finished enough to show at ECTS.

Kate's got the bugs worked out of her polygon mesh renderer, and it's gleefully drawing
a bending elbow. Hey, it's a start. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-07-24T20:31:00.000Z

Firstly, I should correct my oversight and formally welcome Chris Carollo to the `Project. This is Chris' first project at Looking Glass, but he comes to us with a strong background in 3D modelling for a certain other first-person game, and it's great to have him aboard.

Kate is in the debugging stages of the new polygon mesh renderer, which'll bring our
graphics for creatures up to the state of the art. Unsurprisingly, Robb has been up to his elbows in polygon creatures.

Eric and Josh have been getting up to speed with the level editor. Dorian has been working out multiplayer scneario and feature ideas (with plenty of input from the team).

And I've been thinking we should update the What We've Been Playing Lately page. Hints: Richard Garfield, Klaus Teuber. Evil is Good (now there's a sentiment that we on The Dark Project can agree with). -Tim

Project Diary

1997-07-17T20:32:00.000Z

That feature push in our level editor which I mentioned last week bore more fruit this week, as we finally got cylindrical and pyramidal geometries integrated into our core set of building blocks. By itself this is nothing too special as these sorts of things go. But some other features we've got help us take better advantage of the new geometries, such as being able to cleanly join cylindrical sections of "pipe" at corners fairly easily (I'm putting up a screenshot of a sewer-pipe level to show the kind of thing I'm talking about).

Meanwhile we're giving a few interested parties tryouts on level editing to help fill the gap left by Jeff's recent departure from the team (looks like for good this time). No, that's not a job opening as such ... but you may be seeing some further changes in the team coming up. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-07-10T20:33:00.000Z

More great E³ feedback. All About Games online magazine is giving The Dark Project their E³ Best of Show (Roleplaying) Gold Medal. Hopefully this bodes well for our reentry into the CRPG/Action-adventure field after our satisfying but distracting efforts on our millitary strategy game Terra Nova.

On the project front it's been a productive but considerably less flashy couple of weeks, as we've concentrated on absorbing the lessons from our demo effort. The design team is putting the finishing touches on the final production version of the design specifications (especially our novel multiplayer "Theftmatch" mode, which owes a lot to the efforts of Dorian and Doug).
The programmers have been finishing up systems which had to be nailed down half-implemented for the demo. Finally, we've been collaborating on a final feature push for our level editor, using what we learned from putting together our demo level to pave the way for better production work on our final mission levels.

Okay, I said the magic words "final mission levels." Yep, we're getting perilously close to jumping down off our ivory-tower game design pedestals and getting up to our elbows in bits. So far most of what you've seen has been proof-of-concept levels' screenshots and other flavors of elaborate ruse. Just goes to show the difference between a 3D engine (which we've essentially had since January, though refinement continues) and an actual game. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-06-26T20:35:00.000Z

Fearless Leader is back from E³ with good things to report. Apparently interest in the 'Project was high, though naturally Flight Unimited II captured the lion's share of the hype, being much closer to shipping. On that topic, however, I should note that some of the promotional
material we had at the show was pretty far out of date, listing a release date of Summer 1997. In fact, our current projections are for Winter 1997-98. For those of you interested in why games slip their release dates, this has to do with some team reshuffling involved in shipping British
Open Championship Golf, plus some project redesign I might actually go into some day.

This week's been largely taken up in mopping-up from the demo frenzy, trying out the demo some more, and getting everyone back on track for longer-term goals. So, until there's another great leap forward to tell you about, why not do as we do and surf the Dark E³ buzz on the web?

cnet Gamecenter's article on The Dark Project
Next Gen Online's article calls us a "shooter" but likes our concept and level
architecture.
The guys from Computer Games Online have clearly been taking the mind control drugs we've been
sending them.

Finally, since next Friday is a holiday (that'd be Independence Day, for those of you outside the U.S. who didn't see the movie) we're going to skip another week of web page updates. Come back July 11^th; we'll still be here. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-06-19T20:36:00.000Z

Loads of stuff to report this time, both because it's been two weeks since our last update and because everybody's been taking to heart the unofficial company slogan, "Work like a dog, or you're fired!" (In the real world, of course, firings happen on a much more arbitrary and capricious basis, as evidenced by my upcoming story about Kate).

Warren's minions in our Austin office got basic spherical-object physics in, so objects can collide with each other. Mahk wasted no time setting up our first bow combat system. Doug revisited the outer space rendering code from System Shock and got in starry night skies. He also prototyped our footstep sounds, so you can now hear enemies coming (and vice versa). Briscoe got AI's hooked up to Jon's speech system, so they bark out appropriate guard-like phrases when they begin to detect you. He also implemented some new behaviors for non-combatants (sleeping, fleeing, general helplessness).

Kate and Mark's biped animation work is finally starting to bear fruit, though we almost fired
her when we discovered she'd never heard of Ray Harryhausen. We can say stuff like this about Kate because the thought of firing her is so absurd. For one thing, her presence may just be the bulwark against the project pit's descent into locker-room-like squalor.

Robb continues on object models, including a new set of flickering-torch models and broken versions of various fragile things. He's also got us our first mock-up of the player's view of his own hands, which does more than you might expect for making our pre-Alpha look polished. Meanwhile, Dan and Josh finished up our promo trailer for the E³ demo.

Dorian's been working closely with Steve on our prototype mission architecture, with a smidge of polish from Greg and much kibitzing all around. Jeff's been finding the bugs with AI behaviors in our level, both on general principles and 'cause we all live to cause vexation to Briscoe.

I've been working over our database of object properties, making profound statements like "arrows are solid." Grungy work, I admit, but without it our largely data-driven system would be, as they say, all dressed up with no place to go. -Tim

the Dark Project - the Games we Play

1997-06-18T08:54:00.000Z

Misty-eyed Reminiscences

* Which, by the way, are a sword called Blackrazor, a trident
named Wave, and a hammer named Whelm.

What we've been playing lately

MAHK runs a GURPS Illuminati campaign he calls "Gedankenspiel," set in a version of the Over the Edge universe. He has used Final Fantasy 7 to force Tim to concede that there are good PlayStation games. He wants you to play Settlers of Catan today. Mahk got 70 stars in Super Mario 64.

Tim plays in Mahk's Gedankenspiel run as Angus MacAllan, the world's most charismatic performance artist. Having finished Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, he's decided to give King's Field II a whirl. Apparently (according to reviews of King's Field II) "Blending elements of RPG with the first person is something never done before" (PSM Online) and "Ascii Entertainment has developed a unique perspective to play an adventure/RPG game" (Gamezilla). Which just goes to prove how much you can believe everything you read on the Web, or in the gaming press.

Tim got 90 stars in Super Mario 64.

Dorian GM's one AD&D run (in which Kate is now playing) and plays in another. On the machines, he's been playing Warlords III and HOMM II; on the wood slab, he's been playing Settlers of Catan and Robo-Rally; and on the green carpet he's been playing ultimate frisbee. He doesn't remember how many stars he got in Super Mario 64, but it's an embarassingly small number (in the 20's or 30's).

Doug presents the illusion of buying lots of games and leaving them in shrink-wrap on the shelves in his office for lack of time to do anything but work, then every once in a while surprises you by revealing that he actually does play games in the 25^th hour of every day. Plus he and
Rob "Xemu" Fermier of Irrational Games have a standing weekly appointment to play Wave Race.

Greg doesn't play anything much other than his bass gee-tar. That's why he's the boss.

Project Diary

1997-06-05T20:38:00.000Z

Jon's got the first cut at his AI speech system running. With all AI's currently using a tuneless whistling as their idling noise, and sounds not attenuating in volume according to distance, our levels sound a lot like some sort of twisted piece of concept performance art. Mahk has started work on bow combat, only to discover that our 3D arrow model is oriented pointing backwards. Which looks a little funny shooting away from you.

Mark and Steve are back from France, and claim to be working again. Danno is still working on our "trailer" cutscene. Robb, Kate and Mark are all generating object models in one sense or another.

Jeff and Dorian continue work on our demo level, while I've been hunched over our design
document actually informing the team about all the decisions we've made in the past couple of months.

Also, we've decided to skip next week's web page update, due to the project team's well-known crippling triskaidekaphobia. Next update: June 20. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-05-29T20:39:00.000Z

We got back the results from our voice-talent auditions last week, and picked out some guys for minor roles in our prototype. When asked to fake a scottish accent, one of our actors put on a flawless Sean Connery impression which floored us all. Now, if we ever do a Dragonheart game, he's all set.

Another big revision of our level prototype got signed off this week, with Greg doing some good concept work on the exterior city street and Dorian reworking the interiors to refine the flow of gameplay.

I spent a good part of this week going over our hypothetical feature set and starting to decide what to cut. This is part of that effort to freeze our design and get into production gear I've mentioned.

This was also the week of the "minutes of gameplay." A minute of gameplay is a short description of what a typical one-minute period of playing our game would be like, which is used to focus your concept of what play is central to the project. We put out a general call to the team for these things this week as part of our finalizing the design spec, and we got a lot of interesting stuff out of it. We also got a lot of stuff which is probably going to fall casualty to those feature cuts I mentioned, which is why I'm not going to put any of those description on this site.

Or let our marketing people see them. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-05-26T20:40:00.000Z

Dorian and Robb did a rough draft of our mission prototype this week, and submitted it to the
jeering ... er, that is, the "critique" ... of the team in general. Dorian's back in the level-building mines now polishing it up for another draft based on Robb's input and that review. We're all getting antsy for our actual object-placement functions to be implemented in the level editor so the whole thing can look a lot more lived-in. Luckily, that's allegedly supposed to be happening in the next week.

In audio-visual land, Jeff has been writing sample phrases and putting together auditions for voice actors, while Danno swears he's on to something with respect to video mission briefings, but he won't unveil it yet.

Meanwhile the team leads have been nailing down our remaining hanging design issues and generally manhandling the whole Project out of design/technology/tools mode and into actual product production mode. The rest of the team, ever-vigilant, siezed the day and seduced us all into a giant spontaneous design flame ... which was what everyone was doing Friday instead of
updating the web site. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-05-15T20:41:00.000Z

Dorian's finished roughing out a level for our E³ milestone, which is incidentally similar to our first post-tutorial mission. This being our big litmus test for level development, we've been going over it in detail over the course of the week.

Greg has been locked in a steel cage grudge match with Warren and Microsoft Project, which can only mean that we're shifting from the design stage of things to actually bringing a product to market.

Mark and Steve are off to Paris to do some sort of artist thing (I hear they're big on that in Paris). Before he left, Mark supplied a mockup of our main on-screen interface art, which doesn't mean that he and I actually came to agreement last week, but that's what mockups are for. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-05-08T20:42:00.000Z

Well, Dorian's off and running on our E³ demo. Robb has done not-yet-jointed versions of a couple of new creatures, plus prototype models for a player powerup we'll code-name the "fungus bomb" for now. There's new code in to resize objects at run-time in one or several dimensions, and it's just that sort of rain which makes the fungus grow. Whatever that means.

Mahk and Briscoe are integrating the creatures' AI settings with our spanking-new object system and editing tools.

Mark and I are wrangling a bit over the main on-screen interface, and we're both right. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-05-01T20:43:00.000Z

Greg is back from CGDC claiming that there was a lot of interest in The Dark Project. Despite the fact that this means we have a guaranteed audience of several hundred other game
developers, we've decided not to rest on our laurels.

We tackled and nearly pinned down our plan for non-player character speech, so that the collections of polygons who are supposed to be guards searching for you will actually chatter something like guards searching for you. This is beyond the idle humming and mumbling they do so that you can hear them coming. Life is so much easier when you stick with non-humans, but humans are more fun to outwit. The speech system is being headed up by Jon Chey, whose
previous work at LG we can't really talk about, but who knows his Artificial Intelligence from Artificial Stupidity. Whatever that means.

Robb's been working on polygon-modelled creatures we won't be able to see until Kate does several weeks worth of work on our jointed-mesh renderer. Impatience reigns.

Jon and Briscoe sound like they're discussing the economics of Czarist v. Soviet Russia, and Dorian beat Steve at speed chess. Mahk, Dorian and Kate didn't invite me to their game of Settlers of Catan. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-04-27T20:44:00.000Z

The astute among you will have noticed that it has not, in fact, been seven days since the last update. This was due to the unexpected absence last Friday of our stalwart customer service (and `Web page) manager Steve Pearsall. Oh, how we missed him.

Firstly, it behooves me to note that reports of Jeff's demise were exaggerated. Would-be replacement Ken Levine is going to be leaving LG for greener pastures (I'd say who and even link to their `Web page if I only remembered, honest I would). Actually, I just wanted to use the word "behoove."

The big news this week is of course that Greg and Doug are off at the Computer Game Developers' Conference. The rest of us toil here cranking the lumbering, ponderous gears of the game design machine. By which I mean the week was largely taken up in design meetings and scheduling, centered around the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Exposition. But in case I just got your hopes up, our own exposition at the event will probably be private and for press only. I understand that Flight Unlimited 2 is going to be putting on quite a display, though.

What the art squad was up to this week... well, let's just note that many of history's greatest artists were insane. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-04-17T20:46:00.000Z

Well, a strange report this week, as literally half the team takes vacation time. Combined with the imminent arrival of British Open Championship Golf on store shelves, office moods have been quite out-of-the-ordinary. Among those on vacation is Tim, leaving me (Jeff) to write
this entry.

Unsurprisingly, with over half of our programmers and designers out of the office, that leaves most of the new developments in the art department. Danno's been working on storyboarding of cutscenes (for both between and during missions; we've got some innovative video ideas). Robb has been building bipeds for enemies while we work on how many polygons we can get while still having a healthy framerate. New artist Steve has been building textures for one of the mansions in the game, and Mark has been busy with lead-artist tasks like scheduling and getting materials to marketing.

That leaves me doing product document revisions and object database work, and Ken working with Danno on the storyboarding. Mahk, as usual, has been 1)doing user interface development 2)working on object editing 3)plotting world domination. -Jeff

Project Diary

1997-04-10T20:47:00.000Z

Okay, I finally got sick of our screenshots page saying "This Week's Screenshots" when we weren't updating it every week. So, starting with the next update (April 18th), we'll have fresh,
piping hot screenshots every week. No, really.

The results came back from our trademark search, only to start us thinking that maybe we don't have to name the game all that descriptively, after all. Hey, "The Dark Project" has worked fine for us so far. Why be conventional?

Oh, and somewhere in between working on how to promote the game, we really did do some work on mission-building and such. But that'll speak for itself. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-04-03T20:47:00.000Z

Mahk attempted his return from Austin just in time for the big blizzard earlier this week. This basically paralyzed the city of Boston and closed LG down for about a day and a half. Mahk eventually did get back, and brought a heaping stack of new code to integrate next week, along with vital intelligence on the efforts of the Austin office, whose inventory interface it sounds like we might steal.

Meanwhile, our new art squad has been getting up to speed, sweating over our level-editing tutorial, mocking up level designs, and such. They won't show them to me yet.

Intermittent team member Ken Levine now looks to be on board for the long haul, filling the designer slot soon to be vacated by Jeff. Jeff in turn is heading off to work on the Golf line. Ken and Dorian have come up with a draft of that stealth system design I mentioned, which is looking good. As for the quest for a real title, we've settled on a pair of alternatives to go to trademark search, and if at least one of them clears we can put the issue to bed.

No, I'm not going to say what they are until we've decided, `cause I don't want to jinx the deal. So there. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-03-27T21:48:00.000Z

Our first motion capture shoot went off without a hitch this week. We got an even 100 short animation scenes shot in one hectic day. Jonathan, our model, is a sword and bow enthusiast himself and ad-libbed some lovely sword kata at the shoot. Now comes the long process of sifting through and editing the animation data.

Welcome to LG's new director of marketing Jim Veevaert, who's spearheading our effort to eliminate those pesky "(working title)" notations from the Web page by finalizing our game's title. We seem to be down to a few frontrunners, so expect the big announcement sometime soon. Not to worry, though, I don't think we're going to get the other project teams to call us
anything other than "The Dark Project" any time soon.

In a related effort, superhuman artist Dan Thron has mocked up some truly amazing prototypes for the box cover itself, which may make their appearance here once we've ironed out that little
"(working title)" problem.

Until then, you just have to take my word for it. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-03-20T21:49:00.000Z

The `Project geared up for school this week as Greg and I played guinea pigs for our 3D guru's level-building tips, covering how to keep your polygon counts low and your frame rates high. Work on actual level construction held its breath pending the outcome of this and other experiments. Well, that and the fact that there was much playing of British Open Championship Golf.

Looks like we only thought that that thing last week was our real maneuver list, and much time this week was spent reviewing the technology with our animation programmers (when it could be wrangled from the hubbub which is Golf Beta. and revising, and revising. It ain't rocket science, but it is a big, painstaking process.

On the whole, it was a strangely quiet week, with all the `Project's programmers who weren't out on loan to a certain sports title (that would leave Mahk) working with our associates in LG's Austin, TX office. The phrase "calm before the storm" somehow comes to mind. -Tim

Project Diary

1997-03-13T21:50:00.000Z

It looks like we're getting a bunch of additional talent on board, as British Open Championship Golf gets closer to shipping and art resources get freed up. Chief among the newcomers is System Shock's own Mark Lizotte, coming on as lead artist. This is good. Soon he'll have to sit for the bright lights and get a creepy photo on the team bios page.

Work on the object models continues. The new combat system design has been firmed up and we're sending our maneuver list to the motion capture studio.

We've moved on to nailing down our design of the creature list and stealth systems. Since we're concentrating on a thief as player-character that last bit is going to be particularly important, and we've been putting our heads together over AI models, audiovisual cues, and a number
of game rules to bring it all off. There's not a lot of precedents for a game concentrating so much on stealth: I told a friend of mine that we had a two-hour flame comparing our game to a submarine battle. She said she didn't understand how I got paid to do this stuff.

Amen to that. Tim

Project Diary

1997-02-25T21:52:00.000Z

Sound is now appearing in the game, hooked up to the AI. Hurrahs to Eric and Briscoe. Guards now hum, mumble, and otherwise talk to themselves as they patrol about (this is important, so that you can hear them coming and plan accordingly.)

Biped -- full skeletal motion -- is also in, which looks excellent. This has also gotten hooked up to the sound, so that each footstep a guard makes resounds with a clomp.

The guards also react to you as you move around; if they only sort of detect you, they'll mutter something like "what was that?", and make sharper shouts up to when they detect you and raise the hue and cry.

We did a demonstration of all this technology (as well as showed off our architecture) to the rest of Looking Glass last week at our company meeting; feedback was very positive, which is always nice. :)

Lots of other, less glamorous but equally important work behind the scenes. We can now clump pieces of the world together and move them around as if they were only one block -- sort of a "block protect" for geometry. This will make staircases a hell of a lot easier, and the designers are praising Doug's name for it (in addition to all the other obvious reasons to praise Doug.) The
artists are now making objects with which to fill the world; the programmers and Tim are working out the combat system; Dorian's testing Briscoe's AI code; Greg's in six zillion meetings; me, I'm back being Web Guy again. -jeff

Project Diary

1997-01-30T21:53:00.000Z

The programmers pushed the game to a new milestone; we can now save off objects, AI paths, and most other elements of the game that are in yet. Before, we could only save physical geometry, and had to re-set all that other stuff each time we loaded up.

Briscoe's gotten the AI stuff, especially the enemy detection code, into shape far ahead of schedule, and now we've all got to test it to hell. Sneaking around and avoiding detection are key elements of the game, so we need to make sure his algorithms are sound.

The artists have been re-structuring the textures for our new texture regime, wherein we can use any number of texture or texture groups we want. Before, you could only use one texture "family" at once, so if you were making catacombs, you had to make sure all the textures you wanted were in that "family". Now we can cross-match as we see fit; this means the levels will look a lot more realistic look than they already do, since we're not tied into artificial groupings. Objects are also popping into the game -- full bipeds real soon.

On the design end, we're busy going over the levels, making sure they flow together right and have the right amount of "coolness". We're also checking for the right "ramping up" of game events -- don't want to top-load all the good stuff and have the rest be dull. We also want to make sure we're teaching all the skills at the right rate, so that you don't have to keep looking at the manual during your first hour of play.

Robb's been taking our pictures for promotional material. This involves going to our A/V studio, turning off all the lights, and sitting right over a spotlight pointed at your chin. Don't look down -- damn, you're blind for minutes!

LOOKING GLASS UNVEILS "DARK" PROJECT

1996-12-18T09:00:00.000Z

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LOOKING GLASS UNVEILS "DARK" PROJECT

Next Generation Engine drives Remarkable Role Playing Game Set for 1997
Release

Dec 18, 1996 - The extraordinary talents at Looking Glass Studios, creators of such hits as the Ultima Underworld series, System Shock and Terra Nova, today unveiled their previously top-secret "Dark" project, which will produce a revolutionary CD-ROM role playing game set for
release in early 1997.

Dark will transport players to a magical age via a next generation 3D engine that combines lightning fast frame rates with advanced texture mapping to create a true "6D" world. The game will feature Act/React technology to produce a uniquely immersive environment in which objects will react as you intuitively expect. Dynamic lighting and interactive water, a realistic weapons interface, mission-based gameplay and an in-depth storyline all enhance the game
experience.

"We pioneered immersive reality on the computer with our Underworld series," said Paul Neurath, president of Looking Glass Studios. "The �Dark� project will take the roleplaying genre to a whole new level, and demonstrates our commitment to lead the industry."

Looking Glass� unique level editors allows designers to build intricate areas, from sloping passageways and underwater tunnels to arching cathedrals. Each environment that the player explores will be rich in object interactions beyond that ever seen in a computer game.

Joining the "Dark" project team is renown computer game producer Warren Spector. Spector, who will serve as executive producer and general manager of Looking Glass� Austin office, produced Ultima Underworld and Ultima Underworld 2, as well as the science fiction adventure, System Shock. He joins Looking Glass after seven years with ORIGIN Systems, Inc.

"The �Dark� project is one of the most exciting endeavors I�ve embarked on in years," said Spector. "Looking Glass has been waiting for the right time to get back into RPGs, and the time is now. We�ve revolutionized computer roleplaying games once before. Now we�re really going to blow people away."

Looking Glass Studios, Inc. is a leading developer of entertainment and simulation software distinguished by its expertise in 3D technologies. Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, the talented team at Looking Glass has created some of the best-known, best-selling titles in the interactive entertainment industry, including the Ultima Underworld series, System Shock, Flight Unlimited and Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri.

Thief Game Universe

1995-03-15T17:19:00.000Z

Alphabet sorting. Used IE import/export bookmarks function.
If you found broken link please comment it. If you want to add your THIEF site, fill free to add it in comments. Later we will update it on the site.
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Thief Game

TES4 = Thief 4?

Eidos Mobile: Thief 3 Mobile

STORY

SCREENSHOTS

Typical Controls

Icons

Action Icons

Weapons Icons

Miscellanous Icons

Commands

Walking and Running

Crouching

Hiding

Climbing Stairs

Doors

Picking Pockets

Locks

Characters

Picking up Items

Pick up Characters

Rooftops

The Shop

Interacting with the environment

Inventory

Blackjack

Arrows

Bombs

Health Potion

Mechanical Eye

Hints & Tips

Pausing the Game

Resume Game

Map

Objectives

Restart Mission

Quit

Credits

Thief: Deadly Shadows Release

Iomo: 'Thief: Constantine's Sword'

Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem On Looking Glass Studios

The Thief II: The Metal Age level editor

Thief 2: The Metal Age FAQ

Thief 2: The Metal Age ���

Thief 2: The Metal Age FAQ

TTLG's massive interview with the Looking Glass Studios' Thief 2 dev team

LGS announces Thief 2

Thief Gold has gone GOLD

Thief: Gold ���

Download DromEd, the Thief: The Dark Project level editor

Postmortem: Looking Glass's Thief: The Dark Project

the Dark Project - the Games we Play

Thief: The Dark Project Release

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Thief: The Dark Project to Steal Show at E3

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

To See the Light As Thief: The Dark

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Thief 2: The Metal Age ��

Thief: Gold ��

Next Generation Engine drives Remarkable Role Playing Game Set for 1997
Release