Daniel Vávra spent some time at Digital Dragons discussing how he went about designing an historical open world RPG.

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Designing historical open world RPG

Dan Vávra is one of the most recognizable Czech game developers. His career started at Illusion Softworks and he first worked on Hidden and Dangerous as a 2D artist and then become director and writer on Mafia series. Since 2011 he is a creative director at Warhorse Studios which just released realistic medieval open world RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance – one of the most successful crowdfunded games so far. The game sold one million units in first week.

Speech description: Dan will speak about our approach to storytelling in open world, how the historical accuracy and realism affects our design choices and about the historic context of our game – how accurate are we actually.

A blog post from Daniel Vavra of Warhorse Studios talks about AAA development.

CHECK YOUR PEOPLE

Filed in Developers' diary by Dan @ 3:08 pm UTC Mar 19, 2012

HOW TO MAKE CALL OF DUTY KILLER FOR LESS

So, how many people do you need to make a triple-A game? In the last century it was anywhere from one nerd, to “big” teams of 15 to 30 pizza-eating individuals in a garage. I remember my reaction, when I saw Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge for Atari ST, back in the days when games were made by two people – a programmer and the guy who did everything else – while Daley was done by a team of five and the graphics were completely digitized. My first thing thought was: “Oh boy, nobody needs artists anymore, the good old days are gone...”

Luckily, I was very wrong. At the time.

A few years later, during high school, I worked on an Eye of the Beholder like game. It was just me and two coders. Later we worked on an Elder Scrolls Arena clone. The programmer was 14 years old, and did awesome work on the engine side. Neither game was ever finished, we were just naive students with zero funding, working on them in our spare time, but even the big games were developed by just a few people in those days. Just look at the credits – Doom was developed by ten people, the first Elder Scrolls or Duke Nukem 3D by 15 developers and those were the biggest games.

These were the days I started in the games industry. I didn’t like the change from small garage teams to big professional software houses. But I didn’t have a clue just how wrong my definition of “big professional software house” was. If only I knew what was to come...

Later, I worked on a big open world multiplatform 3D game, one of the first of its kind. A huge project that combined several genres in one and had an insane amount of assets, game mechanisms and everything. We were making a racing game, adventure game, shooter and extremely long animated movie at the same time. We were developing all of the technology as we went along, the team members were around 21 years old on average. But we were still able to do it within a very reasonable budget and less than 30 core developers. These were the good old days.

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Warhorse Studios Dan Vavra was at GDS 2014 and gave a presentation about Practical Game Design. I missed the first two parts so here is the latest video in English.

This talk is sequel to the last year talk and will be about everything that game designer have to challenge, when his godly design document starts to be transformed into a reality. From little technical issues, discussion with programmers, to writing 1000+ pages long document and still remain sane.