Hello, backers. We meet again in good spirits!

We’ve got quite a bit of development progress to get into, but before we jump into that, we’re going to do a quick repeating feature at the top of every update addressing some of the common questions we get. Usually we get these same questions several times a day, so hopefully this will help keep everyone up to date:

ESSENTIAL Q&A

Q: How/where do I upload my guild crest?
A: We’ll be including crest uploads as part of the actual game, so there’s never a deadline. It will only be accessible by backers.

Q: When is the game coming out?
A: Later this year. We used the overfunding to significantly increase the size of the game and extend the release date.

WHITE BOX

As you may have heard, Factions is out. We’ve finished all the combat upgrades which you can try in the game (we’ve also decreased the “grind” quite a bit based on feedback we got). This means that every character ability ranks up and becomes more powerful, which was the last combat system we needed for single player combat.

To mention it again, everything we did for Factions is for the single player. Even the intro cinematic in Factions is actually the intro to the single player game, and the combat boards in Factions are key fights in the single player campaign. We're using all parts of the buffalo, so to speak.

During this time we’ve finished final design work on all our systems. With this documentation finished, implementation has begun.

Here’s a recap: The Banner Saga has three primary gameplay systems: combat, conversation and travel. You switch between these to advance the story. Conversation tracks your decisions and advances the plot, travel is a combination of Oregon Trail and King of Dragon Pass, moving the story forward while creating events related to what you’re doing. Travel also accounts for exploring towns, just like how you see Strand in Factions. The turn-based combat occurs when conflicts arise. Each of these systems feeds into the others.

What is a white box?

This a term used to describe the entire game from front to back laid out with placeholder assets. Sometimes it’s called a gray box because in 3D games designers will rough out the shape of the world or levels with simple gray boxes so that they can playtest it before doing time-consuming and expensive final art.

What this means is that we have been implementing every travel scene, every conversation and every combat into the engine and tying the whole thing together via scripting so that we can actually play the entire game. White boxing takes the game from being a series of design docs and makes them exist in the game in rough form. Travel will have placeholder art, combat will have placeholder enemies and conversation will have placeholder dialogue that we can easily iterate on.

What a white box is invaluable for is 1) making sure the systems are functioning correctly, 2) other work can be developed based on this (for example, sound and music), 3) making sure the transitions between systems work well, and 4) Iteration! This last bit is probably the most critical part because it’s only once you have everything playable that you can start to refine it until it shines. Imagine making a game as drawing an enormous mural. A painter doesn’t start in the corner of the picture and complete the image one inch at a time. He roughs in the entire image in pencil, makes changes to the composition, blocks in the colors, adds shading and lighting, then starts to do the detail work. Making a game is a similar process of iteration.

In our case we scoped out the game in rough documentation. We re-scoped when we got 7x the funding. We created gold standards (final look and feel) for travel, conversation and combat. We then started to build the framework for each of these systems. You can see travel functionality when you pan the camera in Strand and the story is already playable through Inkle Writer. We had the great fortune of being able to use Inkle Writer as our conversation toolset, and this has saved us literally months. Inkle Writer will allow us to output functional code that easily plugs into our engine to control variables and conditionals. We took combat past the point of being functional into full polish. As this was our highest risk system it made sense to front-load the work on combat. Playtesting and feedback made sure that it’s as good as we can make it, and we’ve iterated the hell out of it.

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

Game development has a lot of hidden nooks and crannies. For example, when you think of designing a game you say things in your head like “when the player wins this battle they’ll cut to a conversation...” but how does that happen? You don’t want a programmer to sit down and input every aspect of the game as hard-coded data, which is time-consuming and prone to errors. Instead we’ve created a data-driven system that allows any developer to adjust and modify variables, triggers, actions, conditionals, etc at will.

Each individual game can approach this in whatever way works for them. In an extraordinarily complex game like Star Wars: The Old Republic it’s virtually impossible for any one department to understand all the systems that spiderweb to draw the game together. For example, let’s just take cinematics. The developer accounts for calling appearances, tracking any previous variables like story decisions, calling any other PCs and NPCs in the scene, tracking the characters equipment, and then a slew of specific details about what animation to play, which camera to use, which vfx or sound fx to play and a dozen other choices. And that’s multiple OAVs (Object-Action-Value string) per line of dialogue, sometimes numbering in the dozens. Now take that whole packaged cinematic up one level and you’re integrating where it appears in the world, what prerequisites are associated with triggering it, what state the environment and characters are in, what event spawned this current one, what will be spawned after, what variables change as a result and how the information is given to the player through UI indicators or journal updates. Branching storylines will exacerbate all of this to an incredible degree. At the end of production on The Old Republic, BioWare had literally dozens of designers called “scripters” whose entire job was just to tie everything together. You probably didn’t even know they existed because their work tends to be invisible.

In The Banner Saga we’re able to boil this down to a much more manageable level. First of all, as a 2D game we’ve already reduced a massive amount of complexity. Secondly, we’ve streamlined the whole system to only account for exactly what The Banner Saga needs, not an engine that needs to be applicable for both first person shooters and puzzle games, for example.

Here’s a practical example: we need to track a package of things that happen. “When you do this, that happens, which changes this and puts you on that path”. We’re calling these packages “Happenings” and they tie everything together. It’s just a word we made up. Happenings sounds like a weird thing to call a system but we’ve found that the more identifiable a name, the less likely you are to confuse what you’re talking about. When you have lots of systems interacting with each other, this is vitally important. For example, we call a package of animation, abilities, sounds and vfx for a particular character a “phantasm” so when we use that word we know exactly what we’re talking about.

A happening is made up of the exact the elements needed to start and finish an event. We have triggers, actions, variables and resolution. A happening can spawn other happenings running simultaneously and each tracks different values until they resolve. Here’s an example of how you might construct a happening:

Your trigger is what calls the happening. Let’s say we want Crossing a variable threshold. Ok, once the threshold is crossed we’ve triggered the happening. Maybe this is a number of days that have passed, or a travel stat changing from 2 to 1. Then what happens? Let’s say the action is Go to combat: X. This will put the player in a pre-defined (or random, if we specify) combat. Once this action is complete it goes to the next value. Maybe it’s another action: Go to conversation: X. The player cuts to conversation mode which can introduce variables. If it does create a new variable, this probably spawns a new happening to track the variable. Or it may result in a linear variable, like moving time forward. This would create Modify Days: X. When the conversation ends we go to the next value, which may be Go to travel: X. This will put the caravan back into travel mode where they’ll trundle along until they trigger the next happening.

This is a very simplified example, but in sequence it may look something like this:

Happening: Plot_element8
Trigger: Cross a variable threshold: days=23
Action: Go to combat: forest_ambush
Action: Go to conversation: part2_13
Variable: Modify days: days+2
Action: Go to travel: road_to_strand
Resolution: end

This is a linear sequence of events, but each happening in itself is linear- we don’t track conditionals here. At day 23 of travel we got ambushed. After the fight we had a conversation and did something that took 2 more days. Afterward we were back in travel, heading toward Strand. The new happenings that trigger are what make the game branch and diverge. For example, you may make a decision in the above conversation that causes a new series of events to be set in motion. Maybe there was a heated debate about which way to go and one of your companions lashed out in violence. This new happening doesn’t require a trigger because it was spawned in the above conversation. Here’s what it might spawn:

Happening: conversation2_13_bob_attacks
Variable: remove_bob
Variable: morale-2
Action: Go to combat: bob_dies
Resolution: end

In this case the decision I made in conversation caused bob to die and that modified some variables and spawned a combat immediately. Once the combat has resolved it’s gone, but the previous happening is still going. I return from combat and do “Go to travel: road_to_strand” before that happening will end. Most of these variables and conditionals are applied in conversation, which uses a whole different set of toggles called markers to define different conditionals that then inform global changes or variables to the parent happening.

This is just one example. The list of functional triggers, actions and variables is much deeper and includes everything we need to make The Banner Saga functional and dynamic.

Now first of all, let me mention that this isn’t ground-breaking stuff. Most games use something like this and ours is fairly simple, based on our understanding of it working at big companies. But as you can imagine, this can start stacking up to get fairly complex. Fortunately, with the game itself being well-defined we can afford to add complexity to the story, where we want to see it.

When a company plans to make a game it can choose where to place its complexity. If you want full 3D environments, top of the line visuals and animation, complex physics, branching dialogue and advanced combat or inventory systems you'll pay for those exponentially. You can almost think of it as each major feature you add to a game amplifies the difficulty of all the other features. Indie games success has almost always been in taking one or two features and taking them to their furthest extent, usually trying something that feels new in the process. Story has always been our primary focus and our other systems bend to its maniacal demands.

The main point of this long explanation is that this is currently where we are in development- hooking up the white box.

TRAVEL DESIGN

We’ve now finalized the design for travel, conversation and combat (single player features like AI, spawners, random battle generation, etc). In this update I’ll go over an explanation of travel and some of the features involved there.

Everything in this section is a step-by-step example of us identifying a problem, coming up with multiple solutions and implementing the one that works best for the game. We think it’s great to be able to show the whole process, not just the final result. For reference, we do this with just two or three of us, in a single room, throwing ideas around and mocking them up within minutes. While working for a big company the process would be very different. We’d write a “user story”, schedule a conference room, have a three-hour meeting, document the result, send it up the chain for approval, integrate the feedback, get it approved, pass it by the upper management/publisher, get more feedback and integrate a variety of requests from management or marketers who don’t really understand the system in the first place. Then we’d find out it got cut and... anyway...

We knew the travel involved two key features since it’s earliest conception: we want the player to travel across vast, beautiful landscapes, and we want them to be making decisions that affect other systems including combat, conversation and the story in general. The gameplay requires that the player can set up camp at any point and make decisions about the path they wish to take.

Additionally, as described in update #30, players will have to deal with events that arise as they travel. The decisions they make persist and affect their story, similar to King of Dragon Pass. It’s like managing a rolling settlement. This is still the core fundamental experience of traveling.

However, as we began to mock up the system we found one issue in particular that we needed to solve. Here’s an example of the travel mode as we’ve implemented it:

Just like our trailer, the player travels across a land that looks like this. The events as we described are ready to go and events would work fine here. The caravan trundles along similar to Oregon Trail towards their destination.

However, from this angle we knew that we had an issue to solve: unlike Oregon Trail the landscape isn’t abstracted. If we have wide distances between two points we have four problems: 1) to make the world feel appropriately large we would need to create a massive amount of content to fill the space. This would require us to either sacrifice other systems to buy the necessary time or have a lot of very repeatable assets which would defeat the purpose of making the player watch it. 2) Watching travel for extended periods of time would be boring even if it were all unique. We want the player to feel like they’re making progress, not passively waiting for something to happen. 3) If we make the play-time correct instead of the distance it will feel like the world is tiny, with only a casual stroll between major cities and milestones, and the fiction would fall apart. 4) We want the player to feel the impact of choosing different paths. If they choose a different path via the story and end up on a similar looking travel screen it won’t feel significant.

Our first instinct was to create an overhead map for the player to fill the gaps, as so:

In this design we have a map with different waypoints. Systems like this are used in plenty of rpgs like Dragon Age: Origins, Final Fantasy Tactics or FTL. The player would choose a destination from any adjacent location and they would head in that direction. When they reached the location they would go back down into the sidescrolling travel mode show above. This would let us give the impression of traveling a long distance without having to sit through it, while also letting us show off beautiful landscapes at key locations. Since we define those locations we could make sure that they use unique art.

This had a few problems, too. World maps tend to make a world feel small, not big, by shrinking huge distances down to a short line. It also gave the impression that the world is just a series of points and not a real place. In gameplay terms we didn’t like how the player would watch their caravan slide across the map without any indication of what was happening to them, which felt impersonal. We also didn’t want the player spending significant time staring at the same map over and over.

To address the issue of tracking how far a day of travel is and make the distance feel more concrete and larger, we considered the “dashed line” approach used in, for example, Indiana Jones when he travels by plane.

When selecting a location, it would generate a travel plan in dashes. The red dashes would represent a passage of time (say, for example, 1 dash = 1 day of travel) and the blue dashes would represent at what point the caravan would shift to sidescrolling travel. In this mode, the player would press a button each day they wished to travel, similar to changing seasons in King of Dragon Pass.

We quickly scrapped this idea. It felt too gamey, ui-centric and potentially boring, and would still require us to code, playtest and create art for an even more complex system which burns development time.

Ultimately what we came back to is that you’re traveling a vast, beautiful landscape. By utilizing the travel tools that we already have we drew up this:

In this version, the player transitions from close-up travel to a camera that is pulled back to show an expansive landscape. When reaching a landmark or town you still travel at 1:1 scale, amongst trees, guards manning city walls and animals in the field, but now you’ll also travel along gorgeous vistas of massive scope.

The caravan shrinks to show just how many people could be in your population, potentially in the thousands. The distance between two landmarks can fit in a relatively short period of play time, while still giving the sense that you’re traveling a vast distance. Our minimal hud at the top counts up, tracking days as they pass, reused from the deployment hud in combat (which you’ll recognize if you’ve played Factions).

Not only does this save development time but it makes travel beautiful again. We can animate things happening around you, weather, things blowing in the wind, show the state of your caravan and have landmarks appear in the world. You make decisions about which paths to take in either popups or dialogue, triggered as part of the story. This will make the decisions feel more organic than clicking a point on the static image.

However, we still missed the greater sense of your place in the world that the map gave us, so while traveling, you can press a button to pull down the map behind you. It works aesthetically and lets the player check their location without stopping the action. This is not the real map, incidentally:

You’ll also notice that the ui on travel is extremely compact. Just like with combat we wanted to feature the art and make using the ui as intuitive as possible. You can see your travel stats change as you travel, select different modes of travel if depending on if you need speed, rest, food or other variables. You can make camp allowing you to change your travel mode and talk to companions. When you reach a unique location you duck back into close up travel and when you arrive at a location like Strand (the city in Factions) it becomes your interface for exploring the city.

THE GODS COMETH

I’ve now been in conversation with the backers who were generous enough to earn a place in the heavens as viking gods. This means we’ve also finalized the lore documents and have worked out the mythology and history of the world. I have to say, on a personal note I think the gods are coming along really excellently and will add a ton of depth to the world.

Gods each have a unique godstone, and crossing these along the journey will give you the option to learn backstory. Godstones also act as milestone markers and instill bonuses to those who path beneath. When you see a godstone in the game you’ll be glad for it.

COMING UP

We’ll be going into more detail about travel details and how they interact with other modes, probably going deeper into conversation and single player combat as well. As we’ve mentioned in previous updates, stats like endurance, morale, population, supplies, the number of warriors in your caravan and a few other factors all determine how fast you travel and the state of the locations you can travel to, but also factor into the other systems. Your choices in each gameplay mode affect the others.

At some point we’ll also be doing a featured update on the animation process where we go over everything involved in making a hand-animated character.

PUSHING AHEAD (PLEASE READ)

We know many people are anxious for the game to come out, so are we. Our original estimation was Nov 2012 and when we were given the option to take longer, and make a better game, we decided to take it.

That said, we don’t want to make any more delays to the game. We think most of you will agree that the best way to do this is to halt anything that isn’t related to getting chapter 1 out the door.

When we complete the Saga finished systems will continue to make their way into Factions.

We are shipping the game for Steam first, and the standalone port (on Desura, GOG and Amazon) will be our immediate task after that. Yes, that does mean Steam will get it slightly sooner because we’re already integrated in Steam. However, the game is universal to all backers, so even if you prefer the standalone version you will have access to the Steam version. We don’t see any reason to withhold the game while we convert it to work as a standalone. We are also going to be more quiet between updates as they can take a lot of time to produce.

To put it simply, it’s full steam ahead on the single player game and everything gets shipped as it gets done. The good news is it’s coming along great!

Until next time,
Alex

Hey everybody! We’ve had so much going on that it’s been hard to find the time to catch our breaths. With Factions coming out in the next week this seemed like a good time to catch up with our backers and have a nice chat.

Basically, we know there are lots of questions about the project right now. We’ve answered every question we can find, in as many places as possible, but we think it’d be helpful for everyone if we rounded them together for an update.

I’ll also be happy to field any questions in the comments section below if you don’t see it in this update!

The release date on the project said November, now it’s February and you’re just releasing some multiplayer thing I didn’t even want. What gives?

This is the biggest issue we want to address.

When we set a launch date of November, we didn’t know if we’d match our funding or not. If I’m completely honest it was probably too optimistic, even if we had only gotten the minimum funding. We should have known better, and I apologize for that mistake.

Just as importantly, we made 7x the funding we expected. We made the game exponentially bigger. Imagine a tv show that gets picked up for 7 more seasons, or a book that gets made into a 7-part series or a 20-minute indie film being given the funding to turn it into a 2 hour feature film. All of these things take a long time. And hopefully, every one of these examples means a much better end result.

Where did this Factions thing come from anyway? I don’t remember hearing about it.

We mentioned a free multiplayer standalone at the end of our Kickstarter pitch video. At the time it was more of a side note, and not what we wanted to focus on. Near the end of the campaign we added a stretch goal to add player-owned cities to Factions. Again, a lot of people didn’t realize we were talking about the multiplayer game.

As for personally? We love single player RPGs and we love multiplayer matches. We loved the idea of working on both of these things in the same world and sharing the content and tech.

Why make Factions at all, instead of just making the single player game?

Factions started out as a way to give backers a playable part of the game early. It also turned into a huge endeavor.

We got beta players, and we got lots of feedback, and we ended up making the best combat system we could. As we developed the combat we made huge improvements to the game. We reworked the interface three times until it was really intuitive, and we overhauled the classes dozens of times. We really fine-tuned and polished the hell out of the art and the combat mechanics. The depth and scope of the multiplayer game is far beyond what we had originally set out to do.

Did we spend too long on this system? Maybe. It’s still hard for me to know for sure. Making a single player game is vastly more simple than making a multiplayer game, and these challenges cost us more time than we would have liked.

At the same time, if we had not gone through this process, the game, both single and multi-player, would be significantly lower quality than it is now, without a doubt.

We say it in every single update, but it’s 100% true - the combat in factions was made for the single player game, and we’ve used that to make a fully functional game that you can play now! We had really hoped people would see this is a huge bonus.

Ultimately, which choice would you have made? We know there are people on both sides of the issue, and we’ve seen both good and bad results from the path that we’ve decided to go down.

Factions just looks like a cash grab to me.

It really bums me out to see this sentiment, we have tried really hard to avoid it. First off, let me mention that this is not our goal. We didn’t set out to make a f2p game with the funding from the single player game which we crap out as an afterthought.

We’re using any revenue we get for salaries. None of the core team have been taking income since we started the company last January. Unlike many Kickstarter funded projects which pay mostly for salary, the $650k that we received after Kickstarter and Amazon’s cut have gone squarely into production: programming support, animation, audio, music, sound, QA, writing, office space, legal fees and software. This isn’t said for sympathy - we knew what we were getting into and we also have a buffer in case things get dire. This is simply the reality of why we’re raising money.

Factions looks like a grindy, pay to win game.

We’ve heard some major, and valid, concerns so far: the shop is overpriced, earning renown is too slow, and buying Renown or characters means the game is pay to win.

We’ll be making a lot of adjustments to costs this week. We’ve removed all renown costs to adjust your stats on a character, because this is a core part of what makes it fun to experiment with characters and teams. Now it’s free! We significantly lowered the price of color variations. We’re also adding a lot of achievements that grant bonus renown to make earning renown happen a lot quicker.

As for “paying to win”, this honestly shouldn’t be the case. Your team has a rating (a total of each character’s rank) and you’ll always be matched up against teams with a similar rating. No matter how your opponent made his team, you’ll be fighting on equal footing. In addition to matching by total rank, we also use each player’s ELO (ranking) to find equivalent matches, so that veterans tend to match each other before new players.

There has also been an exploit that allowed players to artificially lower their team power so that they could intentionally fight against new players. First of all, this is unbelievably lame of some players, but we’re also putting in changes to how team power calculates to make sure it doesn’t happen at launch. In addition, we’re also adding safeguards so that new players only match against other new players based on how long they’ve been playing. Whether this works will rely somewhat on how big our population is at launch.

Will there be microtransactions in the single player game?

No.

Will I miss out on anything in the single player game if I don’t play Factions?

No (except having fun).

Now, that said, we’ve put a lot of thought and effort into Factions. It’s not just a mindless one-off from The Banner Saga. Factions takes place in the same world, in a city that is part of the single player game and when events happen in single player they’ll affect the world in Factions. As we create new system for the Saga we’ll be testing them through Factions, so things like playing against the computer will appear in Factions as we work out the code, and the story will all tie together.

I don’t care how you explain Factions, I hate everything about it, I wish you didn’t make it and I feel like you tricked me into paying for something I don’t want.

I suspect some people feel like this. To those people, I would say I do understand. We became very ambitious and wanted to do the best work we could. The result is that it took a lot of time. We do not expect Factions to buy us yachts and mansions, just to pay for some living expenses. As our first time running a studio of our own, we’ve learned an enormous amount in both production and management. We hope you’ll accept our apology, and we strongly believe that we’ve taken the correct steps to make the best possible game. It will be worth the wait.

How do I upload my crest?

This has changed from the original upload idea, because that would have been very messy. You will now be able to upload your image in the game itself, when it releases. This way, nobody will miss any deadlines and you’ll be able to see it right in the game. Don’t worry, this is still EXCLUSIVE to backers!

Will Factions be ported to Linux /iOS /console?

No, we don’t intend to put Factions on anything but PC and Mac. Now that it’s out, we’re moving on to the rest of the single player campaign and cannot afford to spend weeks or months porting the multiplayer standalone. Our stretch goals applied only to the single player game.

When is the single player game coming out?

Our best guess right now is between mid and late this year. We’re a little shy of giving specific dates this time around, but we are full steam ahead on this. What we do promise is that we’ll continue to do regular updates on our progress, so that you can see how everything is coming together.

I still don’t completely understand combat and I’m getting crushed every time I play. What do I do?

We’ve included four different tutorials in the game. The first one covers the basics and you play through it when you boot up the game. On the main screen in Strand, you can click the banner button in the upper right. This shows you a cheat sheet of the most important things in combat and also includes two training videos. These will cover every single aspect of Factions. Lastly, every page has a ? button in the lower right. Clicking this will tell you what you need to know for that screen.

How do you feel about the game?

Personally, I think it’s coming along incredibly, and I’m not just saying that. My biggest regret is how long it is taking, but it’s coming out better than I had ever hoped. Some players have been rather upset about the delays, while others have told us to take as long as we need. The truth is, we only have as long as we have funds to pay ourselves. We can’t work on this forever.

I couldn’t be happier with our progress so far; for what we’ve done with a small team I don’t think I could imagine anything better. Despite the insane hours we’ve been putting in, I’ve never been prouder of anything I’ve made before, and we hope at the end of the day you guys agree it was worth it.

Thanks!

As mentioned before, we’ll be fielding all questions in the comments below. Fire away!

A time of reckoning is upon us. All of us at Stoic are proud to announce, after burning the midnight oil for many moons, that beta has ended for The Banner Saga: Factions and soft launch is today!

What does that mean? In industry terms, soft launch is a short period in which a game is finished and complete, but released to a limited public.

Also, it is a thank you to our generous and wonderful backers to get a head start on the release build of the game. Your progress is being saved this week and carries over for the official launch.

There are some special perks available this week only, and every backer has a special green jade stone shown on your combat emblem that is exclusive to backers and early access players that are yours forever.

From Feb 18th - Feb 24th Factions will be available exclusively to backers. The current characters, stats and rankings have been wiped for the last time and the game is essentially now LIVE, along with a fully functional tutorial. Later in the week we’ll be holding the first tournament exclusively for backers.

Factions will be released to the public on Feb 25th. If you’ve been waiting for beta to end before trying the game, this is your week.

With Factions’ launch, we’ve effectively worked out the thick and thin of combat and we’re soon on to travel and conversation outlined in the previous update, and thus, the single player campaign. Consider this the first major milestone on the road to success!

From all of us here at Stoic, Skal!

WANT TO GET IN FACTIONS BUT HAVEN'T YET?

If you haven't been added to Factions yet but would like to get involved, you're always welcome. Please head to our forums and create an account using the same email address as your kickstarter account. That's all you need to do, and we'll send out keys and instructions on how to get the client on a regular basis (they won't arrive instantly!)

ALSO NOTE:

Crests will be uploaded in the single player game (we may add it in Factions earlier than that, but not immediately).

Hello! I’m Alex, the creative director and it’s about time we updated you on some progress. Let’s get back to what most of you are interested in: the single player saga.

With Factions wrapping up shortly we have a very confident handle on the combat. We’ve mentioned it before: combat in Factions is combat in The Banner Saga single player game. We hope that you guys like being able to jump in and try it for yourself instead of just reading about what it will be like. That system was, by far, the most complicated and risky part of the game and we’re nearly finished with it, aside from the enemy units that we haven’t released yet. That’s a great feeling.

Moving on! Game development is often thought of as one big whole- you’ve got story, level design, gameplay, art, features, dialogue, combat, so on and so forth. All of this naturally generates a series of dependencies. For example, you have to do concept art and story outlines before you can do animation and dialogue, and prototype gameplay before a final combat system. We’re well past pre-production now, and deep into the meat of production. So let’s talk about what that means.

Please keep in mind that we're basically showing everything- the good, the bad and the ugly. Some of this is polished and complete, other things are very rough and some might even look amateurish. Rest assured the final product will be as polished as Factions is now. It's all part of the process.

From a top-down view, we have three key systems that interact with each other to create the core experience of the game: travel, conversation and combat. We’ve talked a lot about combat, but what about conversation, travel and the branching storyline that ties everything together?

Travel
Playing through the game means transitioning between all of these systems. Traveling across the land happens in two ways: you’ll shift between a world map and side-scrolling travel with an emphasis on your caravan, the people following you. Some of the following images are pulled directly from our high-level design docs; quick sketches used when proving out the ideas. They clearly don’t represent final art!

Lots of games have world maps that let you roam a continent, discovering locations and giving the sense of a larger world. We wanted to capture that feeling, but with the sense of urgency and hardship that comes with thousands of people marching across a huge landscape. In The Banner Saga you don’t have the luxury of mucking around. Time plays an integral factor, and traveling plays a huge part in the decisions you make.

With that in mind, you’ll have a specific goal as part of the story, and the world map is where you’ll plot a course toward that goal and make high-level decisions. Deciding which towns and territory to pass though and whether to make a straight shot for your destination or a safer, more roundabout route will have a huge effect on the events that occur along the way. You carry news with you that others have not heard, and how you use that knowledge also impacts the story. In addition, the world is not an unoccupied land mass peppered with friendly villages. There are contested territories and different factions who have different opinions of each other. Negotiating these problems is part of travel.

At key points along the path events will occur that are out of your control and have world-wide effects. How you react to them, and the path you forge in response, are part of your story.

When major events happen, or you’ve taken an action like setting up camp or entering a town or city, the world map transition into the side-scrolling mode shown in the trailer, called exploration. This is a big part of gameplay! Here you can see the size and mood of your caravan, how many people are traveling with you, and get a better view of the world around you. Exploration will introduce you to the stark beauty of the world around you, and better immerse you in the environment.

In exploration, you’ll be able to interact directly with your camp or a city to talk with characters in your caravan, enter buildings if you’re in a city, rest for specific amounts of time and adjust how you’re traveling. The city in Factions is a working example of how exploration will work.

The decisions you make along the way have an effect on how you are traveling. Your speed is a combination of factors, and you’ll need to manage the caravan’s endurance, morale, size and supplies to stay out of trouble.

Endurance inevitably decreases as you travel. The only way to restore it is to rest, but that costs time. Morale comes and goes based on your actions, how successful you are in combat, and how much the caravan agrees with your actions. Mobility is dictated entirely by the size of your caravan - the fewer people are traveling with you, the faster you can go. Of course, this also means the fewer people that may survive. Lastly, supplies amplify all of these other factors. Go too long without finding food or medicine and everything else will deteriorate quickly.

Events
This brings us to events. If you’ve ever played King of Dragon Pass, you’ll be familiar with this sort of system. As you travel, the game notices how you are doing in each of your travel stats. If you’re within a certain threshold, you may trigger an event.

Usually, events arise without warning, and are related to what is happening around you. You’ll have to react to them in the way you think best for everyone. If you’re low on supplies your caravan may try to revolt. If you’re high on morale, you may end up with a camp full of rowdy drunken revelers. However, don’t fear when an event pops up, they’re just as often positive experiences as they are negative, and may be crucial in keeping your caravan healthy and happy.

Even more importantly, don’t think that events are one-time deals. The decision you make this time may cause a new event to arise later. Just because you’ve resolved a problem for now doesn’t mean it won’t come back to haunt you further down the road. Events can be related to the area you’re traveling in, the decisions you’ve made in the past, the state of your caravan or pre-determined events along the way, and can affect everything from your caravan’s stats to which characters in your party live or die.

We’ve now written dozens of events, some of which can be several parts long. Multiple playthroughs can feel wildly different.

Events, however, are just the tip of the backdrop to a broader story.

A quick note, you may have noticed that our design documents are being housed in google docs. Stuff like this is not uncommon for game studios - google is the easiest way to create cloud-saved documents and spreadsheets that can be easily shared and edited with other developers across the world and easily converted into pdf files. Not many better options on the market.

Conversation
The main focus of the game has always been a deep and personal story. The things that are happening in the world may be out of your control, but you always have a choice in how you react to them, and the main way you do this is through dialogue.

Traveling and events feed back into conversation. At key events and in camp, you’ll talk to characters in a more personal point of view. Instead of describing what has happened in narration like an event, conversations become closer and more personal. The Banner Saga is primarily a dialogue-driven story.

Coming from a history with BioWare, we’ve familiar with how to create branching story. Where we differ is in the idea that every line needs to be something that the player has chosen. Instead, we provide a choice of what to say when there is an important decision to make, instead of filling dialogue with false choices that loop back to the same place and have no bearing on the conversation.

The conversation toolset has been detailed out in the design doc and allows us a range of options to create fairly dynamic-looking conversations that give a personal touch to what is usually dry text. The animated portraits you see in the proving grounds are part of this system! As we’ve mentioned before, we’re using every part of the buffalo. Almost everything you see in Factions is content made for the single player game.

So, through conversation you’ll make key decisions that have wide-reaching implications throughout every other part of the game. You’ll decide how to handle the most important situations that arise, make decisions that may affects the caravan’s morale, size and supplies, and form a personal connection to the characters traveling in your party.

How exactly do these decisions affect the story?

Creating a real, branching story
Similar to Final Fantasy Tactics or Shining Force, The Banner Saga has a large cast of playable characters; special warriors in your caravan who can also join you in combat. You’ll play primarily make decisions as one character at a time, but as the story unfolds you’ll shift between different main characters, giving a broader sense of what is happening across the land.

Creating branching content can be very time-consuming and difficult. In most stories, even a single branch means instantly doubling your story content, and lots of branching compounds this exponentially.

We have a few things going in our favor in this regard. By having largely text-driven and modular gameplay, we can produce a ton of high-quality content quickly and cheaply. While a standard RPG requires cinematics, voiceovers, 3d art, lighting, scripting and unique animations for each and every event, our advantage is in creating less expensive but vastly larger amounts of content. If you’ve ever wondered why older games like Planescape and Fallout could afford to have deep and rich stories with lots of characters and cool ideas like unique “low intelligence” dialogue while modern games somehow fail to match their predecessors, it’s because they could produce a lot of content quickly and cheaply, and leaves the details to player’s imagination. It’s a tradeoff for modern cinematic presentation, but one that we think is the right decision for The Banner Saga.

Additionally, this style of production lets us iterate the writing up until the last moment. It’s impossible to overstate how important this is. For example, on an RPG with voice-acted dialogue, the writer often gets one chance to get it right before it’s recorded and set in stone. This is not how books and movies are written. Authors edit and rewrite their stories several, sometimes dozens or hundreds of times, and the ability to be agile and make changes to existing parts of the game based on new ideas gives you the best chance to make something exceptional.

That said, it still holds true that branching content is expensive. Our approach to this is that things are happening in the world with or without you, and how you spend your time is important. You may make decisions that slow down your travel, and when you reach different destinations you’ll find them in different states. For example, travel to a city quickly and make it in time to repel a siege, or travel slowly and arrive to find it burned to the ground.

The overarching timeline for the first chapter has been laid out, and Austin Wintory (the composer for The Banner Saga) has already started thinking about the musical arch. Below is the actual timeline for the game, boiled down to the absolutely most vital events in sequence.

As the player, you personally have a lot at stake as well. The fate of innocent people rest on your shoulders, based on the decisions you make. Whether your companions live, die, stay or leave are also in question. We plan to have over a dozen characters important to the story, and each lives or dies based on the players actions, sometimes in ways that are unfair or due to a series of decisions that may have seemed like the right thing at the time.

In this way, the world in The Banner Saga doesn’t change any more than we can change the world around us in real life, but how we experience the world and what we do with our time is what’s important. Though we both arrive at the same destination, your story may be wildly different from mine. Ultimately, though the game is three parts long, and though chapter 2 may start in the same place for everyone, we expect that chapter 3 will end in several different ways (by which I don't mean red, green or blue).

Writing
When writing a branching story, being able to access it, read through it and see the story play out in front of you is extremely important, and that’s something you can’t do in a standard document. In fact, writing a toolset to do it in the client can be prohibitive too. For example, BioWare’s writing tool is very robust, but also heavy and unwieldy and makes it slow to produce content.

I’ve done quite a bit of writing in this format and have used almost every modular writing program I can find, including Inform 7, Choice script, Articy Draft and Twine. While all of these are excellent in their own way, I’ve recently been using a program called Inklewriter which I find exceptional.

I’ve just recently finished creating the full outline in Inklewriter. Not only does it let me quickly “sketch” out the story, but I can quickly play through it and share it with other developers. Here’s an example from the intro of the narrative:

The choices at the end of the paragraph are multiple choice options that advance the story, maintaining all the variables that you can set throughout. At this point we can confidently say that the entire first half of chapter 1 is actually playable through Inklewriter. You can literally sit down and “play” the game, making choices that respond in the exact way they will in the final game. This is an incredibly powerful tool, despite its seemingly simplicity. Again, don’t believe that games are only made with tools that cost a fortune and are complex, even engines are starting to become affordable and user friendly, such as Unity. The best tool for the job is the one that fits your needs.

Additionally, Inklewriter automatically generates a story map based on the content that you hook up, giving an incredibly useful overview of your story. Here’s the actual layout for the first half of the game:

The game begins at the node on the left, and goes down. You can see that when decisions are made, the story branches, and sometimes decisions you make in one place can affect a branch that seems to be on a completely different path.

Throughout this story map, what you can’t see are the huge amounts of critical points where important events take place, the player is making decisions that will last throughout all three games, and characters are joining, leaving or dying while the main plot goes on. Though the story occasionally ties back to itself, important things have changed in between.

Also note that the middle section called Path split ends in three branches. I’ve shown the one branch plays out, but the other two are completely different. From this you can see that the story starts out pretty focused as you learn the game, and in the middle section important events happen, setting the conflict into motion. At this point the player makes some key decisions that dramatically change how this part of the story plays out. You might not even be playing the same character in each of these branches. Layer the variably triggered events on top of that and you’ll get a story that feels very personal and reactive to how you play it.

Even if you don’t intend to use Inklewriter for development, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s an excellent, easy-to-learn tool for story writing. You can help support them, too. In the near future they’ll be releasing Steve Jackson’s adventure book Sorcery! on Inklewriter, which I am hugely anticipating.

Combat
As mentioned earlier, combat has come along better than we had ever imagined. If you’ve played Factions you already have a great idea about how combat is going to feel. What you may not have inferred is how this relates to the single player game.

The biggest addition to the combat in Factions carries over well to the single player game; the horn.

The horn was a major feature we had wanted to implement early on and works beautifully with the current system. Currently, each kill you make adds a star to the horn. These stars can be spent to blow the horn, creating the effect of restoring willpower to your characters during combat. In the single player game different main characters carry different horns, and their effects will be unique to them and compliment their personalities. In this way each character not only has their own stories and motivations, but changes the overall feeling of fighting with their team. We hope to roll this eventually into Factions, as well.

Just as with every other system in the game, your actions in combat will have a broader reach than just the immediate result. Characters in battle do not heal immediately after combat, instead needing time to recover during travel. Characters who are seriously wounded won’t be able to jump right back into combat, instead relying on other fighters on your team who may not be as experienced. Choices you make in conversation and travel can affect how difficult combat is, and your performance in combat can, in turn, influence the caravan’s morale and endurance.

Combat can also be as prominent as you’d like, depending on how you play the game. During combat, the caravan will continue to move. While destroying your enemies ensures victory, you can choose to hold them off long enough for the caravan to escape and you’ll be able to retreat, giving you the choice to play aggressively, defensively or cautiously to minimize the damage you take and your ability to fight another day.

Art production
Aside from design and story, art continues at a breakneck pace. Powerhouse is now deep into the final set of classes, including the primary characters for the single player game, Rook and Juno, featured in the two animation cels and the poster. Below are the next set of base classes, and if you’ve been playing Factions at all you know that these will be promotable into a wide variety of specialized units made to work in unison with all the other characters in the game. Our animation prize-donators Brendan Iribe and Alex Maxwell star as the male Mender and Spearman, respectively.

Powerhouse has now lovingly crafted literally hundreds of these hand-drawn animations and they keep getting progressively better and better. Some of the latest work we’ve been seeing had been absolutely jaw-dropping. Check out a few in the video below:

We’ve also been adding substantial amounts of art to our library of environment pieces that’ll be vital to creating the world. Using these pieces we’ve added the beach, great hall and proving grounds to the variety of playable maps in Factions, and soon we’ll have a full set of particles to bring them to life, like crackling fire, blowing snow and animated wildlife.

Factions
Release of Factions is nigh! At this time we’re looking at roughly a month before the game comes out to the public, and it will be finished and ready for backers to get a head start before then.

If you haven’t tried Factions since the last update, there are plenty of things to give a shot. We’ve added friend mode, letting you enter private matches against Steam friends. We’ve updated the promotion system now so that you can hire new recruits at the mead house and upgrade them in the proving grounds. Most units have been rebalanced and fine-tuned to be final. Characters can be renamed. Match resolution now shows you all the achievements and bonuses you’ve earned on each match and each screen has a helpful ? button in the corner which explains how to play the game.

Between now and launch we’ll be adding a proper tutorial, tournament matches and color variations for all the characters.

Once Factions comes out we’ll be on to the other systems - specifically travel and conversation while also working on the AI for computer-controlled enemies.

When is it coming out?
Now that we’re well into 2013 and our estimated date was November last year, many people have been asking when the game will ship. This is a topic that comes up a lot in interviews in relation not just to us but most Kickstarters and honestly, most games in general.

To cut to the chase, we’re currently looking at mid-year for release of the Saga. We’ve said this in a few places but it’s worth repeating - when you scope the game for a certain amount of money and you make 7x that much, there’s no way around it, the game takes longer to make. We’re doing our best to mitigate that, we’re not taking anything like 7x as long. Hopefully with the progress we show in regular updates you’ll agree that we’re using the funding well and making the best decisions for the game.

In the meantime, Factions will continue to be available! As we add new features for the single player game, we intend to release them in Factions so they can be played instead of just told about. For example, one of the first features we’ll be releasing is computer-controlled AI for enemies

We'll keep everyone informed about progress every step of the way. We're going to be contacting the donators who chipped in for the god prizes and items soon. In case you missed the previous announcements, guild crests will be uploaded in the game itself, so please don't worry about missing the deadline (since there isn't one).

See you next time!
Alex

Greetings! As you guys know, we do a monthly progress report to keep you up to date on how progress is coming on the game. We'll have the usual progress report coming just next week with lots of progress happening this month on the single player Saga.

Today we have an excellent update from Kpow Audio, who have been doing an astounding job with the sound and audio implementation on the game, which you can already get a good dose of in the Factions beta.

Kpow Audio is Michael Theiler and Peret von Sturmer, working remotely from Sydney, Australia, and what you hear from them are thanks to your support, without which we'd be doing our own foley, and that would not have been pretty. I very highly recommend checking this out even if you don't know much about sound in games. The depth in each branch of game development can be pretty fascinating stuff.

I'll leave it to Michael from Kpow to explain:

Situating an Ambience

When creating ambiences for games (this applies equally to film), I am striving to make them blend into the background, and not mask any important in game sounds. For most ambiences, these are the most important qualities that I am attempting to resolve.

In order to achieve this, I need to firstly focus on the repetition and timing between audio occurrences in the sounds. This means spacing sounds, and adding and removing sound occurrences in my audio sequence. I then work on the frequencies in the sounds, using equalization to mold them into the right sound. Finally, I work on their sound propagation, and the sound of the space in which they are to inhabit. These are the steps necessary to mould sound into something suitable for the space. Just adding reverb is not enough - the sound needs to be purpose built for the space’s reverberation and delay treatment.

Sprinkling Sounds
The first task I need to do to ensure the ambience retreats into the background is to select the correct sounds. The more particular you are about the sounds you choose, the better results you will get. Don’t settle for an slightly inappropriate sound if you know its going to be a lot of work to massage the audio to make it sound right for the space. Often I will find nice long stereo files that contain approximately the right sounds, but they always need some work to be made to fit the particular space I am attempting to create. Usually they will need to be edited, removing anything that pops out and distracts you from the space and time of the location. I say time because often with an ambience the frequency of occurrence of particular sounds is something that needs to be considered. If there is too much happening, the space feels cluttered and busy. Even if you are depicting a busy location such as an outdoor market, or a busy mall, too frequent a bunch of sounds together and you have a mess. This kind of cacophony can be used as an effect, but in games you don’t have control of the player’s orchestration of the world you are creating. Therefore care must be taken to design the sounds in a pleasing, but apparently random manner. These same sensibilities are used when designing a more molecular, procedural ambience - tuning time between ambient audio events is what makes these spaces feel ‘right’. It is something that I learned after doing this for a long while, less is more often than not, more. Keep most things subtle, and let the occasional sound pop out only if it sounds perfect to do so.

Removing anything that pops out is a balancing act. A space is determined by how the sound and its propagation ‘sits’ in the space. We manipulate this with delays and reverberation. If nothing pops out at all, the reverb doesn’t have the material with which to bloom, and therefore describe the space. So I am not trying to get rid of every descriptive sound, I am trying to ensure every sound is right. It sounds the right distance away for the space I am trying to describe, it sounds at the right level (usually low, but not always), it occurs infrequently or frequently enough to be believable.

Frequencies
The next consideration when building an ambience is the frequencies, their relationship, any build-ups of particular frequencies, and the overall mix (which actually comes last). As I mentioned before, I am trying to ensure the ambience sits behind any important close sounds. Every audio building block needs to be eq’d so it plays a background role. Usually the frequencies I am concerned with are the middle frequencies, from around 350Hz to around 2kHz. This varies of course, and I will have chosen audio already that doesn’t contain important information that is loud and overbearing in these frequencies. Also, I am talking by degrees. Everything has these frequencies in them to an extent, I just ensure they are not overwhelming or distracting in any way. After a multitrack of up to 30 channels has been eq’d, usually if an individual channel is solo’d, its surprising how much frequency content has been removed. The overall feel of the ambience needs to be fairly light. If there is too much bass it means when in game you get used to the bass, you start to ignore it, then a bass-heavy weapon or impact or vehicle sound loses its impact as the player has learned to become accustomed to these frequencies, so the contrast is not there. So keeping things well tamed is important.

The final element, often the most time consuming, and probably the most important, is getting the space right for these sounds. They usually need to be pushed back. They often need to be diffuse, and the distance and diffusion usually needs to sound a little more exaggerated than they would in real life in order to create some contrast and depth to your sound design. I like to think of these ambiences as layers. They have depth also - the sounds in them are not from the same distance or perspective - they are from over there, behind that, a block away and behind that hill.

In order to give perspective to these sounds, my setup usually starts at this first example, and morphs from there. I am going to take you through a couple of different mix setups. I use ProTools, so will be describing these techniques using the much maligned behemoth, but these techniques apply equally well to other DAWs.

Spacialisation Setup Number One
The first setup is one I used many times on the ambiences for LA Noire. We didn’t have a procedural system in place for LA Noire, instead we had tracks between 1 min 30 seconds, and three minutes long, that looped, providing the ambience for different locations. There were over 100 different ambience tracks for exteriors and interiors, which faded in and out based on locations.

Once I had chosen the sounds and eq’d them to feel right, I would set up my delay auxiliary channel, and my reverb auxiliary channel. Both the delay and the reverb channel would be set to pre-fader. This way, I can control the apparent distance away that the sound appears, by reducing the amount of direct sound on the sound’s channel. So the signal you hear might be half direct, but all reverb, and some delay, creating a diffuse distant sound.

Automating the send level of the direct to the reverb and to the delay, and automating the reduction of the direct level of the individual tracks leads to a huge amount of variation in perceived distance from the space that the sound has propagated within. It lets me have a version of a sound get louder by having a good amount of direct sound, a little less reverb, and a little delay, therefore sounding closer, but then blooming within the space. Reducing the direct sound and keeping the reverb send up gives the sound a diffuse, more distant quality. Tuning the delay lets you describe the slap off of building, or hillsides, or distant mountains or canyons, or an alley way. This slap is something that quickly clues your ears in to the space around the sound. It may seem a little more crude than a reverb, but it can sound very beautiful, can be instantly evocative, and I believe is a very important ingredient in describing a space.

The relationship between the direct sound, reverberation and the delay begins to build a picture of the space the sounds are occurring in. But if we stopped here, we would not have all the depth that can be achieved with the next step. I always, and I mean always, set up an equalizer after my reverbs and delays, on the same aux channel. This is hugely important, and is a technique that I have found improves mixes in any circumstance. Once its in, I usually start by carving out some highs and lows, usually shelves, but sometimes, if I need to be a little more brutal, I will use a low pass or high pass filter. With ambiences, I am trying to reduce their weight. I need the frequencies that give the ambiences their heavy, suffocating qualities, for other more important sounds, so these areas need to be tamed. The high frequencies also need to go. Often it can feel like the sparkle is leaving your mix, but very high frequency reverbs are not realistic, and often sound bad after any compression. I tend to avoid this sound in my reverbs unless they are for a specific effect. As I do this, I am often fairly brutal at first, and I am listening to the sounds behind the reverb become unveiled. This is where I create depth. The separation between the reverb and the direct sound, as if they are not in the same plane, but a related parallel plane. This is what gives the mix space. It lets you hear the reverb as support, and lets the main sounds function better.

Once the reverbs are done, I do exactly the same thing to the delay. Often with the delay I am a little more extreme, but I also find here is where I can give the description of space even more value. For example, the fast delay in a wood room sounds different to a glass room. Obvious I know, but here is where I can quickly simulate that sound by eq’ing the delay. For a forest, its going to be pretty dead in the high frequencies - I might dampen everything above 1.2kHz. A quarry is going to be a bit more live, but still not have the higher frequencies very present.

And that’s basically it. I am sending all the tracks to a master bus, which has an overall eq that I might take out a little more bass, and a limiter on it that usually never gets hit, and I record out. Then its a case of bringing that stereo file back in, making it loop seamlessly, and I am done.

Spacialisation Setup Number Two
For The Banner Saga, we are doing a more procedural ambience. I approached this a little differently. There are many different spaces in this game, but one of the more important ones is the opening view of the City of Strand. It is a distant view of a small city. I wanted to create the feeling that the city is alive and populated, audibly so from this distance. As it is a seaside city, I used seagulls as my close perspective sounds, and added wind and sea for the mid-distance. I then used shouting and the sound of anvils being struck for the distant city sounds. This worked out well, but getting the distance on these sounds correct took some time.

To get them sounding right, once I had picked out the sounds, I arranged variations of them sequentially in ProTools. This is procedurally generated content, so I needed lots of individual sounds with which to randomise their playback using FMOD Designer, in order to create the ambience. Once arranged, I setup a convolution reverb on their channel, set to something that approximated the slap and diffusion of being in the narrow streets of a stone and wood city I then sent varying amounts of this to my usual reverb auxiliary channel, but this time I had two delays setup to provide the slaps.

These delays were to give a sense of bouncing off the surrounding mountains. There was a medium delay time of around 300ms, and a longer one around 600ms. Once setup the length of delay meant you could hear that these were facsimiles of the sound repeated exactly (despite some eq), so I needed to add another reverb after the delays (on each delays channel), to wash out the delays a little. This started to sound right, but was still a little heavy sounding for the distance, so I went a little harder on the eq’s, with my final settings including some shelving of -16dB at 130Hz and below, and a low pass at 18kHz. I then also have some cutting at 990 Hz of around 10dB and also at 6.5 kHz of around 7dB.

The eq’s on both delays are similar but have some differences - for example the eq on delay 2 has some boosting in the high frequencies as shown in the second eq image.

The delay aux channels levels are also both set fairly low, around -18 to -19, so they are only contributing their character subtly to the mix - it’s not a huge effect, despite being necessary for the sound

The main reverb is a convolution reverb, with an Impulse Response that mimics the sound of a block party, it has some diffusion, as well as some hard surfaces slapping.

The eq after this just tames some bass and cuts some highs, with some lower mids also scooped. This created the sound I was after. Its a fairly diffuse distant yelling and clanking, with a diffuse echo that sounds like it is carried off by the wind. Its a more high frequency echo, so simulates the effect of bass reduction over distance, and the whole effect, although subtle in its execution, is slightly exaggerated and stylised compared to how the sounds would be in real life.

You can hear how it eventually came out here: http://youtu.be/k9JAepiBpLs

And that’s it. The setups I’ve explained above work in almost all cases, and offer a huge amount of controlled tuning to create most spaces you will need.

Tools
The only thing left is to go through the specific tools used, though as long as you have a good reverb to start with, most DAWs come with everything else you need.

Equality by DMG Audio
This eq is very transparent. It does not provide any colouration, but it is crystal clear, dependable, and very easy use. The display does a great job of showing what it is doing, and it provides a built in frequency analyser which is often handy.

Reverberate by Liquid Sonics
Until Altiverb is released for PC’s, this is the convolution reverb I have settled on. It is infinitely tweakable, which can be a time sink, but it is usually easy to get the sound you want without too much tweaking. I have boosted its functionality by purchasing some IR’s that are great for Post Production. I believe the ‘block party’ preset I used above was from ‘kinetic sound prism’.

Valhalla Room by Valhalla DSP
This is a beautiful sheeny reverb great for User Interface sounds, but can be used for real spaces if you show some restraint. Its also great for music. I used this to smear the long delays on the distance sounds for the city screen in The Banner Saga.

L2007 Limiter by Massey Plugins
All Massey’s plugins are well priced and extremely useful. I love this limiter for its sound, very transparent. Its fast to setup, and always does what I expect.

Delays are usually just the standard ProTools delays. In the above instances I used the Extra Long Delay II.

An important consideration for me is how quickly the tools I use can get me to the sound I want or hear in my head. The above plugins don’t have a particularly coloured sound, so may not be great for anything that requires a lot of character, and they don’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but for my needs they are great in that I can be efficiently setup, and provide the sound I want, fast. I have created templates that have my sessions set up with all the channels, auxiliaries and sends outlined above, ready to go. This lets me sit down and create, rather than jumping constantly from left to right brain states.