Neal Hallford on The Making of Betrayal at Krondor

[nealiios]

Of course for those of us of a certain age, when I saw Krondor LP, I thought "he made a record?" And then after I realized how silly that was, so my brain went to "lumbar puncture?"

 

[Ninjerk]

Where's the update sstacks

 

[Infinitron]

Where's the update sstacks

 

[Ninjerk]

 

[Infinitron]

Betrayal at Krondor's lead artist was a psycho!

Krondor Confidential - Part V
“The ingredients for a hero are, at best, a strange and elusive concoction. A man might live the span of his life a great and powerful magician but never be called to duty, while a humble peasant might save the life of a King. To some degree the characters of Betrayal At Krondor have fallen together because of luck, to another degree, because they have lived miraculous lives. They have lived to tell the tale.” – John Cutter & Neal Hallford, “Betrayal at Krondor” Design Document

I have to admit that I’ve been struggling a bit with this installment of Betrayal at Krondor’s “origin” story. You’ve already heard a great deal about John Cutter and I, but so far I’ve not said that much about the rest of the team. I don’t want anyone to walk away from this blog series and think that John and I sat down in a room, put our hands on a stack of Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar novels, and *BAM* the game just magically happened from our sheer strengths of will and imagination. We weren’t working alone. From start to finish there were probably at least fourteen or fifteen people who were touching the core development of BAK on a daily basis, and many more when you get around to factoring in all the support personnel necessary to pull everything together. It was a well-oiled machine with many, many moving parts, and there wasn’t a single unimportant person in the bunch. Change any one of them and it could well have been a very different experience, and very possibly not the hit game that so many fans came to love.

What’s worried me in this writing, however, is that some people might construe my lack of details so far on the rest of our team members as a reflection of a narrow estimation of their contributions, or of their talents. Let me assure you that isn’t the case. Not by a long shot. I loved those guys and gals so very much, and I still do. For many of you BAK is a fun game to play, but for me it’s the artifact of four of the best years of my life, great years largely because of the time I spent with those people. When I think of my Dynamix days, I’m not just a guy in my office trying to create a computer game, I’m Harry on St. Crispin’s day at the field of Agincourt, getting ready to ride out into a desperate battle with banners streaming, and the only thing that is going to win the day are these guys standing at my back.

From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

You’d think that as much as I care for these guys that I’d have scads of war stories about my colleagues, and that I could regale you with our merry exploits for hour upon unending hour with stories that would dazzle, and delight, and amuse. You’d think that…but you’d be wrong. The fact of the matter is that I don’t have a lot in the way of stories that I remember about individual people at Dynamix. Part of it is the simple fact that it’s been twenty five years since some of these events took place, and I wasn’t taking notes. I didn’t think about there being a quiz at the end. But it’s more complicated even than just that. Circumstances were all such that it was difficult for me to have the kinds of shared memories that would give rise to those kinds of stories in the first place.

Before I go any further, I should explain that I don’t have an off the rack personality. Things that are easy for other people are often not very easy for me. I don’t have any trouble getting along with people – and generally people don’t seem to have any trouble getting along with me – but I do struggle at times to make more than casual connections with other people. Folks see me on podcasts or up on stage at a convention and mistakenly come to the conclusion that I must be a raging extrovert (or at least a “vert” of some stripe), but the reality is that I’m actually fairly shy. I will almost never strike up a conversation with strangers unless doing so is required for business, and even then, it can be excruciatingly difficult for me to do so. I’m terrible at small talk. If I’m invited to a party that has more than five or six people, I’m likely to retreat to the least populous corner and try to find a dog or a cat to play with. I’m THAT guy, and it has played to both my social and professional disadvantage all of my life. Dynamix was no exception. While for many people like myself there are the standard social lubricants of alcohol or drugs, I’m too much of a personal control freak to enjoy either of them, and me without inhibitions is not something the world really needs anyway.

The upshot of all this being is that I didn’t really spend huge amounts of time “hanging out” with my most of my team mates, though I did make a couple of life-long friends there. I was a single guy on a team comprised mostly of married men who had wives and children, and they tended to go home at reasonable hours to be with their families (at least until we hit crunch, and there are some fun stories there that I’ll relate in another installment). Even in the hours in which we were at work together, unless we had a big issue to tackle that required all of us banging on it, we tended to stick to our own offices or cubicles so that we could focus on getting our jobs done (a practice that today has been thrown out of the window in favor of the disastrously ill-conceived idea that we should all be sitting in an open bull pen and yakking at each other all day long, a formula for destroying productivity and an utter hell for introverts like myself).

With all of this now fully and excruciatingly qualified, let me give you at least of a snapshot view of some of the teammates that I worked with on a fairly regular basis, along with a tale at the very end about one team member in particular who tested John and I’s patience on a fairly regular basis.



NELS BRUCKNER (LEAD PROGRAMMER)

In the 1990s, Nels was pretty much the living embodiment of why everyone thought that people from the Pacific Northwest were just innately cool. He was an insanely good programmer, and terminally mellow. Given the crazy requests that John and I routinely put on his plate on a frequent basis, its surprising that he didn’t chop us up in our sleep, but he always handled things with the unflappable calm of a Methadone patient. When he wasn’t programming, he was a metal guitarist, and he often wrote band reviews. He was a damned proficient juggler, and it wasn’t at all uncommon for him to be juggling balls or clubs while he was thinking through a problem. He also had a knack for making origami art…and often employed it to rather successful effect with dollar bills.



STEVE CORDON (PROGRAMMER)

If you weren’t paying attention, it would have been easy to miss Steve. In meetings, it was very rare for him to speak up and say anything unless asked a direct question, and even then, he would always answer in the most concise manner possible in a voice that was often so quiet that he’d have to repeat himself, sometimes more than once. In conversations with him it was always clear that there was a vast intelligence at work behind his unassuming Clark Kent glasses, and he always seemed to be at work on some programming problem regardless of the circumstances.

On our team he was the designated pinch hitter, in charge of whatever gameplay coding got knocked in his direction, be it the dialog system, item & inventory systems, player stats, world state tracking, quests, high-res book interface, or the town GUI. Whatever he was asked to do, he could do it…though we didn’t always have to ask. It wasn’t at all uncommon for John or I to request if he could create a specific function or feature, only to find out that he’d “just finished it” an hour or a day before. He seemed able to anticipate every request that John and I could come up with, and it earned him a reputation as the team’s “Radar” O’Reilly. It became a running joke long before the game was done that Steve had actually finished the whole thing, he just needed to “uncomment it in the code.”

Once on a snowy day, Steve’s wife Michelle showed up to take him somewhere, and John and I happened to be looking out of the window of his office as we saw Steve and Michelle exiting the building. They were holding hands, laughing as they skidded in the snow on the way to their car. John looked at me. “Those two are probably the cutest, most adorable couple I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Of course, they’re probably serial killers.”



TIMOTHY STRELCHUN (PROGRAMMER)

As the occupant of the office immediately next to mine, I probably spent more time talking with Timothy Strelchun than with any of the other programmers. Often we’d discuss music, and I seem to recall discussions about Enigma, Erasure, and other bands, prompted usually by one of us overhearing something to which the other was listening. (I also seem to recall he shared my interest in electronic music and keyboards, though it’s possible I’m imagining that.)

Other than John, Timothy was the person on our team most vested in the story we were telling with the game. I remember him asking a lot of very good questions about what I was doing, and I often found that in answering his questions I’d identify things that I needed to take a closer look at, or I’d find opportunities to expand on elements that John and I were playing with which I hadn’t sufficiently explained.



MIKE MCHUGH (LEAD ARTIST)

I’ll be bluntly honest here and tell you that Mike is the principal reason that I’ve delayed writing this particular installment of Krondor Confidential. At one level I wish I could conveniently just skip this bit entirely, but doing so omits two very important things. Firstly, I need to acknowledge his contribution. Mike WAS in charge of the art for the game, and in that capacity he did an excellent, outstanding job. He gave us a look and feel which was completely unique at the time, and I cannot say enough good things about Mike’s talents. They were respectable. Unfortunately those talents came with a cost, and that was the creation of a work environment that was often incredibly difficult for the rest of the development team.

I’m guessing Mike must have been in his late forties or early fifties. It’s ironic for me to realize that he was probably as old as I am now. He was a big, bulky guy, built like a cross between a hell’s angel and a grizzly bear. If you need an even more explicit image of what he looked like, you need look no further than the cover of the game. Although a different model was used as the basis of Roger Smith’s amazing painting, Gorath couldn’t have looked more like Mike McHugh than it we’d just used a photo of Mike instead. To this day, their images are nearly inseparable in my mind.

Mike came to Dynamix with an impressive portfolio of previous work. He’d been a theme park designer, and as such had been responsible for some of the best known attractions of the time. His work was painterly, and in some respects, far too advanced for what computers were capable of in 1991. The restrictions clearly frustrated him, and I wondered why he’d even bothered applying to a computer gaming company when he clearly seemed to disdain what could be achieved with the technology. On the other hand, I know what it is to be a greying creative. Jobs get incredibly hard to find as you age up, and it might be that he simply landed whatever gig he could that would allow him to have a steady paycheck that still allowed him to be creative. If that was the case, I totally get that, and can relate to it. I know the frustration that can come from having doors repeatedly slammed in your face purely because you’ve had the gall to age past thirty. In retrospect, it could be an explanation – if not an excuse – for all the things that came after.

Gorath’s beard was perhaps our first sign of the trouble that we were going to have with Mike. I remember some of the early concept work that we sent down to Ray, including sketches meant to represent the main characters. We got a note back saying that Gorath couldn’t have a beard because the moredhel don’t have facial hair. I can’t remember whether it was a genetic or a traditional thing, but the bottom line was it was not in line with canon. We asked Mike to change it, but he flatly refused. He claimed artistic license, saying his vision trumped Ray’s dictates. The beard stayed. For years I’ve wondered if this might have been something more personal. Maybe this was Mike having a strong association with Gorath, and not wanting to have that association cut from the game. Maybe he wanted to be the strong, half mad warrior in the game. Perhaps we’d gone all Delilah on his in-game Sampson. Sadly it was just beginning.

Not long after, John, Mike, and I had to tackle the storyboards for the cutscenes that would play at the start and end of each of the game’s nine chapters. The initial story outline had largely glossed over the fine details of each scene, leaving us with more flexibility to develop them as we went along.

The day of our first storyboard session, John and I prepped in advance by coming up with some visual ideas to run by Mike so that we’d have a good place to start the discussion. Convening in the tiny conference room near my cubicle, Mike plopped down with a sketch pad and pencil across from me, suspiciously eyeing my copy of the synopsis that I’d marked up with our some of our early concept notes.

As we begin to work through the first scene where Gorath kills the would-be assassin, Mike is getting more and more irritated as he roughs out the images that we’re talking about, though neither John nor I know what’s up. Finally, midway through the session Mike goes thermonuclear, shoving back from the table and standing over John and I both, punctuating the air with his pencil as he rants about us giving him no room to participate in the narrative of the cutscenes, colluding intentionally to shut him out of the process. “I’M NOT YOUR FUCKING WRIST!” he screams in our faces, and then storms out of the conference room.

For a long moment John and I just stare at each other, wondering what the hell’s just gone down, or what we might have done to bring on Mike’s sudden outburst of rage. Both of us are physically shaken. Our only intent in the prep had been to start the meeting as productively as possible, with less time wasted sitting around the conference room hemming and hawing over what we should do.

It was only days afterwards that I’d recognize the irony that John and I had both just felt endangered over a scene about an attempted assassination.

For the following storyboard session, John talked to Mike in advance and gave him our assurances that we’d come into next session with nothing but the original script, and that we could work out the details together. This evidently seemed to mollify Mike, and we all hoped for a better outcome the next time around.

The day of the next session arrived. At the appointed time the three of us once again filed into the conference room, this time with Mike bringing not only his blank sketch pad, but also a set of highly polished boards showing the scenes we’d managed to plan in the first session before Mike’s walk out.

To this day I have to admit I still get chills thinking about seeing those first production boards. It was the first time I’d ever seen anything I’d written storyboarded out, and certainly nothing of that level of polish and quality. For the briefest moment I imagined that perhaps we’d just got off on the wrong foot the first time around, that maybe things would go better in our second session with a different set of rules in place. Quickly I was disabused of this magical idea.

Once again, as we began to work through scenes, Mike grew irritated with John and I, stopping in mid-sketch at one point to ask us why the hell we didn’t know what we wanted to do in the scene. I very nearly chewed off the end of my tongue to keep from saying something that I felt fairly certain would have resulted in my being punched in the face if not optically skewered with his pencil. Patiently John and I struggled through the rest of it, managing to keep Mike from storming out once again, doing just enough to keep Mike’s ever brewing temper from boiling over.

And so it went. Not just for the remainder of the storyboard sessions, but for the entirety of Betrayal at Krondor’s two and a half years of production. Despite the relative harmony of the rest of the team members, Mike would not kumbaya with us. He was the volcano at the center of our lives, the imminent threat that stayed with us until the bitter end.

…And The Rest…Here On Gilligan’s Isle

There are other people who played critical roles during the production of BAK, but whose introductions are better intermeshed with the tales still to be told. Suffice it to say, on the balance of things, I have far more and happier memories of the great people that I worked alongside than of anything negative, and I’m looking forward to introducing even more of the players to you in the near future.

 

[Ninjerk]

[redacted]

Easy enough to find if you really care.

 

[Mustawd]

K. I dunno what to put in here now.

Nice article Neal.

 

[nealiios]

[redacted]

Easy enough to find if you really care.

I know, but I don't want to make it any easier than it needs to be. Thank you.

 

[Darth Roxor]

The Cleve of Krondor

 

[Haba]

Hahaha, I always wondered about that beard...

Oh well, at least it certainly made the character more memorable.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

That's as artistic a temperament as I've ever heard of.

 

[Mustawd]

nealiios , I wonder, how much interaction do writers have with other parts of the team nowadays? Anything you can comment on in terms of how it's changed since BaK?

 

[Infinitron]

http://nealhallford.com/post/143531055388/the-moredhel-puzzle-chests-from-the-original

The Moredhel Puzzle Chests from the original Betrayal at Krondor are arguably one of the most iconic elements of the original RPG. Now I’ve given the original 2D experience a full 3D revamp for Betrayal at Krondor: Remastered!

Check out my latest video update on my ongoing replication of the original role playing classic with the new Amazon Lumberyard Game Engine!

Part one of the BAK Remastered series on the Dialogue and Keyword systems can be found here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LRioTpg3yQ

For more information about the project, check out the official FAQ athttp://nealhallford.com/post/141194355948/betrayal-at-krondor-remastered-faq

To support this project, as well as my various other films, games, and writing projects, please consider subscribing to Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/Nealiios for exclusives not available anywhere else!

 

[Wyrmlord]

Having read some stories of what game development studios are like, it does not surprise me too much to hear of people like BaK's lead artist.

id software, Sir Tech, all these 1980s, 1990s era videogame development studios were full of offbeat people.

 

[sstacks]

Yeah, when you get people together in high pressure teams, especially creative people, interesting stuff happens.

For a lot of folks too they see it as a job, not a doing it for the love of games thing, etc. So their bs tolerance level is lower and they treat it like any other job.

 

[Ninjerk]

I could be wrong about this, but art seems to attract more narcissistic types, as well. Or, at the very least, the narcissistic qualities emerge in a more spectacular way when their "true genius" isn't appreciated. There were some serious lulz back in the day on CA.org when overconfident amateurs would put their pieces up for critique and didn't get the responses they liked.

 

[Mustawd]

Oh...the old CA is fun to read.

But really Ninjerk , if you're familiar with CA then you probably realize a lot of these artists spend tons of time alone as a profession. Whether it's doing studies or working on free lance work, there's huge blocks of your week, as a professional, where your only interactions might be email or phone.

So I think a lot of these types also just never develop the skills to work effectively in a team. Hell, lack of interpersonal skills is probably a big reason why some people become artists, writers, or coders in the first place.

I used to listen to Dan Warren's (free lance artist) youtube channel while I did my art studies, and it's a bit funny and sad how he'd talk about just going days without even seeing someone sometimes. The dude was just up to his eyeballs in work, trying to make a name for himself. He eventually got well known enough where he could slow down a bit, but you can tell he was kind of losing it there for a few months.

 

[Ninjerk]

The isolation is what initially turned me away from pursuing an art education beyond a couple of years. I just knew I couldn't sit in front of a canvas for 8-10 hours a day. After my detour through bartending I like people a lot less so the isolation doesn't seem so bad.

 

[abnaxus]

I wonder whether Sierra ever approached nealiios to work on Betrayal in Antara.

 

[nealiios]

I wonder whether Sierra ever approached nealiios to work on Betrayal in Antara.

I can categorically tell you no, they did not. I was already long gone by the time Antara happened.

 

[Neanderthal]

Just finished BaK, some o them fuckin riddles, worst one were about someat goin along wi a wagon, took me three days to work out it were "noise." I feel exhausted, satisfied an a bit disappointed its over, like after a good long ard screw in summer. One o best games o all time, thats for fuckin sure. Never could get them mercs up near Northwarden to tell me how they fight goblins, bit pissed off about that.

 

[Severian Silk]

Has anyone seen a demo of what the combat is going to look like in this game? This is probably going to make or break it for me, since I quit BaK due to the cheesy looking combat.

 

[nealiios]

Has anyone seen a demo of what the combat is going to look like in this game? This is probably going to make or break it for me, since I quit BaK due to the cheesy looking combat.

If you're referriing to Remastered, then no, no one has seen anything because that part hasn't been built yet, and won't be for many months. I can say, however, is that if you didn't like the combat in BAK, then you won't like it in Remastered either. I will probably be dropping the combat puzzles (or drastically changing them), but otherwise I'm sticking with the isometric, turn-based combat.

 

[Mustawd]

To be fair he might be referring more to the look rather than the mechanics or execution of the combat.

 

[Severian Silk]

I am referring to the combat graphics. Is the remake going to feature an isometric view? Because the original did not.