around, and I think Paul came down for a couple of days, and then Paul and I came back
up to Boston, and Paul, Austin, and I bounced some ideas around and came up with a
couple of little meta-settings. The abandoned spaceship or the abandoned moon base
kind of things. And frankly the most important thing that came out of all of that was Aus-
tin, Warren, Paul, and I wrote up a bunch of minutes of gameplay. Just sort of “Here’s
what a minute of playing this game is going to feel like.” You know, “You hear the sound
of a security camera swiveling, and then the beep of it acquiring you as a target, so you
duck behind the crate and then you hear the door open so you throw a grenade and run
out of the way...” We had acouple of little docs like that which Austin and I took and
revised. And in a lot of ways those became the game design. Obviously we put real
story around it and all that kind of thing. So that was pretty important forShock.
We kind of wanted to do something different with it.Underworldwas designed by a
screenshot that Doug Wike had done with Paul before Paul even hired any program-
mers. Doug was the artist who had worked on Paul’s older games and had worked at
Origin. Doug was the main artist onUnderworld. A guy named Carol Angell also did a
bunch of work in the second half of the project, but Doug was there at the beginning,
and he did this screenshot, which was a screen layout and a little twenty-frame anima-
tion of an orc walking down the hall at you and you swinging your sword. On some level,
whenever we had a design question onUnderworld, we would just pick up that
screenshot and go, “Well, I guess there’s a little ‘lips’ icon over there, I guess that’s how
you talk. OK, better write some code.” And obviously we had to make a lot of actual
design decisions about combat and game mechanics and spells and all that, but you
could still come back to that screenshot about how the game was supposed to feel. And
so forShockthe minute of gameplay served a very similar purpose.
OnUnderworldwe had stats and inventory and talking and movement, and inShock
we really wanted to unify that. I felt thatUnderworldwas sort of three different games
you played in parallel. There was the stats-based game with the experience points, the
inventory collecting and management game, the 3D moving around game, and there
was the talking game, the conversation branch game. And much as the world was very
low-fi, it was still way more hi-fi than any of the actual characters were. Branching con-
versation trees do not represent human interaction very well. Even worse than moving
a mouse around represents walking. So forShockwe really wanted to get rid of some of
that, and that’s whyShockhas the full-screen mode with the HUD. Everything was an
overlay; the auto-map was an overlay, the inventory was an overlay, and so on.
One of the reasons we wanted all the audio for the voice-overs was because the
whole idea of killing everyone on the station and then making all the people only acces-
sible through their data logs was that you could keep playing the game. You wouldn’t
have to stop to have a conversation or stop to read or stop to choose, you’d just be mov-
ing around and, if you wanted to, you could listen to a log from the person there and
they’d be describing a scene that had happened in this very room you were in. We felt
thatUnderworlddid a good job of exploring. You explored spaces, and people really
remembered the spaces, they talked about them, they’d been there. They’d say, “There
was that room where there was that fight between the trolls and the knights and there
was all that blood and that’s where I did this thing.” They had a very visual memory of
their exploration, and they had a very clear sense of exploring the inventories and what
you could do and pick up. So we wanted to make the plot and the story development of
Chapter 26: Interview: Doug Church 507