Postmortem: Myth: The Fallen Lords

Myth Postmortem

Introduction The Making of a Legend, er, Myth What Worked What Went Wrong Post-Release Reactions

The project began in January 1996 with four programmers, two artists, and a product manager; midway through development, one programmer dropped out and an artist was added. Music, sound effects, and cut scenes were done out-of-house, and a few artists were contracted to help with interface artwork.

The roots of the Myth programming team were on the Macintosh, so most initial coding was done on the Mac with Metrowerks CodeWarrior. When PC builds were required, though, we used Microsoft Visual C/C++. Myth was written entirely in C.

In addition to creating the shipping product, we developed four tools to aid in the construction of the game. One utility, the Extractor, handled the importing of sprites and the sequencing of their animations. Another tool, dubbed Fear, dealt with importing polygonal models such as houses, pillars, and walls. The Tag Editor was responsible for editing the constants stored in cross-platform data files, which we called tags. And finally, Loathing, our map editor, handled the rest. Loathing was built around the Myth engine and allowed us to modify the landscape, apply lighting, set terrain types, script the AI, and place structures, scenery, and monsters.

The artists used Alias|Wavefront's PowerAnimator and StudioPaint on a single Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 to create polygonal models and render all the characters. At one point, the artists worked separate day and night shifts so that they could maximize their time on the SGI. Models were brought into the game using Fear, while the sprites were cleaned up in Adobe Photoshop and imported with the Extractor. To create the texture maps for the terrain, the artists used Photoshop to draw what looked like an aerial photo and applied it to a 3D landscape in Loathing.

If this sounds like a lot of work to you, you're right. Most maps took at least a week or two to create. We considered using fractal-generated landscapes, but we were worried that the inherent randomness of such terrain would make it extremely difficult to design good levels. As a result, all maps were painstakingly constructed by hand. As the artists put the finishing touches on the landscapes, the programmers, who doubled as level designers, scripted the AI for the levels.

Myth took approximately two years from start to finish. It began as a six-degree of freedom engine that allowed you to fly around a landscape. Soon, troops were added, heads started flying, blood was made to destructively alter the terrain's color map, and the network game was born. Most of the first year was spent developing the initial network/multiplayer game play. Almost the entire second year was spent developing the single-player game, refining the levels, and testing bungie.net, our free online service.