By Kristophe
February 15, 2007

Listen to the interview (19 minutes 26 seconds): Windows Media Player (3 MB)
Listen to a preview of the Broken Hourglass battle music: MP3 (776 KB)

Kristophe: I'm here this morning with Jason Compton, cofounder of Planewalker Games, the developer for the highly anticipated and upcoming CRPG, The Broken Hourglass. Additionally, he is the chief organizer and webmaster for the internationally known Baldur's Gate modsite, the Pocket Plane Group.

Good morning, Jason!

Jason: Good morning, Kris.

K: Before we begin our discussion about what is happening at Planewalker Games, let's talk about your earlier and (hopefully) still current work with the Pocket Plane Group.

J: Okay. Well, the initial efforts got started back in, I guess it was 2001, where I was just a player of Baldur's Gate at the time, and on one of the Baldur's Gate communities—it was actually a Usenet group—well, there was always a lot of discussion about people were dissatisfied about the romances in the game, particularly as there was only this one male romance character for female protagonists.

I noticed the disparity—it never really bothered me overmuch, but people were very, very agitated about this, and I noticed it going on. Somebody said, "Well, I'm part of a group, and we're going to do something about this. We'd like to create new characters for this, and we're looking for writers."

I'd never really done serious fiction writing—I am a writer by trade when I'm not modding and making games and so forth—but I'd never really done serious fiction writing. But I said, "I know this game, I seem to know what people are at least complaining about not having. Sure, why don't I get involved with this?" That guy quickly disappeared, and the story gets a lot more complicated from there, but it was this sort of chance "light bulb goes on" and "hey, maybe I can get involved in doing this"—and that's what led me to cocreate the "Kelsey" NPC, which has almost been out for five years now, which is a little frightening. That we used to launch a site on and popularize the site—we relocated the site a couple of years later and formed Pocket Plane Group—kind of around that chance "hey, why don't we make a romance NPC" meeting almost six years ago now—that was what got things rolling. From the popularity we enjoyed from releasing that character, we were able to attract more mods and modders and branch out into a lot of different areas of Infinity Engine development. So that is how that was born.

K: Interesting. I naturally would assume that you are familiar with the writings of R.A. Salvatore?

J: Yes. I've read Salvatore. I wouldn't rate him at the top of my list, but I enjoyed Dark Elf Trilogy. I think I was fortunate to read that one first. Some of the stuff after that didn't grab me so much, but I do certainly know his work.

K: That's cool. What are some of the other outside influences for your work—in other words, like your favorite author for instance, or movies?

J: I don't know how much they relate to the work that I do. Probably overall favorite author, although it is a fantasy genre, just overall I'd probably have to say Roger Zelazny—I'm always impressed by just how much storytelling he gets done in such a limited amount of space—in contrast to today's fantasy series, where you could fill a phone book with some of these endless, endless book series, he could get through an entire world and a lot of interesting characters in a hundred pages, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty. Makes him very rereadable and so forth, so that's probably the top. Been reading some James Clavell recently as well—Shogun, Tai-Pan, things like that. Sort of like Zelazny, he has his characters that he writes well and ones that he writes not so well. Clavell kind of seemed to have the same story that he just kept retelling in different settings, but it's very engaging and interesting world settings. So I guess those are probably the big ones.

As far as movies go, I am a child of the eighties, so I grew up, at least for part of my childhood, with easy access to VCRs and cable channels, which always played the same three movies over and over every day. So I'm in that mindset where I have that stable of favorites that put me in that hypnotism mode where I can just have them on in the background, and I like that. Those range anywhere from silly kid movies like Better off Dead to Tron or Columbo or ... I've even gone through phases where I watch a lot of Glengarry Glen Ross and Get Carter. I'd kind of like to do an RPG someday that worked like Get Carter—although it would be an interesting challenge, that's not what we're working on here so much.

K: Okay. Let's discuss how you met and became good friends with your cofounder and partner there, Westley Weimer.

J: Okay. That also goes back to where the modding got started—that was the summer of 2001, so Baldur's Gate 2 had been out for about a year—the first Baldur's Gate preceded it by a few years—and it was right around that time that the people who were working on hacking the Baldur's Gate file formats had worked out most of what was going on in that they had described it, they knew what the file formats did, they knew what happened when you changed this byte or introduced a file that said this or whatever. But nobody had really put it together in a form that made modding sensible or easy, and that's why most of the things that were mods at that time were really just "here's an item" or "here's a spell" or "here's a monster." There was no story, there was no character, there was no real packaging to it—with just a couple of exceptions.

Wes had gone through the same thought process that I had gone through. He saw that people were dissatisfied with the character options there, and he decided to do something about it himself. And he designed a romance mod around the Solaufein character—one who actually existed in game. But he also discovered everybody's described the file formats, we know what the Engine is doing, but nobody's put together a program that makes it easy for me to do what I want to do. He tried using what was out there, and it was sort of a disaster. But, because Wes is a computer scientist and a very talented programmer, he was able to take those file descriptions and create his own tool to accomplish what he wanted to do—which was change a couple of characters around, introduce some dialogue, so on and so forth. He did that, and that's the program that later went on to be known as WeiDU [pronounced "Y D U"].

But Wes is not much of a marketer. So when he finished the mod, he announced it on this Usenet group—alt.games.baldurs-gate—and just said, "I'm Wes, I've done this thing, and here you go." Some people took note and played it, but that was about all he said about it. Even though he had made this breakthrough, he didn't really make a big deal out of it. (As a sidebar, I'd love to hear Wes tell this story someday, because the events would certainly be the same, but the interpretation of what was going on would be different, and I'd love to hear it—it's a shame we couldn't get him on the phone today.)

Anyway, so Wes put this out, and since I was interested in the same issues with the friend that I was working with to implement this character—we were running into the same kind of problems, namely the tools that we had from the community were just not adequate to getting the job done. But we were not computer scientists, we were not programmers, we couldn't make our own tools—finally, I said, "Jesse," who was the friend I was working with on Kelsey at the time, "there's this Wes Weimer guy. I think he's solved these problems. We should really talk to him." So we dug up the information and contacted Wes, and I said, "We could use some help. We see you have this tool. We don't understand how it works. Can you help us through it?" And it was basically in pestering Wes constantly for interpretation of features, or explanation of something, or documentation, or a new feature that I guess it got to the point that he couldn't get rid of me. And so now, five-plus years later, that's still kind of where our relationship is. He designs software, and I say, "Wes, I don't understand this," or, "I need more features for this" or whatever. That he's put up with it for five-plus years is a testament to his great patience.

K: [laughs] So in other words, basically, Westley is the designer, and you're the marketer.

J: Yes, he's not too involved in Broken Hourglass game design but certainly on the engine design and implementation side—the engine is what he wrote up and coded up as well. I've always been more minded towards, "Okay—we've done this thing. Now we need to tell people about it." Wes—at least with most of his modding efforts and so forth—he does it, he puts it out, he says, "well, here you go, you know where to find it." But I did a lot of running around in those early days because I thought that what he was doing really was important and that people did need to know about it, that it was a breakthrough, that it was important. So I spent a lot of time running around the Baldur's Gate player communities and modding communities saying, "Look over here. You really need to see this Solaufein thing. It's important." That relationship has worked out well because that gives him time to focus on the technological stuff that I can't do.

K: So when did you and Westley actually, formally establish Planewalker Games LLC?

J: The formal registration was late 2005. That was at the point where Wes had done work on the engine, it looked like it was really going to work, it was really going to come together, it wasn't going to be that we were going to hit some wall that would make it impossible to proceed or whatever. And that was when I said, "Okay, yes, Wes, I will really put my money behind this, and you will really finish this engine—so yes, now we will have this corporate entity, er, not corporate but company entity, the LLC."

K: Let's talk a little about the organization of Planewalker Games itself.

J: Okay.

K: Besides Westley Weimer and yourself, who else comprises the Broken Hourglass team, and what do they do for the game?

J: There's about twenty contractors that have worked on the game. I don't want to do a full credit roll here because we'd be here for a little while.

K: That's fine.

J: Actually, I did the tally in anticipation of this, and I was a little surprised to find there's actually been—not even counting myself—there's been thirteen people who have worked in some way on in-game content design in terms of quest design or character design or character dialogue or quest dialogue or whatever. Most of that is drawing from a world document that a couple of the designers worked up, and then a large list of quest outlines that I developed along with one of the world designers. It's unified in that we're all on the same page, we all are working on the same subjects but—when I added it all up—it was like, wow, we've actually have had quite a few people who have had a hand in putting the content together. I act as the lead on content, and everything passes over my desk before it goes into the game—but yeah, thirteen of them. Wes, of course, is the engine designer—he's the one who does the technology part. Beyond that, we've worked with a couple of sprite artists, so they're the ones who are putting together the characters, the creatures, the flashy spell effects that come up, so on and so forth. There's a couple of guys who have done area design—the backdrops that you walk around in, the exteriors and interiors, the assorted animations in those landscapes. And then a couple of people who have done the static imagery, item icons and things like that.

K: May I ask, just out of curiosity, is Jill Rossetto¹ in on the team?

J: Yeah, Jill has worked on some character design for us, and hopefully we're going to get a little more dialogue out of her as well.

K: Excellent. I know it's never easy for any game developer to project a completion date for any given project, but may I ask how are things progressing in reference to The Broken Hourglass?

J: Where we're at now is—all of the artwork is just about done. There are a few areas that I am waiting to get in from the area artists, there's a few things in the visual effects area—you know, big flashy spell effects and explosions and so on and so forth. And then there's—sorry, got off track there—so art's almost done, much of the writing, the vast bulk of the writing is also done, and so now it's a question of wiring everything up and making it playable. The content is there in pieces, and now it's down to scripting it all together so that A happens after B and C says something to D and so forth. It looks a lot like a game now.² It's just in terms of implemented content. There's a long way to go there, but the design is all there.

K: Okay. Can you give us any idea on what kind of distribution plans you may have for The Broken Hourglass?

J: Well, one encouraging thing is we have had some interest from a couple of publishers at this point—companies that are willing to at least consider taking a chance on an outfit like ours, which is very encouraging. We'll see how that goes. If nothing happens there, or even if it does but there are certain regions that aren't taken care of, we're certainly ready and willing to do our own direct distribution. I am not proud—I will put labels on envelopes and send things out. I'm interested in digital distribution—I've been a little discouraged about what I've seen in terms of the existing digital distribution options. There are sites out there which cater to digital distribution of the kind of retail, so-called triple-A titles—and so probably aren't necessarily appropriate for us. And then those which do cater more towards the independent game and the independent gamer—most of those are in the casual game space, and casual games tend to be a lot smaller, just physical download size, than ours—so that's an issue as well. And those that aren't, in my estimation, their fee structure doesn't really fit the services that they're providing. I don't mind paying somebody to mind the cash register, but the fee structures I've seen so far for some of these independent portals are much more appropriate for somebody who is a true partner. And I haven't really seen that any of them have a big marketplace of buyers that would justify that premium above just minding the store and sending out the download. I'm keeping an eye out for things that are happening there—it's always possible that Amazon or Apple or WalMart or somebody will step in and kind of bring order to that marketplace the way that Apple did with iTunes, where they kind of set the standard for what music downloading was going to be like—which kind of whipped everything into shape and gave a little clarity when there were a lot of smaller, fragmented sites where policies and so forth weren't real consistent. That would be one possibility that might make things a little easier on the digital distribution side.

I also haven't ruled out setting up our own digital download store. I don't eagerly want to be in the business of running a big digital download site, even if it is just for our own products, but I will if I think it is in the best interest of getting our game to our customers and doing it in a way that allows us to get a return on the game. I would like to see if there is some way that maybe some of the other independent RPG guys out there who are going to face a similar problem to ours might be interested in getting in on that sort of thing, but that's something that we can discuss down the line.

K: Very good. Is there anything I may have missed that you would like to pass on to our readers at the Four Fat Chicks?

J: Well, I'm (obviously) always interested to hear from people who have an eye on the game and to share information about it, so I'm grateful for the opportunity to go over that today. As far as things to pass along, we're really still here. I think we're well past the point of pulling out on something like this. It's been the interest and support of gamers out there which has helped us get through some of those rough patches where you just say, "none of this is ever going to work—I've already spent too much money on this and it's never going to happen." But knowing there are still people out there who are anxiously looking forward to the game obviously makes it a whole lot easier to move forward on that.

The only other thing I'd say on that there's a lot of interesting potential in RPGs right now. If you look out at the landscape, we're not the only ones who are taking this approach and saying there's a game style out there that has been underexposed, and players who have been underserved for years now, and we're not the only ones who have decided to do something about it. There's Eschalon, there's Age of Decadence, there's Depths of Peril—these other games out there where independent developers, many of which have no professional experience, have said "well, I know what I like, I know what other people like, it's a shame these games aren't at retail, and we're going to try and fix some of that problem." I think if we all really get it together and get things out there, I think it could be a very exciting time for RPG enthusiasts. I do hope that everybody stays tuned.

K: I'd like to thank you for taking the time and trouble from your busy schedule to talk to us today, Jason.

J: No problem.

K: Of course, we all wish you continued good luck in your endeavors.

Notes

¹Jill (aka Saint Josephine) was one of the original mod editors on my [Kristophe's] team when I was working for the RPGDot network. She faithfully and dependably covered all aspects of her particular area of expertise, which was in doing all of our Baldur's Gate mod reporting, and stayed with the Dot until the time that I left to ship over to the Four Fat Chicks.

²The "mail truck" in the audio was my voice email notification that I just received new email.