Divinity 2 - Development Update

Swen Vincke gave a second update on the development of Divinity 2 and what is happening at Larian Studios.

Hello again everybody,

Time for a new update about how development is going and what exactly is going on at Larian.
First of all, we’re going gold next week ! And no, I’m not talking about Divinity 2 In parallel to the development of Divinity 2 we’ve had a new secret broadcaster game in development since last year, and that one is now ready. Broadcasters have different ways of marketing things which is the reason you haven’t heard about this one yet, but that’s soon going to change. It always gives me a nice feeling when we actually manage to put something on a CD that goes into retail. For the people working on a game that’s been in development for a long time, it shows there is light at the end of the tunnel and for the ones that just finished their game, it shows that all that stress and problem solving are ultimately worth it. For me, the best moments of being a game developer have always been seeing people play your game and having fun, and I guess that goes for most of the team here. So it’s cool to have something go gold, it also means we still know how to do it.

With regards to Divinity 2, there’s been a lot of progress since the last time I gave this update.
Our sound/art/animation departments are continuing to polish and get the final pieces of content in before they’ll be heading into an extensive post-production phase. A couple of things were fun to see – for a long time we’ve had a long list of areas and dungeons that were fairly empty as they weren’t populated with all kinds of sceneries and items. Now that these regions are getting the “placement” treatment, the world is really coming alive and you also start seeing all the more advanced graphical features being used by the artists. When looking at how some of those levels come together, you start getting the feeling of – “hey, this really is a game”. It’s all good and well knowing that RPG world building consists of placing layer upon layer of content, but actually seeing all those layers come together makes you feel a bit more confident in what you’ve been doing all along.

The same goes for everything which is coding related. For a long time, our programmers have been making system upon system upon system. One system for boosting items, another system for animating dialogs, another system for determining what will happen when you walk into a particular trigger etc… I think the number of gameplay features alone runs in the four digit numbers. Once these systems are finished people tend to forget about them until the content teams start actually using them to do their thing. That typically ends up in the system being revisited because this thing isn’t possible, or that was forgotten, but as more and more of these systems become operational, the feeling of “hey, this really is a game” increases dramatically.

A publisher once told me – “seeing is believing”. I remember answering, “yeah, sure, whatever, but this is an RPG we’re talking about and, “, thinking of the layer upon layer thing, “it’s going to take a long time before you’re actually going to see the game get together and it’ll even take longer before playing it will be fun”. It frightened the XXXX out of him and I could understand his fear, because what I was saying was that he was going to have to invest a huge chunk of money into something which he’d only know was any good a long time after the start of production.

He didn’t sign in the end, and I often have to think of him now that we’re in this phase. I think it’d be good for his understanding of RPG development that he’d see the magic that’s happening now. But it’s also good for us, because I have to confess that throughout development, we often had doubts if we were doing the right thing. RPGs are such monsters with so many components in them that just listing those components can be frightening. And when you’re making them, you realize that with each component you add, you’ve just added another opportunity to ruin everything. We still could for that matter, still have the little matter of balancing all those systems to take care of.

Anyway, “layers coming together” is probably the best way you can summarize the development that’s going on right now and as I said in the my previous update, I find it one of the coolest phases of development, despite everybody stressing about “how the hell are we going to get everything ready in time”

A few other things I’ve spotted in the studio:

-A small team of guys has been slaving over the user interface (to replace the thing you saw in the mockups) and they’re starting to get some cool results. Visually it’s a bit of a mix between the user interface from the first Divinity and more contemporary elements. I’m quite fond of it so I hope you all will like it too. Can’t give out any screenshots yet, but you’ll see it soon enough I think.

-We’re prepping ourselves for the voice recordings and subsequent animation work and I’ve had pity with the guys who have to prepare everything on the logistics side. There’s this one excel file containing around 131000 fields of data, and they have to make a plan for hiring actors and assigning voices to npcs out of that, preferably a plan that makes a lot of sense. It’s another one of those RPG specific things – there’s a lot of text, especially if you add in things like multiple solutions and choices, and each piece of text, with the associated event flags, is an opportunity for things to go awry.

-A lot of optimization and bugfixing work is going on on the engine. The engine programmers have this impressive looking graphs running on their screens showing frame rate and memory consumption over time, and it’s quite fun to go listen to them losing themselves in long conversations about why “where the XXXX does that memory think it’s going”. I think I mentioned it before, but the 360 thing is a really good thing for PC players. Memory consumption and frame rate are managed much tighter (because there is no choice) and it leads to a smooth feeling when playing it on PC.

-The first easter eggs are making it in too. There’s one in particular which will be interesting to explain to certain people, don’t know if we’ll be able to keep it in, but for sure it’s a world premiere in game development

-I’m soon off on another press tour so we’re preparing a build for that, and that always causes an extra layer of stress, as the general idea is that everything works more or less in a way that the game can be presented. No pink textures, no characters that are 2km tall instead of 2m tall and preferable something that can run smoothly without crashing. The designers have a hall of shame in their room which illustrates the biggest bugs we’ve encountered during development. I hope that once the game ships we’ll find time to release them here, it’ll give you an entire different view on Divinity 2.

-Been looking at pictures from the days when we made LMK and Divionity. First observation, I had a lot more hair back then. Second observation, there really were few of us compared to the amount of people working on the game now. For  Divinity we were only three programmers over the entire development as opposed to the twelve that’ve been working on Divinity 2. I don’t even want to start talking about the amount of artists. Third observation, knowing what I know now I think we could’ve made Divinity in half the time so there’s something to be said for experience. Fourth observation, knowing what I know now I might not have started on Divinity. Fifth observation, I wonder if we could’ve made Divinity 2 in half the time knowing what we know now. Sixth observation, if I start like this, I can probably go on for a long time, so it’s probably better to abandon this chain of thoughts.

-We're looking for cool ideas for the cover of the game. Suggestions are always welcome.

I’ll end this update with another thought about the layer upon layer thing. If you look at screenshots from games in development, you can actually spot where they are in development, or at least, where they were in development at the moment those screenshots were taken. Usually you get to see screenshots months after they were made. It occurred to me when browsing through the dragon screenshots that they already don’t correspond anymore with how things look on screen (I mean that in a good way). Those shots are particle light whereas current versions of dragon action are quite particle intensive, adding a whole different atmosphere. Or those interior shots we released at the time of the announcement. There are quite a lot of layers missing there and when you see it now, things are very different. Made me think if it’s actually a good idea to release any media before all layers are ready because first impressions are so important. Then again, that would probably mean no media before the game is ready, and that’s probably not a good thing too. But I wonder how many people judge a game on the first shots and then don’t look anymore. I know I made that mistake a couple of times, even with some very popular games which I subsequently didn’t buy right away, only to be surprised in a positive way afterwards. Something to think about.

Cheers

Lar