5/4/99

"Thinking that we're getting older and wiser when we're just getting old..." -David Gilmour Back in the day, I used to be a (not-very-good foil) fencer. When I left college, I took my fencing mask with me to TSR and hung it in my cube as decoration so everyone would know just how Renaissance I was ("Wow, he writes AND fences! What a guy!"). One day, one of my office pals (Bill Connors) got the bright idea of throwing one of his plastic-tipped darts at the mask from his cube. The dart stuck, quivering merrily. A light dawned in our eyes. I put the mask on my head and (very carefully) inserted one of the darts into the mesh right in front of my eyes. I had a good three inches of room between the dart's tip and my cornea. Thus was the Mask of Valor born. When TSR hired new editors and designers, we marched into their offices, dragged them struggling into the hallway, forced the Mask on their heads, and threw darts at them. This gave rise to the magic item I called the Helm of Valor, detailed in the Complete Book of Elves. What's the point of this story, you ask, and what does it have to do with Torment? All right, here's the answer: It's all about the inspiration. Where do we get our ideas? How do we implement them? What goes into the process? For most of us designers on Torment (I asked around), we get our inspirations from books, ranging from basic pulp fantasy/sf to classics of literature to philosophy and science texts. We get our ideas from everyday dealings with people, or from memories we have of our dealings. We show ideas to ourselves in our dreams. We look at art, listen to music, watch a broad range of TV, examine and enjoy different genres of movie, and admire nature, play other computer games, look at other role-playing games, and take lots of drugs. Just kidding about that last one, probably. Did I mention that we read, read, read? Sometimes we take notes for ideas, and other times we just write down whatever comes to mind and throw it directly into the game. Of course, without a vision to mix these ideas together, none of this is any use whatsoever. All the ideas have to come together to create a cohesive, coherent whole, or elese they're just so much chaff. They have to fit under the aegis of the broad story outline, and have to help move the game story along. That's where the Vision Document comes in. But since I see I'm running long again, that's an update for next week. And the week after that, I guess I'll show you just what goes into creating a dialogue. And now I'm back to Sigil. -Colin

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.