Android!

People have been asking about an Android version of the game since before it came out. There were technical challenges, but a major issue was that I have no particular expertise in Android development. And as a single developer, taking on such a major project would have meant that I couldn’t continue to enhance the game. And even if I did the port, selling via the various Android markets isn’t the same as going through the iOS App Store.

Fortunately, like a heroquester travelling on the Other Side, I could call for help. HeroCraft, a “top developer” on Google Play, took on the daunting task of making the game’s 50 screens work on arbitrary screen sizes. Plus all the other work needed to get a game that depends on UIKit, Apple’s Core Audio sound format, Game Center, etc. to run on different operating systems. And they own a lot more Android devices to test on than I do (just a Kindle Fire I bought to check out the port). Actually, with all that work, maybe they were the heroquesters, reenacting “The Making of KoDP…”

I’m extremely happy to say that the journey is now complete. King of Dragon Pass will be available via Google Play on 12 August for $9.99. If you’ve played the Windows or Mac version of the game, this is the updated version, with a host of new content, more advice, heroquest hints, and a somewhat simplified game. If you haven’t played before, you’re in for a treat!

As a veteran Android publisher, HeroCraft made a fun game trailer. (We probably should have made one ourselves, but wouldn’t have come up with their clever way of emphasizing the story aspects.)

Since I’m not an Android user, I was a little surprised that the game was a medium-sized download, but when you first launch, you need to download the bulk of the assets. I thought the size limit was a thing of the past, but I guess this is standard and you’re probably used to it as an Android user.

In a discussion with HeroCraft, the subject of piracy came up. I have no experience with Android publishing, but they certainly do. It’s a sad fact that people steal games for any platform, but it appears to be worse on Android. If my publisher is concerned, then I am concerned, since affects my livelihood, which in turn affects my ability to make more games. And actual sales will encourage HeroCraft to bring their port to more mobile platforms.

I hate to remind people, because I don’t think it’s you, but buy the game, don’t pirate it. (This may protect you and your friends from malware, too.)

If you haven’t played King of Dragon Pass yet, be aware that it’s a unique game that can be a bit hard at first. Check out the manual! We also have a tips page. And, welcome to Dragon Pass!

How We Update

As you may know, we’re working on an update which will include the winner of the Scene Contest and a number of other new scenes. We actually added so much that we had to revise the file format (it wasn’t really designed for expansion back in 1997, and we didn’t rework it for the iOS version).

All screen shots are from actual App Store updates

But we always make sure you can continue a game you’ve started. King of Dragon Pass is a long game, and it would be unreasonable to have players not upgrade because they’re in the middle of a game. So KoDP reads the previous format, but writes the new format. In fact, we’ve done this before, so it can read several old formats. We also sometimes have to go through gyrations to make sure new variables appear only at the end of our data files. (During development, we’re less strict about this, and testers occasionally have to discard games in progress.) Just to make sure, I just loaded a game which was actually saved in 2011, before the 2.0 release.

We also do our best to test all the new content. There are 16 new full scenes, plus news and other followups. We run through every outcome of every choice, ideally in the context of a normal game. The last thing we want is an update that has serious bugs! All this play can uncover minor bugs in previous parts of the game, and we fix those too.

Finally, we want the update to be free to everyone who’s bought the game. That’s pretty much how the App Store works, but I suppose we could make new content an in-app purchase. While episodic content may sometimes work like this, King of Dragon Pass was not designed to be broken into chapters. There are other reasons for making the update free, but a big one is that don’t want to ruin the play experience.

Version 2.3 is not yet ready to go, but when it is, it will be quality software that’s compatible with ongoing games, and will be a free update.

Future Updates

Just a quick update:

Apple will be releasing iOS 7 “this fall,” and we want to be sure KoDP runs well under it. There’s a cosmetic issue we can work around, so we’ll be making a small update to do this (as well as fix some bugs). This release will also add a convenience feature: the Magic screen will show you any blessings that are in effect due to a sacrifice. (Including sacrifices made automatically as part of tribal agreements.) It will probably be out in a few weeks.

Then we plan to add new content. This is a much more major undertaking, as it involves commissioning new artwork, writing new scenes, and testing. This will take longer, in part depending on how many scenes actually work out. I’m hoping it comes out in Autumn, but can’t promise anything.

By the way, most of the changes in the upcoming 2.2.1 are due to player reports. Please let us know if something isn’t quite right.

Architecture Redux

I’ve mentioned the game’s architecture before, but understanding it helps answer some common questions, so I thought I’d draw a picture.

The game has three main divisions. In the original version, different developers were more or less responsible for each.

The user interface (the 50 or so screens and dialogs) were created for the Windows and Macintoshes of the day (that day being somewhere between 1997, when we started the project, and 1999, when it was released). We used mTropolis, a powerful multimedia development system that was discontinued over a year before the game came out.

The interactive scenes (and news) were coded in OSL (the Opal Scripting Language, or the Opal Scene Language).

The game engine, written in C++, executed the OSL code, ran the economic model (tracking cows and the effects of treasures on them), and was responsible for saving the game. It was cross-platform, running equally well on Mac OS and Windows.

When we created a new version for iOS, the basic game code and the scenes didn’t need radical change. Both were enhanced (for example, the game had more advice and supported 7 new treasures, and there were 28 new scenes) but existing code continued to work. By contrast, none of the user interface code could be used. Not that it would have mattered much, the small touch screen needed a new user interface anyway. This was a very substantial effort, and it ended up being partly duplicated for iPad and again for the 4 inch display.

There are numbers in the diagram because they suggest why the iOS version is distinct from anything else. Saved games assume a specific number of scenes and treasures. Adding more would mean substantial reworking of the C++ code. But this code had to work with mTropolis, so it’s tied to 1998 era systems. The hardware and compilers I used back then are long gone.

So that’s why the GOG Windows version can’t be updated.

Some have asked about a new Windows or Mac version, or an Android version. Since mTropolis no longer exists and UIKit is iOS-specific, any version for any other platform will require reworking the user interface (possibly with some redesign, definitely a brand new implementation). Think of it was rewriting a third of the game.

The first iOS release took about 20 calendar months. Since the C++ code didn’t need significant updating, the user interface could thus be said to be about half the code needed for that project.

Actually, there was some new C++ code, because we wanted to add Game Center achievements. Most of this would work on Mac OS X, but not on other platforms.

So unlike the original version, where it was trivial to build for both Mac and Windows, there’s a daunting amount of work to bring the game to another platform.

What we’ve done instead is reflected in those numbers: reworking the 50 screens for iPad (and soon the iPhone 5). And adding new treasures and new scenes in an update we hope to release this month.

4 Inch Display

I really have to wonder when I see a one star review in the App Store that reads: “I have to give 1 star to any game that doesn't optimize for the iPhone 5... Its just to easy of a fix.” (sic)

One star? Really? The game is awful because it was created before the iPhone 5 existed, and has not been altered to use the wider screen? If the reviewer stopped to think at all, is adding 88 pixels of width to a landscape game really going to make that much difference? In other words, is this screen

really so incredibly worse than this one?

In almost every possible case, getting extra width buys you very little with a landscape application. Text lists still scroll vertically, and the landscape height of an iPhone 5 screen is exactly the same as the landscape height of every other iPhone. So a bigger screen doesn’t mean less scrolling.

As for easy, it turns out that we had to rework 31 different screens. In many cases, it was an easy enough transformation, like the one above. But there were cases where because we’d put in so much effort making sure the game worked on the original iPhone that it needed new design and coding to work on a different layout. In particular, for the one area where the game can be a little better on the iPhone 5’s 4 inch display. Interactive scenes always allow you to view the entire illustration, but during play it’s partially covered with text.

On the wider display, less of the picture is obscured.

(I suppose we could show more text instead, but as shown above, it doesn’t always need to scroll. It seemed like a better tradeoff to favor art over text.)

Obviously it’s better to fully support the new screen size, but we could have used the money to commission new artwork instead of new versions of the same user interface elements. And used developer time to create new scenes, instead of redoing 31 different screens to show 18% more pixels (18% more blank parchment in many cases).

As you might have guessed from the screen shots, we are in fact adding new assets and code to support the 4 inch display as well as the 3.5 inch display on iPhone and iPod touch. But it’s because Apple now requires this, not because this game really gets better because of this effort.

The Debug Dialog

When I was creating the iOS version of King of Dragon Pass, I included some of the same debugging utilities we had in the original game. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember exactly what we had, and there was no good way to look, because the release version of the game didn’t have them. (And it’s real hard to search an mTropolis project.)

I knew there was a way to trigger a specific scene (critical for running them over and over to test all the possibilities). And a set of commands that do things like get rid of all your food (to test things like starvation advice) or get raided by Trolls.

But I knew there was something more, just not what it was.

Today I happened to run into this code
/*
Returns text about our clan helpful for debugging (shown in the \ dialogette)
*/
char* CPlayerClan::DebugInfo() const
{
gString = "farmerMorale: ";
UString::Append(gString, this->MoraleFarmers());
gString += ", warriorMorale: ";
UString::Append(gString, this->MoraleWarriors());
gString += ", thrallMorale: ";
UString::Append(gString, COSL::GetIntegerVariable(var_thrallMorale));
gString += ", mood: ";
UString::Append(gString, this->Mood());
gString += "\rvictory: ";
UString::Append(gString, COSL::GetIntegerVariable(var_victory));
gString += ", kingship: ";
UString::Append(gString, this->Kingship());
gString += "\r";
UString::Append(gString, fYearsAsType, "year", "years");
gString += " as clan type\r";

return (char *)gString.data();
} // DebugInfo


which was clearly used to display some internal status useful for testing.

This isn’t as important as it was in 1999, but we’re in the process of thoroughly testing a number of new scenes (currently 14, but several more are in progress). So I put this into the current debug dialog. It’s almost like seeing a long-forgotten friend.

Art Process

I was going through the files and ran into some work sketches, which we usually didn’t save. So I can show a bit of our process for creating art.

King of Dragon Pass had three separate art styles (plus interface art), so there wasn’t a single process. This is the basics of how we worked with Stefano Gaudiano to create artwork relating to the present (as opposed to the Otherworld or history).

A scene’s writer (usually Robin Laws) would come up with basic art direction. I (David Dunham) might expand on it, and pass it off to Stefano as Art Director.

R257: A prosperously-attired female carl from the Prosperous Clan (R90) comes to tell us of an attack on her cattle by a fearsome creature called a walktapus. A walktapus is a humanoid creature with an octopus for a head; its skin is mottled and wrinkly like an octopus, but it walks on land. The walktapus has attacked a typical shaggy cow and has its tentacles wrapped around the beast, while carls from this other clan look on in horror, too scared to fight it.

Stefano would get someone to make a loose thumbnail sketch in pencil. (These varied in size; the ones I found were 3 to a standard sheet of paper.) This served to make sure the writers had communicated to the artists, and as a quick way to iterate the design. Elise Bowditch and I reviewed all the thumbnails with Stefano. Sometimes there were small changes (to bring out important elements of the scene, make sure that there was room for text, or emphasize something interesting the artists had come up with). Unfortunately, I don’t know who did this thumbnail.

Once the thumbnail was approved, Stefano assigned it to an artist to create full-sized (9 x 5 1/8 inch) pencils. We’d get these by fax, since there usually wasn’t much discussion at this point, and we could usually give feedback by fax or verbally. Again, I don’t know who did the pencils for R257.

When the pencils were approved, Stefano inked them, then gave them to a colorist (Mike Christian and Brian Sendelbach did most of the coloring). Note that this scene is in flashback style, where the event occurred in the recent past.

Stefano would then do any additional work (such as adding the embroidery on the woman’s overdress). He scanned these images and sometimes made color adjustments or small edits with Photoshop.

Troll Hero Preview

As you may know, we’re hoping to make a fairly large number of new scenes for a King of Dragon Pass update. We do have a constraint: there is no art pipeline the way there was in the original, so we are repurposing existing art. This isn’t actually a new thing — we reused artwork rather than commission art for the over 500 scenes in the original. (There are “only” about 420 illustrations earmarked for scenes.) After all, it makes sense that Sora Goodseller looks the same each time she visits (though she actually has a second piece of art).

One of the design goals for this update was to make use of artwork that may not be commonly seen, such as a scene that occurs as a direct consequence of a previous scene (i.e. a story branch). Here is one of them, a visit from a troll hero.

To write this scene, I consulted with the world’s foremost uzologist, Dan McCluskey. (I had to cut some of the finer points of troll behavior since you are seeing this from the human viewpoint.)

This scene has some internal branching, so it was a bit time-consuming to code, but it’s now ready, and got a good response from initial testing. Now we need to perform more rigorous QA, making sure each of the branches works.

This is the 11th new scene. Others are in progress, though I don’t know if I’ll really end up with all 29 I have ideas for.

Planning for Growth

King of Dragon Pass has continued to grow since the last mention of what changed in the iOS version. There are still seven new treasures (it turns out to be tricky to add new ones without breaking saved games). There are now 29 new scenes, 4 more than when we first released. Two of the new ones have new artwork. And one of the bug fixes actually enables a scene that accidentally never showed up (a bug was introduced about a month before release back in 1999).

The way the save file format works, it’s not easy to add an arbitrary number of new scenes. And new treasures are also problematic. Luckily, the iOS version doesn’t need to worry about dealing with back-and-forth file compatibility between versions (since you can only upgrade and can’t move files between sandboxes). So I can add code to deal with old saves, and gain the ability to add a significant number of new scenes, as well as new treasures. Four scenes are coded, with one new treasure.

This is the first time we’ve changed the file format (we’ve always taken pains that updates could always read your saved games). It’s a bit of a pain, so I don’t want to do it again if I can help it. Accordingly, I want to release the next version with a fair number of new scenes. Fortunately, I have ideas for another 29. Unfortunately, most of these are not fleshed out, let alone coded and tested. Some may not turn out very interesting. So the update won’t be ready for some time.

This may hold up bug fixes and advice improvements. But hopefully one big update will end up better than a number of small ones, so all the story content is available at once (after all, you could easily play a game and not see a specific scene).

Outtake

I was just looking at the King of Dragon Pass source code, and came across this table:

"Desperate",
"Impoverished",
"Adequate",
"Adequate",
"Adequate",
"Good",
"Excellent"

These adjectives describe the clan’s quality of life, which was calculated on a scale of 1 to 7. Factors included food supply, whether people had gone hungry in the last two seasons, adequate goods, and the presence of exotic luxury goods.

There was clearly provision to display this in the user interface. My memory is hazy, but I think at one point the Clan screen showed these.

Apparently some time during 1999 this got dropped, probably to de-clutter the interface.

Conceivably an iOS update could restore this as advice.

Just because the quality of life is not summarized on-screen doesn’t mean it has no importance. As you might expect, clan mood is affected by meeting people’s needs.

King of Dragon Pass Grows Up

The game celebrates its first birthday on the iOS App Store this week, on 7 September. We thought it was time it grew up…

…from 480 x 320 pixels to 1024 x 768. After longer than we expected, King of Dragon Pass is now a Universal app, and fully supports iPad as well as iPhone and iPod touch. It took two additional UI artists, and we had to rework each of the 49 screens, but it was worth it. You use an iPad slightly differently than an iPhone or a computer (even a laptop), and it really feels like reading an interactive, illustrated book.

The game does support the Retina Display on both iPhone and iPad, though most artwork looks just fine at standard resolution so that’s what we used. And we didn’t want to add another 500 MB of art (an estimate how big the 436 event illustrations would be with 4 times as many pixels, for both iPad and iPhone screens).

So the iPad illustrations are the same resolution used in the original game (upscaling inevitably introduces distortion, even if it’s barely perceptible). This left enough room for a reasonably sized column of text. You can see both the art and the accompanying story at the same time, and in most interactive scenes, you don’t need to scroll. And there’s enough space that we can show the info that was hidden behind the graphic on iPhone, and add a Saga button. Again, this really seems like the perfect platform for this game. I can’t imagine playing it on my 30 inch display.

Since the iPad UI is different, we also had to make a new version of the tutorial (most notably because there’s a single Sacred Time screen on iPad), and the manual.

We know a lot of people have been waiting a long time for this version. And we didn’t want them to have to pay a second time. So we made the game a Universal build — it adapts to the device you’re playing on. And we made it an update, rather than a new title, so that it would be free to existing players.

The downside is that you need to download the assets for the device you don’t own. So to make sure there was something for iPhone owners, we added a new illustrated encounter. We also followed up on a suggestion to show deity icons in the lists of blessings, which help identify them. And there were the inevitable bug fixes.

Enjoy the update!

(And, since all reviews and ratings reset with a new version, consider going to the App Store and rating the game.)

Bugs

Like any large software product, King of Dragon Pass is not perfect. We wish it were, so we track bug reports and try to fix things when we do an update.

When we created the original game, we had a quality assurance team to find bugs. We also relied on beta testers. For the iOS version, we don’t have a paid team, and Apple limits the number of outside testers. So we have to rely on players to do much of the bug finding.

Today, a blog comment read “the game seems to be crashing often.” My first thought was “no, it doesn’t!” The second was “that’s not a very good report.” But then I thought, “what if it is crashing more often than I think it is? If so, I want to fix it!”

I remembered that Apple makes crash logs available to developers. Normally, if an app on your iPhone crashes, a log is saved on the device. When you synchronize, it’s copied to your computer. And if you’ve given the OK, it is also sent to Apple. (I believe only when you synchronize, though I’m not sure of the details.)

This is especially handy because Apple will combine duplicate reports. When I logged into iTunesConnect and checked, the top 3 crashes accounted for 71% of the reports. I grabbed these.

The logs by themselves aren’t very useful. They include a stack trace which shows exactly where the crash occurred, but only in numeric form. They need to be symbolicated — cross-referenced against the symbols (typically method or functions) of your app. For this to work, you need to save the symbols with each build. Luckily, when you make an archive to submit to the App store, the symbol table is saved. Unfortunately, Apple’s development tool Xcode is terrible about symbolicating. In fact, I was only able to symbolicate about half of the logs. Luckily, I could get one log from each of the top three crashes. And they all pointed at a method in my AdviceView. In one of them, the call stack included showQuestDialog, so I started showing advice and opening and closing the Quest dialog. Sure enough, I got the crash. From there it was pretty short work identifying what was going on (it was a message sent to zombie object, one that should have been dead). And easy to fix.

So this story has a happy ending, and one that makes me glad I’m an iOS developer and a lot of the work was done for me. (Bigger software developers often create a similar infrastructure themselves, to capture crashes in the field.)

But the moral of the story is: we can’t fix bugs we don’t know about! The 2.0.5 build has been played since February. Nobody mentioned anything until now. Please let us know about problems! http://a-sharp.com/kodp/bug.html explains how to send a report from the game itself. (This won’t do anything with crashes, but you can email bugz «at» a-sharp.com with the reproduction steps, and we can send back the somewhat picky details of finding the logs on your computer.

iPad Update

Yes, we are working on a Universal update. Yes, it is taking a long time. No, iPad users won’t have to pay for this separately. No, we don’t know when it will come out.

But that’s not really news. We do at least have some concepts and user interface artwork that can go in the game (instead of the placeholder artwork we’ve been using).

Here is a sneak preview of one of the dialogs. You can see that we’ve enlarged text and buttons (since you hold an iPad differently than an iPhone). And since there is room to fit all the advisors all the time, it’s easier to consult them. But it’s the same dialog as always — you won’t have a different play experience on iPad (although the larger screen does make some things easier, such as less need for scrolling text).

This is the only dialog that’s completely converted to the new look, so there is a lot more work to do. And we still don’t have all the new artwork. But there has been progress.

Still Not Universal

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of progress to report on the Universal build of King of Dragon Pass. Due to unforeseeable issues, our artist wasn’t able to complete the work. We’ve arranged for another artist.

Since we sometimes get asked: we are making a Universal build. That is, a single app that will run on iPhone or iPad, and take advantage of the screen size of each. If you already have the app on an iPad, it will be a free update.

(While the game doesn’t fill the screen of the new 3rd generation iPad, that device does use its Retina Display to display text, so the game looks very nice when blown up to 2x.)

We’ll let you know when there’s more progress.

A Taste of QA

While cleaning up the house (King of Dragon Pass was created in our home office), I ran across a notebook kept by Rob Heinsoo, our QA lead. Here’s a typical page:

While for the most part we avoided the branching problem, King of Dragon Pass still had a lot of content, and we wanted to make sure each response of each scene was tested. Most of these had success and failure results, so our QA team had to keep track of when these happened. (It was possible to force things to happen, but I think our preference was to have them come up naturally, since in many cases things depend on something that happened earlier. Forcing a scene or outcome might be buggy in its own right.) Note that a scene might behave differently depending on clan status, e.g. R288 depends on morale.

The new scenes in 2.0 went through a similar process to make sure every branch and outcome worked.

A Big Game, Visualized

I’ve said before how King of Dragon Pass is a big game. My graphic designer wanted to get a sense of the game flow, so I put together a collection of iPad screen shots. This gives another sense of how big the game is — there are 49 screens here. (This doesn’t include the long game victory, because it doesn’t need additional layout or updated assets.)

This is basically the same number of screens that the iPhone-sized layout uses (there’s an additional annual recap screen, a menu screen, and interactive scenes have different sub-screens).

This is the complexity involved in a port to any platform. Even to iPad, each of these screens needs to have layout. Most of the code is the same between iPad and iPhone, but not entirely.

Universal Update

Although there are still a few known issues, and none of the iPad-sized assets are final yet, all of the screens have been converted to take advantage of the 1024 x 768 pixel screen. (There are 49 iPad-specific .xib files, which specify layout.)

As I’d hoped, there don’t seem to be any problems with the 480 x 320 pixel version, so I can finally be confident that we can do a Universal version — one build that runs on either iPad or iPhone. Right now it’s about 242 MB (again, we don’t have final artwork so this could change before release).

Although the game art isn’t available at full-screen, we are taking advantage of the iPad screen to showcase that art by not covering it with text. In addition, scrolling choices is much less frequent. Advisors are always visible. And it’s now possible to read the manual from within an interactive scene (as per the screen shot above).

The Universal build has not been through any sort of QA, but I hope to start testing soon.

iPad Update

Introduction screen (work in progress)

The first pass at doing an iPad build is just to get it running on iPad, making each of the 40 or so screens big. This is not yet complete, but all of the management screens, interactive scenes, and the intro have been converted. It’s kind of cool playing the game and seeing all the artwork, while very rarely needing to scroll.

On the other hand, it’s painfully obvious that we still need new assets, and a lot of attention to layout.

One interesting thing that has come out of this so far: there is one less management screen. The two screens that appear as part of Sacred Time can be combined into one.

I also have a rough estimate for the size: probably about 250 MB. That’s for a universal build that has assets at two sizes. This compares to 104 MB for the current iPhone-sized build.

It’s also less than a number of games I’ve downloaded, such as the special editions of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2. And way less than RAGE HD at 1.21 GB!

That’s a plausible size, and it also doesn’t appear that I’ve broken anything on iPhone. So it seems likely that there will be a universal build. That is, an eventual update that will play in native resolution on iPhone and iPad.

Pelaaja Interview

Before the iOS version was released, Janne Pyykkönen contacted me to request an interview for Pelaaja, the Finnish video gaming magazine. Janne’s article was published last month (in Finnish), and Pelaaja has allowed us to post the original English-language interview.

You were the producer, designer and one of the programmers of the original King of Dragon Pass. That’s quite a lot of titles, so how much was the original King of Dragon Pass ‘your’ project? And did you yourself originally come up with the idea of a Glorantha based computer game like KoDP?

The advantage — or curse — of being an independent developer is that you wear many hats. Luckily, I enjoyed all of those.

King of Dragon Pass was indeed an idea I dreamed up (though obviously many others helped bring it to completion). I actually came up with a different sort of game about the colonization of Dragon Pass as part of my tabletop gaming in Glorantha. It took a very different approach, but it showed that the setting would work for this sort of game. A few years later I figured out how I’d use this in a computer game.

The other designers were Glorantha creator Greg Stafford and another famous PnP designer Robin D. Laws. What kind of aspects of the game did each of you focus on?

Before development began, Greg and I bounced ideas off each other. Our thoughts were surprisingly in sync. As the project progressed, he approved artwork, and offered useful advice. We adapted the initial clan creation questionnaire from one he’d used in a paper & dice game.

I asked Robin to write the hundreds of interactive scenes, but he ended up fleshing out much of the game framework I’d come up with.

The original structure — management screens, advisors, scenes — ended up pretty much unchanged, though we added interactive battles thanks to Rob Heinsoo. Elise Bowditch and I wrote a few of the scenes. As far as design, I was responsible for the economic model, and tried to make it interesting and workable.

Why was the Orlanthi culture picked to star in the game of all the Gloranthan peoples? Was it because the viking-y warriors were seen as one of the more relatable ones, or was it more due to the setting of the Dragon Pass itself? It seems like a good choice at least from my own perspective, as at least many Finnish roleplayers were familiar with the setting from the translated RuneQuest material published back in the day, like the Snake Pipe Hollow adventure (which I don’t remember anyone ever surviving).

One answer would be simply that in the fictional world, there already was the story of the recolonization of Dragon Pass by the Orlanthi. This gave us the most material to draw upon (such as Snakepipe Hollow). Of course, if it wouldn’t have made a good story, we would have picked something else.

The fact that KoDP takes place around 300 years before the published RuneQuest material also seemed like a nice twist on the setting.

Was it hard to design a truly Gloranthan fantasy computer game? The way the setting handles stuff like myths, magic and tradition (or even the titular dragons) is quite different from classic D&D-ish fantasy which dominates the gaming scene. And what is it for you personally about Glorantha that most captivates your imagination?

I think in most ways designing for Glorantha made things easier — so much detail already existed (even though we ended up filling in a lot more). Robin and I respected the setting, so it was easy to work with its creator, Greg.

And yes, Glorantha does have a different feel than other fantasy games. I was drawn to it by its strong mythic sense, and the fact that its cultures actually seemed plausible from an anthropological sense. In KoDP the trolls are antagonists, but in Glorantha as a whole they are just another type of people, and you can play them equally well.

In addition to your work with KoDP, you’ve been a pen&paper Glorantha contributor as well. Do you still play roleplaying games on tabletop these days?

A lot less than I used to, thanks to the iPhone project...

KoDP is one of those games which doesn’t fall neatly into any usual computer gaming genre. Is it a strategy game where you don’t even see any 'units' and the of the most important thing is your number of cows? Is it roleplaying when you control an ensemble that dies of old age and is replaced by new generation? Is it multiple choice interactive fiction? So, how would you descibe it yourself today? How would you personally describe it to someone who hears about the game first time now? What is King of Dragon Pass really about?


I’m asking this since because the the critical consensus on the game was really mixed when it was released back in -99 (the Mobygames review index is hilariously polarized) and it seems many reviewers didn’t know what to make of the game at all, and it still might be a ‘hard sell’ for a new generation.

Hmm, Mobygames seems to have ignored a lot of reviews, such as Pelit’s 94/100.

It’s true that the game doesn’t fit neatly into the standard slots. I think that’s a plus — the genres are useful for marketing, but they aren’t the only ways to have fun. If I have to describe it, I usually call it a "storytelling strategy game," because I think the stories are the key element, and because the rest of the game play most resembles the turn-based strategy genre. But what it’s really about is telling an interesting story that takes a generation or more to unfold.

Looking from the outside, King of Dragon Pass seems one of those games that really divided gamers but at the same time created a very enthusiastic cult audience. Is that true, and do you get lots of contact from eager fans still today? Can you comment on how the game was back then as a commercial success?

I was a little surprised at how well people liked the game — we had a money-back guarantee and only two people ever took advantage of it. Just this week I was wearing a King of Dragon Pass t-shirt, and a coworker (who didn’t know I’d created it) commented that he liked the game. The game’s been out a while but even so there’s still a residual community, and I hope it picks up again with the new release.

I’m told the game was in the top 10 in Finland, but in the rest of the world it didn’t do as well. We did have to make a second printing, but it wasn’t a commercial success.

How did the project to bring a new 2.0 KoDP to iOS start for you and where did the idea come from? I personally always thought of the game as a hardcore pc title but now realized it’s been out on Mac as well and you seem to have lots of previous experience on iOS platforms as well...?

[Oops, I somehow overlooked this question! Sorry, Janne!]

What kind of improvements have you done for the game? Did you have to drop any features that just didn’t work on an iPhone?

The elements I dropped weren’t so much because they didn’t work, but because reimplementing the clan overview (with the little herds) and the clan rock (with the glowing runes) were way more effort than I thought they were worth.

So you had Olli and Jani helping you on the conversion. I guess they’ll be able to tell me also what they’re actually doing, but how did you come in contact with these two originally, looking from your point of view?

When I worked at GameHouse, our sister studio was Mr. Goodliving, where Olli worked. Olli was a fan of the game, and pitched a prototype to Mr. Goodliving, shortly before they were shut down. As the game got more complete, we needed an artist to work on the new user interface, and Olli put me in contact with Jani.

I feel a bit sorry for Jani because he came onto the project fairly late, and I had to keep saying “no” to his suggestions, because the game design was already in place. But despite the constraints, he came up with some elegant ways to have a touch UI that was both functional and attractive.

The original art was one of the selling points in King of Dragon Pass. How much of it did you retain and how much did you have to get done again due the size constraints?

The original artwork (such as the ink and watercolor scenes) was the property of the artist, and they sold much of it over the years. I now have the remaining scene art, and people can buy it at http://daviddunham.etsy.com/.

We scanned the original artwork at 640 x 480, and then did retouching and color correction using Photoshop. The iPhone has a smaller screen, so we could just use the digital art. But we no longer had all the originals available, and wouldn’t have the staff to rework them in any case. So there’s no version of the game optimized for the 1024 x 768 pixel iPad screen.

Do you think it’s possible the revival of the game might also bring about some sort of digital distribution deal on pc or even console direct download shops? In fact, I guess many fans of the original are wondering why we haven’t seen it yet in a place like Steam where many eccentric games seem to thrive today... I think I read somewhere (RPG.net discussions maybe) that some sort of trouble did  prevent the republishing at least in some point...?

No, it is not possible to distribute the original game digitally. I think people don’t realize the difficulties of trying to use a 10 year old development system — which had been discontinued before KoDP’s release — to change the game so it wouldn’t require a CD. We spent a fair amount of time on this but were ultimately unsuccessful.

KoDP can be quite daunting for a beginner due its complexity and the fact that things don’t work quite as same as in ‘normal’ fantasy games. Do you have some words of wisdom to offer new players who would like to become clan chieftains in Dragon Pass? What are the most important things or principles to remember? (I might personally say ‘Don’t piss off the ducks!’)

First, listen to your advisors. Second, read the manual! If you don’t read the manual, at least read the Info available from the starting screen. We’ll be posting a series of tips on our Twitter feed, @KingDragonPass.

On the other hand, perhaps pissing off the ducks leads to an interesting story (and there’s always Restore if you decide to change your mind).

iPad Plans

A number of people have asked if the iPad build would be Universal — the same app running in native resolution on both iPhone (and iPod touch) and iPad.

We don’t know.

It is absolutely our plan to do that — I’d like people to keep their Game Center achievements, or play on any device. But we’ve also been actually developing for only two days, and it’s early to make promises.

Although there have been only two days of coding, I didn’t even start that until I came up with a design that should work on iPad. There’s no value in simply blowing the existing interface up to fill the larger screen — iPad can already do that. Well sure, you’d have crisper text, but you’d still be scrolling through advisors and text.

And, since we didn’t have a perfect crystal ball in 1997 when we began our art pipeline, the highest resolution available for images is 640 x 480 pixels. There’s no way to fill the iPad screen without introducing some distortion, however kind a good filter might be.

Someone asked if it would be the same UI as the desktop version. Besides the fact that the original crammed in a lot of controls and wasn’t at all touch-friendly, I think we can do a better job presenting information with the extra real estate.

So there will be larger images than the iPhone version, and larger text.

Now that iOS 5 is out, what about iCloud? Wouldn’t it be cool to play a game on your iPad, and play a turn or two on your iPhone while you’re waiting in line at the post office?

Of course it would. But what happens if neither device is online, and you play a few turns on each? There would need to be a way to resolve the conflict. And UI to specify whether to use iCloud at all. This is starting to seem like a lot of work that would actually not be that great a benefit to that many people. I don’t want to delay the project for features that won’t actually let more people play, so there will be no iCloud support.

So there’s still a lot of uncertainty — I don’t know for sure it can be Universal. Likely this depends in part on how large it ends up (it will almost certainly be at least twice as big a download), which I don’t know. And I don’t know how long it will take. (So far none of the approximately 40 screens is really redone.) But I hope that still provides some information as to what’s going on.

Oh, one more thing. If you only have an iPhone or iPod touch, and it’s a much larger Universal build, what’s in it for you? I have at least one new scene (with new artwork) planned, and there will be bug fixes. So hopefully it will be worth the download for everyone.