 |
|
| A TREASURE OF A CD |
If you have curiousity, courage and love beauty and mystery, and have the fortitude to invade the tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi, first Emperor of China (3 B.C.), about whom foreboding rumors flow, this digital adventure is for you.
Through the power of the computer, the tomb of the first Emperor of China is revealed in a handsomely rendered compact disc. Luyen Chou, President of Learn Technologies Interactive, returned to the land of his birth to seek out the roots of the legend first told to him by his father. As a child, he was held entranced with the marvelous stories of Qin Shi Huanghi, the man who built the Great Wall of China and buried a ceramic army of thousands of foot soldiers to protect the treasures he seized. Unifying the tribes of the great nation of China in the third century B. C., Qin is the subject of many folk tales.
Chou's father, a professional musician, went with his son on a pilgrimage to the province of Shanxi, China. There they heard the stories of the ruthless supression of the people during the Qin's reign and how he entombed a full-sized replica of his army to guard his treasures and his reputation.
Luyen Chou, searching for a theme around which to build an interactive CD, immediately chose the story of Qin. It is this colorful tale that is the basis of the strategy game, Qin, Tomb of the Middle Kingdom. Using computer graphics rendered with accuracy and precision, Qin returns the player to the location of the burial site to face the challenge of unearthing the concealed treasures of the catacomb.
If you recall seeing the rows and rows of stone soldiers in the burial site, you will remember what curiousity the site evokes. In this program, you are invited to journey to Lishan, China for a digital adventure. Imagine yourself an archeologist commissioned to excavate this tomb, given the opportunity in the 2010 A.D., to recover the glorious artifacts buried with the Emperor. Through a series of puzzles and pitfalls, and helped by maps, a glossary and translating encyclopedia, your mission is to uncover the cache hidden in five locations.
GS. Hello. Luyen. It is great to have you here. I have been wanting to ask you some questions since I first heard about Qin.
The subject you have chosen (The Tomb of Qin Shi Huang) is an historic one which presents some evocative images. It also has strong educational potential. What was your vision that convinced you it would be a great subject for a compact disc?
LC. My professional background is in K-12 educational technologies. I spent the five years prior to founding Learn Technologies developing software for schools, and teaching history to high school students. One of the things I have always been interested in is figuring out how to make the study of history more of an adventure -- which is really the way most professional historians view their discipline.
After we founded LTI, we began thinking about what sort of software we would like to bring to market. Several of us were enamored with Cyan's Myst at the time. I remember asking my father to take a look at this new game. My father is, among other things, a composer, and a China scholar. Though he is a self-described Luddite, he immediately understood the possibilities represented by Myst. His only complaint, however, was: "Why isn't it about something real?" His contention (dating back to when I was playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading Tolkien) was always that real history is more interesting than anything pure fiction can conjure. It was his idea to focus our development on Qin Shi Huangdi's tomb, and in fact, many of his own books and collected artworks served as the initial inspiration for our research efforts.
GS. With the doors to China restricted, did the political situation effect your research?
LC. Not really. Most of the research was done right here in New York. In fact, the doors really aren't closed. My father is in China at least two or three times a year, and regularly brings back books and other materials. We didn't need to actually visit the site itself because there was such good documentary materials covering the tomb and the emperor. Interestingly, while we've sold over 50,000 copies in the US during the first two months, our biggest sales, in volume, are to mainland China. Talk about coals to Newcastle!
GS. The Emperor Qin apparently thought that he could take his worldly goods with him to the next world and in order to protect them from grave robbers, it is said he ordered the death of all those who worked on the tomb. Did this ever give you pause? Did the folk tale ever manifest while you were working on the project?
LC. It is hard to separate myth from reality when it comes to Emperor Qin. We would like to think that he was more benevolent than he is typically depicted as being, and that he in fact >rewarded< all those who worked on the tomb (including the virtual one we've all worked on). One of the benefits of historical revisionism.
GS. How did you conceive of the interactivity (gaming) aspects of entering and examining the tomb?
LC. Several people played key roles in defining the interaction. Chris Pino, the line producer, moderated dozens of design meetings during which we slowly storyboarded and diagramed the site and the puzzles. Abigail McEnroe, the art producer, drew up literally hundreds of storyboards and sketches, which she hung from fishing line from the ceiling so we would look at them wherever we walked in the office. Laurent Stanevich, the company's chief interaction designer, worked on everything from the "cursor float" model, to puzzle design, to room navigation models, to the DataVisor (encyclopedia, maps, interpreter). Arne Jokela and Leslie Horovitz fleshed out the story based on our design discussions. Arne also put together detailed specifications for the interactions in each room view, and led the scripting team as they actually built the program. The engineers in Dallas had lots of input into what was feasible and not feasible; and because they are all gamers, lots of input into what was desirable and not desirable. Michael Hoffman worked with Arne on implementation of the interaction model, and also the wonderful interactive soundtrack for the game. All in all, it was a tremendous team effort.
GS. The CD, Qin, uses the particpant as the prime mover in the formulation of the game. How did you go about customizing the topic to make it attractive to the widest possible audience?
As the producer of a project with 1,300 images -- first let me ask you -- did you start out with the idea that there would be so many or did they simply become necessary as the disc developed?
LC. I'd like to say "yes", but that wouldn't be completely true. Qin was our first adventure game product (and our second product as a team). We did some early estimates about number of images, views, nodes, etc. But we really didn't know until well into the development process. By the time we had detailed schematic maps of the game space, we had a real good idea of the resource count, but of course, once everything was scripted together we had to fix all sorts of problems with the flow of the game and navigation. France Israel and Chung Ma Son at View by View in San Francisco did a terrific job of just cranking out images. We probably used a tenth of what was rendered over the course of development, choosing so that we could create the best flow possible.
GS. In your capacity as producer, how did you organize such a formidible task? (I can think of at least six or seven ways you might have done it):
> a.
Chronologically.
> b. The easiest first to enable the technicians to
acclimate themselves to the project and to working together.
> c.
According to the talent: the manner in which the talent was assembled and
available at the time.
> d. Starting with the most complex with a view
to completing all units simultaneously.
> e. Depending upon equipment
availablity.
> f. Costs of implimentation as a guide to
scheduling.
> g. The sequence was built using the priorities of which
images were already completed.
This was really overseen by Chris Pino and Abby McEnroe. What we did for the most part was to get representative sample images for each "realm", then focused on a realm by realm approach which paralleled our scripting efforts. As we scripted and finished the plaza and palace, images would start coming in for the undercroft and garden, and so on.
GS. The games aspect is so integrated with the subject matter that it seems you might have built it frame by frame rather than laying down the pathways and imposing the puzzles and hindrances on top of them. What took precidence, the world or the player's interaction?
LC. We actually did try to impose an order to the chaos early on by drawing world maps and interaction specifications. However, there was a tremendous amount of tweaking at the end in order to get it to "feel" right. Development was very "iterative", which is nerve-wracking from a project management standpoint, but advantageous from a design standpoint.
GS. Was the original concept of having clues in the sound and game clues in the map of the territory part of the original plan?
LC. Yes. In fact, we wanted to have more of these than we ended up with.
GS. The navigation is accomplished by four way directional travel which meant there needed to be at least four branches for each image. Did this technique make the programming easier or more complex?
LC. Certainly easier than providing complete freedom of movement a la Doom. However, it was necessary, not so much from a programming standpoint, but from an asset management standpoint, to limit the choices in this way since the emphasis in this game is on the quality of the images and the visual detail. If you stand still looking at a wall in Doom, you see a bunch of giant pixels that convey no information. To combine the freedom of motion in Doom with the detail of Qin, you would need at least DVD-sized media, and ten years to do all the asset production.
GS. What was the most significant thing you learned when putting this together?
LC. Hard to say. Probably the most significant lessons were all about team interaction and personal relations. You get to be like a crowded nuclear family when you work the kind of long hours we worked to get this thing out. It takes a lot of determination not to want to kill one another. Thank god games like Doom and Marathon exist so we >could< kill each other on a regular basis without extracting any real blood.
GS. What advice would you give writers wanting to write for interactive media?
LC. Get really familiar with the medium. Writing for interactive media is totally different from writing for linear media. You need to be a real product head before you can begin to get in this business, or you'll end up writing stuff that is completely incompatible with the exigencies of this wacky new medium.
GS. Thank you, Luyen. We'll be sure to checkout the on-line sample of Qin, Tomb of the Middle Kingdom.
© Gloria Stern 1996
