00:04We're Dedalic. It's common courtesy, we don't just generate our maps randomly.
00:10The most gorgeous thing in Black Barts are the characters.
00:14They've turned out so good, and after two and a half years of development, you really grow fond of them.
00:22Our intent is not to make the game overly difficult for the players, but we want it to be a
00:26challenge.
00:33Dark, mature, and in 3D, with their turn-based RPG, Black Art's Dedalic Entertainment is treading new ground.
00:40It is only fitting that we didn't meet with senior producer Kai Fiebig and his team in their studios,
00:46but rather in the tenebrous dungeons beneath, which are exclusively reserved for this project.
00:52Practices like these are unpleasant but necessary.
00:55Creating an RPG always comes with a lot more of blood, sweat, and tears than an adventure.
01:01We love telling stories, and the RPG was always the adventure genre's neighbor.
01:06Black Guards takes place in the universe of Europe's most successful pen-and-paper role-playing game, The Dark Eye.
01:12In contrast to all the soft predecessors, though, we take off the white gloves.
01:16You won't get to play a paragon hero with this one.
01:21The appeal of playing a scoundrel in Black Guards is basically your moral flexibility.
01:26You don't have to play by the rules, but breaking them may have consequences.
01:35Don't break anything.
01:41Yes, we ultimately went for criminals, since you've already seen the virtuous heroes saving the princess a lot of times.
01:50There's some point where you get tired of being the hero.
01:55We don't have hardcore felons here, however.
01:58They're not loathsome.
01:59They're rogues.
02:01Deep, damaged characters, basically.
02:05We just wanted to turn things upside down.
02:08We said we wanted interesting characters, polarizing, with a good deal of grit.
02:13Often the bad guys are more relatable, often even more likable than your goody two-shoes hero.
02:24It's amazing.
02:26I think we really succeeded in creating a strategy game with a lot of depth to it.
02:32Sure, there are some more relaxed maps in between, where you can just casually slay your way through some enemies.
02:41But otherwise, we definitely fought teeth and claw during development to keep that depth.
02:51We had this huge pile of skills and spells, and all from the Dark Eyes source books, and we wanted
02:58to keep as much as possible.
03:04Interactive map objects, the environment you can use to your advantage during battles.
03:10All this offers an insane variety of options to solve the problems we present the player with, and to win
03:18battles.
03:24One of the challenges was that in a world like the Dark Eye universe, there already are plenty of characters
03:31with stories written for them.
03:33The hard part is to avoid a clash with these characters and sad stories.
03:40Aventuria's story is constantly expanded by hard-working writers, and so we did the following.
03:47We picked the area of the Emirate Mengbilla, the Wild South, an area that has not been played that often.
03:55It's not as restrictive and tightly written as other parts of Aventuria.
03:59That makes things deliberately easier for us to tell our story.
04:07Designing something like that is a bit like dancing chained up.
04:11You have to stick to the source material.
04:13This means creatures, characters, and the world are very close to the books.
04:18The challenge to implement all this in the world was mainly in terms of design and the wiggle room we
04:24had to give ourselves.
04:25Many times we had to be interesting, more bold than we were supposed to be, make colors more vibrant, bolder
04:33in terms of forms, and the whole stylization.
04:36The biggest challenge was certainly the rules.
04:40No pen and paper player would want to do without the rules.
04:44And implementing these rules into blackguards and making them work was tough.
04:50We made many things more transparent for the player.
04:53This means, we kept the rules, but a lot of things happen automatically, in the background, so the player doesn't
05:01have to deal with them.
05:03Of course, anyone can check on the background processes, but it's way more simple this way.
05:13It's really nice to see the players start talking to the heroes.
05:20When they go like, Zerberan botched up another spell check, come on, man, at least pretend you're a wizard.
05:28Additionally, everyone of the blackguards team had their personal challenge.
05:34There are hundreds of thousands of obstacles, because we weren't yet familiar with the tech.
05:40Fiddling your way into this, finding out how things work, getting to know the new engine, getting familiar with the
05:47new work processes, those were the difficulties in the beginning.
05:51But when you had the first results on your screen, that felt good, and gave you the motivation you needed
05:57to pull through this.
06:01Yes, programming an AI causes all kinds of mayhem.
06:07It's really like educating little children, teaching them to walk and to react to stuff.
06:17The craziest of situations happen during this process.
06:22One moment you think you taught them sensible enemy behavior, and suddenly, they start pushing our nice interactive objects all
06:31over the place.
06:32Without any sense or reason, they move around chairs.
06:43For more information, visit www.fiddling.com to visit www.fiddling.com to visit www.fiddling.com.
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