A couple of new interesting forum posts from Torment: Tides of Numenera developers. First, environment artist Jon Gwyn on the current state of things:

ps. The whole team is also playing Planescape Torment every week to keep us grounded in what we are trying to accomplish ( i just found my way out of the Mortuary into the Hive…so I know I have a long way to go)

Cant wait for all of our kickstarter friends and fans out there to get a gander at what were putting together. All this cool art mixed with the really in depth design and story work should make for a special game that classic RPG fans deserve.

On the Overall Art front, things are progressing nicely. We’ve recently bolstered our Effects team with an experienced artist who I know from my old days at Shiny as well as a young upstart who wowed the art director on a recent trip to Gnomon. Our newest Environment artist Paul is quickly making his mark with some nice Crystal environment work as well as helping me on some hidden Bloom rooms. Paul comes to us from our friends at Obsidian and was an artist on Pillars of Eternity so he knows his way around our process pretty well.

Thanks to all the peeps who helped us fund the newest stretch goal - The Gullet - !! I have been working on this area recently and its taking shape in a nice way. If you can imagine an area called The Gullet inside of a giant creature made of guts and viscera then you know this ‘belly of the beast’ will be extra creepy. Working with Joby on the design, we’ve come up with some cool elements that should make for a fun experience.

And project lead Kevin Saunders on our writing processes and standards:

My apologies for the late reply to this question – thanks for your patience. I’d like to comment a bit about Torment’s writing team and our approach to writing. I don’t know whether I can assuage your concerns, but at least you’ll have additional information to base them on. =)

First, a couple quick notes with regard to the comments about the writing quality of Wasteland 2. To start, it could be good to keep in mind that Wasteland 2 takes place in a very different setting than TTON and also the game had a different focus, with different project priorities. As long-time backers may recall, Wasteland 2 originally was going to have a pure keyword system for its conversations, like Wasteland 1 did. The backers indicated they wished for more, and the Wasteland team agreed with and accommodated this desire. But this meant that the underlying system and tools, which had been developed with a keyword system in mind, had to be stretched to handle more, and that was in addition to the already great burden of achieving the over-the-top reactivity detail that was a core part of Wasteland 2’s vision from the start.

Colin McComb (TTON’s Creative Lead) wrote design for some of the L.A. content (specifically the Coliseum). I don’t know how much of his writing per se is (or isn’t) reflected in the final implementation.

Nathan Long was the lead writer for Wasteland 2, which among other things meant that he wrote the majority of the conversations in the game. He’s currently a writer on TTON. He owns one of the companions and is also writing some area conversations for a region that Adam designed (and thus owns). Nathan has a strong background in traditional fiction and also experience with writing screenplays and films. As such, Nathan brings an interesting perspective to the team – he is approaching Torment from a different perspective and has frequent insightful comments and questions that stem from his experience in story telling and his understanding of techniques used in cinema.

Nathan has little experience in writing for video games, and TTON has a very specific need there given the interactive nature of the dialogue. Wasteland 2 was his first video game writing experience, though he had veterans, such as inXile’s president Matt Findley, to help him adapt to that part of the process.

Fortunately, we have that video game writing experience in spades. Both Colin McComb (our creative lead) and Adam Heine (our design lead) are not only accomplished fiction writers (see Adam’s short story currently being digitally published by Paizo, for example), but were also key members of Planescape: Torment. (Adam was a scripter back then, not a writer, but Colin was the second most prolific contributor to PST’s conversations.) We have a good balance there between Colin’s over-the-top creativity and Adam’s more pragmatic perspective.

And there’s George Ziets (our lead area designer), whose 15+ year career has been focused on writing for video games. He’s seen it all and has conversation design and construction down to a sort of science (though he might disagree with my characterizing it that way =) ). He didn’t work on PST, but has studied it (both as a hobbyist and as a professional) and has almost unparalleled experience in actual time invested in writing for these types of games. (For an example of George’s work, see Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer. He was the creative lead on that project and wrote all of the key story conversations, including the ones with the gods Mykul and Kelemvor.)

Adam and Colin (and I) have been fleshing out the writing standards and conventions since the project began, including prototyping and internally trying out some ideas. We also identified a plethora of new toolset features that would further encourage both higher quality conversations and the faster creation of them. Through fleshing out the conventions, prototype conversations were written and implemented. In some cases, this lead us to change some decisions because an idea didn’t work as well as we had hoped. In other cases, we had a great example that new team members could then play through to help them understand the feel of the game and the writing.

After George joined the team full time, we spent some time calibrating the writing styles and approaches and implementation techniques of each Adam, Colin, and George, to ensure that everyone was on the same page. They did a lot of cross-review of each others’ work and we further refined our conventions and ideas through that process. We’ve spent a fair amount of energy on all of this review, but decided it would be well worth it for Torment. The improved consistency in style and the bolstering of everyone’s understanding of dialogue structures and techniques results in higher quality first draft conversations, and also greater efficiency in writing new dialogues now.

As Wasteland 2 ended and Nathan joined us, he too was acclimated, with at least 2 of Adam, Colin, and George reviewing each of his early conversation drafts. In the beginning, much rewriting was necessary – as one would expect as it takes time for any new writer to get accustomed to a new style. (Plus we tend to be extremely critical in our internal reviews, especially early on when corrections can have the greatest positive impact (because a mistake is more likely due to the person not knowing what’s right as opposed to them just making a mistake).) As time has gone on, Nathan’s first passes have been increasingly on target, and at the moment just Adam is reviewing his work (as is the usual case as Adam owns the area Nathan’s been writing for and thus knows details Nathan may not).

Meanwhile, we’ve made significant story changes due to insights provided by Nathan. (The most recent of these, depending upon Colin’s final decision, happened just last night!) What I’m trying to communicate here is that we have a cast of extremely talented and experienced people, with a variety of strengths and weaknesses, and are attempting to exploit each person’s strengths to the greatest extent possible, while being aware of any weaknesses so that we can mitigate them, and bolster with others on the team. (There are others involved in all of this, too, but this is already a rather lengthy post, so I’ll have to ask the forgiveness of the many other skilled team members whose efforts with respect to our writing deserved to be called out, but that I didn’t mention here.)

In saying all of the above, I’m by no means intending to offer a guarantee that TTON will be the best written game ever. We’re doing our best, but everyone makes mistakes and game development (like most professions, I imagine) offers many challenges, even for those who may be talented and/or experiences. So, I hope that our fans are keeping their expectations grounded and understand that TTON isn’t going to be as perfect as we’d like it to be. But why I do say all of the above is because I would like you all to have a better understanding of some of the people involved in creating Torment. And also so that you know that we know that we can always do better; we are constantly challenging ourselves and each other to make Torment the best game within our capabilities.

Kevin