That single area spanned eleven maps to provide a sampling of each major type of environment: towns, dungeons, and wilderness. You're taking everybody's work, all these creative people's work-including your own-and putting it all together in a finished piece.” Dyrford Village.ĭyrford Village was the first area created for Pillars of Eternity by being the area built for the vertical slice. For me, inherently, area design is the most interesting of the design disciplines from the sense that you're touching everything. “Building things is cool, and I think level designers, most of the ones I know, have that same mentality. “Ever since I was a little kid, I've loved Legos, erector sets, Lincoln logs,” Null said. Though he had joined Obsidian five years earlier contributing to design for Neverwinter Night 2 expansions as well as Dungeon Siege III and South Park, his penchant for building dated back to childhood. Bobby Null, designated Lead Level Designer, was one of the most excited to dig into Pillars of Eternity’s vertical slice. More developers piled onto teams as work on South Park: The Stick of Truth wound down. Once the slice is finished, content creators build out from there. The goal of a vertical slice is to incorporate most or all of the features to be used in the final version of a game. The concept artwork and animated background Obsidian had released in late 2012 and the spring of 2013, respectively, formed the foundation for the vertical slice, the pan in which the rest of the game would be prepared. Vertical slice is industry speak for a playable chunk of a game designed to showcase progress across an entire project. We wanted all the core elements of the game working and up and running at that stage, before moving into production.”
“The vertical slice was the Dyrford Village scene. “That was the June to August timeframe when we were trying to finish that up,” Adam Brennecke explained. Over the spring and summer of 2013, Pillars of Eternity’s developers baked their Infinity Engine RPG cake and cut off a vertical slice. The quantities of those ingredients varies depending on the flavor of RPG one aspires to make. Like a family recipe passed down through generations, crafting an environment in a roleplaying game calls for specific ingredients. Pause Screen: Fighting Randomness - Feargus Urquhart on Fig and Obsidian's Future.Pause Screen: In the Guts of Game Design with Josh Sawyer.Pause Screen: 24 'Til Launch - Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.Pause Screen: Chopped Up - John Romero on the Sorrows of Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows.Pause Screen: Stone by Stone - How Planescape: Torment Raised the Bar for CRPGs.Pause Screen: Long Table - Pillars of Eternity II and RPG Design at Obsidian.Pause Screen: Romancing the Throne - David Gaider on Intimacy in Baldur's Gate II and BioWare RPGs.Pause Screen: Realmsplay - Writing, Adapting, and Playing in the Forgotten Realms.Pause Screen: Where Winter Never Ends - The Freewheeling Development of Icewind Dale.Pause Screen: Green Team - How a Ragtag Band of Upstarts Created Baldur's Gate.Pause Screen: World on Fire - The Oral History of Fallout and Fallout 2.Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs Table of Contents
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