Designing a Game

The first step in designing a game is, of course, deciding what type of game you’d like to make. In the case of The Bard’s Tale we knew we wanted to make a game that was a sort of spiritual successor to the original without being directly related to it in any way. The original game was essentially a dungeon hack that upped the ante in several areas on its contemporaries. Using that model we decided that our game would take what the current generation of dungeon hacks were doing and try to improve on them in the areas we felt were being neglected or underutilized, as well as inject some old school sensibilities that had disappeared from the current crop of games.

If there is one overall law or directive for The Bard’s Tale it’s that we want every aspect of the game to have a strong sense of character - we didn’t want anything to feel cookie cutter or generic. We also knew we wanted to have a narrative thread running through the game, to that end we also wanted a hero who was a little different from the norm. The Bard became a cynical, wise-cracking rogue who did things out of base motivations and not because he had any sense of the greater good.

Next we had to flesh out the Bard’s abilities. Wanting to emphasize the “bardic&#822 1; aspect of the character we knew we wanted him to use his music as magic. The main question was wha

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