The Initial Design
The first step in designing a game is, of course, deciding what type of game
you’d like to make. In the case of The Bard’s Tale we knew we wanted to make a
game that was a sort of spiritual successor to the original without being
directly related to it in any way. The original game was essentially a dungeon
hack that upped the ante in several areas on its contemporaries. Using that
model we decided that our game would take what the current generation of dungeon
hacks were doing and try to improve on them in the areas we felt were being
neglected or underutilized, as well as inject some old school sensibilities that
had disappeared from the current crop of games.
If there is one overall law or directive for The Bard’s Tale it’s that we
want every aspect of the game to have a strong sense of character - we didn’t
want anything to feel cookie cutter or generic. We also knew we wanted to have a
narrative thread running through the game, to that end we also wanted a hero who
was a little different from the norm. The Bard became a cynical, wise-cracking
rogue who did things out of base motivations and not because he had any sense of
the greater good.
Next we had to flesh out the Bard’s abilities. Wanting to emphasize the
“bardic” aspect of the character we knew we wanted him to use his music as
magic. The main question was what sort of magic should he use? We could have the
Bard use his music to cast spells the way a typical magic-using character would,
shooting out fireballs, lightning, etc, but we felt that this was overused and
in the end it didn’t feel right for our game. Instead we came up with the idea
that the Bard would summon various creatures who would take the place of the
usual spells. Instead of a defensive shield he would summon another character
who would block incoming blows for him, instead of a spell that revealed traps
he would summon a crotchety old explorer who would reveal them for him. In this
way we figured we could invest each of these “spells” with a tremendous amount
of personality and character.
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