Austin Grossman - You

I tried to think it through. Was it possible to tell the story without all the baggage Lisa talked about? No conversations, no cutscenes. Just gameplay. No interruptions, no one telling you what to do.

I thought about Doom . I thought about what it’s like to grow up in Endoria at the end of the Third Age, about the forest and the castle. What does the start of a story look like?

Once upon a time…

Like a path leading into the great forest at the edge of your father’s land. You can only see a short way down, then it curves out of sight, darkly shaded by the old growth above.

There’s a field behind you, and a low castle in the distance, smoke trailing up into the chilly autumn air. Sigh. There’s something expansive and melancholy at the same time. The sun is well into the afternoon. It’s almost too late to set out.

You can walk back to the castle if you like and see sunburned men and women bringing in the harvest. The castle feels like home, but they don’t need you there. Sooner or later you may want to leave and start your life in earnest.

Maybe it’s not that hard to begin a story. You can walk into that forest anytime. Break off a branch and walk as long as you like. Farther on, the pathway forks at an old stone milepost dating from the last empire. In one direction you hear the sound of a stream. In the other, silence. The start of a story.

There are brigands moving around in the forest. You might meet one and kill your first man in a breathless scuffle. A carriage might pass through, carrying a noble lady of House Gereint, which your father warned you against. There’s a hole in the ground where the people of that last empire mined the stone for their mileposts, but it’s been long ages since they ceased work there. Their tools lie abandoned in their places, as if they left in haste.

But what does the start of your story look like? Maybe you don’t feel like taking that path. You can see there’s also a road leading from the city out through the fields and through a mountain pass and into the town, which sits on the border between the House of Aerion’s land and the Gereints’. Caravans run through it and halt outside town at camps, where the caravan drivers tell tales by the firelight. There’s a tale that mentions your great-grandfather’s great-grandfather, and the war he fought in a frozen land, where he lost a crown. The next day there’s a brawl in the marketplace. There are rumors of war. There’s an old woman who can teach you how to find due north by starlight.

I sketched the map freehand, using a contour map of Cambridge as a guide. The mines went in at Porter Square, the deepest station in the Boston subway system. I let the Mass Pike heading east lead off toward other kingdoms, and the train lines running south became a deeply rutted cart trail.

I looked at the result. Seen this way, Cambridge almost seemed like a cool place to be.

That night I thought about the game again as I was falling asleep.

It hovers like a cartoon logo in your head as you lie under the glossy, striped sheets you chose at the store and the heavy sleigh bed you assembled a few weeks after you moved in. But you wake remembering it, as you listen to students talking underneath your window and skater kids rolling past at all hours. You live in a college town, though you’re no longer a student yourself, and haven’t been for a long time.

It’s raining outside. How did you get here? And how did you get to be twenty-eight?

Picture the road north to the country, where the crown is. It starts with getting out of this bed. You would get up right now, stand in your boxers and complimentary T-shirt from a theater conference two summers ago, go down the stairs, the carpets no longer showroom quality, down through the black rooms of dinner smells to the sliding door out into the backyard, the air still warm from the late summer heat. The stars are desert-clear.

You’re in one of your quiet panics that get worse at night. Around the side of the house and into the quiet street, asphalt even and warm. Where the block ends, there’s only scrubby grass and dry soil and wildflowers, now just dried-up seedpods ready for fall. You walk into the middle of the road and sit down. The street is so quiet you could linger for hours. The moon is desert-clear as well. There’s a path leading off down the hill, marked with pale amber lights mounted at ankle height, leading down through the park.

You think about your sister, Margaret. She just turned thirty-four. She’s moved into a trailer she bought and parked on your father’s land, by the house he bought in upstate New York a few years ago. She seems happier than she was. She has a small dog. She’s dating a guy ten years younger, an undergrad at SUNY Buffalo. You worry about how the trailer will do this winter.

In the middle of your life you find yourself in a suburban housing development. You’re sure as hell not going to law school, so what’s going to happen to you? I mean, seriously, what happens at the end of the Third Age? To any of us?

For the last week of preproduction my section of the schedule read write TDR document. It turned out this meant “technical design review,” and I tracked down the one Darren wrote for Realms of Gold VI and set it to print, which resulted in a stack of printouts four inches high. The TDR was the universal blueprint for the entire game, the almighty spreadsheet of creation.

It listed every object, every feature, every level, every scene, every character—everything from the Save/Load screen to the closing screen. When I was done with it, the other teams would take it for holy writ. Gabby would take it and break down every texture they had to draw, every 3-D model they had to build, every animation they had to script, and assign it all to somebody, and estimate how much time it would take and put that in the schedule. Don would take the schedule information and track everybody’s progress and figure how many people we’d need and how much money all this would cost.

Lisa would do the same thing—break down all the functionality, systems, and subsystems for the programming team, including all the process-oriented stuff—tools for the designers, the mechanics of taking raw graphics files and importing them into the game engine, etc., etc., etc.

I would do the same for the designers, who would then build the levels, spec the interfaces, write the dialogue, and place the objects, traps, and monsters.

It occurred to me to read through Darren’s TDR in case he’d listed “crazy black sword of insanity” anywhere. He hadn’t, which only added to the mystery. If you didn’t put that on a list, how did it get in the game?

At the top of a fresh legal pad I wrote:

Technical Design Review: Realms of Gold VII: Winter’s Crown

“The World Is Everything That Is the Case”

For example: What is every possible action you can ever possibly take?

For example: Walk, run, jump, crouch, pick up, drop, throw, stab, chop, slash, parry, shoot, cast a spell. Talk. Sneak. Get on a horse, get off a horse, open a door, close a door. Lock a door, unlock a door. Light a torch, snuff out a torch. Fall over. Die. Was that everything?

Next there was, oh, God, every single object in the entire world.

door

horseshoe

catapult

tiara

bucket

stone, large (4′)

stone, medium (2′)

Stone, small (1′)

Stone, tiny (1″)

Oh, God. Maybe if I worked by categories. I started with foodstuffs.

Turkey leg; pint of milk; seedcake (the contents of Black Arts’ refrigerator).