Project Diary
Date of Release : Tuesday, July 21, 1998
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
