Black&White 2: Developer Diary #3: Village Life and Warfare ...

It’s time once again for Black & White Studios to embark on the fabulous journey through the development diaries so that you’ll be able to keep abreast of all the goings on in the world of Black & White 2. I’ll be your guide through the entire development process of the game and, lucky you, you get to experience it all from my rather distinct perspective.

John McLean-Foreman

Let us not forget that what we’re creating over at Black & White Studios is a god-game, and in a god-game, as one would expect, it’s vitally important that you get to feel like a god – empires crumble at your command, social structures swing based on your mood, and the world you control physically alters itself to reflect your true nature. In a nutshell, you want to feel all powerful. That may sound obvious, but in Black & White 1, sometimes I felt more like an errand boy doing favours for a bunch of thankless little whiners who didn’t even remember what I’d done for them five minutes after the fact. There seemed to be no global ramifications to my actions whatsoever.

Well, that is not the case in B&W2. Because we really, really want you to feel like a god when you play this game, we’ve kept our design process very organic. By that I mean that it’s ever changing. We try something, and if it doesn’t work, we scratch our collective heads and try to puzzle out why it didn’t work. For example, we built a siege weapon, dragged it through the city, and we thought, “Well, why has nobody reacted to it?” So we fiddled about with the program until they did. Granted, that’s not something very godly, but it is a fine example of action and reaction. Now expand that concept to the point where villagers react to just about everything that you do, and you start to understand what it feels like to play god.

As I mentioned in the first Dev Diary, there are two distinctly different ways in which you can play the game: one focuses on building and nurturing majestic cities that lure enemy villagers away from their homeland in order to become a citizen of your empire, and the other focuses on taking your enemies’ territory by force. The trick here is teaching the game how to realistically have both game styles work in conjunction with each other… which doesn’t always happen in ways that we expect it to.

This is what we call a cow...

One morning, I overheard some tittering coming from the programmer’s side of the office. Being the nosy sort of fellow that I am, I felt compelled to investigate. Glen (our villager AI programmer) and Jonty (head of B&W studios) were standing by his computer, both looking highly amused. It seems there was a little glitch… well, oversight really… in creating the breeder disciples, a particular breeder, a female in this case, was methodically moving through the ranks of a platoon of soldiers, boosting morale, so to speak. The female breeders can sleep with anyone they wish, but once they become pregnant, they’re supposed to declare it a job well done and stop. This young lady not only slept with every member of the army in turn, but on her way back home, accosted every male who happened to cross her path.

Glen had another, yet unrelated, bug to demonstrate. With the click of a couple of buttons, he set up a recruitment tent inside a residential area, and began drafting children into the army. A little politically incorrect perhaps, but certainly not unrealistic. Glen actually had the solution to the “draft-a-kid” problem at hand and was just about to implement it when we insisted that he first show us the children being slaughtered by an elite group of samurai. Ahhh… if only there had been sound effects too. It did raise an interesting question though: because Black & White is about free will, should we allow the player to put children in their army if that’s what they really want to do? The game no longer automatically recruits children if they’re nearby the tent, but if the child is old enough to grab a sword and the player is evil enough… maybe we should allow it.

Speaking of the horrors of war (as the previous scenario so aptly depicted), if you repeatedly declare war against the various computer players, the ramifications of that behaviour will ripple across the world and your opponents’ playing strategies will alter accordingly. Further, many of the characters will react differently than they would if you were good god.

War and Villagers!

Personally, I plan to declare war on everybody, especially when we test the game against each other. I think that’s largely due to Jonty’s continuous assumption that I’ll play the scummiest god possible, but I also want to take advantage of a little loophole in his playing strategy while it’s still available. You see, his Creature is so sickeningly compassionate that it hasn’t yet learned not to heal everyone who gets hurt, and that includes invading armies. My Creature will not be making any such foolish mistakes, in fact he’ll be casting horrifying, flesh-melting spells, kicking Jonty’s Creature when it’s down, commanding my armies to perform complex military manoeuvres (that are based on real land war strategies of the era, incidentally), and just generally being a miserable swine. Jonty claims he has plans for my people. I find that rather ominous.

Of course that doesn’t mean that I won’t also be building up my city to counteract my people’s desire to emigrate to a kinder more magnificent land. If you’re really lax as a god, your people will become dissatisfied and start picketing outside your cathedral. They might even try to riot. While my good opponents will undoubtedly be setting up idyllic gardens, sculpting grand statues, laying roads to make travel easier, building taverns where townsfolk can enjoy some time off, and doing whatever else it takes to build an outstanding city, I’ll be throwing down the bars (I do like those) and torture chambers wherever I notice unrest. I don’t need my people’s love, just their blind obedience and a healthy dose of fear.

As always, it comes down to choice. Be nice and the world will flock to your door. Be evil and you get to kick the doors in. Either way, everything you do has a consequence, so prepare to play god because your people are watching.