Betrayal at Krondor: Remastered Blog Update and Design Document

Original designer Neal Hallford took some time away from his work on the upcoming Betrayal at Krondor: Remastered project to provide a quick blog update on the work that is going into recreating the moredhel puzzle chests for the updated release, as well as to reveal “a small excerpt of the narrative timeline” from the game’s original design documentation.  Here’s a little something from the former:

One of the fun parts of the Betrayal at Krondor: Remastered project is that it’s allowing me to indulge in one of my side hobbies messing around with 3D modeling. Now as I tell everyone, I’m not really a 3D modeler. I’m slow, I’m clunky, and I don’t always take the right path to getting to the final product that I want. That said, I really enjoy doing it.

My weapon of choice these days for this little hobby is Blender, whose initial appeal was that it’s free. It has both its ardent supporters as well as its vocal detractors, but if you’re patient with it, you can get really nice results (especially now that the Cycles Rendering is built in.) Now admittedly the learning curve is steep, more so if you’re already familiar with Maya or Max (you’ll have to unlearn a few of the ways you already do things), but now that I’ve got used to the funky way it does certain things, it’s not that difficult to use. You can check it out for yourself at http://Blender.org.

The next big task I have on my agenda for the Betrayal at Krondor: Remastered project is recreating the moredhel puzzle chests from the original game. These were special treasure chests scattered around the game world that required the player to solve puzzles before they could open them up. Opening chests at first requires well a chest to open so I’ve been busy creating the asset that I’ll be using in the game. (Strangely enough puzzle chests aren’t an asset that’s readily available out there on the interwebs.)