Key Iteration
I would not characterize “Bloodline” as simple quest and it certainly took investment to realize its full potential. From its development I’ve chosen to share key aspects of its iteration.
“Creativity in life is about saying yes to new ideas.”
-Nolan Bushnell
Refining the Premise
After I established that the team would be going against Azetechnology and Blood Mages we needed to fill in what they were up to exactly and why. I knew I wanted something that was dark, compelling, and magical but I only had some scraps of ideas.
It was actually a pretty brief meeting with the writer for the quest, (the main writer for Dragonfall Andrew MacIntosh) to land the nature of the Bloodline project, clones and all. I recalled him being a bit surprised that I was behind it right off the bat.
Creative drive is why a lot of us make games and that needs to be respected. I’ve seen some designers, almost reflexively, need to put their two cents in on everyone's contribution to an area they may be developing and sometimes that’s simply not needed. If an idea is good and fits with overall design goals, get pumped, say “Yes, that sounds awesome!” and hit it. So much work is done in the execution and there is no reason for a quest designer to have their fingerprints on absolutely everything.
Confronting the Blood Mages
Early versions of the quest had the confrontation of the Blood Mages being more of a just boss fight with pretty boilerplate pre boss fight placeholder text and all I was looking for was a brief conversation followed by some climatic combat.
Andrew saw that mechanically things were shaping up to be intense but the Blood Mages felt like a missed opportunity. He wanted an epic contest of wills and for players to feel the power of the Mages as they actually took over a conversation but was not sure how that could be technically supported to the depth he wanted.
He gave it a shot but the complexity of supporting it was not something he was able to manage and he was considering reducing the scope to move on.
I believed in what he was after and to make it happen I built out the complicated structure of the dialog flow in the conversation engine with the multitude of checks and flags required. The end result not only served the quest but provided the foundation of how to do similar things in the future including during the final confrontation with Dragonfall’s ultimate antagonist, Dr. Vulclair.
I believe in following exciting ideas. Sometimes others on the team really don’t know what’s possible so it is important to encourage your collaborators to not self edit and put forward what excites them because something may be more in reach than they think.
“Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight.”
-Bruce Colburn, Lovers in a Dangerous Time
Managing Complexity
Because of the scope and reactivity of the quest (it is one of the largest and most complex of the trilogy) production and leadership was always a bit nervous about it and rightly so. As I saw the trigger list grow, I realized that managing all that would present some challenges, so put some things in place to mitigate issues.
Beyond keeping my triggers tidy I did a fair amount of the QA myself and wrote pretty extensive docs for QA so they could track and test all the quest’s twist and turns. This kept confidence and momentum up even in the face of working through the bugs resulting from this quest’s complexity. In point of fact, I had to put in a lot of work in testing and fixes, a lot more than linear quest would have required by a fair margin.
Lots of interactivity is compelling but in practice takes discipline, structure and likely a bit more hard work than you were expecting to pull off. Bloodline needed all of that but was more than worth it to deliver a quest that was ambitious and memorable.
