Lionhead Studios April Community Update

Lionhead Studios developer and all-around nice chap, Sam Van Tilburgh, was kind enough to send me an email recently and inform me of the April Community Update that was posted over at Lionhead Studios.

The update which was published earlier on today, goes on to discuss just some of the exciting things that are going on at the Lionhead Studios HQ, as well as how work on Fable 2 is progressing.

Below is the article in full:

You would be surprised at what goes into making games here at Lionhead Studios; I’m personally still amazed by some of the things that go on in the background. Everyone is starting to breathe Fable 2 over here; from the core development team and the CTG all-star team to the other supporting departments. And so it’s time for some serious Fable 2 gossip!

The team is currently deep into their next milestone, and the planning for the next one will be fully locked down in the very near future, it is actually being worked on as you are reading this. On Monday 23rd April the team had a presentation and I’m getting the impression that they’re working on so many different systems here that some of it is just completely bonkers! Reading the extensive design document is also becoming a huge task…

For our production-team, the planning has been dominating a lot of the work that’s been done the last few weeks. Several meetings, writing documents on how to actually do work, hitting the Senior Scripter with a stick, meetings, going through a lot of lists, meetings, more meetings and spending evenings with suits discussing project managing. Yum! Oh and one of the producers mentioned going to salsa…

The Design team has also been extremely busy; the list is endless (well, a couple of hundred items anyway) but to mention just a few; they have added ‘evidence of dog activity’ spots to Bower Lake, gotten as far ahead as possible with every region in the game, and every dungeon, and revisited everything and then some more ‘whiteboxing’, writing thousands and thousands of words in design documents, after talking about it in meetings, updated some more documentation that was already there, designed some of the main characters such as G[CENSOR]h and much teeth grinding when something went wrong.

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In the mean time, as far as all things programming are concerned, some of the time was spent interviewing applicants for the job openings we have (mainly scripters), then there was also some anger, regret and joy. They’ve been working away on some of the navigation code to make people face towards their destination for example but also support work for the combat system, fixed up broken vaultlines (don’t ask me what it means, it’s all Chinese to me anyway) and especially of interest after the GDC revelation; a lot of additional work has gone into the dog! Also, seeing a lot of the animations being implemented in the game (the code has been developed as well, primarily regarding the simulation of the world) which means that the place is now really becoming alive.

The Core Services team have had a quiet week, they’ve mostly just been fixing problems, while the Engine Team have been having a lot of discussions on lighting which will hopefully be useful in the next milestone. Explaining to you what our Tools Team has been up to would include twenty times the word CENSOR, so I’m not going to go into any detail.

The real eye-candy however comes in when we start talking about the Art Team. It’s fair to say that Fable has a very strong artistic identity and Fable 2 is not going to be any different in that respect. If anything, next-generation means that it’s going to look amazing. You’ll still be able to instantly recognize the game that you grew familiar with, albeit that the place has changed and evolved – for the better in my personal opinion. A lot of sketching and concepting for some of the main characters has been done, allowing the character artists to start modelling them. At the same time, the modelling of the Wind Chimes also seems to be getting along nicely and the hats and hairstyles for the farming community have nearly been fleshed out. Finally; one of the artists started growing a beard, and we’re not sure why…

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There is much more I could tell you, but we’re not quite ready yet to reveal any major things about Fable 2, however the first episode of the Lionhead Video Diary is coming…

You can also discuss this news article in our Fable 2 Forum within this thread: Community Update April - Fable 2 Discussion.

This item was filed under: Fable 2 News.