KotP – Four years on…
Tonight I’ve been reading posts on the ttlg.com forums. KotP is once again the topic, unearthed from the crypts of older threads.
I sometimes say that designing A Keeper of the Prophecies nearly killed me. It felt that way and I did wind up sick enough to miss work for several weeks. After a project like that — 80 hours a month of the most demand and complex design work I’ve ever accomplished missing sleep and cutting into time I didn’t have — after something that grueling, it didn’t matter beyond bugs fixed and players playing. I didn’t care anymore. I was done. After five years and 5,000 hours I was done. I’d wrung everything I could from the experience — the rush of creation, the sweeping emotions of this story through the eyes of invented characters, the ordinary and spellbinding events.
I was done.
That was May of 2005. In July I took up the cross one last time to compile the whole thing into one campaign. It went together like a hand into glove — mainly because everything but the whole hand had already been inside that glove a thousand times. Three thousand custom files were released. Something like 215Mb – which is already laughable in this age of photo-realistic games with physics engines terrifyingly accurate beyond anything used for even spacecraft engineering. Compared to game design, rocket science isn’t rocket science.
Not my point, though.
My point more than four years out is how KotP is still being played – perhaps 10,000 downloads so far — also translations into French, German, Russian, and Bulgarian and likely a few other languages I don’t know about. By now I’d figured no one would be playing Thief anymore, especially not a mod made with many core elements formed in 2001 and 2002 based on an game engine older still. I mean the game engine is ten years old and without considerable effort, most off-the-shelf PCs can’t even run the program anymore.
Yes, tonight KotP is once again the topic. Some players still don’t like it — which is a sign that I’d pushed hard enough. Others get the point and in the end say things about the campaign they don’t say about any other game. I’d like to repeat those comments, but I can’t for a hundred reasons.
It’s a pretty good mod, though nothing like what some NASA-sized army of game designers and software engineers could have built. My volunteers were awesome. But we all have real lives to live in the real world.
Where I didn’t cut corners?
The story. And even though I told my own story for my own reasons — not really even caring if it worked — in the end it apparently delivers all the power of an entire planet concentrating a beam of light onto one undeniable point — just as I’d hoped when I took up the mantle.
If we are free, then we are free to choose and even though imperfect and with far less insight than the gods, we can still do what they seem so utterly unable to do with their high-falutin ‘Prime Directives’ standing in the way.
Without saving the whole world, or even being noticed at all, we can intervene in the face of a simple injustice to change the course of one event where it might matter most to just one person, and that can be enough.
What I didn’t realize is how powerful and lasting such a simple idea could be.
