Terrible defense. I didn’t know until I read about it on Qt3. And it also serves as zero excuse for the almost complete lack of upgrading the mechanics set by Diablo. I would think people who worked on Diablo would have ideas on how to make it better, and not just make the exact same damn game.
Maybe not the best thread for a long dissertation on the reasoning behind the design and the decision-making process for the project, but what the hell!
To make things a little clearer as far as company makeup - we have 5 folks who were involved with either Diablo or Diablo 2 at Runic. The entire company size at this point is 27 folks ( we probably averaged 20-21 or so over the course of the development of Torchlight, starting at 17. )
Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer were cofounders of Blizzard North ( along with Dave Brevik, who doesn’t work here ). Max is the CEO, so he is mostly involved in a business/contract sense as far as daily work, while Erich is our Chief Creative Officer ( I think that’s his title anyway, we’re not that big on titles), and does design. Erich is mostly responsible for item/random affix design, and a lot of skill balance work, and contributes like all of us to the overall design of the game.
Peter Hu was a developer on Diablo II and the expansion, and responsible for the Diablo 1.10 patch and was also instrumental in Battle.net’s development. His day to day involvement has actually been almost wholly focused on the next project, and not on Torchlight at all.
Matt Uelmen is our musician/sound designer, and is responsible for all of the music in Torchlight, as well as all of the original sounds that we didn’t get from a library.
And Ian Welke is our QA Manager - he was a QA Lead for Diablo 2 ( and Starcraft, and other games I’m not remembering off the top of my head )
The rest of us come from various other studios ( as well as some folks new to the industry ). Our staff breakdown for Torchlight Development is ( and I know this doesn’t add up to 27 or 17, but not all positions are hands-on development positions, even if they are absolutely integral to our success. These are just the positions that ‘put things on the screen’ ) Not all of these folks were here at the start of the project either - some didn’t arrive until the last 4 months or so. Our whole team is awesome, and I love 'em.
Engineers-2
Tools Engineer-1
Art Director-1
Concept Artists-2
Animator-1
Designers/Particles-2
Level Designers-2
Character Artists-2
Music/Sound-1
Technical Artist-1
Background Artist-1
I’m the President/Project Director, and one of the engineers, and the only thing anyone knows me for is making Fate - which was itself a Diablo-style game that I’d probably charitably describe as ‘endearingly rough-hewn’. Many of the design decisions for Torchlight were carryovers from Fate though - this project wasn’t so much ‘let’s make a proper sequel to Diablo’ as it was ‘let’s make a proper sequel to Fate’, and it was approached from that perspective.
I run day-to-day operations and am responsible for the ‘final say’ as far as the project’s scope and basic details. Obviously, many folks are involved in shaping those decisions, but maybe that gives you a better idea of how the company is basically structured, and where we started from to make the decisions we did.
At a very basic level, the scale of what we set out to achieve was extremely rigidly bounded by cash and time - neither of which we had a lot of. We knew we needed to make a project that we wouldn’t ‘throw away’, but which could naturally transition into bigger and better things. We ARE ambitious. Our ambition was tempered however by the realities we faced of starting a studio from ground zero and getting out a game in a year’s time - neither of which is a simple prospect. We elected to do something we knew how to do, at a price point that no-one else was doing it at, in a genre that really doesn’t have that many games in it, and which would leverage the past experience that all of us had. It was also something we could reasonably expect to make our money back on, which would in turn allow us to make something bigger and better.
There are a lot of folks who believe in the ‘go big or go home’ method of development. I’m just not one of them. My idea of building a company successfully is to start small, attempt to generate a small success, and then build on that success to make a bigger and better project that surpasses what we’ve done before, and is also ideally successful. The trick is, to build on your past successes, you usually have to be at the same company you were before - unless you achieved financial independence through the success of your last title. I certainly haven’t. So, here we are at square one again.
As far as project goals for Torchlight they were ( not in order ) -
a) Release a pretty fun game at a low price that gives good value for dollar
b) Build a toolset so we actually have something to work with for subsequent projects
c) Begin to develop an IP that we can expand on in the future
d) Take Fate’s approach to Diablo and attempt to polish it, address its shortcomings, and expand it where possible
e) Make a lot more interesting randomized dungeons than we have previously
f) Release in less than a year before we ran out of money
For the most part we achieved the goals we set out to do, and the game has been profitable and is buying us a little more freedom for the next project, as we’d hoped. Our aim is basically to carefully earn the ability to take more interesting risks.
A bit of a boring approach, but we tried to minimize our risk wherever possible in starting up, since working together is what we want to do more than anything else. I think having a happy and secure team which loves working together is the single most important ingredient in making a great game.
I think most of Yahtzee’s observations about the game’s shortcomings are spot on. How can you argue with clunky pathfinding and an over-reliance on identification? Most of those were elements that bugged the crap out of us too and that we would like to have addressed. And now, thankfully, we can.
Keybindings are available in the config file, but I’m the first to admit it is an AWFUL solution - and one that only went in about a week before gold, because I didn’t have the time to implement and test a real in-game option. To be frank though, we couldn’t have gone another week - we ran it right down to the end and used every last available day.
I might go as far as to suggest that the current game COULD be worth as much as a gravel-FREE ice-cream sandwich though, to the right buyer. ;)
