Drakensang – Official Dev Diary #5

30. 03. 2007: From pen & paper to computer game

Today I’d like to write a little about the game design. Before I tell you about my tasks on Drakensang, I’m going to introduce myself.

When I started playing the very first edition of The Dark Eye in 1985, I discovered my love for role playing. After TDE, I played many other role playing systems: AD&D, Shadowrun, Phoenix-Command, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy – these are only a few examples of the games I played in the last 22 years. Of course, at the same time I started spending more and more time on all types of computer role playing games.

Notes from a revision of the rule set books, here different pen & paper advantages / disadvantages and their effects for character creation. (in german). Note that this sketch does not necessarily represent the implementation in the final game.

Since last September, Sven and I have been responsible for the game design of Drakensang. I spend a lot of time on collecting pieces of information and on conceptualisation.

In the first part of my job - collecting information – I analyze the TDE rule set, making detailed descriptions for the graphic artists and doing research on the previous TDE computer games. Finally, I’m the one who is in charge of the documentation of the game concepts and the one who keeps our corporate wiki updated. For fulfilling these tasks we collected tomes of TDE rule set books, novels and other background material – our TDE library is growing with every new publication.

In the conceptual part of my work on the game design, I adapt the pen and paper rule set for the computer game and I also implement the story into the game’s program. Obviously, our work has to be very precise to guarantee satisfying basic conditions for the game. Before a final concept can be made, our in-house departments - for example the coders, the level designers and the graphic artists - make an estimate of the work they will each have to invest in order to meet my demands. On that basis we finally make our concept.

Early sketch for a character creation screen. Note that this does not necessarily reflect the final solution within the game. The translations are not official and made by ourselves.

It is very fascinating to see the world you have only known from sketches, drawings and descriptions become a virtual 3D universe that you can explore on the computer screen. We experience the birth of every new character, and we are thrilled when the software gets updated again with some more detailed locations – we have a highly motivated team that tries to make a fantastic world come to live.

Many of our employees are active role players themselves, and all of them have very specific ideas on how certain things should look or work. So, on the one hand my task is to make design decisions which make the story and the rule set as authentic as possible for experienced TDE players, and on the other hand my task is to make the content as understandable as possible for those players who have no TDE background.

I hope that I was able to give you an overview of the work of a game designer. In my next article I will tell you how we created the Tatzelwurm.

- Written by Fabian Rudzinski, Game Designer for Drakensang -

Comment this article at our forum!