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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Dev Diary#3 Feature
Chris Leyton
20/08/2004
Andrew Chambers, Designer, explains the Single Player mode in a nutshell, in our latest Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Dev Diary…
Single Player Game
By Andrew Chambers
Designer
Introduction
Welcome to the third installment of the TVG Developer Diary for Dawn of War. My name is Andrew Chambers, and Iām one of the designers on the project. Last time, Chris Degnan gave you an overview of the process of getting the whole project started up. Today Iām going to be going into a bit more detail on one of the largest aspects of the game, the Single-Player campaign.
Iām not going to go into too many details of the story itself here; I wouldnāt want to ruin the experience for anyone! Instead Iāll talk about some of the things we do when we are putting it all together.
Putting together a Single-Player campaign is no easy task! There are an immense number of things that come together to deliver a compelling and fun experience to the player who is looking for something more story-driven than online play can offer. The goal of the Single-Player campaign is to bring the player into the universe, to immerse them in a rich and expansive world that, especially in the case of Dawn of War, is entirely fictional.
Story
We support the storytelling process with a few different mechanisms, but probably the most prevalent is the story that emerges as the characters tell it through non-interactive sequences and in-game events. Story has always been an integral aspect of Relicās games. In Homeworld we gave the player an emotionally powerful experience in the voids of space. In Dawn of War we needed to find something with just as much potential that worked within the context of Warhammer 40,000. Fortunately, Warhammer 40,000 is an amazingly rich universe in which to set a story, with an abundance of material to choose from.
The path we decided on was to tell the story from the perspective of the renowned Space Marines, focusing on the trials that they face as they fulfill the will of their god, The Emperor of Mankind. We chose Space Marines as the focus for a few reasons. Firstly, they are the most recognizable aspect of Warhammer 40,000. Secondly, they are human and therefore easy for the player to associate with. Finally, they have a rich history and are simply enthralling once you start to learn about them. They represent all that is āgoodā about faith and religion, warrior monks whoās every waking moment is dedicated to the service of their god. Not to mention they have big guns, big tanks, and whup a whole lot of alien butt!
With that decision made, we can start the process of developing the story itself. First off, we gather for some brainstorming sessions. Over much coffee, a large table and a great deal of concept art we gather a few creative minds to sit down and talk about what gets us excited about the Universe, and how we can translate that excitement to the player over a series of missions. What we come away with is an abundance of ideas that sit and simmer in our minds for a few days.
The Lead Designer then sits down and puts all of those ideas into a coherent (well, usually coherent) flow that sets down the initial overview of the story. This is then refined repeatedly until we end up with something that we feel is the story we want to tell. As a part of this process, we develop the characters that will be telling the story. These can come from requirements in the story, but we usually have a pretty good idea going in what and who our characters are going to be. We use this period to refine motivations and character profiles.
This overview gets put into draft form, and we start coming up with a number of mission concepts that would fit in with the story as itās been drafted. The strongest of these missions are then put down on paper, and we hammer out the finer details of what the player is actually doing, objectives, cool mission moments etc.
Whilst all this is going on, the script is handed off to the writer who starts putting together all of the dialog thatās required by our characters to tell the story. He takes the character profiles and rough drafts and starts putting ācharacterā on the page. This is an incredible time actually, because we can actually start to hear our characters saying these lines in our heads as we read them on paper. Itās amazing to see what a talented writer can do for a rough script to bring it to life!
Eventually, after many more iterations, we can hold in our hot little hands what we call the recording script. This is it, the final draft, along with all of the paper mission designs, some of which have begun to be implemented. Very little actually changes about the script from this point out, we lock it fairly hard and only do major reworks if we come up against critical flaws or technical issues.
The process of developing the story can take anywhere from 6 months to almost an entire year, depending on the number of iterations required.
Mission development
This is where the ārealā work is done, in the mission development phase. Here is where we sit down with the Mission Editor and our scripting system and make magic happen. Just as with the story, a great deal of effort and a number of varying systems come together here.
When you see a character on the screen move around, or when your army gets attacked by that swarm of Orks, what you are seeing is our scripting system in action. SCAR (SCripting At Relic... yes, we are naming geniuses!) is the language that we use to make everything that you see in the missions happen. It gives us the ability to do anything from detecting when the playerās squads are near a location, to influencing how the AI attacks, and even making the camera move along a smooth path to show things of interest.
During mission development we also create the non-interactive sequences (NIS). These are the bookends of the missions, where the letterbox is down and the player can sit back and watch the story unfold. When laying down an NIS we start by asking some questions about the dialog and the intent of the NIS. What is being told here? What kind of action takes place? What is the mood of the NIS? This then gives us a place to start laying down camera, characters and actions, all of which are done with the Mission Editor and SCAR.
We also put together some focus-group testing for the most important missions in the game, missions 1, 2, and 3. These missions are critical, because they are the first thing a player sees when they start up the game and begin playing. If these missions are too hard, or dull in any way, then player might wander away, which is the last thing we want! A great deal of effort is placed on these missions to keep them as entertaining as possible. This is a great process because it also gives us a number of insights into how to make the game more fun overall.
Developing a mission is all about iteration. Nothing works exactly as expected when itās first implemented. Either itās just not possible, itās not quite as fun as it should be, or itās too confusing for the player to understand. So we iterate a great deal on the missions, polishing everything up, working on objectives over and over until we can get them just right.
Dawn of Release
And then we come to the final stages of developing the Single-Player campaign, pretty much where we are as Iām writing this diary actually! This is where we do a final few polish passes on the missions, making sure that everything is as good as it possibly can be before we lock the content and just start working on bugs.
This is also where we just play the game incessantly for weeks on end, carrying out a ton of additional small polishing tasks, specifically to the cinematic sequences and AI, getting the game as fun as humanly possible before we stick it in a box and let it go.
Conclusion
So there you have it. The Single-Player campaign in a nutshell. Of course, this was just an overview of the process! There are hundreds of other elements that go into making the game what it is. Itās always a fantastic experience putting together such a large portion of a game like this, seeing it grow from the initial concept to many hours of fun gameplay. Itās even more fantastic to see everyone playing it and enjoying themselves, having just as much fun as we had making it.
Till next time, remember this Thought for the Day: Knowledge is power, guard it well.
TVG will have more from Relic Entertainment and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War soon.
Anonymous
Date Added:Thu 25th Jan 2007 22:26