Editor's
note: This Postmortem appears in the July issue of Game Developer magazine.
Thief:
The Dark Project is one of those games that almost wasn't. During
the long struggle to store shelves, the project faced the threat of cancellation
twice. A fiscal crisis nearly closed the doors at Looking Glass. During
one seven-month span, the producer, project director, lead programmer,
lead artist, lead designer and the author of our renderer all left. Worse
still, we felt a nagging fear that we might make a game that simply was
not fun. But in the end, we shipped a relatively bug-free game that we
had fun making, we were proud of, and that we hoped others would enjoy.
The Concept
The Thief
team wanted to create a first-person game that provided a totally
different gaming experience, yet appealed to the existing first-person
action market. Thief was to present a lightly-scripted game world with
levels of player interaction and improvisation exceeding our previous
titles. The team hoped to entice the player into a deep engagement with
the world by creating intelligible ways for the world to be impacted by
the player.
The central
game mechanic of Thief challenged the traditional form of the first-person
3D market. First-person shooters are fast-paced adrenaline rushes where
the player possesses unusual speed and stamina, and an irresistible desire
for conflict. The expert Thief player moves slowly, avoids conflict,
is penalized for killing people, and is entirely mortal. It is a game
style that many observers were concerned might not appeal to players,
and even those intimately involved with the game had doubts at times.
The
project began in the spring of 1996 as "Dark Camelot," a sword-combat
action game with role-playing and adventure elements, based on an inversion
of the Arthurian legend. Although development ostensibly had been in progress
on paper for a year, Thief realistically began early in 1997 after
the game was repositioned as an action/adventure game of thievery in a
grim fantasy setting. Up to that point we had only a small portion of
the art, design, and code that would ultimately make it into the shipping
game. Full development began in May 1997 with a team comprised almost
entirely of a different group of people from those who started the project.
During the following year, the team created a tremendous amount of quality
code, art, and design.
But by the
beginning of summer in 1998, the game could not be called "fun," the team
was exhausted, and the project was faced with an increasingly skeptical
publisher. The Looking Glass game design philosophy includes a notion
that immersive gameplay emerges from an object-rich world governed by
high-quality, self-consistent simulation systems. Making a game at Looking
Glass requires a lot of faith, as such systems take considerable time
to develop, do not always arrive on time, and require substantial tuning
once in place. For Thief, these systems didn't gel until mid-summer,
fifteen months after the project began full development, and only three
months before we were scheduled to ship.
When the
game finally did come together, we began to sense that not only did the
game not stink, it might actually be fun. The release of successful stealth-oriented
titles (such as Metal Gear Solid and Commandos) and more content-rich
first-person shooters (like Half-Life) eased the team's concerns about
the market's willingness to accept experimental game styles. A new energy
revitalized the team. Long hours driven by passion and measured confidence
marked the closing months of the project. In the final weeks of the project
the Eidos test and production staff joined us at the Looking Glass offices
for the final push. The gold master was burned in the beginning of November,
just in time for Christmas.
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Stealth
is one of your best weapons in Thief. The game's designers made sure
that expert players would have to make effective use of silent weapons
such as the blackjack and the bow and arrow. zoom [left]
[right] |
In many
ways, Thief was a typical project. It provided the joys of working
on a large-scale game: challenging problems, a talented group of people,
room for creative expression, and the occasional hilarious bug. It also
had some of the usual problems: task underestimation, bouts of low morale,
a stream of demos from hell, an unrealistic schedule derived from desire
rather than reality, poor documentation, and an insufficient up-front
specification.
However,
Thief also differed from a number of projects in that it took risks
on numerous fronts, risks that our team underappreciated. We wanted to
push the envelope in almost every element of the code and design. The
experimental nature of the game design, and the time it took us to fully
understand the core nature of that design, placed special demands on the
development process. The team was larger than any Looking Glass team up
until then, and at times there seemed to be too many cooks in the kitchen.
Reaching a point where everyone shared the same vision took longer than
expected. A philosophy of creating good, reusable game engine components
created unusual challenges that didn't always fit well with schedule and
demo pressures. The many risks could have overwhelmed the project, if
not for the dedication, creativity, and sacrifices of the team.
Throughout
the life of the project, more than 50 people worked in one way or another
on Thief — some as part of the "Camelot" project, others as part
of the Looking Glass audio-visual and technology support staff, some as
helpful hands from other Looking Glass projects. The core team consisted
of a number of veterans of previous Looking Glass titles (Underworld I
and II, System Shock, Flight Unlimited, Terra Nova, British Open Championship
Golf, and the unpublished Star Trek: Voyager), as well as some new industry
arrivals. The project had a number of very talented people and strong
wills. Although it took some time for the team to unite as a tight-knit
creative force, the final six months were incredibly productive, spirited,
and punishingly fun.