Page last updated: 23/01/2009
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Peter Baron and Bob Stevenson (Creators of Myth) speak about work on Devious Designs... "Here's a brief story of what happened before we started making the game...Pete and I locked ourselves in a nice hotel for 3 days and just focused solidly on the design. It was a good idea because I had a nasty habit of dragging him away from work and getting drunk for the whole day, such was my tremendous work ethic in those days :) The first pitch to a publisher that we gave was probably the worst I've ever been part of. But of course, is very funny looking back on it now. We went to pitch the game to a friend (Phil Harrison, who incidentally is now the head of SONY Worldwide Studios)of ours boss. This 6ft 6'' scary We came up with a bunch of interesting ideas and we drew the game design by hand and painted the front cover (a square earth) CRAZY but it actually looked good and we were both very proud of it... Pete, I can't remember if we did that design doc before or after that pitch... Anyway, the second pitch to a different publisher went great they loved the idea and after a month of contract negotiations, we had a deal... It was really a fun time, we made some really good games. Myth, Salamander and Devious Designs... I was in a meeting recently and this guy said out of the blue "How did you do the flames in Salamander?"... " Bob Stevenson.
"Devious Designs was a game concept that Bob and I came up with in the pub just after we finished Myth. We were really into the idea of putting mystical mind powers into a game and the whole running up walls bit was mainly the result of a pint too many (as if there is such a thing!). To be honest we designed a game that was too complex - the character (J.J.Maverick) had a huge range of moves - picking up, pushing, pulling, throwing blocks... also the ability to mentally 'merge' with blocks then control them like missiles... plus the whole 'down is the direction your feet are facing' thing which allowed him to walk up walls and upside down. Although I'd previously managed to cram a Lot of different moves onto the old C64 one button joystick for Myth, the controls for DD became far too unwieldy and the learning curve was too steep. We got the 'first playable' together in record time (I think it was about a month and a half) and then spent the next 3 months trying to make the game work the way we'd envisioned it. In the end and very reluctantly, we started to remove special moves. We ended up leaving the core set of block moving functions, and the gravity distortion (because everyone thought that was a highly distinctive feature) but stripping virtually everything else. The C64 version was the lead product, mainly because I'd never written anything on an Amiga or Atari at that time and I needed some lead-time to read the manuals and learn 68K assembler language. However even after stripping down the move list the game still felt somewhat awkward to play - we were having trouble designing the 'easy' levels that would introduce the player to the moves in a logical and progressive manner and our 'test' level was what became the Big Apple for New York advanced level (this was one of the harder puzzles in the game) so we had a lot of complaints from Mirrorsoft about the learning curve and general difficulty level. Nine months in we felt that we'd done about all we could do to fix these problems and we were both dieing to get started on the Amiga version. I did a straight line-for-line code conversion from the 6502 assembly language to 68K and rewrote the I/O libraries to work on the Amiga, and surprised Bob by converting all his C64 graphics too... we had the first Amiga playable ready one day after we started on it, which went a long way to restoring Mirrorsoft's faith in the project :) That's pretty much where the C64 version stopped. Development went ahead on the Amiga as lead machine from that point on, and more moves were sacrificed in favour of the new gun and floating elementals (a feature we were not at all keen on). We sat down for a week with grid paper and designed many of the puzzles, including the Igloo which was finally simple enough to prove to the managers that the game could be made playable. By the time the Amiga and ST versions were nearly done, we were over the original deadline by two months and rapidly running out of money, we discussed the situation with Mirrorsoft and (rather surprisingly) they said that the C64 market was no longer large enough to be worth supporting so we should finish up the 16 bit versions and push them out for release. The music was done by another contracter - I don't think it was Martin Walker this time though I can't be sure - there should be a credit in the Amiga/ST versions as they were all done by the same guy (Frank - "Amiga credits show that Martin did do the music, so this is now confirmed."). We had decided to attempt to use dynamic music that reacted to the game and the player's actions, so we requested a huge selection of audio loops that could fit together in a large number of ways - the idea was to 'build' the tune by choosing the appropriate loop that fitted onto what had gone before. Unfortunately the musician had a lot of trouble putting this idea into practice - the loops were too short and it was very hard for him to hear what it would sound like in each permutation. If I'd had a bit more time I would have put together a play-back tool for him, but in the end I think we settled for a regular tune. I still have a box of 5.25" floppy disks from years ago, so it's possible that some of the source and maybe even a playable version are still available on one of them - I'll dig through next time I'm up in the attic and send you anything useable that I come across. Later talking about how to play the game, and the game's excellent moves... "JJ has 'personal
gravity' so whichever way his feet are facing, that's 'down' * big effect for
transition between the blocks and the 'finished shape' Peter Baron. |
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