Of the many hats David Bowman wears, he enjoys his role as game designer role best. After a long period of working with cutting-edge developer Bungie Entertainment's RTS Myth, he was drawn to work with a relatively new player on the gaming scene at that time, Massively Multiplayer games. Preferring the small, independent developer scene, David joined Turbine's Asheron's Call live team, eventually becoming Lead Designer. When Turbine ran into some financial trouble, Bowman stepped up. "They built a game, now they had to build a business. I decided to help out there, and we were able to get some deals negotiated. I moved from design into a Vice President role while I was there. I ran the Asheron's Call live events for 13 months, and learned a lot about how to do live processes, and what not necessarily to do from the development point-of-view. I also had a hand in the pre-production of Asheron's Call 2, didn't necessarily agree with where that was going, and started looking around the industry for a new technology. Jeff Anderson came in for Turbine, an excellent financial decision for Turbine... he's a great businessman, but I wanted to do something different."
David Bowman
Which brought Bowman to Artifact Entertainment's doorstep. He had the expansive skillset the small-budget developer needed, and, to Bowman, they had the right ideas for back-stage technology. David was hired in June 2001 to work on Horizons: Empire of Istaria, which was due to launch that November. However, citing some painful business and personnel decisions (Bowman and now-Auto Assault Producer Steve Snow were the only two people working on the project that had actually "shipped"- developer parlance for developer producing a commerically-viable product, the industry-equivalent of a Mafioso "made man"), the game went gold two years later than intended. "I would say that it should have been three years, but because of business goals and the industry we're in, because of our situation we shipped the game. And we've been working ever since to fix that situation... We thought we'd be where we are today much earlier, but we reduced our staff dramatically through this whole business process. We have our core team now; they're tight, they're focused. They're seasoned now, and we're doing a lot of good things with them. But our technology has stopped being the thing that has stopped us from really progressing. Until recently, we've been trying to clean up some of the decisions we made in the technology, client side especially... but now it's time to make the game. Now it's time to really emphasize the lore, the stories, the quest, the environment. Peter is really the first step in all of that."
Enter Peter S. Beagle, an iconic figure among modern fantasy authors and perhaps best known for his masterful meld of lore, wit, and wisdom in The Last Unicorn. I talked with Peter Beagle at length about his work, and though he has a handle on the lore, he's not quite sure what his role will be with the Horizons team. Turning to David Bowman for some insight:. "We've got a long-term contract, and it's an extensible agreement- if it's working for everyone, we're going to keep this going forward. Peter's piqued by this new way to express himself. Our current team is skilled at creating an experience, but their medium is not text. So I've been looking for someone that's not only a fantasy author but also someone who has movie, or especially, television experience. Peter's done all that. Brian Green, who's done Meridian 59, helped introduce us. It was just a really nice coming-together."
"We've given him all the lore that we have, both in-game and out-of-game. We told him where we wanted to go with the story, what we wanted to do with sort-of our sub-arcs... so he's sort of soaking in that right now, it's sort of pre-production for him. What we're hoping will come out of this: he'll help us re-write some of the lore that's out of game and make it available in-game, help us improve the writing and the presentation-style of existing dialogue and content, some of our dialogue is way wooden and empty; we want to improve that. One of [Beagle's] best strengths is the ability to create dialogue from the perspective of a character that fits that character. You feel like your reading stories from all kind of writers, and no, it's just Peter... We want to breathe life into a lot of the world, we've been waiting to do this. Now it's time to do it."
Games like Asheron's Call used published fantasy authors to make live events more, well, livable and enjoyable. Could we see something like this with Horizons? "Peter is interested in maybe taking a persona and bringing it into the game world. I'd love to have players have a chance to actually meet some of Peter's characterizations, as sort of a real-time acting experience. We've been working to make him more accessible to people [through events like GenCon] and we'd like to make him accessible to the playerbase."
To what extent Peter Beagle becomes a real-time fixture is yet to be determined, and seems largely dependent on Peter's comfort with Tulga's software tools. From my limited experience behind the curtain of the gaming industry, I've realized that a producer must create a fluidity between art, game design, and programming assets. How does this work with a writer who's dubbed himself "a pothole on the information superhighway"? "We've not just contracted Peter, we've contracted his whole team [Conlan Press]. They've proven themselves to be skilled at working with Peter and helping Peter be successful. Peter's a genius, they're the business... I think we're walking a tightrope of exploration, if we go too far this way or that way, we'll miss our opportunity." But, referring to Beagle's versatility, Bowman noted: "I think with Peter we're working with more of a balance beam than a tightrope. We've broadened our chances of success."
So what does this mean, short term? "We've got about 6 months of new material lined up. We would like to avoid dumping it on the players: bam! here's new monsters, bam! here's a new experience. We like to introduce things through player-interaction and through story-line. He's helping us prep some element of this... he might pull us in a direction we might not have gone before... There have been promises made by the box, by the publisher, by the game. We need to fulfill them. We introduced dragon lairs on Thursday, they're a fulfillment of our promise to let dragons create in the world."
And what promises are yet to be fulfilled? "There's a war. The Withered Aegis leading the undead forces, bringing the war to players. But it doesn't feel like a war; it feels like a series of conflicts. We're going to be focusing on fulfilling the war for the playerbase. And once we've done that, I'll feel like we've met all our promises to the playerbase. And to wrap around that experience: we have confectioner as a school in the game, it's not complete. That will be wrapped up very shortly; I can safely say by the end of January it'll be in place... We're not making any new promises until we've fulfilled these. And once we've got these down, we've got a lot of plans."
