Hi there.

My name is Richard Boon, and I work for International Hobo, a UK-based video game design and script outsourcing company. At the start of the year, 3D People brought us in on their Kult: Heretic Kingdoms project to aid in a mechanical redesign and to re-work the narrative. We are now involved in the final stages of the project, and are involved mostly in testing and tweaking.

Oh, and Peter can’t be here today because he’s working flat-out - with the rest the 3D People team - on their game. So I get to do the diary. We had hoped to publish more regular installments of this diary, but the game takes priority I’m afraid… we’ll try to write a diary entry whenever time allows.

So. Last entry, Peter described his interest in bad beer and sleeping bags. Beer and sleep are both core to any worthy game development, of course. Since that time Kult has come on leaps and bounds. 3D People have now managed to implement almost all of the game features, and have also picked up the majority of the bugs and problems detected during preliminary testing.

At the start of the month, the majority of the 50–or-so environment maps were up and running, but many aspects of the character customisation mechanics (primarily the Attunements system – think character abilities, but gained organically from use of equipment, and much more flexible than in traditional systems) had yet to be implemented. In addition, the majority of the inhabitants of the world (NPCs and monsters) were placeholders, or wandering randomly. Now all the monsters are where they should be (do we have a credit for Monster Wrangler?) and their stats reflect ihobo’s parametric design, allowing for serious playtesting to take place.

My personal duties revolve around the script. Anyone following Kult on the web will know that we’re making grand claims for this story, and as the game nears completion, it’s becoming apparent that these claims are actually true! It’s always exciting to see a script integrated into a game, and Kult moves further from ‘neat game’ to ‘engrossing experience’ with every quest, NPC script and event to be implemented. It’s pretty much all there now, leaving me with the task of systematically testing all the many possible interactions and outcomes of each quest, to make sure everything happens the way it should. 

Luckily, testing also involves playing the game. We’re primarily interested in two things – the first being good old fashioned bugs, and the second being the balance of the gameplay. 

Testing for balance is simultaneously the most interesting, and most stressful part of this process. Let’s go back to those frisky Attunements for an example. Each Attunement represents a selectable ability – random example, Defensive Aura I, which allows a character wearing no armour to gain magical protection equivalent to 8HP armour. This value has to balance with upgraded versions of this skill, with the various types of armour available, and with enemy damage relative to the point in the game it becomes available… and, in addition, other Attunements can affect this one, so they have to be balanced too. We have over one hundred Attunements, and each must work as part of the system.

Then: are the monsters too tough? Not tough enough? Can the player equip their character in such a way as to make a quest too easy? What are the effects of allowing the player certain weapons at specific points in the game? We have well over 50 melee weapons, plus ranged weapons, magical focuses, armour and shields, rings, amulets, cloaks, boots… you know the score… and they all must work as part of the system. So we’re playing and taking notes and filling in our logs and checklists, in an attempt to make the player’s experience as rewarding as possible. 

But the rewards are worth it. With so many items, Attunements, monsters, NPCs, locations and quests, we have a game which can be approached in many different ways. A good balance should allow players to play however they want with the tools we give them, without compromising playability. And with a system this complicated, testing is constantly uncovering new ways to play the game to get advantages.

For instance, let’s take the Wolf Hunters. A surly mob of cash-hungry rogues, their greed is threatening the attempts of the Corwenth army to repel incursions of Taymurians (kinda like wolf-people, but not so cuddly). They’re well armed, they’re tough, and they don’t like being told what to do. The solution? Rather than storm in, sword waving, one cunning playtester decided to try a more unpredictable strategy… 

By slipping into the Dreamworld (a magical realm parallel to the Heretic Kingdoms, accessible to only powerful mages and demons), our playtester avoided the Wolf Hunter guards (who aren’t even aware that the Dreamworld exists!), snuck up behind one of the archers, returned to the real world, killed the archer, took his powerful bow before his friends could react, then proceeded to shoot holes in anyone who approached. By the time the Wolf Hunters had gathered their wits, our playtester had slipped back into the Dreamworld, ready to reposition and begin again.

This caused an hour-long discussion of how we might combine the Attunements system with the Dreamworld powers to make an even greater mess of enemies. Sadly, we then realised that we were supposed to be working, and had to stop hypothesising. 

This illustrates the joy of testing. Though we’re short on time and long on issues, it’s always a pleasure to play with these toys we designed so many months ago, and begin to experiment. On current evidence, it’s going to be even more fun to get this game into the hands of the players – some of the most cunning individuals ever to walk a brutal fantasy world – and see what they can do. We’re prepared to be amused, excited and shocked.

Okay, that’s enough for now. Keep checking in, we’ll try to put a few more diary entries up before the game releases. Hope you enjoyed this one!

Richard
Head of Script, International Hobo Ltd.

July 20th, 10:17 a.m. Manchester, UK

As 3D People work flat out to push Kult: Heretic Kingdoms from Beta to Master in the next few weeks, it falls once again upon a member of the International Hobo team to keep the outside world updated on the project. This time, it’s Chris Bateman (or “me” as, like Julie Andrews, I call myself). I’ve been the surrogate lead designer and script writer on this project, and as such have become quite attached to it.

Contrary to popular belief (at least if online discussion forums are to be believed), it is not easy to design a great game. The chief barrier to this goal is not budget (although commercial reality must apply to any professional game project) but the huge diversity of tastes and opinions in the gaming audience. There is no single game that you could get everyone to agree upon as the best game ever, and as GameFAQs polls demonstrate, if you try, you end up pointing to whichever games have the largest cult following since block voting tends to dominate a largely fractured set of opinions.

This week, one of the chief tasks on the game from our side has been dealing with the blind testing reports. That is to say, reading through transcripts of people playing the game for the first time to see what their responses were. This often overlooked process is vital, as once you have worked on a game for six months or more you no longer have the capacity to look objectively at the game – you are too close to the game, you know the mechanics too well, and that makes it hard to assess things such as the learning curve of the game.

Because Kult: Heretic Kingdoms tries to be a little different in a few areas of its design whilst still remaining at heart a simple-to-use hack and slash RPG, we definitely have issues with the learning curve. Certain players pick up the Attunement system quickly, and are immediately selecting their weapons and equipment with an eye to maximising their preferred strategies… less experienced players are getting to grips with the basics of combat much later, and therefore not really understanding the Attunement system.

We’ve been using the blind testing reports to help construct the load hints for the game – a process requiring a great deal of care and attention. In the absence of a formal training stage in the game, and in the sure knowledge that most players will not even look at the manual unless they get stuck, the load hints need to gradually introduce the player to any concept they might have missed – and despite what so-called “common sense” tells you, even the smartest players can miss what appears to be obvious. It’s just the nature of being human.

The loading hint puzzle has been complicated by several other factors – the fact that some locations load so fast that you can’t fit in a hint of more than a few words, for instance, and the fact that you want to get certain information to the player but you only get one tip per location in the schema we are using. This has led to the whole team striving to find ways to reorganise the sequence of load hints to give us the best chance of delivering the information that certain players will need at as close to the best time as is possible. 
As a professional game designer who has been making games now for pretty much my whole life, I can confidently assert that it’s these little corners of a game project that the public as a whole are fairly oblivious to. Do poorly, and you might get criticised, but do well and nobody is likely to notice.

The other side of that coin is trying to make sure that you don’t spend too much time trying to fix problems that a minority of players are actually going to experience. When you’ve racked up over a hundred hours of play time on a game that hasn’t even been released, you can be oversensitive to issues that simply won’t matter to a player who is playing the game for the first time.

On the whole, I think that Kult: Heretic Kingdoms will go down well with players who like a good, original fantasy story set in an interesting world (no elves and dwarves here!) and with a combat mechanic which is on the one hand simplistic and on the other subtly complex, provided one takes the time to learn how to use it. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I hope it will appeal to a lot of the RPG fans who are complaining that no-one is making games for them any more.

Chris
Managing Director & Creative Overlord, International Hobo Ltd.