making the link interactive . . .

http://www.darkslayers.com/deep6/thumbs/

-Sazerac

Nice!
Are these all locations that haven't made the final release of the game?
Frustrating too, to see there is so much more in the game than we can see, and being unsure there will be a sequel.
But I'm afraid that begging mr Bradley to e.g. enable multi-player again won't do any good.

I totally re-did the Crypt and the Snake Temple.

The Crypt I made, well, look like a crypt. It was much tighter, more eye-catching. There were some cool places, like instead of the "elevator" to the mummy, it had a spiral staircase that dropped down from the floor in pieces. The whole complex was set up so that it hinted at a much larger burial ground, but several cave-ins prevent passage way there. The Urns/Two Pathways is totally different now. It was even set up to have the secret 3rd path, which was for only the thief class to find (this was removed from the level that is in the official game). The "Asylum" area is no longer in there. While the mad scientist is there, the asylum was originally made as a test deathmatch level way back when. If this new crypt was going to be in the game, that asylum area was going to be made into sewer network which was going to be under one of the towns (sorta the way Bard's Tale did it).

The Temple overhaul was again more precise like the Crypt. It actually had sleeping quarters, both for the Acolytes and nice ones for the Priests. The Priestess even had a master bedroom, with a small bath/waterfall (which has a secret door behind it). The official way to enter was by placing a gold coin into the snake idol which is now in the front room, next to the front door. The secret area that had Kerah's Statue was more elaborate -- it hinted at the idea that the snake temple was once a temple to Aneaphas, with sandstone walls and hieroglyphics. There was even a cool overlook, where once the priests threw their victims into the snake's mouth, they could over look the Naga eat'em up

The Town was a thing I did for kicks, b/c I had so much fun playing Thief. It combined parts of the new crypt with the all of the new temple, plus a new facade/front gate into a small slice of medeival urban-ia

I got the impression no one bothered to even look at these levels until a whole year had passed and Activision was about to publish WW, which is too bad; it would have made those first few levels more exciting and look less dated (well, I'm tired of square hallways, that's all I have to say).

Funny thing is, maybe it didn't matter, b/c everytime I suggest showing some things off from the game that didn't make it or discussing some of the background, almost no one seems interested. So, perhaps it wasn't a big deal that the game came out late and looked dated.

alz

What a pity! What a sad pity they never made it in there. However, this does clear up some confusion as to why there's an asylum in a crypt. It's great having insider "scuttlebutt" on what was going on during development.

Any chance those designs could be worked into an add-in?

-Sazerac

Not sure if they'd make it into an add-on (if there will even be an add-on). The levels fine-tuned to match all the same puzzles in the previous versions, so you'd either have to radically change the levels, or have the exact same puzzle set up (or more noticeably, same pace and relatively same layout and relationship of rooms).

While it wouldn't be considered new material, I would love to see a W&W gold box set that swaps out the old levels for these levels, with multiplayer turned on If there was enough interest and the process of swapping out all the trigger/activation/event points were not too tedious, I'd change the levels myself. But I'm not sure what's going on at HPI right now, so I'm not going to try asking at this point.

Well, regardless of whether they make it into a re-release or not, I for one would love to hear more about the inside "dope" on what was going on with HPI and Wizards and Warriors. The game is still great, IMO, but it would be really nice to see what it could have been. So please, do continue posting information her, Alzagor! I know I'm interested, and quite a few others probably are too, but are just lurking.

If there's not enough interest, e-mail me at bignord@lycos.com and we can talk about it offlist.

Thanks,
Sazerac

Actually I am interested too! And more than from a gamers standpoint.

I have done testing, project management, and product management for sfotware utilities companies and a few others but I have never had the opportunity to work with a gaming company so it would be great to hear what it is like to develop a game like this.

Also, working with Activision can be frustrating at times. One company I was with did kind of a preview/OEM thing with them for a release and while some of the people there were great others were under so much pressure that they kind of took it out on other people.

Anyway, you can post a general list here, or if you want I can give you my private e-mail and you can contact me directly.

Alz

Thank you for sharing! Please show more stuff if you have it!

Scronan

Heyo,

Yeah, game development and an awful place to work *laughs*
Very stressful with long hours (I work 50-80 hrs a week), with little monetary reward (most people are lured in with promises of bags of money from royalties, enough to purchase a car or a down payment on a house). But on the flip side, it can be a very creative environment. I'm working on Aliens vs. Predator 2 right now and had to just scrap all of my past years work in favor of a new direction, which is good for the game, but damn... why'd I spend all those weekends working, when I didn't really have to?

Hey here's a tidbit -- I was trying to slip in some Highlander references into Wizards. I was going to make a Scottish Highlander and a Ramirez-type character, but never had the time (or programming assistance) to take it that far. There is a Ramirez model in the game, however. If you can look past the character skin and animation on the Pirate, you'll find it matches Ramirez's outfit!

Most of the levels were designed by 3 guys (me included). DWB laid out the crypt and the mines, but not sure what else. I did the top half the first snake temple -- there was a lot more in there that didn't make it, like a second story above the torture room which had sleeping quarters and the priestess' chamber. The top and lower half of the temple were originally going to be 2 levels, but since they had to be incorporated into one level, all the trim and fancy detail on the upper half was dropped. That "monster slot machine" room next to the "monkey vending machine" room was going to be this elaborate laboratory (now it looks like a storage room).

Most of the secret rooms I put in my levels were wired up to be required ares to explore. Which (to me atleast) defeated the purpose of them being bonus areas. The whole attic of the temple as well as the lower sand tunnels under the Shrine (beneath the falling tile room) were designed to be freebees for those that took the time to explore the area.

The main levels I built up were the Mines, the Caves and the Shrine. I'm sure I've got the original layout specs somewhere around here! Be interesting to see how different they are now. I rushed through the mines and caves to get to the shrine, then unfortunately lost interest just before getting inside the shrine. The various interfaces me and another fellow did are interesting; probably have some screenshots of those somewhere.

Hi Alz

Man, and I thought my job was bad, well it is...but I do learn a lot and pay stinks to high heaven.

Aye, it would have been cool to see Highlander stuff, or maybe a "MacCloud Claymore" or something! The weapons seemed to be done hastily...I was kind of disappointed with them.

Hmm, sounds like you were the man with the ideas, and a lot of them weren't listened to. You know, I could see now why a sequel may not be made, sounds like things were pretty rough!

So, maybe you know, where is DWB these days? He seems to have vanished...do you think he'll make another in this genre?

Again, thanks for sharing!

Scronan

DWB's probably tinkering on some new submission/proposal for another game. Dunno if it'd be a Wizards sequel. Chances are it'll definately be some fantasy/RPG type game.

Concerning development woes:
I was really upset when they removed the 3rd person camera and the ability to split up your party. I suppose since the public had never seen Wizards in that way, it wasn't missed that much. But after playing it for several years and working over a year on PC animation and costumes, it was hard to just let it go. It was damn exciting watching the characters I built up from scratch tromp around the world on horseback or swim or shoot spells. Despite some pretty dynamic camera AI, I heard it was ultimately removed because the dungeon's weren't made to support the over-the-head camera with it's low ceilings. Of course I think this option should be left up to the individual player (and if those new levels were ever put in, it'd alleviate alot of this "low-ceiling" issue). What more than likely happened (I'm just guessing) is that the PCs were removed because over the system requirments. I think the engine was pushing a minimum of 72 MB of RAM just to operate with all it's bells and whistles (including the XX MB PC models with their 700x800something textures). A good way to cut that down is to just wipe those guys out. Probably should have gone with a skeletal based animation set rather than the single-mesh/vertex animation system, but at the time (1995), skeletal stuff just wasn't that impressive.

ramble ramble

Actually I am impressed that someone was willing to remove features in order to meet some requirements set up ahead of time. Often I have seen the requirements changed to meet the features and that the date and feature set will not slip so everyone is looking at 120+ hour weeks just to get the thing in a moderately usable shape.

If it is okay to ask... do the credits reflect the whole development staff or were there additional people that did not make it onto the credits?

>I was really upset when they removed the 3rd person camera and the ability to split up your party. I suppose since the public had never seen Wizards in that way, it wasn't missed that much. But after playing it for several years and working over a year on PC animation and costumes, it was hard to just let it go. It was damn exciting watching the characters I built up from scratch tromp around the world on horseback or swim or shoot spells.

Re this: First off, I am not very computer knowledgeable, so forgive me if I express a desire for something that is not possible. Before I played WW, I played Return to Krondor. It wasn't as long as I like a game to be and was fairly simple without much depth but I absolutely loved the battle options. I am not sure if you are talking about the ability to see and place your characters in battle but that is what I really did miss in this game - more than sleeping . I like to be able to protect certain characters when needed and allow my characters to be placed strategically, according to their skills and abilities.

Thanks for the link - that was very cool. And despite all the "I wishes" spoken, I still love my game.

RE: 3rd person combat.

There was an option to just "DEFEND" which meant your character would stand it's ground and only defend itself. This was removed when all the characters were phased into one "being" or location. I used the DEFEND option all the time when you were able to split your party up.

See the way Wizards was first wired up, all six of your characters were individual people *in* the world (so you saw all your characters in their glory (or disgust?) running around the levels, following whatever character you picked to move around the world with. So when combat took place, your party had a physical relationship to everything. You could line up your characters behind objects or other players to make sure they didn't get hammered by the monsters. Using DEFEND, meant they stood their ground and didn't move around if you picked one of your characters to charged the monsters with.

I would typically spend my time fighting with my lead character and have the rest of my party on "auto", so they'd do the last action/attack on the last monster I told them to. I'd be running around, swinging my sword (negating the turn-based-option by choice) and as I'm wacking on some evil priest, my party would be shooting arrows, slashing ghouls, or casting spells at the rest of the monsters. Verrrry cinematic in some aspects.

Then at some point, beta testers at Virgin said it was too hard to manage all 6 characters at one time. So, HPI squeezed all your characters into one location, having them phase in and out depending on who was currently active. However ... you still had the option to split your party up in groups, so you could have a group of 4 go one way and a group of 2 go another way. This still made it possible to split the whole party up into 6 groups, letting you see all your party members in the world at the same time.

But with the removal of multiplayer, and the "problems" with low ceilings and 3rd person cameras, the PCs were removed from the 3D world, and therefore the ability to split up your party, negating any way to place your characters in any sort of defensive position for combat. You were basically left with a "6-headed" character.

To remove this option to lower the requirements for the game was a quick and dirty solution. This was probably the only thing that could have been removed. Even then, I think the system requirements are too high. There was no way this game would have done any sales if released a year before and a XXX-pentium requirement with 64 MB of RAM. I'd take a guess and say the engine code is fairly dated and bloated for what it is.

RE: credits.
I believe everyone involved at HPI was listed on the one-page credits. You could say we almost had 2 teams. There was a period where we had some weird synergy and heaps of wonderful ideas emerged from the team. A lot of this overflowed into the NOX development -- when HPI was asked to the the graphics for NOX (before Westwood bought the rights to it and totally changed it), the team had several sessions with NOX's creator and carved out some fantastic game ideas.

But since development for Wizards was taking longer than expected with most of the remaining work focused on level design and programming, some of the team members left to do other gigs (a couple of them landed at Blizzard!). Then more people were hired and this sorta built up the 2nd team which did polish spots here and there on Wizards while graphics for sequels to UNREAL were being pumped out.

I'm not quite sure what the current team is over at HPI. It's too bad it took this long for Wizards to hit the shelves. I watched Quake come and go, with its sequels and several iterations of Tomb Raider pop up during the production of Wizards. Man, it'd be pretty wild if Wizards had come out when scheduled! You'd probably have just finished SWORDS & SORCERY 2 (that's what it was called back then) while we wrapped up S&S III for an X-MAS release [and all the cool ideas you guys have come up would probably be incorporated into the 2nd and 3rd one with new suggestion rolling into the 4th one]

It is pretty amazing that you guys were able to do this with that small of a team and that many changes in direction. I know there are problems with it and features that could be added but still... wow.

Are you no longer at HPI or just not on that team anymore?

I'm not at HPI anymore and all the original people are no longer there (except for DWB). Once in awhile I'm still tempted to go back, but at the moment, I want to finish a project and see the full cycle of development (I left a year before Wizards came out, because I had no interest in doing graphics for Unreal 2). I work at Monolith right now, but for a spell I was working at Sierra on Middle Earth Online (oh boy, and I thought only small companies made poor decisions! What Sierra in "cancelling" MEO was ... well they might as well just shoot themselves in the head and end it quickly).

Yeah Sierra is a little mixed up. They are the company that directed Dynamix to produce multiple versions of a Bass Fishing game.

Speaking of HPI (or any where else for that matter)... a friend of mine just got laid off. He is a Graphic artist and has done some UI work. Do you think there would be anyinterest. He is in LA and would pretty much want to stay here but might contract if he could work from home.

Well most game developers want people under the same roof. Just too much little stuff that can't be done if the people are spread out over several states. I don't think HPI is in any position to hire anyone right now -- however, it's quite possible that someone could get hired there with only a little experience, if the ball gets rolling again -- the demo reel has to be something tangible to the game developer environment. I can't tell you how many demo tapes I saw that were artsy-college reels and not samples of game mechanics at work.