Alien RPG - Forum Snippets

J.E. Sawyer has made some nifty comments about their work on the Alien RPG at the Obsidian forums:

Things are going pretty well, but please understand that we're still very early in development. The game is many months off and we're still doing a lot of prototyping/core technology development. The design staff is refining a lot of early work on the project right now. Chris Avellone is the Lead Creative Designer on the project and he has been helping develop our dialogue tool and banter system. We want something that feels "natural" in flow and delivery but still gives the player a great deal of control and good options to take relationships in different directions. Paul Boyle joined us a couple of months ago as our Lead System Designer. Paul previously worked at Maxis on Sims titles and on Spore. He's been working a lot with me on our core system designs. We have good arguments discussions on ideas and he has been building a top-down 2D prototype for our tactical combat systems which is giving us great data on interface and AI/pathing issues. It's also allowing us to do rapid iteration on the crunchy numerical aspects of the game. Finally, Mike Stout joined us from Insomniac as our Lead Level Designer. He worked on several Rachet & Clank titles and as the Lead Multiplayer Level Designer on Resistance: Fall of Man. Mike is working with the art team to develop our level pipeline and establish building metrics. He's also been doing research on different types of non-linear games to see how they handle various aspects of revealing areas, opening up quests, scaling difficulty, etc.

As for me, I'm re-learning Flash to implement several prototype interfaces. The last time I had anything to do with Flash was when I made this. Yay!

Thanks, dowon.