Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense by David L. Craddock

Author:David L. Craddock
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7: Landscapes

JULIAN AND NICK GOLLOP SIGNED a contract with MicroProse UK in 1991. The agreement granted them approximately 3,000 pounds per month (roughly $2,224 in 1991) to tide them over while they developed UFO: Enemy Unknown, which the publisher estimated should take eighteen months.

“They didn’t really have any sophistication about planning a development release schedule for a game,” says Julian. “It was eighteen months: that’s how long these games take, so that’s how long it will be. Of course, it took a lot longer, almost twice as long as that, which got us quite worried, actually.”

Nick was content with the arrangement. “To have proper funding made a huge difference to us. Before, we didn’t really have money.”

At the start of the project, MicroProse UK’s Pete Moreland asked Julian to give Mike Brunton and Stephen Hand a design document. Julian was as confused by this request as he had been by MicroProse’s earlier call for a storyboard. “When I produced an initial game design document for them, which was about twelve pages long—I’d never written a design document before, by the way—it was a very high-level thing. It didn’t go into a lot of detail,” Julian admits.

Design documents have grown into understood constructs. Developers write them to explain a prospective game’s art style, atmosphere, gameplay systems, and production needs, costs, and a timetable with milestone dates for completing tasks and showing playable builds or demos of the game to the publisher. In the early ’90s, they were virtually unheard of.

Steve Hand called Julian to complain. The design document was so poor, he declared, that if not for his love of Laser Squad, he would have dropped the project. Julian returned to the MicroProse UK office to walk them through his plans. “I think they were happy enough with the explanations I gave, but clearly the document wasn’t good enough.”

The meeting illuminated Enemy Unknown’s grand scope. Players would fight back against aliens through two interfaces. The first, called the Geoscape, showed a view of earth from space. Players started with a base in a random location on the globe and built others to more quickly research technologies, build weapons, train soldiers, and more. The Battlescape interface took place on earth, where players deployed and positioned their soldiers to hunt down aliens.

Julian’s breakdown of the design document gave MicroProse UK’s team a chance to weigh in on all aspects of development. For instance, Julian’s document included sketches of aliens players would encounter. Steve Hand raised concerns about the artwork. “The original aliens were boring or comical. Some graphics were almost childlike,” Hand remembers.

Hand realized he and Julian were approaching aliens from different perspectives. He was thinking of creatures seen in Marvel comics, classic horror films such as Dracula remade by British production studio Hammer Film Productions, and Gerry Anderson’s UFO show. Julian seemed to have a more contemporary vision, such as abductees taken by flying saucers, experimented on, and dropped back to earth with no memory of the encounter. Little gray men

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