More Die By The Sword Props

Although in my earlier post on DBTS I talked about Mark Nau's level design contributions, the truth is that it wouldn't even have had levels if it wasn't for Chris Busse.   We thought of it as a fighting game - two guys face off, one lives to face the next guy.  Then, instead of going home to his family, Chris spent Christmas making a prototype level, proving it would be more fun as an adventure game.  I'm a little ashamed for having forgotten - it was many years ago, and once you've been working on a game for a long time those early design decisions start to seem 'obvious' and you forget how much people agonized over them - but basically, Chris invented Die By The Sword as we know it.

Comments

[Chris Busse]

Now the pendulum has swung the other way. =)

I still maintain it was a complete collaborative effort. The game would never have been what it was without the awesome contributions of everyone involved.

Mark's guidance; Tomo's jack of all tradesness; Peter's programming; Don's programming and company management; Chuck's tools and programming; Soares' artistic vision; my gumption; and your project management focus and programming. They were all key and everyone contributed to the design.

I may have put the rooms together that Enric ran around, but if we all hadn't seen what it could be, it would have gone nowhere.

It was a perfect combination of 8 guys working towards the same goal. And damn if we don't all miss it.

We all created Die by the Sword. If it had been any different people, it would not have become what it did.

We started with the wrong art style, the wrong original concept, and the wrong result; we corrected those things with the right people moves and ended up with a single unit that made a game I will always be proud of and a group of compatriots I will always consider comrades.

[Chris Busse]

PS: If you're looking for people who have done and can work as a group, you could do much worse than any of the guys listed in the credits of DBTS. Best two years of my professional life.

[Sergio]

My time at Treyarch is post DBTS, but Busse was the one that brought me into the Treyarch fold way back in '99. One of the best things that ever happened to me. I still look back on the days with great fondness. Some of the best times, people, and places... EVER!

(whew! Luckily, I'm in a very similair situation here now at Brash Entertainment... a start up with HUGE potential!)

[Jamie Fristrom]

I don't remember making that much of a creative contribution to DBTS - I did feel mostly like a worker-bee on that one. Although I do remember, way back when, before Treyarch was even a gleam in Pete's eye, saying to him, "It would be really cool to make a modern version of Bilestoad." He'd been thinking along the same lines - he said, "Yeah, a sort of Swashbuckler 2000." (Which reminds me - pretty sure it was Don who came up with the title - were we listening to Slayer at the time or just talking about them?) Some of my biggest contributions, I think, were insisting that we use version control and introducing the radical idea that we fix bugs right away instead of waiting for alpha...pretty cutting edge, ten years ago...even Id didn't use version control back then.

[Chris Busse]

Dude, using source control was huge. I think we were years ahead of people using it for data as well, that's only just coming online in the last couple of years for most people. And it was nearly 12 years ago now. =)