Drakensang: The Dark Eye Developer Diary #11

Drakensang.info has cranked out an eleventh developer diary for Radon Labs’ Drakensang: The Dark Eye, this time with intern Dennis Reichelt discussing how the team is implementing the TDE4 rule set.

This TDE rule set is the foundation for Drakensang. The team around Lead Programmer Nicolai Pogoczelski stood before a hard-to-survey mountain of (separate) rules that had to be sifted through and checked on playability and feasibility of implementation. Thus one prerequisite for the programers was to have very good knowledge about the rules, preferably from real use on the game table.

The fact of the matter is that a part of the rules of the 4th edition cannot be converted 1:1 for a computer game. In this case we try resorting to older rules from previous versions and use them as alternate templates. If that fails as well we choose a logical and playable approximation as arises from extensive discussions.