Stay Awhile and Listen: How Two Blizzards Unleashed Diablo and Forged a Video-Game Empire
by David L. Craddock
“We had a great game experience, but it was also enormously stressful because neither one of us wanted to be the one to lose the first game of WarCraft.”
In September 1993, a storm raged through Silicon & Synapse. Programmers pounded away at code, artists colored in pixels, and co-founders Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime discreetly plugged up holes in their sinking ship with funds from bank accounts bordering on empty. Pat Wyatt sat in the center of the tempest. Silicon & Synapse still needed contract jobs to keep the bills paid, but they also needed to make headway on WarCraft, the company’s fantasy-themed, real-time strategy game and the first in what Allen envisioned as a long line of games. Until Allen could free up more programmers, Pat would work on the RTS alone.
Pat cleared his plate and started work on the under-the-hood tech that would breathe life into WarCraft. Battles would unfold across maps too large to load into memory as one gigantic spread, so he wrote routines that clicked the maps together tile by tile, like puzzle pieces. To view the entire map, he added the ability to scroll around by moving the mouse to any edge of the screen. Next, he wrote procedures to process commands received from the mouse and keyboard.
With the game’s backbone mostly in place, Pat stared at his screen, wondering what to do next. On every other project he’d worked on, he had been a junior engineer, a grunt who got paid to follow someone else’s design. Realization dawned, making him giddy. He was the only programmer on WarCraft. He had carte blanche. There was no design plan other than to clone Dune II‘s formula — gather resources, build an army, destroy opponents — and then add multiplayer. WarCraft was his to define.
Keyed up, Pat thought about pulling an artist to draw a few soldier units he could experiment with, but they were buried under other projects. He cracked into Dune II and exported troops into WarCraft to use as stand-ins. Now, he needed a way to select units in bunches using the mouse.
Dune II only allowed you to select one unit at a time. That felt like a crippling limitation when you were trying to manage tactical combat for a bunch of units. Maneuvering them one at a time was a real drag.
Also, there was no formation logic where you could say, “Okay, all you guys go here,” and the units would move together as a group. They would all do their own thing instead of doing what you wanted.
-Pat Wyatt, programmer, Silicon & Synapse
Before joining Silicon & Synapse, Pat had used drafting programs to design cellars for his dad’s wine cellar business. Those programs let users click and drag the mouse to catch multiple screen elements in a rectangular box. The intuitive click-and-drag method seemed a natural fit for rounding up troops in WarCraft.
With all the necessary code in place, Pat ran the embryonic game and pressed a few keys. Units appeared like raindrops on a windshield.
After I got the pathfinding working, I probably spent two whole days selecting units and saying, “Go there!” It actually proved useful because I was able to debug pathing problems and understand how units moved together.
But it was so much fun moving all those units. They looked like little pebbles rolling along in a river. It was this fascinating confusion of motion, and it was all something I had created.
-Pat Wyatt
The sight of his massive attack force charging around at his command inspired Pat to add deeper tactical options.
In Dune II, you would say, “Move over there,” but while the unit moved, it would get attacked on the way; it wouldn’t fight back, and it would show up to the destination nearly dead.
If you do a “move” command for a unit in WarCraft or StarCraft, the unit will move to the destination to the exclusion of anything else going on around it. But if you click “attack” and then click on the ground, the unit will move to its destination, but if it discovers other units, it can attack along the way it will attack them.
-Pat Wyatt
Stu Rose had been the first artist on the project, starting almost neck-and-neck with Pat Wyatt. His first task was to write up a design document, a guidebook that established the game’s vision and gave the team a point of reference as they created levels, gameplay mechanics, story elements, and the technology that powered the game.
I took some initial ideas that Allen had, and ideas Ron Millar had about scenario designs, and pretty much fleshed out a lot of the names. I was pulling names out of my… uh, out of different orifices. “I think I’ll call this Stormwind Keep!” I drew up the original map for [the Human kingdom of] Lordaeron.
-Stu Rose
Artists gradually finished up the contract work that paid the bills and threw their weight behind WarCraft. Samwise Didier, who had cut his teeth creating artwork for The Lost Vikings and Rock ‘n Roll Racing, had a penchant for doodling fantasy characters that were heroic in proportion and cartoonish in design during company meetings. Allen pegged Sam’s unique style as the artistic vision for WarCraft‘s two factions: the Humans—a mix of Archers, Knights, and Conjurers; and the Orcs—clans of Warlocks and beasts such as the Grunt, a foot soldier with tusks as sharp as his axe.
We started out trying to make things more realistic. But in the game, the realistic stuff was thin and tall and just didn’t look powerful. So we started squashing the characters so they looked better from the camera angle, and it just turned out that they looked cool and mighty.
So we just stuck with that look on all of our games.
-Samwise “Sammy” Didier, artist, Blizzard Entertainment1
The original WarCraft: Orcs and Humans, released in 1994, was a humble start to what would become one of the most recognized franchises in gaming. Image: Blizzard
Although Allen Adham was a Blizzard co-founder and the guiding force behind design, his word was not law. When talk turned to how players should produce units, the team deliberated between two options. The first followed Dune II‘s methodology: select the appropriate building and click the unit to produce. Allen and Ron Millar favored option two: rather than let players have control over unit production, various units would randomly pop out of buildings.
A company-wide battle over unit production broke out.
When Allen and Ron went away to CES, Stu [came into my office and said, "Pat, we've got to talk. This is what we need to do." He laid out a plan for how unit creation should work.
I worked over the weekend to finish it before Allen and Ron returned. Come to think of it, I worked every weekend.-Pat Wyatt
I was really big about making sure the pace of the game was set to the point where the player always had something to do. I didn't want players to feel out of control of the situation. They had to have a vested interest in their build choices: "This is my choice to build something, so I want to build a Peon."
Being at the whims of fate can be really frustrating, and that's something I didn't want anywhere near WarCraft.
-Stu Rose
When Ron and Allen returned, they played the game, discovered Stu's bold change, and agreed that control over unit production made the game more fun. At Blizzard Entertainment, fun trumped all other considerations.
One afternoon, Pat Wyatt slipped a floppy disk into a fellow programmer's computer and copied the IPX packet driver, the traffic cop that directed information back and forth between computers engaged in a game, onto the disk. Then he walked over to his computer, dumped the data, mashed it all together into a complete version of WarCraft, and handed a copy of the prototype game code over to fellow programmer Bob Fitch.
Bob compiled the code. WarCraft roared to life on his screen. On the main menu, the multiplayer option lit up. Pat raced back to his desk, fired up his game, and connected to Bob's computer. The screen went dark, then a preliminary base appeared—a town hall and a few Peons, worker units that the player used to harvest resources and construct buildings.
WarCraft was online.
Grabbing his mouse, Pat ordered one Peon to build a farm and sent the other three into the mine to harvest gold. In the background, drums thundered ominously. Pat felt his pulse quicken as he dragged the mouse cursor around the screen. He didn't know what Bob was up to, and Bob had no idea what Pat was building in his little corner of the map. That's what made the match such a rush.
We played for probably 20 minutes or so, building barracks and attacking each other. Then the game crashed. I ran into Bob's office and said, "That was freaking awesome!" And Bob said, "Yeah, that was epic! And I was kicking your ass!" And I said, "No way, I was kicking your ass!"
We had a great game experience, but it was also enormously stressful because neither one of us wanted to be the one to lose the first game of WarCraft. Playing against a human was way, way more stressful than playing against the computer.
It was just this magic moment because it was so invigorating to play against a human and know that it wasn't some stupid AI. It was a player who was smart and doing his absolute best to crush you. I knew we were making a game that would be fun, but at that moment I knew the game would absolutely kick ass.
-Pat Wyatt
1As quoted in "Samwise: That Blizzard Magic." Blizzard Entertainment. February 2001.
Stay Awhile and Listen: Book 1 is available now on Kindle, Nook, and iTunes e-reading platforms and apps.
from Digg Top Stories http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/10/stay-awhile-and-listen-book/?cid=co13879964
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