Back in 1998 or 1999, I was having lunch with Russ Nicholson at the Dumpling Inn in London's Chinatown. I'd been working at Eidos, a videogames publisher, and had written specs for three games: Plague (later renamed Warrior Kings), 2020 Knife Edge, and the Fabled Lands MMO that was destined to morph into Abraxas. Astounding as it may seem today, back then most publishers had no clue that game development is an iterative process that requires continual refinement of the design, and so it had been suggested to me that Eidos wouldn't have much for me to do until their internal teams had finished those three games. I disagreed, and my friend Nick Henfrey and I had given Eidos execs a detailed analysis of how development ought to work (pretty much how every developer does it now, but not in the '90s) but while waiting to hear if the message had got through I was trying to come up with a new project. Russ was also looking for something to work on, hence our brainstorming session over dim sum.
"What about a comic book?" suggested Russ. He didn't need to twist my arm. We both loved comics. Because Russ had worked out in Papua New Guinea and met quite a few tough engineering types, we came up with a scientist/archaeologist and his roustabout minder who are searching for the site of the Garden of Eden. They find two sets of weathered tree roots, which unknown to them are the remains of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. That night they get stoned and are forced to run for their lives when attacked by bandits. They run through some kind of interdimensional portal to another world. We follow the scientist character who arrives alone in a beautiful verdant landscape quite unlike the desolate rocky terrain he was camping in moments earlier. But it's a case of out of the frying pan, as a spear thuds into the ground by his foot and he realizes he's being hunted by the natives of this other world. I scribbled the notes as we ate.
Long story short, here was our surprise twist: the roustabout guy ran through the interdimensional rift a few seconds ahead of the scientist, but in this other world that meant he arrived ten years earlier. In that time he's made himself the warlord of the place. He has corrupted paradise. We were quite pleased with ourselves for dreaming that up, and remained so until Outcast came out a few months later and it turned out to feature the exact same idea. Under the sun there is no new thing, it seems. Oh well.
I didn't lament our Garden of Eden story for long. Outcast did it all so brilliantly that it's hard to imagine we could have topped that. In any case, I got drunk with another gaming friend, David Bailey, and after an all-night conversation over whisky we came up with the idea of asking Eidos to set us up as an independent development company. That became Black Cactus and although 2020 Knife Edge and Abraxas fell by the wayside, Warrior Kings finally shipped. In the world of game development, one out of three ain't bad going.
Since then we have lost Russ, sad to say -- two years ago tomorrow, hence this post. Black Cactus and Eidos are no more. Even the Dumpling Inn has gone. The grass withereth and the flower fadeth...
The realism versus playability debate has been going on for decades. Which is odd, because there aren’t really any games that err by being too playable. I can cite lots that are too realistic, though. There was the CRPG where you had to remember to restock on shoe leather. If you didn’t, your character would go “Ow!” every so often and lose a hit point. A long journey could kill you before you even got to the dungeon.
The same debate occurred long ago in movies and TV – although there it was “realism vs enjoyment”. Thankfully, the realists were beaten back into a tiny corner. Other than 12-hour Andy Warhol epics watching a flag flap on the side of the Empire State Building, visual narrative is free of realism. Arnie says, “Let’s go to Cairo,” and – alakazam! – there he is.
The guys at Pyro got it right when they talked about narrative games (like CRPGs) involving a contract with the player. It’s what happens all the time in movies when there’s a flashback. Sixty years ago, audiences needed a wash dissolve to believe it. Now you can play around with time using just an ordinary cut.
Why have realism at all? Well, take an example I used when designing my RTS Warrior Kings. Without any rules for supply in such a game, conquest works like infection. You can take a single worker behind enemy lines and build a massive base to attack from. That will lead to some pretty odd strategies if the game is set in the Trojan Wars.
But you don’t want real realism. Full-on true-to-life supply line rules can so easily lead to a player struggling against the game rather than against the other players. So you need to find a way that rewards the player if he does it right, but still allows him to ignore supply lines if he wants. One way to do that is to have injured characters automatically recover hit points if they’re in supply, for example, which is how I had it work in Warrior Kings. The player doesn't have to micromanage supplies, but they do get a bonus for not letting a force get cut off behind enemy lines.
Still, games aren’t movies. The whole point of a game is to give the player a hands-on experience. And sometimes that experience might be of inevitability. I played a wargame of the Cuban revolution. The government player couldn’t possibly win (Michael Corleone was right) but it was fun to see why they couldn't. Only games can do this. Which is why the debate will rage on. And there will always be a case to be made – even for shoe leather.
I finally got around to watching Stranger Things. After all the hype it came as a disappointment. I get that it's a pastiche of '80s movies, but I like my pastiches to be more than just familiar ingredients slung together and reheated. Nostalgia doesn't rule out putting something fresh in the mix. Think of Super 8, or even Fargo (season 1, obviously). Without the spark of originality, you might just as well be listening to greatest hits covered by a tribute band.
But I digress. I don't want to talk about 1980s, Stephen King, or pastiches in general. It's just that the Upside-Down in Stranger Things jogged my memory about a game concept I sketched out at Eidos in the mid-'90s. We needed a quick-n-dirty game (famous last words that have brought many a developer low, those) to show off Sam Kerbeck's cutting-edge 3D engine. It needed to be a realtime strategy game because that's what our game Plague, later renamed Warrior Kings, was. Sam happened to flip the landscape upside-down while showing off what it could do, and something in my brain put that together with the Aztec land of death.
We never got around to doing the game, as Eidos shut down internal development a few months later and Sam went off to do other things. His engine got used for another RTS game, Warzone 2100, but never in the freaky way I had in mind.
AZTECS
A variant on Plague set in pre-conquest Mexico, using the same engine and basic game design principles. It's anticipated that Plague will make quite a splash, and Aztecs will satisfy demand for follow-ups in the long wait for Plague 2.
Aztecs will however not be simply a copy of the original game swapped into a different setting. The Mesoamerican world is uniquely colourful. The architecture, costumes and imaginative mythology have rarely been used in computer games and merit a product that stands alone.
City management will be less intricate than Plague. This will be a game of warfare and keeping the gods happy.
All flesh is grass
Villages supply food. Food is not an explicit resource in the game as with Plague but is simply shared out to any units within range of your buildings. Rather than bothering with quantitative measures, you can tell how well the farms are doing by the landscape textures used: rich green if there's plenty of food, dusty scrubland if times are hard. Lack of food leads to loss of hit points; an excess is required for units to recover from injury.
As long as your people are healthy and well fed, new Aztec children continually appear in the School. You can pick these up and drop them onto other buildings, which will determine their fate in life. For example, a child dropped onto a Temple becomes a Priest, one dropped onto the War Lodge becomes a Soldier, etc.
Do it this way
Units are given orders through a (graphic) verb/adverb icon system. This means you can tell a unit to Attack (the verb) and just leave it at that, or you can go to the next level of icons to specify how the attack should be carried out: Aggressive, Balanced or Defensive (the adverbs). As with Plague, what you don't specify is left up to the individual unit's AI.
An eye in the sky
Your view is provided by a flying camera giving an eagle's-eye view of the world. You can fly the camera anywhere, but how much you get to see depends on whether you have any units nearby. Within range of a friendly unit, the camera can see enemy units and the condition of enemy farms and buildings. Outside this range the view enters the Fog of War; it becomes sepia-tinted, buildings appear stylized without hit point info, and enemy units freeze and gradually fade as if from a persistence of vision effect.
Trading in secrets
Merchants were notorious in the Aztec world for spying. This is reflected by allowing all players to have a clear view, free of the Fog of War, when within range of any player's Merchants. Thus the Merchant who increases your wealth by trading with another city will also allow you a clear view of that city's defences during his visit there but this advantage is a two-edged sword.
Discriminating views
View of enemy units is subjective. This reflects Aztec warfare, where experienced soldiers were needed to recognize details of enemy deployment. In the game, you can only distinguish the enemy's elite units (Eagle Lords, Jaguar Lords, Arrow Knights and Hummingbird Priests) if you have elite units of your own near at hand. Otherwise all the enemy's troops appear as generic soldiers and you won't know where the danger lies.
The flipside of reality
Slain units become Skeleton Warriors in the Underworld: a subterranean mirror-image of the living world, where mountains ridges become narrow defiles and vice versa. You view the Underworld by flipping the world around to see the underside. The Underworld is another front where you must fight wars, because the concentration of your Skeleton Warrior forces in the Underworld affects the power of your Wizards' magic in the world above. You have only very limited control of your Skeleton Warriors: you can order them to move, but once they get where they're going they'll just attack any other tribe's Skeleton Warriors that are nearby - even if the other tribe are your allies.
Open heart surgery
Morale is improved by human sacrifice, making it worth capturing foes and taking them back to your Temples. This also prevents the slain foes from becoming Skeleton Warriors in the Underworld, as well as earning you the favour of the gods. You can see this as a strengthening of the glowing aura around the shrine on top of the Temple, which is what your Priests draw on to cast their prayer-magic.
Visitors from heaven
Sometimes, when a Temple's aura is very strong, a Hero will emerge from inside it. These Heroes are beings sent by the god to aid you. They have special strengths in battle, magic, etc, depending on the god. (There are gods of Rain, War, Sun, Learning and Luck.) However, the main advantage of a Hero is that they can dreamwalk. This is essentially a way of setting up a long string of orders for the Hero to follow: a dream-self (Nahual) is created which you can run rapidly around the map, giving it a sequence of orders which it will remember. When the dreamwalk ends and the dream-self merges with the Hero's physical body, he carries out the orders you gave during the dreamwalk. This allows you to set up complex tactical patterns of attack and defence and hold them in readiness, waiting to awaken your Heroes at the moment of greatest need.
The nitty-gritty
There will be considerably fewer buildings and unit types than in Plague. The basic buildings featured in the game are:
Palace
School (spawns new units)
Ball Court (increases public contentment)
Skull Rack (each unit sacrificed adds a skull, boosting morale)
Market Plaza (stimulates trade)
Gladiator Platform (combatant is upgraded to veteran or killed)
Wizards' Tower
Priestly College
War Lodge
Temple (five types)
Canal
Well
Road
Causeway
Buildings concerned with resource production &/or processing:
Farm (can be set to produce food or cash crop)
Fishing village (produces canoes that can be seconded in wartime)
Quarry (supplies obsidian for swords and stone for buildings)
Mine (supplies gold)
Banner Maker (improves the commands you can issue to units)
Aviary (supplies Banner Maker)
Resources that the player is told about in detail:
Gold
Stone
Mana (decreases over time, but never below increasing limit based on total sacrifices)
Hidden resources that you have only qualitative control over:
Food
Cotton
Obsidian
Basic unit types:
Commoners
Merchants
Nobles
Priests
Wizards
Scouts
Swordsmen
Javelineers
And veteran units:
Eagle Lords
Jaguar Lords
Arrow Knights
Hummingbird Priests
Not all of those ideas would have made it into the finished game, of course. This is just a brainstorming pitch document to get the design process started. That's my favourite part of any project, incidentally, though I'm also willing enough to roll my sleeves up and keep toiling away to the finish line.
Jamie and I went to work at Eidos Interactive in late 1995. I don't even think it was Eidos yet - that was some kind of reverse takeover manoeuvre cooked up by Charles Cornwall to finagle ailing software house Domark into a big money-spinning confection. As he put it at the time, "It's a minnow swallowing several whales."
None of that made any difference to us developers. Jamie was hired to do level design on the Deathtrap Dungeon computer game, while Ian Livingstone asked me to design a SimCity-type management and building game set in medieval London, or something like London. The inspiration was Daniel Simpson's short claymation movie H, in which a mark in the form of the letterh appears on the hand of a medieval stonemason who is sculpting a gargoyle for a cathedral. The stonemason is branded a heretic - or something else beginning with h - and burned at the stake We decided to call the game Plague, happily having talked Ian out of calling it P.
After struggling with economic models and architectural plans for a few weeks, I saw Ian in the corridor brandishing a copy of Warcraft 2 that he'd brought back from the States. He knew Warcraft was a favourite game of mine. "Have you played this yet?"
"No."
He chucked me the box. "You better take a look. Plague's got to be like this."
"OK, but Plague is a SimCity game."
I might have sprouted antennae, the way he looked at me. "Nobody wants more sim games. We want excitement. We want realtime strategy."
This was news to me, since I'd been hired to design a sim game, but I loved Warcraft 1 so I wasn't about to argue. I duly started to pack RTS elements into the city-building game the team were working on. It was going to be nearly a year before I realized that what was needed was to throw Plague out and start afresh - which is how Warrior Kings came to be conceived. That got mixed up in the political and business fallout of extricating a team from Eidos and forming Black Cactus, so the Warrior Kings that got released was a bit of a mishmash. A story for another day, that. We were talking about Plague.
As the wargame elements started to get bolted onto the original design, I realized that the team were still thinking of it as a city-building game. Our lead artist was an architecture graduate, and he had a lot of sway in the company, so it wasn't politic to junk the SimCity stuff right away. To help steer everyone's vision onto the new page, I wrote a script for the game intro sequence and got Martin McKenna to storyboard it. This wasn't even the intro I intended to use (more on that next week) but it made the team aware that the game they were working on was going to be about rather more dramatic issues than where to put the fish market...
Opening titles cards appear in sequence:
“The High King is dead.”
“The rule of law and justice is dead.”
“The dragon wing of night o'erspreads the world…”
We see the funeral of the High King. He's carried by his knights and laid in a burial mound, which is then sealed. As the knights and mourners file away, a storm-cloud darkens the sky.
Unhindered by the old King's edicts, resentment festers among his former knights. Each believes himself the rightful inheritor of the crown. Honour withers and treachery takes root, spreading like a poisoned weed in embittered hearts.
Across the countryside, the peasants huddle in fear. Murder, acrid-smelling, wafts on the air. The knights scent it; they grow grim and battle-keen. Each dreaming of dominion, they marshal their forces and prepare for the carnage to come.
In the court, knights look at each with hooded eyes, distrustfully. Some glance towards the empty seat at the round table, behind which hangs the dragon's-head banner of the High King.
Shadows on a castle wall: an assassin stabs a man in the back.
Kindled by intrigue, old grudges ignite. The kingdom is plunged into civil war. Armies surge and clash. Ringing steel and the wailing of widows drowns out the voice of reason. While Death sharpens his scythe, men who were once closer than brothers slaughter each other like wild beasts.
Crops and homesteads burn, great castles are shattered and left to ruin. A hundred noble knights lie dead, swords buried in mud, armour rusting. The victors bay for yet more blood. No quarter is given. The vanquished are hung on gibbets, ripe fruit for ravens.
Scenes of erupting battle, fire, dying men, executions...
A shadow sits now upon the vacant throne: the shadow of terror. The High King's dream has become a nightmare.
Sunset, falling through a narrow window on the deserted hall of heroes, leaves a slash of blood-coloured light across the dusty throne. The dragon's-head banner is by now moth-eaten.
Such brutal passion soon is spent. The fury of battle at last is lulled to sullen silence. In the aftermath thrive pestilence and famine. The soil, blood-clogged, yields weeds instead of wheat. Grain rots in dank barns where rats breed in the darkness. Behind the fortified walls of their towns, the survivors cower in dread of the plague that now sweeps the land. The sick are nailed inside their houses and abandoned to die. Bodies thrown into carts are left to blacken and bloat, the living too few and too fearful to bury them.
Prophets preach that Doomsday is near, that God means to wipe Man from the world for his sins. To most this is welcome news. The suffering is too much. Better the endless sleep of death than to endure the relentless horrors of the world.
Scenes of hardship. Narrow empty streets in a town, with smoke drifting on the breeze. Flagellants wearing crowns of thorns shuffle along, crying out as they whip themselves. A few peasants trudge miserably past – a weeping funeral cortege carrying the bundled body of a child.
Then, one night when the high winds howl, a traveller comes to your court. In these times, strangers are feared as carriers of the plague but he walks past your guards unchallenged, as if in a dream. With your ministers you listen to his words, even though he comes from far away and his tongue is hard to understand. In your hearts you hear him, in your memories you recognize the ring of noble speech. There is wisdom in his strange words. And he reminds you of the secret that in these terrible days of turmoil and death had been forgotten:
The court. Lightning outside. Knock at the doors, which swing open and a stranger enters. He looks like the High King seen on his bier in the first scene. This whole bit seems dream-like. We’re closing in on the stranger's face and into his eyes, sparkling in the firelight, and we hear the stranger speak:
“The soul of the land is its King. It withers because its soul, the King, is dead. So there must be a new King. His reign will mark a new beginning. For good or evil? Time will tell. But power cannot be shared. Others also come to take the throne. Therefore grasp you now this sword. Conquer by might, rule with right. One land, one King.”
While the stranger speaks, the view pushes into his eyes, fades to black, and then shows the faces of those listening to him. We pan around the court, ending on the lord's face.
The stranger reaches the bit about others seeking the throne and his voice becomes more emphatic and resonant. Cut back to where he was standing to find he's no longer there. A gleaming sword hangs in the air. The lord rises, reaches to take it –
The lord wakes, sitting bolt upright. He is surrounded by his ministers and men, who had fallen drunkenly asleep at the benches. Now they stir and, seeing the resolve in the lord's eyes, are instantly alert. Perhaps they shared his dream? We see his hand close, remembering the phantom sword he was reaching for. Jaw set sternly, he repeats the final words of the dream:
“One land, one king...”
Games and interactive story apps are media in which it's easy for the wrong people to get the credit while genuinely valuable input may be overlooked, so I'm going to spell out the creative provenance of The Frankenstein Wars for all to see.
The original concept of a world in which Victor Frankenstein's discovery was used to create an army of resurrected men dates back to around 1999. Martin McKenna and I cooked up the idea as the basis for a PC strategy game while freelancing on Plague (later released under the name Warrior Kings) at Eidos.
Martin and I tried various routes to getting the concept, which we called Frankenstein's Legions, started up as a game, movie or comic book. Martin is not very keen on drawing comics - which is a pity, as he's really rather good at it, but instead we roped in Russ Nicholson to work up some rough pages. (I'd say pencils, but Russ never uses pencils.)
Lots of people liked the story premise. Iain McCaig suggested that Victor Frankenstein's discoveries should extend far beyond the secret of life and death. I'm not sure if there are any greater secrets than that, but Iain is a creative powerhouse and so I'm always willing to listen to what he has to say. Martin's friend Jamie Mathieson, writer of Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, thought it was a mistake not to have one of Victor's descendants at the heart of the story:
"I am reliably informed by Martin that Frankenstein left no heirs as far the original novel is concerned. I also understand that Dave is not keen to invite any Young Frankenstein ridicule.
However, if we make our central character/s descendants of Frankenstein's assistant I think we lose quite a bit of dramatic potential. They have no Frankenstein blood in their veins, they're not cursed down the ages, they're not fated to repeat their ancestor's mistakes etc; they're just unlucky enough to have a grandfather who did odd jobs for a nutter and nicked his stuff after his death.
I realise that if we invent a son for Frankenstein, we're directly contradicting the official novel continuity, but given that we completely change the outcome of the Napoleonic War, I've got no problem with such a comparatively small tweak, that will reap potentially much bigger dramatic rewards.
It also a much simpler sell – potential audiences/buyers would get it instantly. “He's Frankenstein's grandson.” is much easier to get across than “He's the grandson of Frankenstein's assistant.” “Why?” “Well, Frankenstein had no children in the novel, but this guy's granddad was there, he helped him ...wait, no, come back with that big fat cheque.”
Henry Clerval had never been Victor's assistant, in fact. In the novel he's just his best friend, knowing nothing about the experiments Victor has been doing, but in the 1973 movie Frankenstein: The True Story he is the real originator of the life-creating process. The reason Henry's son was one of the main characters in my Frankenstein's Legions story is because he might credibly stumble across notebooks that Victor have left in Henry's care.
I didn't much like Jamie Mathieson's suggested approach myself, for much the same reason that I didn't want to see Davros come back in every Dalek story after Genesis. It turns it all into a pantomime. If I'm creatinga story about nuclear destruction, I don't need to have Oppenheimer's great-grandson poised over the button, or Einstein's great-great-granddaughter swinging into action to thwart him. I wanted Frankenstein's Legions to feel like reality with fantastic elements. But it should be noted that at this stage (2005 or so) I still had never read Mary Shelley's novel, so I was still largely churning through half-remembered Universal and Hammer horror flicks. I still supposed Victor was a baron, for one thing.
While out in LA following the collapse of Elixir Studios, I mentioned the concept to movie producer Michael Levy and, with the help of a games documentary maker called Olly Quinn we made an audio demo to pitch to studios.
When I handed the commission to write the Frankenstein's Legions novel to John Whitbourn (we're into 2006 now) I said I'd stay out of his way and I did. Nothing kills a creative project faster than having too many hands on the tiller. John drew his inspiration more from the Hammer movies than Mary Shelley's story, in that the resurrected soldiers were nearly mindless monsters rather than the perfectly human but inhumanly mistreated wretches that I'd envisaged. He also had Frankenstein's nephew front and centre - though with the ironic twist that young Julius Frankenstein had inherited absolutely none of his uncle's scientific genius. Other people just assumed there was something in the Frankenstein blood and so they were all chasing after a piece of him - figuratively, that is.
Shortly after that I encountered the Muse while out walking in the fog on Hook Heath - her usual kind of reverse mugging, in which she stuffs my head with unwanted ideas - and returned with the plot for Frankenstein's Legionsreimagined as a YA trilogy. The problem was, it had gone all airships and steam-weapons, the focus now really on girl genius Ada Byron rather than the whole Frankenstein thing. Young Adult literature has more than enough steampunk trilogies already, but try reasoning with the Muse.
On to 2010, and Michael Levy had hooked up with a comic book company called Ape Entertainment. We had a whole lot of Skype calls about a Frankenstein's Legions comic, I did a draft script of the first issue, and even started to rethink the story in a US Civil War setting, but it came to nothing.
How does all this connect with my Frankenstein interactive novel app? Not at all, is the answer. In 2011 I pitched the idea of interactive classic novels to Michael Bhaskar, who was then digital director at Profile Books. I didn't particularly want to adapt Frankenstein, having had enough of it (or so I thought) over the last twelve years. But when Michael said that was the one he really wanted, I decided I'd better finally get around to reading the Mary Shelley novel. That was an eye-opener. Instead of the crackly Gothic body-horror nightmare presented in the movies, I found a fresh, modern psychological drama of a divided self - more David Fincher than Herbert West.
Nobody else had input into my Frankenstein app. I used Inkle's markup system to write it all, but the Inkle team had no role in the concept, design or writing. Nor did I get any feedback from Profile's editors, as they couldn't parse sentences like this:
The fiend can cut the knot of my happiness, but {demonize:it|he} cannot unpick this truth: that we were wed, {victor_empathy < -1:as my mother desired|and loved each other}.
Getting left alone to write is just fine by me. After doing this job for thirty years I don't really need a copy editor, and I always have my Fabled Lands cohort Jamie Thomson to bounce story ideas off to see if they work. (Jamie and I were originally going to write the Frankenstein book app together, but in the end he was busy working on the Dirk Lloyd series.) As I recall, the only suggestion from Profile and Inkle was to put a Twitter button at the end of every chapter of Frankenstein so that the reader could tweet things like, "I just helped Victor Frankenstein steal a body from the morgue." Thankfully we authors have something called the moral right of integrity, which basically means you get to tell people to keep their hands off your work. The app was released sans Twitter buttons.
(Oh, fun fact: I wrote the whole of Frankenstein standing up because of a back injury. And I fixed the problem of how Clerval's body gets from Orkney to the very beach in Ireland where Victor's storm-tossed boat washes up. Mary Shelley had thirteen years to work on the second edition and she didn't spot that, so booyah.)
After Frankenstein, I didn't feel any pressing need to go back to Frankenstein's Legions. Been there, done that, got the bolts in the neck to prove it. But then the fellows at Cubus Games asked if I'd like to get involved in launching an interactive story app on Kickstarter. I told them about Frankenstein's Legions and we quickly decided that, to avoid confusion with John Whitbourn's novel, we should call this new story The Frankenstein Wars. Jaume Carballo and I kicked ideas back and forth, but then I realized my work schedule wasn't going to give me enough time to write it. We turned to Paul Gresty, author of Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memoriesand I sent him all my notes and the longest of several story outlines, and as I write this he is wrangling his own ideas into that framework. What you finally see - assuming the Kickstarter campaign is successful - will be the equivalent of a "script by Paul Gresty, from a story by Dave Morris and Paul Gresty".
And that, friends, is the definitive list of credit where credit's due in the long patchwork story of The Frankenstein Wars. And there's still time to pledge for it on Kickstarter - but don't delay, those criminal brains are counting on you.
The Dark Lord books are supposed to be for kids, but I have yet to find an adult reader of fantasy who hasn't enjoyed them too, usually to the point of laughing immoderately in public whenever they open the book, thereby risking a tasering from the people who used to patrol the streets with nothing more dangerous than butterfly nets. I was recently reading the manuscript for the third book (WIP title The Dirkest Hour) in bed and I had to stop because I was laughing so loud I woke my wife up. It's a little hard to explain... "What's so funny?" "Well, there's this goblin and he's throwing custard at the wall, and then he lets off this horrendous fart and... Oh, never mind."
Jamie has just done an interview on the Hachette Children's Books site. Be sure to read the whole thing if you're interested in the creative process and the craft of writing. Here are a few highlights from the interview - and come back on Friday for more news from Jamie:
Some background before we begin... What were you doing, in the pre-Dirk world?
Well, I started off life in the '80s doing game books - the choose-your-own-adventure type - for Puffin in the Fighting Fantasy series. The first book I ever did, with my writing partner Mark Smith, was called Talisman of Death. Those did rather well, so I went off and did a load of them, then I did a two-player series and it had the only book I ever dedicated to my mother – ‘To my darling mother’ – and it was called The Arena of Death.
I must’ve done about twenty five game books, and then that whole market dried up when computer games came along. So I got back into computer games and had a computer game company called Black Cactus which went horribly wrong in the end and we lost a lot of money. After that I got back into novels, really.
Are there any games we might remember from that computer game company?
There was something called Warrior Kings, which was an RTS, in early 2000, a sort of fantasy thing. So essentially, it’s been thirty years of selling goblins to kids and just doing fantasy left, right and centre, creating endless Dark Lords and big, bad villains, shooting them down or killing them. I’ve lived in that world for so long you begin to think ‘surely Dark Lords have mothers…’ and that starts getting you into why someone would become a Dark Lord.
Do you remember where you were when you had the idea for Dark Lord?
Yes, I was with a friend of mine, Dave Morris. We’ve since started another company, Fabled Lands LLP, and we have an American investor. He’s quite a serious biotech venture capitalist, but he also used to love all of our gamebooks; for him it’s a bit of fun and he can meet up and talk to us and set us working on fun projects. It’s great for us because we’re just free to write whatever we like - it’s like having a patron, like a medieval Medici, except he’s called Big Wedge Frank. So that’s wonderful, and actually we’re doing quite well at the moment.
So it was just me and Dave, having a few beers and riffing off about how great it would be if you had a Dark Lord wandering around Earth. It began with an idea about a Diary of a Dark Lord, so it would be like Darth Vader or Sauron actually writing ‘Had to destroy a goblin today’, or you can imagine ‘Today the hobbits found my ring – Noooo!’, that kind of stuff. And then you start thinking about how could you really do the biography of a Dark Lord? You’d need to make him sympathetic or likeable, and you couldn’t really do that if you were doing it straight – then it would be like trying to make Hitler or Stalin likeable. It had to be jokey. And then the comedy angle led to the fish-out-water stuff, and then having him cursed is a natural progression, cursed into the body of a thirteen year old boy and sent to school is just perfect.
This is a very detailed world you’ve created – how long did it take to do that, and is there loads more that you know about but haven't been able to put in the book?
There is a lot that’s been left out, but nothing’s wasted. I’m writing the third Dark Lord book now and you never know when stuff will come in. But my career has mostly been about creating worlds, so that was the easy bit. You need the nations, but you leave religion out of it as it’s too sensitive these days. Already in the American version we’ve had to take out the word ‘Hell’, so instead of ‘By the nine Hells!’ Dirk has to say ‘By the nine nether worlds!’and there’s other stuff like that.
But normally, if you’re doing a computer game or role-playing game, you’d have a very detailed pantheon of different gods for different cultures, different politics and battle and combat tactics, like you’re creating an entire medieval nation from scratch, with stuff from mythology, science fiction and Japanese themes. I’ve done so much of that it would be easy to parody, but this is a more of a comedy parody and at the same time a great example of the genre and a loving homage
Reading the book is almost like being in the mind of a proper mad person, for whom other people’s reality is incomprehensible; how did you do that?
It was definitely part of me, I’m afraid! I think I started life a bit bemused by the world, so I think I drew on that a bit…it’s a product of all that gaming, coupled with my own bemusement. Although, saying that, I was born in Iran and lived there for the first ten years of my life, and then went to boarding school in England; my dad worked for Shell and we lived on an oil field. So, in a way, that also makes you look at the world from a different perspective.
It gives you a very good understanding of the outsider principle.
I think that’s true. You're born a little bit of an outsider, in a small, unique group of people, then you come to Britain still a bit of an outsider.
No Man’s Land is basically home.
Yes, or the alternative is…I fell to your planet many years ago, from the Dark Lands – I pretend it is fiction, but it’s all true.
Do you know where you’re going next?
Not really. We sort of had this idea to do stuff, and it seemed like a good idea to write, but I never realised it would be so successful and create this writing career for me. It was more like, I’ve got some bills coming in and what can you do when you get to a certain age? I was so evolved as a specialist in game books. It's like pandas and bamboo…if there’s no bamboo, they die. As I still wanted to be a panda I had to learn to do something else.
For the last couple of weeks we've been looking at the Frankenstein's Legions game design document, which dates back to the late '90s when I was working alongside Martin McKenna on a bunch of games at Eidos, notably Plague, which later became Warrior Kings.
About a decade after we dreamt up Frankenstein's Legions, Martin and I had a go and rethinking the idea for comics. This got a little further along, and you can even find a link to part of the script here, but we soon found that the artists whom the comic book company had hired were not familiar with our Napoleonic Wars setting. Instead it was all massive Civil War sideburns and zombies torching Atlanta.
Well, if we learned one thing in big development teams it's how to be flexible. And, short of waiting for the long-promised Temeraire movie to come out, we couldn't see any way of bringing the (American) artists up to speed. So we started thinking about how we could move the whole caboodle over to the US during the 1860s. Here's the first of two story development documents that might interest you if you want to find out what a lot of iceberg goes under the surface of the comic book, movie or game that you get to see.
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Frankenstein's Legions: US Civil War story notes
In the treatment, the setting was Napoleonic Europe and
there were two distinct threats. First, the left-wing revolutionaries of the French
government (kind of Khmer Rouge extremist communists, if you like!) were
willing to use the Frankenstein tech in really horrible ways: grafting human
heads onto giant eels, dog heads onto human bodies, etc. In real life, those were
the same guys who invented industrialized executions 150 years before the
Holocaust, so it makes sense they would blithely authorize experiments that
would horrify any normal person.
I wanted that because we have a world in which horrific things are happening -
the dead being brought back to life to serve as slaves and soldiers. So pretty
soon that becomes the new status quo and we need something even more horrific,
like creating hybrid monsters, to define our bad guys for whom fanatical logic
dictates the unthinkable.
Secondly I had Napoleon as a personified bad guy. The French revolutionary
government sent a commando team to bring his body back from St Helena, where he
died in a British prison. After being restored to life, he had to be kept in a
tank of preservative chemicals because he'd been in the grave a while. He was
slowly recovering his memory, so whereas the fanatics thought they'd just
acquired a kind of military strategy computer, they didn't reckon on him
hatching plans to overthrow them.
I needed both those elements, the fanatics as a group and Napoleon as an
individual, because the story couldn't just be "the Brits are good, the
French are evil". Both sides use the Frankenstein tech, and the villains are
individuals or creeds who go a step further. I think you'll need to keep this idea
in the Civil War version. Most Confederates were not evil racist autocrats;
most Unionists were not fighting like paladins with the lofty goal of
emancipating the slaves. There is good and bad on both sides. You may need an
equivalent mythic figure to Napoleon (perhaps from the War of Independence?
though I guess the world has had few dictators of Napoleon’s calibre) and an
equivalent to the extremist fanatics of the French revolutionary government. It
needs to be a creed, not just a few mad scientists. Maybe a crazed cult who
believe God has authorized a new Eden on Earth and it's okay for mankind to
play around creating abominations.
Incidentally one of the key ideas in Frankenstein's Legions is that you aren't just
brought back to life by the technology. When you get off the slab, you don't
know who you are. It's a new you. Like Frankenstein's monster - he didn't
think, "Oh, my brain came from a criminal who was hanged" or whatever.
The brain got rebooted, so in a sense it's a newborn person getting off that
slab. Lazarans are like amnesiacs in that they know the skills they had before –
how to shoot a gun or play the piano, how to speak – but specific personal
memories are lost. The tragedy is that they may encounter their loved ones, but
they don't remember them. There may be snatches of memory, that's all.
So the search to recover memories is one way a resurrected character may go.
Another might want to shun anything to do with who he used to be: "today
is the first day of the rest of my life". Interesting character tensions.
As far as the artwork we've seen so far, it's important that the lazarans don't
look like zombies. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of Civil War zombie books
out there already, and we need to be brandably distinct. A resurrected guy may have
scars if he was stitched together from separate parts, so some of the ones
who've been resurrected many times could be quite monstrous: hands or arms out
of proportion, different skin tones, asymmetric bodies, etc. Others who died a
clean death could look almost normal. Almost. Here is Mary Shelley's description
of the original creature:
I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great
God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath;
his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness;
but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that
seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were
set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
I like the idea that such a face, with skin taut on the
veins and muscles, could be both ugly and beautiful at the same time. In some
cases, the yellowish skin colour (caused by their differently colored blood)
might be the only sign at first glance that the person is a lazaran. Most
certainly they aren't undead – the opposite, in fact: full of vigor, intimidating
to ordinary men because of their raw energy and animal strength. They are the homo
superior of their time, and it's only a matter of time before we see a lazaran
Magneto, or even some people who are willing to kill themselves in order to get
the enhanced strength, speed and senses that come with resurrection.
Okay, so back to that prologue. A raid on a remote farmhouse
where lazaran hybrids are being created? Or perhaps a cult who have their own
unique interpretation of Revelation 20:6:
Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first
resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests
of the Lord and will reign with him for a thousand years.
So these cultists are deliberately committing suicide,
performing surgery to enhance the bodies, and resurrecting each other as the
new "chosen ones" who believe they're going to reign for a thousand
years. (Obviously you'd need to have some normal, sane preachers on the good
guys' side to show that this cult is a definite aberration!) We start with a
small band of Civil War deserters looking to raid a remote homestead. They
sneak inside, bit of banter, the place seems deserted – then they are picked
off one by one, fast like Alien, and that pre-title sequence ends with the last
of them being leapt at by a horrible hybrid: human head, wolf-like body, serpents
growing out of its back or whatever. Let Martin have some fun here! Then cut to
the opening we have already, a quieter scene with a family pushing the body of
their loved one in a cart.
Just when I think I've run out of utterly obscure curiosities to dust off and show you, I go and open a box in the attic and find a dozen more. This time it's a top-level design concept for a browser-based 3D realtime strategy game. This would have been written back around 2000. Having just left Eidos along with Plaguelead coder and Warzone 2100engine creator Sam Kerbeck, the two of us we were looking for a project to work on together.
I got the 'flu and had this weird dream about a guy searching in the dust of Mars a million years ago for the last drops of water. When I woke up, I wrote it down exactly as I saw it and then started sketching out the combined arms principles of the game.
The aim was to make a very simple little game with not too many units, all of which would be low-poly models, so that we could get it done quickly and cheaply. (Yeah yeah, you should always laugh when somebody says that about an RTS.) Then we got more ambitious - as we always do - and decided to turn it into a much bigger game using the astonishing graphics engine Sam created to replace the one for Plague, later Warrior Kings, which was "based on a concept by Ian Livingstone", as the saying goes, insofar as the actual concept in question was for a turn-based 2D version of SimCity set in 14th century London. I kid you not.
Anyway, this game was based on a concept by my virus-cooked subconscious. In my dream it was called Liquid, and I envisaged the ad in Edgewith three coloured dots beside an image of Mars, labelled as follows:
Water - the colour of Life Poison - the colour of Death Blood - the colour of War
Yes, I know - a bit rough-edged to say the least. But to come up with this stuff while you're asleep and running a temperature... Well, you try it. And I believe it is always worth taking the raw material that you get that way and seeing if you can make something good out of it, because it is the one and only time you're creating without the nagging whisper of your critical faculties.
First thing to go would have been the title. It was about the desperate struggle for resources. Thirst seemed to fit it better - and that's a name I've always liked.
What happened? The dotcom bubble happened. We should have stuck with the quick-n-dirty version, because after the shit hit the FTSE there wasn't nobody handing out a million or two for a start-up game developer. But here is the original fever-fuelled outline:
The red desert of Mars. A fissure in the ground. Our view descends into a crevice, down and down towards the sound of running water. A skin of water ripples down the walls, which are covered in astonishing patterns of phosphoric salts. Further down, far below the planet's surface now, the water runs into a gushing underground river. The river is bubbling, pounding, frothing... A living force in the heart of the dry rock.
The pressure builds, sending a jet of water up the crevice. Back on the surface, the dry edges of the fissure moisten with droplets of water bubbling up out of the interior of the planet. It seeps out into the dusty red sand –
A man wakes. His grey eyes stare in shock, fatigue, despair. His blond hair is plastered with sweat. He is wearing a white environment suit and a mask across his mouth and nose.
The image of bubbling water must have been only in his dreams, as all around him lies a desolate dry landscape: ochre-coloured dunes tinted with patches of olive lichen, red sandstone boulders like giant fossilized eggs. Huge flat-topped mesas stand out darkly against a cobalt blue sky. The sun is smaller, dimmer than it appears from Earth, and there are two swift moons.
The man stands and takes a flask from his belt. Removing his mask, he lifts the flask to drink. But there are only a few drops left. Barely enough to wet his cracked lips. He throws the flask down at his feet.
There is a rhythmic hum on the air. As the man looks around trying to work out where it's coming from, his eyes fall on the shadow at his feet. It is cast by the mesa behind him.
So why is the shadow moving?
The man stands with the mesa behind him outlined against the sky. As he turns his head, an airship prow emerges over the edge of the mesa. Slowly it drifts overhead, filling the sky. There is a hieroglyph on the side of the airship - not the same one that is on the man's suit. He grabs his harpoon rifle but it's obvious that it would be futile for one man to attack such a vast ship. As he watches, ports open in the sides of the cabin slung below the balloon. Green droplets are ejected and fall in slow motion towards him.
He's frozen for a moment watching the green droplets fall. Then he runs. Behind him, the poison bombs splash against the red dust - splattering heavily, they contain dozens of gallons each. There is an acidic hiss and clouds of green vapour start to spread. The man pulls goggles down to cover his eyes.
He rounds the mesa. Reflected in his goggles is a horde of giant crustacean – or insects, maybe. Their hard limbs make a thunderous chittering on the rocks as they march towards his location. Carried in their mandibles are the creatures' riders: soldiers in black environment suits. There are hundreds of them.
The man looks back. The airship has manoeuvred into position between two mesas and is continuing to bombard the ground with poison charges. As he stands undecided, an electrical blast from the vanguard of the insect riders catches him a glancing blow and spins him around, sending him sprawling in the dust.
He's lost his rifle. His arm is stiff where the electrical bolt hit. Maybe he blacked out for a few seconds. With desperate bone-weary strength, he pulls himself to the foot of the mesa. Sheer luck guides him to a cave, the entrance partly concealed behind a jagged rock. He crawls inside, his feet tumbling over the pebbles. He disappears just moments before the insect riders come into view.
He peers out. There is a haze of dust as the riders mill to and fro, the huge insects gleaming like oiled machinery. At close range the insects look like scorpions, their heads tiny in comparison to their massive chitinous bodies. The riders sit in massive jaws that protect them like a cage, while above them gleam the insect's inscrutable jewelled eyes.
The airship has dropped anchors. They are tethering it between the mesas, lowering a ladder so that the crew can descend to the camp.
The man retreats deeper into the cave. As the noise of the soldiers outside grows fainter, he hears a trickling sound. He looks at the wall of the cave. Something odd. The rock seems to quiver and swim...
He reaches out and touches the wall. Water flows around his fingers. Tentatively he touches it to his lips - then he is splashing it over his face and pressing his face against the rock to drink.
Half crazy with the discovery, he runs back up the passage towards the mouth of the cave. But a rider of the enemy army is there, his insect mount stooping to allow him to look into the cave. As he sees the man, he levels his gun. The man cries out in panic, pointing back into the cave. He's trying to tell them about the water.
Too late. A blast of electricity burns through the air, flinging the man back. The last sight we see is the liquid gleam of his eyes as they go dull and dead.
GAMEPLAY
Units
Ground units:
Infantryman - Carries a polearm with a white-hot welding-type arc at the end. Very tough in close combat. Medium armour.
Plasma Artillery - Carries a heavy bazooka that fires plasma blasts. When artilleryman is in position, bazooka takes a few moments to set up on its base before it can fire. Weak in close combat, because they cannot fire at point-blank range (the plasma blasts have a detonation radius). Medium armour.
Kelid Riders - Humans riding in the jaws of giant scorpion-like insects. They fight with magnetic guns that fire thin metal harpoons. Light armour.
Aerial units:
Airship - Huge hydrogen-filled balloon driven by solar-powered propellers (the solar panels cover the balloon surface). At manoeuvring altitude, the Airship moves a little slower than an Infantryman. At cruising altitude (higher) the Airship enters the Martian jet streams and potentially can move faster than any other unit, but only in the direction of the jet stream - in order to switch to another jet stream in a different direction, it must first drop to manoeuvring altitude. (Note: the directions of the jet streams are very predictable, like rivers, but their speed changes slightly with the seasons.) Airship weaponry consists of bombs that explode into clouds of acidic gas when dropped - Infantry and Artillery will die before they can get out of a direct hit, but Riders are fast enough to escape the cloud with only about 50% damage.
Skimmer - A very fast, low-flying intelligent creature like a dragonfly. Skimmers live in hives in the caves inside a mesa and will collect ore, which they deposit at the nearest friendly Command Post. As aerial units, Skimmers can see further than troops on the ground and this means they also act as an early warning system of attacks on their city. However, they are not intelligent enough to distinguish troops' type or allegiance - to a Skimmer, they just appear as generic units.
Armour Weapon Range Move Infantry 3 7 1 5 Artillery 3 6 9 4 Rider 1 3 8 7 Airship 2 9 - 4/6-8 Skimmer 0 0 0 9 (For comparison, mesas are about height 6-7 and Airships fly at heights 9-20.)
BUILDINGS
All buildings except Bridges must be placed on top of mesas. They are built by Infantry, using the arc-welding effect of their lances.
Bridge - A means of spanning the gap between mesas to extend a city. Energy can be carried along the Bridge's cables, allowing a network of mesas to draw off a shared set of Pylons. Troops can cross bridges, and Fulmin Turrets can be placed on them. Force bubbles do not protect bridges, however. Bridges can also be built across chasms.
Command Post - Generates a force bubble that covers the top of the mesa. The strength of the bubble depends on the energy available. Force bubbles can only be destroyed by Artillery. All types of ground troops can be spawned at a Command Post.
Fulmin Turret - Has a ranged electrical-blast attack that is effective against all units (weapon strength 8 if Turret fully powered, range 7).
Hydroponic Farm - Must be built on the edge of a mesa. Pipes lead down the side and into the ground at the base of the mesa, extracting water from the deep wells below the planet's surface.
Hangar - Used to spawn Airships.
Pylon - A high metal tower stretching up into the jet stream. This continually attracts an electrical halo, generating Energy.
RESOURCES
Energy - generated continually by pylons and fed to all buildings within that city. Energy is used to power Fulmin Turrets and a Command Post's force field - these continually draw energy, and if not enough Energy is available they are weakened. Spawning new units also drains energy. Since space on top of a mesa is limited, you have to balance Pylons for Energy production against other buildings.
Ore - available scattered across the surface of Mars. Some areas are particularly rich in Ore. Meteorites sometimes fall from space, creating a new source. Ore is usually collected by Skimmers, but can also be picked up by Infantrymen, who use their arclite lances to break down the ore. (Infantrymen given the order to gather Ore move at reduced speed until they can return to the Command Post or are ordered to drop the ore.)
Water - an "implied" resource, like food in Warcraft. You don't have to collect and store water, you just build Hydroponic Farms and that sets your population limit.
COMBAT PARADIGMS
It's possible to describe typical combat results, assuming equal numbers on both sides. These paradigms can be changed by other factors such as terrain.
Infantry vs Artillery Infantry will take some damage but will catch up to Artillery (who move a bit slower because of their heavy guns). In close combat, the Infantry then win easily. (Note: the Infantry will take greater damage if advancing in close formation, because of the detonation radius of the plasma bolts.)
Infantry vs Riders The Riders can back away (the insects go equally fast in all directions, and are swifter than men on foot) while firing. The guns don't do a lot of damage, but they will slowly whittle the Infantry away. So the Riders win with no damage to themselves.
Artillery vs Riders The Artillery's plasma blasts do more damage than the Rider's guns. A further problem is that an insect taking a direct hit will scuttle burning through the ranks, causing confusion. Artillery wins, but will sustain about 50% damage.
Infantry vs Airship The Infantry can do nothing.
Artillery vs Airship Artillery's range is unaffected by the direction in which they shoot - even straight up. Assuming the Artillery start firing as soon as the Airship is in range, a sufficient number should be able to destroy it before it is in place to drop bombs. (Note: this is not a literal 1-on-1 paradigm, as one Airship costs as much as maybe six Artillery.)
Riders vs Airship The Riders can do some damage to the Airship, but their guns are affected by the altitude they are firing at, so it's minimal. If the Riders stay in position, the Airship will bomb them before it has taken much damage.
TACTICAL & ENVIRONMENTAL PLOYS
Sandstorms reduce the effectiveness of ranged units (Riders especially).
Riders shooting downhill get a damage bonus that can turn the tables against Artillery (whose weapons do the same damage whether shooting up or down).
Riders who can get close enough to ambush Artillery (eg, by hiding in sand dunes or behind a mesa) will beat them because the Artillery cannot fire at point-blank range.
Infantry who can trap Riders (eg, in a narrow pass between two mesas) will be able to slaughter them easily, as the Riders cannot then retreat while shooting.
Riders who are on a mesa can do more damage to Airships (because there is less of a difference in altitude).
ORDERS
Rout - Units drop their weapons and flee back to nearest friendly base. You have to re-equip them, but at least you save the men.
It's rather strange to come across this after an interval of ten years, especially given the atypical inception of the concept. It's a never-was project, of course. You get through a lot of those in the videogames industry - which is the main reason why I returned to writing.
