One of my most memorable moments in an open world RPG setting came to me when I first laid hands on Gothic for the PC, the title was not only eloquently presented and crafted for its time, it had a great hook; the world around your character was alive. It was one of the few titles I’ve touched that kept me playing late into the night until the yellow/orange tinge of the morning sun began to fill my room. Heck I loved the game so much so I conducted an interview with the developers in 2001 and again in 2002 for Gothic 2. So imagine my excitement when I learnt of a title inspired by Gothic and Oblivion was about to make its way to a portable platform in the fall of 2009. I was giddy with excitement and immediately expressed my interest in the title Ravensword for the iphone.
I caught up with Josh and Russ on how they approached the monumental task of bringing a large scale title such as an open world RPG to a portable platform.
Putting a world in the palm of your hand
Upon booting up Ravensword, first, you will be impressed with the incredible attention to detail followed by the immediate urge to explore what appears to be a vast world that lays before you, wrought with adventures to be had– and on both counts, you would be right. It’s hard to comprehend that a team consisting primarily of two individuals over the course of seven working months, could tie together all the assets and code needed for use in the title.
“We didn’t really start out planning something huge, but as we built it, some things just obviously needed to be added. Eventually we got to the point where we felt we had something worth buying, and released it.”
With the shear scope of the project one would expect that not everything would pan out as planned. When taking on a project of this magnitude which is mainly targeted to an audience very familiar with the genre, you will evidently hit the mark on some areas and regretfully miss on others, which is not all to surprising given the scope and timeframe. And though given that some important factors of game play and content are noticeably absent, they didn’t in anyway make it a game breaker.
{click image for larger view}
Stemming from game play I found the controls responsive and somewhat intuitive, the reason I say somewhat stems back from my harping on the touch screen controls issues that arises on the iPhone/Touch platforms. Aside from that I was curious as to how the final design decision behind the controls came to be, Russ simply stated;
We gave the game to some people to play, and they all suggested the control scheme we ended up with. I was pretty resistant to changing it that late in development, but had to give in.
One of the implementations I was keen on learning more about, was the design decision behind incorporating a “jump” button as opposed to say a block/dodge button leaving jumping/climbing as a context driven event.
I don’t like the game taking over your character for you, and I don’t like the feeling of having your character glued to the ground. We were considering blocking for the first release, but time did not allow for it.
Although I agree with him that sometimes this can be correct, I would have to respectfully disagree here, I would even argue that the opposite is true. For example take the 2009 hit title Demon’s souls, a game which is somewhat rooted in reality, where you have the protagonist “glued” to the ground, but has been given the ability to roll/evade in combat and by pushing against an appropriate object would initiate a “climb over” event. Now given that this game was geared towards the “hardcore” audience you would think it would cause a stir that you can’t freely jump, but what’s interesting to my knowledge it never came up or was raised as an issue, so it’s quite apparent different design philosophies exist here. In all honesty I’ve never found a reason to jump unless of course it’s to higher levels which are rare occasions unless platforming is a major feature within your game. Jumping in combat makes the entire process implausible due to the fact that it’s not exactly practical. So what I’m trying to express here is given the small real estate of the platform, utilizing more usable behaviours could heighten the game experience that much more.
Peeling back the layers of armor
As an adventure/Action RPG, focusing on common lores, magic and exploration, I wanted to believe that armaments such as shields, boots and the like with unique statistics would be on the forefront, unfortunately such wasn’t the case in Ravensword’s current release. When asked whether they were initial difficulties incorporating these features, Russ assured me that this wasn’t entirely the case.
Not really. There were just so many other things to work on that we didn’t spend time to flesh all of that out as much as people apparently would have liked. We’ll be extending that stuff a lot on the next release, though.
For stat mongers who relish the idea of viewing detailed statistics on weapons and armor would be a tad underwhelmed. Unfortunately a large part of my adventure was brought slowly to a crawl because of this omission; this is one of those cases where you can see ideas flowing but were cut short due to circumstances. Now if they were only one weapon and armor available as a gamer I would’ve accepted this and not strive for a goal that gives no real sense of accomplishment. Mind you, I did feel good about finally claiming the top sword and armor within the game, but it didn’t feel like the triumph I was hoping for.
Character wise, stats are automatically scaled based on your level advancement which isn’t a bad decision, but when they really don’t add to the game it’s a bit odd, one stat in particular I had trouble understanding was the large disparity between endurance and the other stats such as strength. On my completion of the game, my end stats where; Strength – 15, Endurance 553, Dexterity 72 and Luck 58. So naturally I inquired, Russ’s reasoning behind this is;
Endurance, as we’ve defined it, is a bucket to hold your health points. All the stats started out in roughly the same range, and endurance grew during the process of difficulty tuning. I kind of like having a big number for it to, as it gives you a feeling of invincibility when you are at higher levels.
Invincibility is great, but intertwined within normal gameplay made the title significantly unbalanced for me.
One of the more intriguing aspects of the game came from the dialogue trees which were represented well, and with a solid base laid in front of them the team does have future plans to make them even more robust;
The dialog scripts are state machines that interact with each other and the mission system. I considered implementing an abstraction layer so they could be made without changing code, but found that approach to be pretty limiting without a lot of work. That’s something up for consideration in our next release, as we will be doing more branching in the story, and that will have to be reflected in the conversations.
Running on pure horsepower
One of the amazing things you would find once playing Ravensword is the strength in its graphically fidelity and the teams ability to handle the iPhone/Touch 1G-3G processors and ram limitations with the greatest of respect. Playing on my 1G iPod Touch, I found that the performance was remarkable and when asked about some of the techniques used to optimize performance and load times while retaining such graphical fidelity, Josh said;
Russ really handled it with culling techniques, and reducing numbers of verts in ways that I don’t quite understand. He’s really a genius on that end.
Software wise the team used Unity iPhone, along with industry standards 3ds Max and Photoshop, and they all ran on “crappy” laptops according to Josh 
.
{click image for larger view}
Technically speaking the hero character has roughly 12 animations throughout, with each NPC occupying 1 animation, but according to the team this will be changing with subsequent releases as they plan to re-work the entire animation system giving them the scalability to add more behaviours to various characters.
Poly count wise, each character ranged from 300 to 1000 polygons with each environment ranging between a respectful 7k to 10k. And depending on the object their textures never extend beyond 512x 512.
According to Josh, overcoming technical hurdles wasn’t the real issue, the issue stemmed from the first paragraph, figuring out just how to make a massive seemingly open world appear to be just that. To offset this issue, the team chose to break the game world down into zones, essentially making the task manageable.
Between Josh and Russ, their duties were split evenly amongst them with the help of contracted freelancers.
Russ was in charge of all Programming aspects, writing the story (some refinement from my part) and I did the graphics in the game, level design, models, and textures. I hired out some freelancers for most of the animation and characters – which would end up getting refined by me in the end and brought into the engine.
Sound wise, I was truly impressed with the soothing melodies and ambience throughout the game, and although some of the sound f/x such as the sword “hit” could use a bit more work, everything worked well together. The team did well with what they had available, since everything comes at a cost when developing on a tight budget you do have to make the most with what you have, and in this case it was purchasing stock music from Sound Rangers and similar websites. Some Sound f/x were even recorded by Josh and Russ themselves.
Quest complete
So now that Ravensword’s release was greeted with wide acclaim, the team has taken an extremely valuable lesson away from it all;
It’s best to listen to your customers. That’s what it all comes down to. What they want in the game – the main points they have to say – will truly make a better game.
I would like to give a big thanks to Josh, Russ and Chillingo for participating in this tech review. There’s an incredible amount of potential with Ravensword, that I’m anxious to see realized.
A word from the devs
We’re currently working on the Ravensword 2 now; there will be a lot to look forward to in the sequel. The size of the world will be doubled, and you will have plenty of options as regard to character choice. There will be new weapons, enemies, better AI – just about everything will be improved. We are crafting the story now – and it takes place in a unique local – should be a nice break from the old version.
Ravensword Game Summary
Developed by: HumanPowered Games / Cresent Moon Games
Published by: Chillingo
Platforms: iPhone and iPod touch
Development time: 7 months
Number of Developers: 2 in-house
Interesting unknown fact: Josh’s wife did the sounds for the Goblin. To this day she still growls at him.
Purchase price: $4.99
Purchase link: Ravensword – itunes
Official website: Ravensword
Tito A. Belgrave is currently employed as a Character Artist at Ubisoft Toronto. He's also an avid freelance game journalist. 
