Community Update April: Making Fable 2
You would be surprised at what goes into making games here at Lionhead Studios;
I’m personally still amazed by some of the things that go on in the background.
Everyone is starting to breathe Fable 2 over here; from the core development team
and the CTG all-star team to the other supporting departments. And so it’s time
for some serious Fable 2 gossip!
The team is currently deep into their next milestone, and the planning for the next
one will be fully locked down in the very near future, it is actually being worked
on as you are reading this. On Monday 23rd April the team had a presentation and
I’m getting the impression that they’re working on so many different systems here
that some of it is just completely bonkers! Reading the extensive design document
is also becoming a huge task...
For our production-team, the planning has been dominating a lot of the work that’s
been done the last few weeks. Several meetings, writing documents on how to actually
do work, hitting the Senior Scripter with a stick, meetings, going through a lot
of lists, meetings, more meetings and spending evenings with suits discussing project
managing. Yum! Oh and one of the producers mentioned going to salsa...
The Design team has also been extremely busy; the list is endless (well, a couple
of hundred items anyway) but to mention just a few; they have added ‘evidence of
dog activity’ spots to Bower Lake, gotten as far ahead as possible with every region
in the game, and every dungeon, and revisited everything and then some more ‘whiteboxing’,
writing thousands and thousands of words in design documents, after talking about
it in meetings, updated some more documentation that was already there, designed
some of the main characters such as G[CENSOR]h and much teeth grinding
when something went wrong.
In the mean time, as far as all things programming are concerned, some of the time
was spent interviewing applicants for the job openings we have (mainly scripters),
then there was also some anger, regret and joy. They’ve been working away on some
of the navigation code to make people face towards their destination for example
but also support work for the combat system, fixed up broken vaultlines (don’t ask
me what it means, it’s all Chinese to me anyway) and especially of interest after
the GDC revelation; a lot of additional work has gone into the dog! Also, seeing
a lot of the animations being implemented in the game (the code has been developed
as well, primarily regarding the simulation of the world) which means that the place
is now really becoming alive.
The Core Services team have had a quiet week, they’ve mostly just been fixing problems,
while the Engine Team have been having a lot of discussions on lighting which will
hopefully be useful in the next milestone. Explaining to you what our Tools Team
has been up to would include twenty times the word CENSOR, so I’m not going to go
into any detail.
The real eye-candy however comes in when we start talking about the Art Team. It’s
fair to say that Fable has a very strong artistic identity and Fable 2 is not going
to be any different in that respect. If anything, next-generation means that it’s
going to look amazing. You’ll still be able to instantly recognize the game that
you grew familiar with, albeit that the place has changed and evolved – for the
better in my personal opinion. A lot of sketching and concepting for some of the
main characters has been done, allowing the character artists to start modeling
them. At the same time, the modeling of the Wind Chimes also seems to be getting
along nicely and the hats and hairstyles for the farming community have nearly been
fleshed out. Finally; one of the artists started growing a beard, and we’re not
sure why…
There is much more I could tell you, but we’re not quite ready yet to reveal any
major things about Fable 2, however the first episode of the Lionhead Video
Diary is coming...
- Sam -
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