Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs (Shacknews Long Reads Book 2) by David L. Craddock

Author:David L. Craddock
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Shacknews
Published: 2019-07-26T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6: BUILDING A DIORAMA

LIKE A FAMILY recipe passed down through generations, crafting an environment in a roleplaying game calls for specific ingredients. The quantities of those ingredients varies depending on the flavor of RPG one aspires to make.

Over the spring and summer of 2013, Pillars of Eternity’s developers baked their Infinity Engine RPG cake and cut off a vertical slice. “That was the June to August timeframe when we were trying to finish that up,” Adam Brennecke explained. “The vertical slice was the Dyrford Village scene. We wanted all the core elements of the game working and up and running at that stage, before moving into production.”

Vertical slice is industry speak for a playable chunk of a game designed to showcase progress across an entire project. The concept artwork and animated background Obsidian had released in late 2012 and the spring of 2013, respectively, formed its foundation, the pan in which the rest of the game would be prepared. 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. Once the slice is finished, content creators build out from there.

More developers piled onto teams as work on South Park: The Stick of Truth wound down. Bobby Null, designated lead level designer, was one of the most excited to dig into Pillars of Eternity. 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.

“Ever since I was a little kid, I've loved Legos, erector sets, Lincoln Logs,” Null said. “Building things is cool, and I think level designers, most of the ones I know, have that same mentality. They just love to put things together. For me, inherently, area design is the most interesting of the design disciplines from the sense that you're touching everything. You're responsible for the final level. 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 was the first area created for Pillars of Eternity by being the area built for the vertical slice. That single area spanned eleven maps to provide a sampling of each major type of environment: towns, dungeons, and wilderness. Every discipline’s leaders had priorities. As Art Director, Rob Nesler focused on concerns such as environmental details that transformed spaces from oddly shaped containers to hold characters and gameplay, into towns, forests, and dungeons that felt alive. “If we're building a world where human beings are characters, I feel it's important that we assemble things in a way that looks like human beings would build them and live in them,” he explained of Dyrford. “That was one of my main rules.”

A dirt road leads into Dyrford Village from the northeast and wends south, broadening into a town square that hosts an inn—the village’s largest building—a mill, a few houses and shops, and a temple.

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