Gavin Clayton has been interested in finding out what makes video-games tick ever since he discovered the old Space Invader arcade machines. It only makes sense that he is the brains behind Daggerfall Unity, a truly impressive port of a DOS game to a more modern engine. He kindly agreed to an interview all about his passion for development, the struggles of his iconic work, his views on the current gaming climate and so much more. Here are his incredibly insightful answers.

Introduce yourself! I’m just a regular geeky guy. I was born in Australia and have lived here my entire life. My father was an opal prospector and gem cutter, and my mother was an exchange operator. I spent most of my early life either camped somewhere near a dig site or living in the nearest small town. We moved around a lot and there was lots of empty time to fill out in the middle of nowhere. Books, comics, and board games of all kinds were really important to control boredom. These days I work in IT solutions – projects, migrations, planning infrastructure, that kind of thing. I’ve always loved pulling stuff apart to discover how they worked, so I’ve kind of fallen into patterns of doing that across various subjects. One of my absolute favourite hobbies is baking sourdough and breads of all kinds. It’s science you can eat! Twitter Daggerfall Unity

1. What got you into game development?

The first time I saw an arcade machine (Space Invaders at a little country town corner shop in the early 80s) it blew my mind right into the outer atmosphere. I often didn’t have so much as a television to watch and here was this alien object bristling with buttons and controls with flashing lights and sound. I desperately wanted to know how it did all that stuff but nobody could tell me.

My mother gifted me a VIC20, a book on BASIC, and some games on cassette. It might not sound like much now, but it was like being able to see in colour for the first time. Gavin Clayton

It’s hard to describe just how frustrating curiosity was back then. I couldn’t look up information on the web like we can now, and nobody around me seemed interested in anything beyond the day-to-day.

I felt like I’d peeked something magical from another universe and had no way of understanding it. This lead me into doing embarrassing stuff (for my parents) like switching arcade cabinets off and on in public places to watch the boot-up sequence, just trying to glimpse something from behind the curtain.

That was the first time I saw the word ROM, which just lead to more questions people couldn’t answer. It’s kind of funny thinking about it today but it was seriously maddening back then.

A few years later, my mother gifted me a VIC20, a book on BASIC, and some games on cassette. It might not sound like much now, but it was like being able to see in colour for the first time.

Within a few months, I was building small games moving ASCII character around mazes and picking stuff up. A few years after that, we had a C64 where I learned assembly from the spiral-bound manual and started building various tools like a sprite editor, ADSR sound editor, and small games. Things just progressed from there and my obsession hasn’t left me.

2. What got you into gaming in general?

I can’t really remember a time where I was playing games that I didn’t want to make them as well. As I got older and learned more about development, I started pulling games apart to see how they worked by reverse engineering file formats and recreating small isolated parts to see if I could do it.

Other than 80s arcades, the first game I really connected with was Curse of the Azure Bonds. I was getting into Dungeons & Dragons around this time and Azure Bonds felt like a solid campaign being run just for me at home. A few other games that grabbed me were Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, Thief, and of course The Elder Scrolls in general.

A few modern games I’ve really enjoyed are Dishonored, Elite Dangerous, World of Warcraft, and Subnautica. I particularly love games that just take their hands off and let me explore their systems independently. That’s one of the things that drew to me Daggerfall – it was simply overloaded with baroque and impenetrable systems and let me experiment freely.

3. If you could recommend only one indie game, what would it be and why?

That’s a tough one! If I had to pick one indie today, Subnautica would be near the top of the list. It’s a wonderfully peaceful game that doesn’t mind if you only want to rest in the sun and listen to the ocean. But you can also plunge into dangerous depths where survival is on a knife’s edge. It’s filled with exploration and discovery, and even has a really touching story to uncover. Definitely one of my recent favourites.

4. Moving onto Daggerfall: what made you decide to port it into Unity? Why that specific game?

It has been a long process. At first, I just wanted to know more about how the game worked. I started with information on the file formats from UESP and created tools to view the graphics, explore the layouts, and listen to the sound and music. I did this on and off from around 2000 to 2013, gradually building tools and expanding on my knowledge of the file formats. Daggerfall became this interesting puzzle-box I’d pick at every now and then.

I’d argue that [Unity] is still one of the most accessible game creation tools for communities, despite not being open source itself. Gavin Clayton

In 2014, I started learning Unity and wanted to find something more interesting to do than the basics. While kick around ideas, my wife suggested porting some of my Daggerfall work over, as it was something familiar I could use to ground myself while learning an unfamiliar tool. And because most of my tools after 2009 were written in C#, the code translated fairly seamlessly into Unity. This is how Daggerfall Tools for Unity came to be. At the time it was just a toolset for importing textures, 3D models, and map layouts into Unity scenes.

#DaggerfallIUnity was announced on August 13 2015. We've come a long way in 4 years! Also related, here's the very first screenshot of #Daggerfall in #Unity3D from 2014 when I was just building a toolset to read files. Everything started with model ID 456.https://t.co/RxzzjT16CH pic.twitter.com/BXXwlcolFe — Gavin Clayton (@gav_clayton) August 13, 2019

This re-sparked the general idea of recreating Daggerfall, something I was already interested in personally by that time. I could see the potential for a free commercial-grade tool like Unity with millions of users coupled with an open source project to create something people could remix and expand on. There’s a concept called “network effect” where once enough people get involved in a something it becomes bigger than the sum of its parts.

[Unity] is the first game engine with a commercial feature-set to truly hit global adoption whilst being free to start using. Gavin Clayton

For all the criticism people like to throw at Unity (some of it’s deserved but a lot of it isn’t), it’s the first game engine with a commercial feature-set to truly hit global adoption while being free to start using. I’d argue that it’s still one of the most accessible game creation tools for communities, despite not being open source itself. Hopefully that will change someday.

Anyway, by late 2015 I felt ready to start recreating the whole game. I had lots working in about a year or two, then things really started kicking off. By 2017, we had several contributors helping to push the game towards completion every day, and there was lots of excitement as it became clear this project actually had some legs. That network effect I wanted had finally put some wind in the sails. Development accelerated as did the modding scene around the game.

5. What was the biggest challenge in porting Daggerfall?

Rebuilding a big complex game without any source code or internal documentation is rife with challenges. So much of the game is a big black box, and a lot of the information out there was either incorrect or only partially helpful. The amount of detail needed to play a system vs. recreating it from the ground up are orders of magnitude apart in difficultly. I particularly give thanks to Allofich and Ferital who can really break down a DOS exe the hard way and helped rebuild some of the more arcane parts of the game.

I spiraled a bit into depression and seriously considered giving up for a while. If the community wasn’t so established and supportive by that stage, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far. Gavin Clayton

But other than reverse engineering formulas and behaviours, the game had to be built from scratch. We all wanted Daggerfall Unity to have mod support like a modern Elder Scrolls game, and that involved compromises between how the game worked in 1996 on XnGine and how it works today in Unity.

And because users have to provide their own copy of the game assets for copyright reasons, we also inherit all those old 1996 formats and structures. This often involved gluing together the old with the new: marshalling data between formats internally, hardcoding some things that had to link with static data, and layering down new systems on top of old that supported the classic data while still allowing for modding and flexibility. It’s sometimes messy and chaotic, like a new house built around the shell of an older one, but it gets the job done.

One of the most difficult systems to implement (and arguably still the most challenging) was the quest system. This involves many small interlocking systems and not all pieces were well understood. I often had to take a best-effort guess and make several passes as new information came to light, usually through bug reports. Building the initial quest system was like a second job for around 18 months of my life.

I received feedback that it looked nothing like Daggerfall or looked too much like Daggerfall. People tend to either love or hate the graphical mods. Gavin Clayton

And because it was mostly data-management and state progressions, it was difficult to show progress in screenshots. I spiraled a bit into depression and seriously considered giving up for a while. If the community wasn’t so established and supportive by that stage, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far. I really need to thank Jay_H here for his early interest in building quests and all his feedback as those systems developed. Without having someone else to bounce off at that time, I really might have stalled or given up.

An unexpected social challenge was how Daggerfall Unity would be perceived by people learning about it for the first time. Depending on the screenshots they saw first, I received feedback that it looked nothing like Daggerfall or looked too much like Daggerfall. People tend to either love or hate the graphical mods, and not everyone understood these were mods created by community members, not part of the base game.

It also doesn’t help that people’s memories of the game vary depending on how and when they first played it. MIDI songs sound different depending on your sound card, Cursor and View modes provided very different experiences, and movement and jumping in classic were affected by CPU speeds. That last one means people who played on a 486 had a drastically different moving and jumping experience to people playing on a Pentium or in DOSBox today. No amount of reserve engineering can overcome this stuff, it’s tied to the hardware platform they actually played the game on. So while recreating, we’re also trying to feel out how most people want the baseline to play.

6. What are some quirky/interesting things that you noticed about the original when making Daggerfall Unity?

So many things! I actually made a thread about this on Twitter and add to it when I think of something. One of the quirky/clever things is how Daggerfall generates building names from a single seed number. That one took a little time to work out. Link to my Twitter thread with some more is below.

I thought it might be fun to talk about some of the challenges reverse engineering #Daggerfall to create #DaggerfallUnity. I'll add to this as I think of stuff. I'm not dunking on one of my favourite games, just some fun insights into the work and limitations of rebuilding it. — Gavin Clayton (@gav_clayton) August 4, 2019

7. What’s your favourite Elder Scrolls and why? (If it’s Daggerfall, what’s your second choice?)

It would have to be a tie between Daggerfall and Morrowind, which grabbed me just as much as Daggerfall. As a developer though, Daggerfall wins out because it’s a quirkier and filled with more mysteries to explore. Morrowind by comparison was a lot more sensible, and probably the better game of the two. But as a puzzle box, Daggerfall is still king for me.

8. What’s your typical playstyle when it comes to Elder Scrolls game?

I like magic-heavy classes. I played Bretons and Dark Elves a lot in Daggerfall and tend to stick with that in later games. I also like the idea of Khajiit and will play one as a secondary character with a thief-styled build once I’ve finished the first playthrough.

My playstyle is generally peaceful and explorative. I usually get more of a kick discovering a new summoning date in the library than fighting something in a dungeon. I love peeling back mysteries the game doesn’t lead me to.

9. Do you have plans for anything similar in future?

No plans for any other remakes or ports. I’m now going to shepherd Daggerfall Unity towards 1.0 while working on my own games. This is what I wanted to do back in 2014, but I had to get Daggerfall out of my system first.

10. What are you working on besides Daggerfall Unity?

I’m now working on a small and fast indie game using concepts I’m familiar with from Daggerfall Unity and iterating them into something a bit different and a lot smaller. A kind of distillation of Daggerfall mixed with a few other things I enjoy. I have something larger in mind, but I’m feeling a bit burned out from working on such a huge and complex game like Daggerfall. For now, I just want to create something smaller and densely fun.

Or the hammer itself could pulse red when danger is nearby, or even just indicate different material types. It's a versatile setup. pic.twitter.com/fhl2T8HxUN — Gavin Clayton (@gav_clayton) October 4, 2019

11. What are your thoughts on the indie genre right now?

Indie games are the best they’ve ever been, but it’s also the worst time to be in the business of making them. There are so many quality games to play but only a few can bubble to the top. Discoverability is at an all-time low and platforms like Steam appear to be groaning under the weight of incoming titles.

With most of the revenue consolidated to a small percentage of developers, I fear there’s a time coming where very talented indie devs will stop finding it a viable business. Everyone needs to feed themselves and their family and the current atmosphere makes it very difficult to earn a living wage from indie development.

12. What are your thoughts on Triple-A games right now?

I’m very disappointed with the focus on microtransactions and gambling in modern games. Ditto for slicing the experience up into smaller pieces to portion out later through an in-game store. Fortunately, a few big studios are still making complete experiences, so all hope isn’t lost yet.

13. Are you a fan of modern Bethesda?

The last Bethesda game I played was Fallout 4. I generally feel that modern Bethesda is in a holding pattern, keeping the business side running with games like Fallout 76 and Blades while working on something epic. At least, I hope that’s what’s happening. I’ll wait until Elder Scrolls 6 before I form an opinion.

If you haven’t followed Gavin Clayton or played Daggerfall Unity yet, I highly recommend doing so. He has made it amazingly accessible to get into The Elder Scrolls 2 which is one of the best games in the series. He also posts very interesting game development tidbits which is fantastic if you’re an aspiring developer or even if you’re just a passerby who wants to see what goes on behind the curtains.