4/13/99

"I don't want the world. I just want your half." -They Might Be Giants I suppose I had better just go ahead and introduce the designers on the team, since that seems to be the trend, and I'm nothing if not a slave to fashion. First off, we've got Chris Avellone. He's the Lead Designer, and is a Senior Designer for Black Isle. He came up with the entire storyline for Torment, and is responsible for a great bulk of the dialogue in the game, as well as coordinating the design team, creating creatures, items, spells, and so forth. He's very busy and very modest - at least, that's what he says. He likes chicken. Then there's me, Colin. I'm the second designer (should that be Second Designer?) on the team. I came to Interplay from TSR, where I helped develop Planescape as a p&p game, along with many other game worlds (yes, even Dragonlance, which we're not doing because we don't have the license). I'm responsible for some entire areas, write dialogues, set up sub-quests, and generally pretend to help Chris out. I get my own paragraph because I'm writing this. The other dialogue/story designers we have on the project are: - John Deiley, a jack-of-all-trades who has been with Interplay for longer than I have, so he's worked on lots more games than I have. He's doing dialogues, dialogue implementation, and various other tasks that are essential to the game. - Dave Maldonado, a recent addition to Black Isle's designers. He's responsible for dialogues, dialogue implementation, and whatever other work we can force him to accept. - Reg Arnedo, a former producer who realized that designers are generally the coolest people around, and so he became one of us. He's doing creature placement, helping the scripters with character actions and interactions, doing some dialogues, and generally making it possible for us to get this done. - Stephen Bokkes, who just got promoted from QA last week. Since he's an English major, we're having him grammar-, spell-, and logic-check the dialogues we give him, implement dialogues, and I'm sure we'll find more for him to do as soon as his brand-new Development computer arrives. Then we've got the technical designers, who: - make it so the player doesn't walk all over the map, over rooftops and through spires; - set up linking from area to area; - keep our maps sanitary and fresh-smelling; - perform other tasks that I'm not entirely clear on. These guys include: - Jason Suinn, who used to be in charge of lip-synching for Fallout 2, so now *I* get to make *his* life miserable. I haven't found a way yet, but I will, rest assured. - Dave Hendee, who is the Fans' Best Friend (tm). You will get to know Dave soon, I'm sure. - aaaaaaaand the inimitable Scott Everts ("That's MR. Technical Designer to you, pal!"), our resident hell-of-a-guy. He likes Star Trek and pudding, usually at the same time. I had probably better mention Ken Lee in here, too. He's our Line Producer, which means that he does all the work Guido doesn't feel like doing *grin*. He is also a huge anime/Final Fantasy fan, and he's helping design our spell effects and making sure we stay on track. He is very polite until you beat him in a fighting game, and then he hulks out and turns green. Is that my word count? It is? Good. I'll catch you all next week, where I'll talk about whatever comes to mind, much as I did today. If you have any questions, please feel free to direct them to Tim Donley, our lead artist. one love, Colin McComb Second Fiddle

Planescape: Torment & Design: © 1998 Interplay Productions. All Rights Reserved. © 1998 TSR, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Planescape, the Planescape logo, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Torment, the AD&D logo, and the TSR logo are trademarks of TSR, Inc. and are used by Interplay under license. TSR, Inc. is a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. Interplay, the Interplay logo, Black Isle Studios and the Black Isle Studios logo are trademarks of Interplay Productions. Exclusively licensed and distributed by Interplay Productions. All other trademarks and copyrights are property of their respective owners.