Diablo: A Classic Game Postmortem

few stragglers still coming in I think that they're closing the doors hi everybody wow there's a lot of people here I know when Rob Bardo asked me to do this talk I was okay sure yeah I'll do it ever whatever but I didn't expect it to be this popular thank you for coming out so let's first go over Who I am my name is David Brevik and I am was the president of Blizzard North for about ten years that's me there on the left with max and Erich Schaefer who were other cofounders of Blizzard north and I was lead programmer on Diablo as well as co-creator and code designer and etc as well as kind of the original concept creator so the idea for Diablo I've started oh wait before we go to that let's talk a little about what we're here for you're here to talk about Diablo it was released December 31st 1996 that makes this the 20th anniversary year it'll be 20th anniversary the very last day of this year some people say that it came out in the very beginning of January technically if you were on the west coast you've got some boxes at the stores on the 31st but then it was probably January 2nd or 3rd before you actually got it in a lot of places in the US because of the way that the shipping worked in things like that at the time so this is I'm here to do a post-mortem on on a game now it may be a little early I don't know if we had enough time to digest whether or not you know it would be the entire gravity of the situation making this game but the but I hope to do it some justice 28 years ago was is a long time ago and my memory is not as sharp as it used to be so let's go through this and we'll see how it goes some first the original concept the original concept it was something I thought of in high school I lived here my junior and senior year of high school out in the East Bay east of East part of San Francisco Bay Area and may in a town called Danville and I lived at the base of Mount Diablo and that is where the name comes from was that I didn't speak a lick of Spanish when I moved here and then I found out what the name movement I was like yeah that name rocks I'm gonna use that someday I was very fortunate to know from a very early age exactly what I wanted to do my dad brought home an apple too plus when I was young and I taught myself to program and play games and programs non-stop pretty much all the way well even today so the I haven't stopped really and it's all I've ever wanted to do make games and so even in high school I was thinking about what kind of games I could make and what kind of names I could use and and the concept was very different at that time it was much more kind of a party based wizardry kind of game might magic and Wizardry and that kind of style that it was that it went ended up being it really was influenced heavily through my time in college by a lot of roguelikes including rogue and and nethack and Moria and Angband and games like that and I played the money's UNIX machines when I was at college before kind of the internet existed and so it existed but it was just like you know the universities were hooked up with government services and stuff like that it was not you know HTML and stuff had not really been invented at that time so then I graduated school and we decided that - we worked very briefly at a few different places including being technical director at Iguana want his claim to fame was really their MBA jam games and and so they moved to Texas they least started out here in the bay area and then I I left when they moved it to move to Texas and started my own company called condor with max and Eric these artists that I had met at at the clipart company that I originally worked at right out of school there was a clip art and then video game company that went under after six months anyway so one of the name of the company we came up with was Condor and Condor comes from that time when we were at the clip art company and we knew it was kind of a mess and and so we were all kind of dreaming about one day we'll make our own games and so the the secret project was gonna be project Condor was the codename hey we want to talk about Condor over lunch and and so we would go and chat and dream of ideas and things like that but I kept coming back to this Diablo idea that I had and that anyway so eventually we put it to paper and here is the original design document for Diablo it was it was very similar to the way that turned out okay no it wasn't similar at all first off it was turn-based next it was single-player it was dossed it had expansion packs like Magic the Gathering cards like you could buy a disc with like fifty items on it and install it and we could sell just tons of these packs that you could just add on and we quickly realized that that was a big issue there was perma death it was unforgiving I mean hardcore eventually made it way its way into this series thankfully but the but at the time it was that it was you know that was very staple feature of roguelikes and so that's that's why I wanted that so and then there's a rumor sort of it's not really just a rumor but that had claymation and that is kind of true the original idea about the art style was that we were going to and this was kind of about five years ago Blizzard made a retrospective of diablo and all their games or whatever and and in it they made this cute little funny jokey cartoon of the of this diamond clay thing coming out and like being attacked and falling over and was very cute but I'm kind of setting the record straight here but there was a game at the time it wasn't just claymation okay so it was a game at the time that was called primal rage and primal rage was I loved the way that this game looked in the arcade I thought it was really neat it had very distinct looking because it used stop motion to make all of its characters and graphics and I thought that it you know they didn't have bump mapping and all these kind of you know really fancy ways you can make graphics look great now they just didn't exist back then and or if they did he needed like weeks to render it so the so we said well we'll give this a try we'll see what this is like and so we sat down and we looked into it we're like oh my god we're not doing this this is a disaster there's no way we can make all these models and photograph all these things we put them in the game so that it was claymation for and it was a really claymation of a stop motion for about 5 seconds so there that was definitely I was that that puts that to rest it was it was they say claymation I say stop-motion but there you go so the company Condor got contracts to do a bunch of different games doing just a contract work with developer and publishers that we knew acclaim and sunsoft and some others and and so we got a contract to do the Justice League task force game and this was a Superman Batman Wonder Woman Street Fighter clone and and so we you know we're working on this and we were working on some football games I'm a big sports fan and they so we were doing some NFL quarterback Club Game Boy and Game Gear games at the time as well and so we show up at CES this is before III existed we used to have our are kind of feel like it's such an old guy at this point back in my day when we we had our show next to the car stereos which were blowing us out the whole time into the uh and so we show up and we're we have our game on display and we look over and wait there's another version of the product for Super Nintendo like wait what what we didn't know that there was another developer working on the exact same game as us the two had never talked the publisher never talked about there was another contract there was no like what the heck is going on it's really weird or whatever and the games were strangely similar like whoa this is really weird so we got to know these guys and their name was silicon & synapse and and and so we got to talking at the show and and they said oh yeah well you know we're we're still accountants in apps right now and and kind of under the radar here we're selling the company and we're going to change our name and we're to make a PC game I said alright that sounds awesome that's what we want to do my dream I have a dream to make a PC game you know that's I loved PC gaming it's the main thing that I play and not and we're gonna someday I'm gonna make this game and we've been trying to pitch this game idea to a whole bunch of people and we've gone around to 25 different publishers this CES and previous ones and handed out this document to a whole bunch people and they have said no RPGs are dead there is no way we are investing in an RPG it was ridiculous you guys are out of here look at that and you guys not only want us to invest in an RPG but you also wants to sell a crap ton of discs and that's a logistic nightmare and that's just never it's going to happen so I said but dammit the game idea is solid ok it's kind of a modern version of rogue or whatever and uh anyway so we got to talking to silicon & synapse in there oh we're making this game or whatever and we're going to change our name and we're going to be called Blizzard Entertainment and the game that we're making is called Warcraft and I said oh well let me let me go look at it so we went back and they had this one room that was maybe 10 by 10 might say will be generous and little 10 by 10 kind of walled in you know semi-permanent permit structure kind of a meeting room and back in the corner there kind of geeking out and playing the game and and and they have a couple posters and a couple press people in there and talking and stuff and I thought it looked really great I thought that it was it was amazing and so a bunch of people heard the buzz at the show about this thing and then as time went on I kept kind of bugging them and said hey you guys you guys need some beta testers because I got a whole company full of beta testers if you guys need some beta testing and and eventually they we got to talking more and more and I said all right after you guys I've got this great game idea they said okay well after we're done with Warcraft 1 we'll come out and we'll listen to your pitch I said okay well that's all I can ask for thank you and so they came out in January of 1995 correct and doing math quickly in my head no yes okay somewhere right in there and and so they came out and and we pitched them Diablo and then you know kind of the the rest is history and so we signed the contract to do Diablo with them we were very excited because this kind of this dream game now at the same time we also we were kind of beginning development on Diablo but we had to finish the development of Justice League and the Game Boy football games and things like that so we had to kind of wrap this stuff up through the most of kind of the 95-year about the first half of it as well as starting and we had to sign these contracts and do all sorts of stuff to to get rolling and that that kind of takes time and whatnot and started to hire some people and and whatnot to try and work on this development but one of the very first things that we did is we decide what is the game going to look like right what is what is kind of the graphic book of the game and one of the games at the time that we've been playing a lot and really loved was XCOM and I still love that game of this day I mean there were a bunch of games actually during that era that that that symptom aid a whole bunch of really fantastic games right then and and so we took and this was not easy back then by the way I kind of took a screen grab of XCOM and had a little cursor box that showed exactly the tile size and etc and we wanted to emulate this look and so we just took that and we put it right into Diablo and so the actual tile square basis is exactly the same in XCOM and Diablo they're the exact same shape and in size so all the kind of technology we built was upon basically you know a screen shot screen grab from Mexico it's so educated that's a really early version of the game there on the right you can see that god I don't even know what's going on in that picture there's I don't even know what those big black boxes are I have no idea what we were even thinking there anyway very strange who knows but me because Leah he's got health and and health Amana reversed is I don't even know what's going on - nothing uh so I'm gonna get a little bit technical here I hope that I don't you know people start nodding off or something like I apologize but I am going to get slightly technical here so one of the things that went right so also before we get into this just a quick note I went through and I looked at a bunch in a post-mortem in my mind's like hey here's three to five things that we did right here's three to five things we did wrong boom ba-ba-boom but boom done you know that's that's opposed to post mortem but I looked online and started watching some of the classic post modems and like they weren't doing that now as I wait what okay well I already wrote my talk and it was all the three to five things that were good and free divided things are bad I don't know what I'm gonna do crap I gotta get me I'll rewrite this thing so I'm kind of merging my old talk with this with the new one so I hope that that one of the things that went right here was that is lighting so we came up with this idea actually I think Eric came up with the idea of doing lighting and arranging the pallet in such a way we have 256 colors at the time this is super VGA 640 by 480 graphics just state of the art kind of stuff and and and so we had I mean two of these six colors was would be a big deal I mean okay I'm VGA you know 320 by 240 I don't remember and that was kind of it you know 640 480 was definitely a big leap up and so we had these 256 colors to work with and so we kind of split the palette into two different sections we did split it into 128 colors for the background and hundred and twenty eight character colors for everything else I was the monsters the UI the the characters the spell effects everything fit into one 256 color palette and then the background into it I mean 128 color palette and the other was the background was 128 colors I'm not really sure why we did it that way we probably should have balanced it a little bit better and made like 64 for the background and the rest for the for everything else but you know who knows I don't know we were your dumb back then actually a funny story and a true story my Diablo 1 was my action it was actually the first time I ever coded in C the I had never done a C program in my life until until I coded Diablo 1 and in fact Diablo 1 a lot of the graphic routines and stuff are all written in assembly they it's still icing me maybe like whatever an eighth of all of the code in Diablo was an assembly so we use this and and kind of organize the palettes so that the colors went from dark to light and so every strip of 16 colors we had you know eight different hues for background eight different hues and saturations whatever you want to call them and likeness levels you know going across so that you could go from dark to light and so when we went to go draw the gretel-ann let's go through the art pipeline first be we've got I'd this is I think this is the butcher but yeah I'm not really sure anyway I got this out of some weird magazine article um you know this was a very popular thing to do when we were making people were making game articles in magazines was this is the process of making the art or whatever and it was like here's the sketch here's the mash there's the the solid render of it and here it is textured and it's like every article on video game making had this included this is a standard-issue art piece in the in every single article anyway we would take this and we would actually render out the sprites develop the models in 3d just like it was actually this process I don't think they ever went to a solid render but the we would then export it and would render out a bunch of series of sprites on a one sheet and so it's kind of some sprites you thing know he'd use this program called the Babel Iser that would map that palette these 24 bit images to this specific palette that we had whatever it was if it was a background piece into the background ones and if otherwise it would go into these the 8 hues of the the foreground and other characters so we had this kind of pipeline where we create the art it would go through this process this post process that would that would convert the pallet so that was they're all in the right place and then we went to go draw it every square on the map would have a light level and and so you would use that light level and it was up to sixteen different light levels and we would use that and combine that with the original light level and then so those two 16 level things those are both nibbles that make a bite that was a byte lookup that I could then get the final light color kind of the matching of the light color and then you know I knew what hue it was and that was the upper nibble and the new bite new nibble on the bottom and became the actual color to use and so then I could write that and that is how we did the lighting we had these these kind of two different tables and set up the palate in that way it was something that really had not been seen before at the time and it really led to the atmosphere of Diablo minik got dark and creepy and and that was one of the one of the techniques that we use to really kind of bring out the atmosphere so what went wrong in the graphics and who this one still gives me I just don't even I don't even know why we didn't change this even when we knew that it was a big problem so what went wrong were the floors or I guess the walls or I guess both alright so looking at this picture you can see that how we drew the drew the scene and so the way that we would draw the scene is we would start it there at tile number one you can imagine then tile two and then three and then four and then five and six and see kind of like went from the back what was away from you and kind of moved forward left to right and drew these tiles and when you drew the tile I drew the tile and then I drew all the stuff that was on top of the tile right there and so it's like oh it's got a player there and it's got an item and that you know it has a chest or whatever and so it would it would draw whatever is on top of the tile so that worked really well until we actually attached the walls to the floor and so when I went to go draw something and you were moving from one square to the other you would get your sprite would get cut off you would be like halfway through your walk as you moved along because you're here in this location in the kind of the one position and as you move the two it would draw - after it would draw one and so your sprite would just end up getting cut off and so we had to fix this by actually moving you to the place that you're gonna be down the screen and then kind of negatively offsetting go back to where you were and then slowly drawing you the other way so in Diablo and we had to program all sorts of AI stuff where was like targeting the right place of where you were or going to be and all this kind of stuff all we had to do was just separate the damn floor from the walls I don't know why we didn't go back and do that if we just drawn all the floor and then draw on the walls then and all the things on top of it would have solved a lot of these problems anyway uh lessons learned you don't have to worry about this anymore the car lot does all this crap for you so it's the kids today B so the big controversy so real-time vs. turn-based this so there is a legend that when we pitched the guys from down south Blizzard Entertainment on on making this game they came out of it they said this game is awesome we're really excited about it it looks great this is it I mean it's just such a great idea but there's two things wrong one its turn-based and two it needs to be multiplayer and they got their way on both but they will get to that in a second the so originally the game was set up to be a turn-based game and was turn-based but the turns were kind of divided into section so not everything was an even amount of turn length so you would have you know it would cost let's say five points to make some moves versus 20 points to make others and you know independent and we can call those you know whatever tenths of a second or something something cost takes a half a second to do something takes two seconds to do whatever and so it was this kind of we set up a whole game to have this kind of this detail of what you know different skills to look and how much time they took and things like that so it was kind of a complicated turn-based game and so eventually Blizzard South they approached us and said well we'd really like to make this a real-time game and I said what are you guys talking about real-time what no no no no no no this is this is one of your strategy games the we are you know I'm really committed to making a turn-based game here I love this this sweat I love in a turn-based game especially in a robe like when you've made a turn and you're you just got hit and you're down to one hit point your Custer antic Lee searching through your mentor oh my god do I do I read this scroll I don't even have it identified I don't I don't know what it's gonna do here but I got like one chance to do something I try to drink a pug do I run away do I oh my god I'm at a dead end I that like I mean your palms are sweaty I've been working on this character for two weeks oh my god what am I gonna do it like you gotta get up and walk away from the computer who I don't know and then of course you dead dead and anomalisa the tears would flow for a second and I alright let's play again and and so and so I really love that tension I really love that the sweaty palms of I've been working on this thing I'm about to lose two weeks of work so I didn't want to lose that at all and they said yeah but you know real time will be better well okay well if you say so so they started you know going around talking to other people in the studio and other people in the steering yeah we should make this thing real time and so I kind of held out about two or three of us they like held out to the bitter end and finally one day we decided to have a talk and and bring it to a vote so we all met in the kitchen and we voted and I voted no and everybody else voted yes and and so I said all right well okay I guess I guess we can do this but it's I called up Lizzie south and I said well as you guys will see in a few minutes we were terrible businessmen so but I but I this is this is huge delay in the project it's going to take us a long time we have to redo all sorts of things it's going to take me forever to write this I you know okay all right yeah but we need another milestone payment out of this but yeah okay we'll go ahead and do it so they agreed to this yes and and so okay I'll do this so I sat down on a Friday afternoon and in a few hours I had to run and and so I can remember yes this is what went right I can remember the moment that this happened I can remember like it was yesterday this is like one of the most vivid moments of my career I was sitting there and I finally got you know all the kind because the turn base was basically already everything took different amounts of turns I just like put in some stuff for moving around took time was basically a certain amount of turns and then just made the turns happen 20 times a second or whatever it was and and and then it all just kind of worked magically and so I remember taking the mouse and I clicked on the mouse and the warrior walked over and smacked the skeleton down and I was like oh my god that was awesome and the Sun shone through the window and gods passed by and the angels song and and sure enough that was when the a RPG was kind of born at that moment and and I was lucky enough to be there it was an amazing amazing moment I'll never forget it and so that was really kind of the birth and really a big turning point in the project and this was pretty early on this was still this was still probably about maybe five months in or six months in that that we had done this what we're wrong budget we are the worst businessmen in the history of the universe okay first off I didn't want to be a businessman I didn't I know it like I'm wondering I have a business but I didn't actually like I didn't go to school I didn't know anything about business how we weren't even paying our taxes I found out that that was a bad idea the and so we we were terrible businessmen so we're so excited about actually making Diablo that we sign the contract without realizing that we just agreed to do Diablo for $300,000 we have 15 people in the studio oh whoa whoa we have to pay them 20 grand piece for the next year to get this done and not only that but that's full that's like with the office space and everything or whatever they gotta pay $12,000 a month a year or whatever $1,000 a month to come work on Diablo how exciting uh wow that was dumb but we're making Diablo hahaha and and so then what are we gonna do about this well we got to get more work all right well we got to do more contract work and so we do some people over at three do and three do is making a new machine called the m2 and and so they said okay well yeah we would love for you to do some cutting-edge development and so we signed a Raymond to do a football game called NFLPA superstars which kind of a backyard football gating like a six-on-six football with just the stars of the NFL league and uh we said awesome and we signed the contract for almost a million dollars which was huge at the time and that helped a lot everybody won in the end here because the m2 Hardware was never really launched and after we were bought by Blizzard the spoiler alert the Wii the m2 technology was sold message Sheeta so for a hundred million dollars so that really kind of launched 3do as a publisher and they used that money and for also and a lot of the reason that you know it's sold was for from demos and stuff that we had of our game are actually our football game looked really amazing it was way out of its time because the architecture on m2 was unbelievable at the time was way way beyond anything else so anyway so that everybody really kind of made out in the end and that was and that was great so we then decided that we were going to you know continue our bad business behavior here and decide well my god were you know even with all this other stuff we got like 20-something people even one point whatever three million dollars but it wasn't three 1.3 million dollars because we had milestones to hit and things like that in order to get paid so we really didn't have all that money in we were still kind of struggling day to day to be a developer with the number of people that we had and stuff but we were just figuring it's going to work out and blizzards really committed to this project and I think that we can convince them that they haven't paid us enough and then they approached us late in a 95 and like December right over the holidays and said hey we're interested in acquiring you guys we're like yes thank God and and it was it was big relief to not have to stress about that payroll anymore and and so in early in January then we started telling people look we're going to probably sell to Davidson associates which was the actual owner of blizzard and and they said and so 3do got wind of it and they you know their deal with selling them to wasn't done yet and they're like oh my god no we can't we can't have that so they found out and they started bidding on us and so with this bidding war kind of ensued between blizzard and 3do and in the end we've never really even almost considered 3do we went in there I in don't get me wrong I went in there we listened to their pitch and trip Hawkins who's an amazing speaker and super influential like I went in there and I was like three to go to the moon coming out of there you know I was like oh my god this is gonna be so awesome then Blizzard said well you know we're not really going to budge and 3do was actually offering us twice as much money and we turned them down really because we felt that blizzard really got us and got the game and we were so close in company culture and beliefs that that we turned down twice as much money to to be bought and become Blizzard so little something there which doesn't make us the best businessmen but another example of my worst business decision of my career late mid 96 max has a friend it's not just Max's friend but max knew him first name severe and he came to us with an idea and he said I get this idea I am going to make email over the Internet I said do that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard what are you talking about I already have my EML over they don't nobody this isn't even an invention this is nothing and he said no it's gonna be huge it's a big idea to really know it he's like look I'll give you 10% of the company if I can take one office in the back just you know you guys aren't even using that room I look it's crunch time we only have a few months left in the project here we're trying to ship by December this is late summer at this point it's like oh my god I don't need the stress I don't need the distraction of him doing it Plus this is the stupidest idea ever email on the Internet doesn't even make sense I already have email on the Internet yeah that company was hotmail which 14 months later store for 400 million dollars of which 10% could have been mine which is now worth 280 million dollars what wait right battlenet so six months before we shift maybe a little bit more than that let's say seven or eight months I think it may lizard South it been bugging us for a little while because they you know they were really focused on finishing Warcraft two and kind of after that was done then there that you know the I turned its way towards us and and started well tell us more about this multiplayer stuff unlike a multiplayer yeah and it's going to happen it's going to happen and and sure this is my first C program but it's going to happen the and so they said well we get this idea that we we're going to we're going to make our own service we're going to put it right in the box and we're going to call it battlenet I said okay well alright I guess I mean that's that sounds pretty awesome there were services at the time like total entertainment network ten where you could play Duke Nukem with others like you could like pay $10 a month and belong to the service and they would host a bunch of games they wouldn't host them but they would they would you could go up there and meet other people and play the games peer-to-peer with each other over over this network and so we were kind of gonna beat them at the game or whatever by actually including it as a one step process because it was a pain in the ass to actually play multiplayer almost anything and so we were going to have it so you just pressed a button and you could play multiplayer over the internet like yeah that is awesome uh okay I guess I'm not going to write this and they said oh yeah don't worry about it we're gonna take care of this and Michael Bryan super genius from down south really kind of spearheaded this this movement to write battlenet Michael Bryan Ock obviously left Blizzard made ArenaNet but the but he at the time was there and and made the first version of battlenet and then they said okay well what went wrong multiplayer we're going to come up and we're going to take a look at your multiplayer code and they came up and they're like you don't have any multiplayer code oh alright well in order for this to work with battlenet we're gonna have to have multiplayer codes so a few of the guys from down south actually moved up north during the last six months of development and started making Diablo into multiplayer an integrating battlenet into the entire thing and so like I didn't know anything about multiplayer I didn't know anything about networking at the time I learned a lot through the process of doing this and actually we were able to do all the networking stuff for Diablo 2 but the this was kind of my first exposure to the entire thing to me it was magic it was like you there's some kind of magic that happens and then everything's okay so what went wrong and multiplayer wasn't just that we didn't have multiplayer code which is bad thing don't get me wrong it was also that we didn't realize we liked it just didn't dawn us like we knew people were gonna be able to hack because it was peer-to-peer and that means that everybody's kind of in charge of their own and we've got you know whatever we're going to we're going to do our own stuff right here and you know everybody if you want to cheat go ahead and ruin your little game for yourself that's fine we don't really care and then we're then it came out and like instantly we're like oh my god they can just upload the cheats and everybody can cheat oh my god didn't even think about that so obviously the number one thing that we want to fix with Diablo was the rampant cheating that happened and still going client-server and for Diablo 2 was definitely necessary so some of the good things and some of the bad things there so uh DirectX and PC gamer CD so late in the summertime in the kind of September ish timeframe DirectX was kind of taking off and Windows 95 was kind of taking off and Doss really sucked because it was really hard to run games under daus because you had to know hey what's your irq of your soundcard and is this extended memory or expanded memory or blood blend a blind you had to have you know PhD in computer science to actually run games and so the they you know DirectX what's going to solve all those problems now that that's what they had said with wengie as well so people were a little reluctant which they dropped like a hot potato and so I don't know about this DirectX thing so we kind of waited a little while and then DirectX said well we would like there to be a demo of Diablo on this CD we're gonna stand out a million copies of the CD which the hoecake I think will make DirectX now and and so we made the DirectX version and it got distributed as well as we use the demo and sent it to a pc gamer and they distributed it in their november 1996 magazine which came out in October and and so I was kind of rummaging downstairs and actually found the disc and I just think it running and here it is this is a little bit of the demo right here now you'll notice a few things here your face is much different panels are reversed the speech for the different I barely escaped from the butcher he killed my wife my children I beg of you in the name of God avenged I believe that was bill Roper but I'm not positive the smell of death surrounds me notice how I miss all sorts of stuff how am I missing that barrel one other thing is that you had to click to move your kriti click and hold quickly could you to quickly clickety click and all the fact there was no quicken hole and our favor fresh oh yeah the butcher was on level one I can't believe that still ran I was amazing I was so excited when I got that thing wrong so one of the things that with that CD that really we got tons of great feedback and and out of that came up a strike team which I'll talk about in a second that kind of processed that feedback and we used that feedback to to kind of iterate on the game in the interface and things like that but right off the bat we knew what we want to do with interface one of my favorite games of all time on one game that was super popular at the office was NHL 95 and what we loved about this game and didn't like about RPGs at the time was it RPGs it was like 25 minutes of character creation it was tell me about your backstory and like where what town do you come from and what color are your eyes and like all of it which is great and stuff but it was like it was 20 minutes to actually get in when I loved about NHL 95 is like clickety-click a quick I'm skating I'm skating around at bodychecking I'm like and so it was the it was like that quick quick action that we really wanted wheel of the doom style menus right and it was really easy to navigate those kind of things so we want to do the simplest interface that you could possibly do and that was something that we that we really pride ourselves on we actually had this thing called the mom test which is kind of terrible to say at this point but it was back then and we would apply it a little bit more my mom actually became a computer expert but at the time she was not and so it was would my mom be able to play this was really kind of the test and and sure enough she could so then she liked it actually she became pretty good my father-in-law actually still plays a ton of be able to but that's not the point the so anyway we we really want to create the the the simplest interface possible and I thought that it was very very effective one debate that we had that was a very hotly debated thing was what to do with the automap and at the time a lot of the auto maps in role-playing games were like a piece of piece of parchment and then drew the grid and you could put your pen on it and you could type in notes and you could do all these kind of things like it was the wrong pace for the game completely at the time a game called dark forces came out which is one of my favorite games and I love that game in the end they had this cool overlay on top of the of the screen I liked so it became this this kind of almost meme around the office of which there was a lot of controversy and finally are we going to do something modern and cool are we gonna do the cool dark forces way or we can it do this crappy old parchment way and and eventually a lot of things it was it was this alright we're going to cool dark forces this was the the the code for we're going to do kind of the modern things so that led to the the Auto map which changed a lot the strike team gave us a bunch of feedback on the interface and we did a whole bunch of changes one thing that you will notice that I was shocked to remember is that we invented the hotbar sometime in the last three months the project on the left on the left screen and the very lower left of the there is one one slot where you could put one potion down in the Chi on that like gold background on the floor left so the the interface got much nicer we cleaned it up I think that the in all fairness the the interface got much nicer simply because we kept changing it over and over and over again so we didn't want to make it look too nice until it was the final version and and it was laid out much nicer and the experience became much better but a lot of this feedback was from this the the PC Gamer and DirectX demo a strike team also gave us some very strange suggestions that will will I'd like to point out at this time one was that they wanted to remove the right mouse button they didn't want right mouse button to be using skills they wanted you to have to bring the skill book up click on the skill and then click on the monster or whatever in the you know in the in the window that that was very controversial for weeks and weeks but the most controversy feel as they wanted cooking and food to be in the game I can't even imagine what that would have been like well a kind of sort of Ken because they put food in world of warcraft so the I think that the premise was the same but Diablo with a food meter was definitely not on the list what went wrong so here's a little bit of a personal story one of the the end was really really rough we crunched probably for last eight or nine months something like that and it was anyway it was all day every day I would get up usually at about 4:00 in the morning and I would drive to work I think of my brother and we go to go to work and then I would work until I don't know midnight or so and go home and get up and do it again and I did this for every day for about eight months my wife was pregnant at the time the baby was due in late December you can see where this is going around December 10th my wife calls I'm at the office and she says I'm having contractions it's go time wait what but I'm in the middle of this oh my god and so we were already burning things you know left and right we really tried to make Christmas we desperately wanted to make Christmas but it just wasn't ready and here was you know kind of my worst case scenario fortunately in some ways it turned out to be a false alarm and the baby didn't wasn't born then actually was born on January 3rd she waited actually for me to finish Diablo and that was very nice of her that's what he so I one of the things about crunch I think crunch gets a little bit of a bad rap and it should but for me personally it is something that I thrive under and I know that it's not really talked about much as a positive thing but I think crunch can be a positive thing if it's handled correctly and if fewer your partner is tolerant enough of such a schedule but the you know I think that for me we really came together as a team we were always very very close we would do all sorts of things together we hung out at the office all the time and went out to lunch every day and did all sorts of things together and but really that those kind of stories in the late-night hours and the goofiness that happens as well as like you know putting in cowsy you can click on and like things like that just they end up happening late at night and that that in kind of distress and it's stressing goofiness of the entire situation so that it was really rough and it was difficult personally and we I was quite burnt out for about two months afterwards two or three months afterwards I thought that it really made the product shine we were super ultra focused on making this thing great and and that really made a big difference in the end so though it was crunches never fun I think that sometimes especially for myself is it's a necessary evil so kind of the home stretch we finally got everything in the game including Diablo Diablo got put in and so we decided we are going to put the whole game to a test we need people to kind of play and iterate and work on this so let's offer up a hundred dollar prize for the first person you know and one more only paying people $12,000 a year that's quite a hundred dollar surprise means something so they they let's go ahead and and and and paid $100 for the first person that kills diabla and so we had this skill in the game called blood exchange at the time and and so what this skill did is this swapped your hip points with a monster well we didn't think that through did we uh and so this person been asked he we ended up finding the skill he runs down to Diablo he swaps his health he's like nearly dead he swaps his health and it kills Diablo went below and we promptly yanked the skill out of the game so anyway that was it and then then Diablo finally got finished and was released on December 31st 1996 and AM turned out to be something I'm very proud of and and something that will be remembered for a long time and I'm just so happy that I was able to participate in and so lucky thank you everybody and I will take questions if people have some so I go ahead yes go ahead hi there I swear this talking is really cool I'm a huge fan of the original game I think it's a really foundational game I think it's a really important game isn't it true that there's no way to buy and play Diablo now uh I do not know I I have a copy of the elbow here okay well the Amazon Marketplace is certainly one I just unopened oh wow oh you should put it on the Amazon Marketplace do you want it I have one thing okay no I just wondered if I know the preservation of this stuff seems really important and I agree I would like to see it still working I don't know if it I got it to work but I have an old laptop it runs on XP still but XP is you know going by the way so I didn't try installing it on Windows 10 or anything like that but I know that it did it did work on on XP okay well I just want to say I hope that there will be Whitney to play this is real for me too there'll be emulators and things like that someday I would guess something yes over here hi so first off thank you for the talk it's great for fanboys like me who got into streams because of this game I have a two-part question the first one is how do you guys come up with Deckard Cain and the line stay a while listen I don't remember exactly how we get however Deckard Cain's name was actually a contest so as part of a gaming PC Magazine I think was computer gaming world or something like that we had this contest where people couldn't send in name suggestions or maybe was their names to get their name in the video game Diablo and some guys sent in the name Deckard Cain I don't know if it's made up or not we're like damn that's badass we're going to use that and and so that's how the name came about actually it was this person somewhere out there there is an actual Deckard Cain walking around I think the it's like I'm famous the stay a while and listen to my story the and so I don't know where the line came from you know I didn't actually write the dialogue so but but that is how the name came about so you talked about a few of the influences for Diablo during the talk I was just wondering if there any more that you could bring up I'd be interested to know my god it's a giant list yeah I mean like Ultima wizardry all the Rope you know of many different roguelikes there were Doom was an influence on us like I said everything from dark forces to yeah I mean you saw the list or whatever but there XCOM and things like that there was so many influences on them what came together to make that game without with one games what's that were there any influences that weren't games maybe movies or books or something like yes ready well I mean definitely in the art style that was it was there was a quite a bit of influence from gothic art style and things like that there was a church that the one of the artists had visited on some vacation that he used actually the model the Tristram Church and things like that and so yeah that those influences were in real life as well as kind of European old style architecture cool thanks very much yeah uh excuse me though sorry I didn't see the third microphone I'm sorry so uh Diablo what is the reason I got grounded in high school and I had my phones taken away because when battle that was like starting to get hot I sat down one Friday evening and got up that Sunday evening having tied up the phone line for hire three days so my question to you double is one of the greatest games I've ever played and it was also the first game I ever pirated because we got a CD CD burner for the first time and we're like can we do with this thing but my question to you is how did you get battlenet to be so perfectly effective and like always on and just in 1996 seven being able to have a persistent internet where anybody can login you can have four player games with people from Germany and Spain and just have 24 hours a day gaming most of it him saying yeah well I mean I guess it's not much of a secret anymore I don't think I'm gonna say it and who knows what I'll get in trouble for it but battle map ran on one computer very bunkers I yeah Mike O'Brien is a networking super genius that guy is just amazing but they would have a bunch of super super smart people that worked at the Alpha at Blizzard at the time and and so I think that it was because we used a lot of we had people directly hook up with each other the bandwidth amongst you know that we weren't handling much of the bandwidth we just handled the kind of these connections they would come into the battlenet we would store their IP information and things like that sent it off to the other people and can I get people to connect up to each other so all I really need to do is get this connection kind of send it off to other people and then that was in do run like a chatroom or whatever which is really not much even back then it was really not much processing that need to be involved in that so it was it was able to run very very fast very quickly and there's many games many MMOs and things like that now that they'll have four or five computers running the front end that that kind of masts the back end or whatever so that you can't actually have access to the hardware but you connect to these connections servers in it and you know they'll have 50,000 60,000 people simultaneously on these things and without much of a problem yeah so one last thing the sixteen year old me a--the carried guilt for about 25 years offer not having bought it so I would like to actually give you the money that I stole from you guys thank you very much thank you that was awesome how early did the composer Matt Elam want come on to the project Olin sagen Olman Holman just go say composer and I figured I'd go for it and I knew I'd mess it up but how early on did he come on and then how much was the project he was very busy at the very beginning okay um it was one of the first people we hired actually he was really annoying uh he sent me this demo tape I don't even know how he got like our name and address and stuff like I don't even know how yeah like we originally met but he sent me this mixtape of with video game music I and I and he would call up and he would write and he would like kept pestering us like how'd you like my demo uh yeah sure I it was good I still hadn't listened to it yeah no it was great it was uh when can I come in and we can talk about this for Dario's use very very adamant about getting a job and so eventually I just relented and and then they and so I came in and he is he's musical genius like he was really it was I was blown away at how lucky we were to have such a talented artist you know with us from the very beginning and he was a huge influence on kind of the atmosphere of the game in general I mean that town music is just so haunting and and beautiful and so you know I think that um you know he was he came up the most ingenious ways to make sound effects like the sound effects for the skeleton our pencils and diced in a little Rolly cup and like you know there's all sorts of things like that that he that it came up with that that it was just it was amazing to see him work and he it was funny he would work like two hours a day and the rest of the day just be kind of farting off but the but the but those two hours were like more productive than my eight so it was the he was he was phasing when he was would work like crazy crazy fast for a few hours and then kind of you know fart around and play with dice and you know and play Diablo anyway it was really good it was he was it was amazingly talented areas and and as well as we were very lucky to have him he was on from the very beginning thank you you guys been lying for long Saddam was easily the most nostalgic game for me it's they created such a sense of fantasy when I was a child I one of the things that I really loved was this idea of the church that you slowly descend into the depths of hell I was wondering when that idea came to you that was that was actually in here that's in this document religiously yeah is there from the very this is something I've been we had been thinking about for a long time that that is exactly the kind of layout that we would have we would be start you know in a town it was a very you know Moria angband roguelike kind of thing where there's one town and the dungeons underneath but you know what better place to place the dark creepy crypts underneath the church right you know and so then it just the it all the idea went like this and it all worked and so that's it was right from the very beginning that we thought of that was that design doc ever made public no I don't think so that'd be cool do ya I'll put it up online if somebody wants to if you guys want to peruse it I'll uh I'll mail out to any URL or else I'll tweet a URL where I can you guys can see this later if you guys want to follow me man it's really my twitter name you may not remember it's David Brevik anyway that's it so if you guys want to follow me out I'll tweet it out later I'll put a URL up and put it up for public consumption yes all right all right so I played a fair amount of games and blizzard games but unfortunately never really got into Diablo so I'm gonna ask you right now sure I have your copy of - yeah yeah you're bold enough to ask for come on up and get it here I don't know if it'll run though unfortunately by day you should give it a try better put at least a hundred hours into that great talk thank you very much for giving it I figured I had to ask you something so where did the advent come from for the when you finished we beat Diablo start on Hana and then you play again and the multiple today I see levels that continue well the multiple difficulty levels was something that we wanted to extend the game player whatever it extend the runway was one thing that I didn't really like about some of roguelikes you know kill the boss in the game ends or whatever I said well we can we can do the same thing that we have in with very little work graphically and things like that no new levels and what now we could actually just go ahead and and expand the content make it last for a lot longer slash forever you know is going to take forever to get to a level 199 or whatever it is and and so that was that was kind of the intention from the very beginning and God now I've lost my train of thought there was something else that you remind me of a different story and I can't remember what it was but anyway it's fleeting fleeting now I'm sorry they anyway so it was from the very beginning that we had intended on extending the gameplay thanks well I thought you're going to talk about the gem in the head by the way that's why I was anyway go ahead over there something I always liked about Diablos not only that um that there's a great loot grind that goes in but also that there's a sense of place some other loot based games that I've played before for example destiny of the division they either had one or the other the other had a lot of great loot drops but this place was terrible or they had a great sense of place some place that I would I feel invested in but just not enough of the game itself to keep one going what would you what would your suggestion be for somebody if I were to make a loot based game to both make the world interesting and loot drops of be interesting I think that the it feels like a real place and what really helps is that it's small when you don't have to make tons of places and make each one identifiable next to chop a lot easier you can keep the amount of content amounts of locations to a minimum then you can really make those flourish you can make those really expand them and and put a lot of detail and a lot of backstory and whatever you want into it to really make it feel like a place thank you yep go over Hey Sian - admit I missed out on Diablo 1 & 2 even get two and you missed out on the copy now - I know - no freeloader boy and even played yella - I had to beg my parents and it was this whole spiel cuz I was definitely not the mature threshold anyway so my questions about Diablo 2 from the chat gem activate I know it's go get asked this a lot I'm still not telling this those satisfactory answer my wife programmed it and it's not you know I'm never gonna tell you what it is sorry it's hers to tell so after coming out with Diablo it was a huge success you mentioned that you were burnt out for like two to three months afterward how did you come back from that and like what how did that really affect your next project and even the time after that nice oh it didn't affect the next project it was even worse the elbow to crunch was the worst crunch of my life the crunch for about a year and a half on Diablo 2 so I you know I I think that it just I just needed to recover I needed to not be so stressed out all the time and that meant well having a baby which strangely is still stressful I don't know that's the you know I went from one stressful situation to the other and but it was also relaxing because it felt very much like a sense of place in a sense of home and it meant it meant something to me right now that was that that made me you know focus on my family and that really kind of made it a you know get away from work and focus on other things in my that that kind of calmed me down and made me you know de-stress and not think about work even though having a baby it's a little a little bit stressful so it's not that bad I mean huge III happen so everybody has me from powers my mutant powers I don't need sleep and and so and this is actually pretty well known I've stayed up for 96 hours straight and things like that during Marvel heroes the so what yeah it's it's a little weird but the and so you know having a baby that's the biggest complaint people have is oh my god I'm not getting sleep but didn't really bother me so it's not it's not a stressful situation is I think for most people anyway so that that's really getting back to it other things that besides games really grounded me and really made me appreciate other things and it took us probably 2 or 3 months after that because we said oh we're done with Diablo were going to move on we're not going to do Diablo 2 and it probably took two months after that before we decide actually do Diablo 2 so playing Diablo 1 and 2 I was quite fun of Deckard Cain and spoiler alert he'll salty or he died in Diablo 3 I I think it sucks you know I I love that character too and you know it's a shame that they went that way but you know I have no real influence or control over any of that and they're gonna do what they want to do and you know I was sad to see him go that's the way it is you eulogy for him I think yes oh guy you can ask a question thank you what is the story with the Hellfire expansion oh my god really you're gonna bring that up I'll tell it quickly but basically it was not made by us we had a design doc they didn't follow it they made a teddy bear quest I was pissed and and so then that that was that's really it in a nutshell and and it it didn't work out it didn't sell like I wanted to I mean Davidson really wanted an expansion for the product but we were going to move on and make Diablo 2 at this time and but Diablo one had sold so well that they really wanted this and we said well so Davidson associates and Syrah online were owned by the same company at the time so Sierra online and Blizzard and all was one company and so some people over at Sierra I said well we've got a team that could make this Hellfire expansion and so we said okay and we sent them over a bunch of stuff and it just didn't work out we couldn't communicate well with them I was really upset about the entire thing and in the end I just kind of disavowed it now whether or not that's the right thing to do or not I don't know but the but you know I'm still upset about the entire way that it went down sorry to upset you no no no it's it's fine it's just that you know it wasn't really a Blizzard North product and they didn't listen to us so that's what can you do yes um so first you almost like my favorite game I've ever played thank you thank you um I was actually curious about the automap er like I don't know if I misunderstood that part but uh you know after all the times I've played it started noticed like motifs like certain rooms OB built like what did it build it in chunks or did it no actually the entire game is tile based which changed for Diablo 2 there is actually room based in Diablo 2 but first one was purely tile based I would set down some patterns when I was doing the deal when if I was doing that different different tile types had different level generation algorithms and the first one was like I built a hall and the hall could have two or three big rooms off of that off that hall and then off those big rooms then it would randomly generate a series of rooms connecting to each other off that that could connect to each other or not connect each other just didn't it didn't matter and then we would like place downstairs in a random location which you know you often saw you would come down the steps and then the stairs down would be right there and and things like that so it was it but it was purely tile based not only was it tile based but all the tables for how the entire thing looked were there was no tool for this I had like hand code when you get this particular intersection with this particular pattern and these four particularly squares connected to each other display the graphics this way and if there was one of these things next to it put a shadow on the wall unlike all of these kind of things I there are eight zillion little exceptions in fact we got down to the the caves level in the caves level we did the generation and it looked terrible we didn't know what to do and so we had to black out kind of the the bottom part of the the cave level and then we realized we couldn't have doors down screen like we could any on other levels so in the caves there are no doors leading down you know down left or down right and and so all of them are up there so each one had its own particular set of you know the only way generated own way it generated in the caves actually there were they were even up to the very end there were still bugs at the caves that would make it so you can get out of the cage you couldn't get the different sections of the caves and stuff like that and I had to write these this terrible algorithm that like brute force checked whether or not you could actually get to every section of the caves anyway so each one was tile based it was very complicated and had all sorts of rules and each one was hand coded mm-hmm hey so you were gonna tell us a story about the jewel in the head but I guess my question is in addition to that because it might you do want to go satchel I do yes absolutely is um what were you planning the story to go in the direction that it did from the very beginning or was that just kind of more of a cliffhanger thing that you want to do it so I um I'll just tell the story so we we were up all the cinematics for the blizzard games were made down south by a cinematic team and they were doing pretty much whatever the hell they wanted to and we had no influence whatsoever over them and so we had ideas and they come up and we talk about him then they would go down and do something different and and so you know like a lot of the cinematix didn't turn out like we wanted them to but then we started to get along a little better and things started to work a little better there's a little more cooperation things started to get and things were going great and then and then I said okay well we're done we've we finished the final cinematic and I'm like okay cool I can't wait to see the you've killed Diablo a cinematic and so they send it up and we look at it we're all crowded around the desk and we're looking at this thing and then and we watch it he dies and then he jams the geminus forehead and all of us are like what the hell did we just watch what was that that doesn't make any sense at all is that cool okay well I don't know about this and so we had a little bit of an argument about whether or not we were going to have this or not and whether or not this could be the official ending it was pretty controversial down there too so there was no intention of this being the ending to the game at all but in a lot of ways it turned out to kind of make sense because of the ability to kind of play the game over and over again it kind of set up this weird not really much of a story you gotta really stretch the truth to kind of get back to Diablo still exist kind of thing but but it was that that was kind of some of the premise of you become Diablo now you have to defeat your old guy kind of thing and that was the that was kind of the idea behind it whether or not that really worked or what it means or what it meant at the time or did it no it didn't make sense and that's you know that's just the way it was and never our intent to do that but without Luis that was the way it was and stayed that way and actually and now looking back and I'm quite happy with it actually it's just weird enough to remember sonica well thank you very much good all right thanks well I couldn't hear you by the way I'm sorry I just heard Thank You buzz yes to render all the sprites and stuff we just used whatever the computers were at the time we used Autodesk 3d studio max to make all the 3d models and stuff at the time except for the backgrounds the backgrounds were actually made on a Mac using some mac modeling program because Eric did a lot of the backgrounds in healing know how to use this thing on the Mac so they he didn't know anything about pcs sorry anything about 3d studio time soon oh they're kicking us out I'm sorry thanks everybody

Channel: GDC

Views: 669,419

Rating: 4.9322386 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: VscdPA6sUkc

Length: 77min 43sec (4663 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/runyoudown]

Thanks for posting this! Postmortems are easily one of my favorite ways to learn about games.

[u/RoadRunner-007]

As someone else already said, thanks for posting. I found this very interesting.

[u/WhenTrianglesAttack]

Interesting talk. A lot of it was already covered in the old design docs and a postmortem article that were posted some time ago, but it was cool to learn more of the details behind the decisions.

Never knew there was a such a disconnect between design teams. Or the bad blood between them and the Hellfire expansion (I knew Blizzard disowned it, but still). Hellfire did somewhat undermine the gothic atmosphere with the humor and absurdity, but I thought the Crypt dungeon had amazing atmosphere.

I had the same reaction they described to the ending cutscene. Soulstone to the head? What?

Great game, despite its age and simplicity by modern standards.

[u/BlinkHawk]

Is he back at Blizzard? Why wearing a Blizzard TShirt and being called by Rob Pardo to talk about the game?

[u/k4rst3n]

Thanks for posting, love these kind of talks! :)

[u/InternetTales]

Someone asks about the chatgem in d2 but he doesn't tell them. Said his wife coded it. So maybe it needs to be activitied then you go to a secret channel. Like, Xarex, which was the name of his character. Or maybe to his wife's name or their child's name. Maybe?

[u/tifached]

great watch

[u/doomiablo]

Very interesting talk! In general game history back then was very interesting compared to today.