Trivia

[èné]

i bet you guys don't know. All right, i'm pretty sure most of you know them. It's mainly for people, like me, who weren't aware of these 2 facts. I do like this kind of stuff, it's alaways fun/interesting to know..


The hint oracle was created because the FTL people couldn't coupe with all those online- messages in the end (asking for some help)


Interestingly some people then (in a genie forum from back in the days) complained how much stuff the oracle gave them away, making life in the dungeon a bit too easy in the end (+ the fact that the game was already quite short in the 1st place).

Another one:
CSB was not intially planned - at least that quickly (if i read/got things correctly), but due to some players having finished DM in no-time, they felt they had to create a quick adventure to compensate..

In short 2 years of long hard work development, ruined in barely few weeks


FTL (author) = Wayne Holder

[ChristopheF]

FTL worked on a 'Dungeon Master Hint Disk' for DM, see http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/247#toc50
But they never released it, and finaly used the technology for CSB with the Hint Oracle.

About the "data-driven" game: FTL did implement the ability to load any dungeon file named DUNGEON.FTL from a floppy disk, instead of loading the built-in dungeon that we all know. However they never used that ability as they finaly released CSB as a complete game.

Wayne Holder regrets that they did not release their 'Dungeon Construction Set' tool to the public (the editor to build dungeon files). There would have been lots of custom dungeons created by fans! This was years before Doom and other games did the same and launched the customization/modding of video games that is so common today.

[Gambit37]

I think there was an ideological rift at FTL around custom dungeons from users. Not everyone shared Wayne's view about that... Several staff felt that allowing swathes of low quality dungeons from fans would dilute the DM brand and make it harder for them to create future games that people would spend money on. Plus the DCS was rather arcane and rough around the edges, and needed a lot of work to be useable by non-technical people.

I personally think they missed a trick. We now know that opening up games for modding prolongs their life considerably. Imagine what kind of legacy DM would have had if it had pioneered modding 6 years before Doom!

There was also discord around the Hint Oracle: not everyone felt it was necessary. Indeed, Andy Jaros loved speaking to fans on the phone who were stuck in the dungeon. I guess Wayne felt differently though, since he was the one paying the programmers and designers to do something other than chat to fans on the phone...! Who knows, if the Hint Oracle had shipped with DM, maybe the whole history of FTL might have been different: freed up to concentrate more on developing new games, we might have seen Skullkeep much sooner, or even the fabled horror and sci-fi games they had apparently been thinking about.