GDC Plays Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast with Raven Software

hello everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis your regular your regular host just hanging out here with you today on this fine Wednesday afternoon good afternoon if you are somewhere east of me good morning if you're west of me and just happy high noon if you're here in California on the west coast we are here today playing a really cool game from when I was 12 years old the game is Jedi Knight to Jedi Outcast I'm letting the old logos fly by on the screen for a bit of nostalgia for everyone here we go here's the Raven Software logo I'm excited a Jedi Knight to Jedi Outcast was a game I played so much of in 2002 2003 2004 and it was announced earlier this month that the game would be re-released on Nintendo switch and ps4 today down in the lower left hand corner of the screen we are joined by four developers who worked on the original game going from nearest to

farthest I've got your names on standby here but why don't you guys just introduce yourselves while I load up Nar Shaddaa I'm Chris Worcester I was the lead designer on the project Mike them all game programmer I'm James Monroe tech programmer era beastmen story from things like that right on Chris I mean I'm gonna ask you to take the lead on my first question here for everyone in chat for folks like adrenaline Lin link duh I do want you to know that you can ask questions too if you ask them in twitch chat there are two kinds of questions if you ask a question and we pull it for the stream we've also got Chris from Raven is hanging out in Channel he'll be grabbing questions some questions that you can ask as well for folks who are fans of Raven Software we would advise we're here today to talk about Jedi Knight we are we would love to answer questions about call of duty but unfortunately we can't do that because we have to stay focused on tonight so if you have call of duty questions if you feel free to drop them in chat and maybe we can get you an answer but for the stream itself we're

gonna be focusing on Jedi Knight Chris I'm going to toss my first question to you as the design lead and as I entered this Nar Shaddaa bar that I remember so what was the origins of Jedi Knight - because I believe from Raven this was Raven taking over development of the dark forces series correct I'm gonna toss this right it Eric because Ariana's our commander in chief on the whole thing so he's he's best suited to answer the the background yeah so Steve raffle was actually the project lead and he bought him a chemical or they did a good job unfortunately couldn't be here today so when we first started we had just come off from working on Star Trek Voyager Elite Force paramount and we had put her a lot of love and passion into that game as well and I think that that was something that helped us take a step towards susi starts as you know they saw what we've done they'd seen all the

stuff we'd worked on before so just kind of like magic happened and suddenly I'm working on the game that I've always wanted to work on in my life like I grew up on Star Wars and they're made a huge thing so huge dent and what I what I did with my life so really it was I didn't think it was more fate when anything just kind of happened we had a lot of really good upfront meetings we spend a lot of you know coming back and forth LucasArts people came out visited us we live in the middle of frigid frosty Wisconsin they're in beautiful sunny lovely California so we visited them more than they visited us but yeah just kind of know if that answered your question you know I feel like it just kind of happened after what we've already done I mean our work it was an example of our work I guess speaking for us just to follow up on that question what was the layout what was kind of the first like blueprint for what this game would look like obviously following up

on Jedi Knight meant as following Kyle here you would be taking up a lightsaber again but you're also you know you guys were coming from a shooter background what were the first steps taken to the programming prototype that you worked yeah but I think well you started building a level just to test features how many things those reflective surfaces rebounding pervious how stormtroopers would walk around AI and stuff like that playground help Mike and everybody's each other stuff and then they took it from there and made it like crazy yeah I remember that's the same level to be released let me show the b3 right you built it and there's also what we released eventually as the demo the game but if I remember correctly you're originally going to do dark forces 3 and wheat and they'd be like just a shooter no force powers no Jenna I don't know if

this because they thought you were in the ps3 or whatever no really we can do force powers we can do my savior heretic 2 which is a third-person action game so we brought over some of that animation stuff and we took the Elite Force engine and we've done we put them together in the ghoul technology you know from soldier 14 yeah it allows like this memory and stuff we put all that together and like hit location like really up skeletal animation and yeah correct all that stuff we put it all together and made a demo in about three weeks I think it was it was quick yeah yeah yeah and that was that was then we brian raffle took that to Lucas art singer like oh okay I guess you're gonna do a Jedi yeah well I think part of it was that we had the you know Kyle Katarn his dark forces and at the end of genic night he's Jedi he's intense so to bring him back to dark forces was a challenge and that's actually challenge we had to follow through in this game too it's why we started him without his his lightsaber we just didn't want to start him as like some uber power Jedi we also

didn't want to create a new character for this one because it had been a while we really wanted to make sure Kyle was a really cool guy like I really like his character and Jan ores and all uh all those you know people that surround him like we want to make sure that the game was about him so it was kind of questionable you know at the beginning like do we just start full-on superpowers you know force user or do we do we bring them back to his roots and at the end of the day we decided to bring back his roots and I actually really think that turned out well isn't that same hero's journey again yeah and I think the design philosophy was like the first few levels weren't like dark forces yeah alright and then it becomes there's a I'm gonna get to that question later adrenaline see Lindsey I may actually remember the the cheat you're talking about but I'm gonna follow up on that what do you think as game makers was sort of the the what was sort of the guiding limitation of your original

tools that you had to make this game because obviously it's much easier to sort of help things into a prototype now but in 2001-2002 that was not the case what what do you think your team did well in getting this idea like from concept to execution but for some tech things I think something we really did well was packing a lot of texture detail in on the characters we had some advanced texture mapping tools that helped us pack them efficiently so for not a lot of memory we got really high details on that and looking at it now he has low quality but for this right we were maximizing everything we could out of those yeah and using skeletal animations because the previous tech was using mesh animation this is much less memory so we had a lot more variety of animations that we could do all the flips and attacks do a lot of large texture map like texture pages a whole bunch of extra asses because with that way we can just use the drawing on the wall we

could cut to the phone as well we're like we're gonna put this on the window we're gonna put this piece on the right when your side of the bar where you just took the texture ball from the same page and just trying to use them for everything we could yeah one of the one of the best part oh go ahead yep what was on let me push this guy okay I can't push him off the edge I am getting shot by destructor I fold this that's going great I was gonna say what was you you know with with having Star Trek and soldier of fortune games under your belt what was different about like getting this texture pack together compare Jews did those games also had to look like the reference from all the movies and everything that's where I was gonna go as Star Wars was pre commuters we have our own environments yeah we're making up the phone but we knew it we knew we wanted stormtroopers we knew there's like the classic Star Wars characters that we wanted and so from a prototype standpoint we didn't have to do a bunch of concepts we didn't have to do you know we could just sit down and work I think that at least from the Star Wars

side things really made it up go a lot quicker we are the world that we want it to me yeah but as far as technology and stuff it was really just building off of that technology that we already used which is we had that in our pocket and it ready to go the fun little note when you're doing the demo and we were starting so quickly and coming right off of the leaf force that for a stormtroopers I just took the Klingons from me for it so if you haven't painted them white but black around their eyes and those were our stormtroopers that's but they but they made them models like really quick they were let's talk about lightsabers this game I think sticks a lot of people's mind because it's one of the first Star Wars game of the stuff does third-person lightsaber action in a way that would be compared to four games when the Force Unleashed came out when this is this is the big challenge of streaming and talking is always new they

think about narrative if I remember correctly it is that was supposed to be before you get your lightsaber yeah but at some point you're like takes to one get your lightsaber we're gonna move those two after you get your lightsaber but the design for the levels was still mostly for shooters yep so it's kind of weird you get your lightsaber and then don't get to use it a lot because there's snipers yeah but that we ended up working on some of those puzzles to let you in top of things yeah no kidding we just had your retro actively work out some of that to make sure that the saber was still really fun to actually use in here yeah yeah like this bar fight in the beginning this yeah once once you get past all the snipers it's actually the bar fight is so great they feel sorry because it feels like the nor Jedi thing you guys put together yeah especially I was replaying and I was so impressed I'll get back to my question

in a second but I I was so impressed with the CD what your cutscene animations seemed ray will do with these low poly stuff because even though even though the models may look a little old sorry the camera choices and the way the model like the animations are pretty pose driven does you get that cinematic sense in a way that I don't that that I think a lot of newer games have to do so much work to get but for so many more effects yes try sniping we definitely a storyboard it on pretty much everything okay no scope no scope yeah let's talk like I said we were talking about the lightsaber and the reason I want to talk about the lightsaber like I said because everything the the limbs that get chopped off to the marks get left on the wall it's very like free-flowing nature of it where I can move right and swing moving left and

swing these are the things that don't like if you think about kotor if you think about the classics like side-scrolling games like the level of immediate Nastase light saber usage wouldn't be meant again for a while what what what do you what was the core design and programming logic that made that possible if you're able to share that for the lightsaber comment and stuff well for the effects it was mostly jet Dischler I recall he spent a lot of time on that making it look really good the lightsaber blur the glow itself the marks on the walls and stuff booty that was all him the combat was we brought over the third-person combat logic that we did for a project - its expanded it for this and like putting a lot of transitions and Chinese even smooth my goal was to make it so that you could be moving in any direction in attack in any direction I worked with the animators on that and trying to keep it as freeform

as possible but give you control in every direction and I wanted it to be quick I wanted to be responsive if I wanted it to be fairly lethal like my actual inspiration for the combat was Bushido blade there's old PlayStation 1 wasn't a PlayStation 1 game of Bushido blade Raina these samurai fighting the facing off with these different samurai weapons swords naginata and stuff like that and you'd like fly through the air and like slash at each other one hit could kill you if you if you timed it just right but that's kind of what I was aiming for right on I'm gonna go into the question power real quick so sorry I have to pause the game play for a sec yeah let's talk about first and third person - you talked about you were borrowing some of your third-person tech this is again one of those things that I think from a player side at the time it see it must have seemed like an easy thing to just say oh the game is in first and third person nowadays you

would still say oh of course you can just set your camera to wherever in 2001 and 2002 I'm sure that wasn't true even though you are working Tech what was the the secret to making what techniques did you use to get a game that could switch between 1st and 3rd on the fly like this and make sure that that didn't create any weirdness oh there was some weirdness there but yeah we took that I think we took the basic that the engine already had a rudimentary third person to just set the camera back and we added in a bunch of scripting and traces to to manipulate the camera to make it feel more natural to do some cinnamon cinematographer type thing where if you know back up into the wall it moves the camera up yeah we did a lot of testing with that when we were building everything's actually those little elevator shafts everywhere to make sure you write for the camera yep and it would slide move around and the little camera I'll try to remember do we did it do it in here when you got some of the kills of slow motion yeah or but

yeah the kills we made a target around them yeah that yeah those are very cool but yeah designing it we just had to make sure that you could do it either way and I'm kind remember you could switch on the fly you gotta switch on the fly there was um menu I think it's P you can find fault well we're not at war on ps4 number basically on the PC so uh so you could yeah you could shoot your guns I'm Riley charge up the breyer pistol yeah do a roll can come at a differently well I stick it right in the head can you stay and then the remember the first bug you know when we did the first person saver there was first-person language and you would do a roll and your sabers would just not really ask your body so yeah we did do first-person light saber and it was but we felt like because Jedi Knight was first person might say but we had to do first personally see what we can prefer the third person right so we did

it and the trick was like I tried all sorts of different things I'm attaching the players view to the to the actual model but then was like moved around to I tried not doing that in Yemen your arms being around over here while you're back here so I blended the two and then I faded out the arms I just put some alpha right from the arms they fade out and we easily went up to the shoulders who is the actual third person Arzo yes and then so that would give it a little bit hide the connects that you're not totally connected I'm not sure how many people played that way though we put it in there but I don't think we get that for Jedi Academy because there was just the Sabre staffs and tool sabers and the acrobatics and such as different little Swiss podiatrists Swiss Army knife savers oh I would recommend investment again ps4 where we're stuck like I said Gary to a lot of me dying this is not Pro play Jay they made you were able to

get okay yeah I took me six hours to get this far guys when I was playing through it again I realized it nowadays when we're making any game we're doing serious talks but onboarding yeah steps riveting we did know onboarding for the most part we're just like hey you've got a gun do this stuff go figure it out hey you found a secret area good job we didn't tell you and when you get your lightsaber I was running around in what part of that's been going why did I make this puzzle so hard this is some painful I defended a meal and I was like well that's right we can wall run here I tell the player you can wall running I'm like yep you were supposed to just know that from yes you were just supposed to realize that was a different time it was things called manuals that we expected people I do want to I need to take a minute I'm gonna pause from trying to

get past the sniper Brigade I need to get some of these great questions in chat we are gonna go back to adrenal link this question in the PC version of Jedi Outcast there's a cheat where you can activate over-the-top dismemberment where you can cut off limbs and even hold torsos I remembered this cheat it was gruesome they heard that the game used the ghoul Google - animation system which was used in soldier of fortune did the functionality of Google - is soldier in fortune was that also used in Jedi Outcast and did that lead to the existence of the heavy korchi basically yes now the goal would be it is skeletal animation system us on whatever were that gave us the ability to pretty much zero out any limb just by zeroing the scale so we could cut off at any joint so with that in mind I think mr. come melt here added the realistic saber where as soon as it touches you it severs you yeah just readings wives

that's wasn't above the joint so that we can make sure every one of them correctly I got seven make sure if I cut off more than one apart work correctly I want to make sure the lightsaber is doing you know I could try out a new lightsaber more deadly by increasing the damage and making it do damage when it's not an attack like it is in a transition very nice that was the deadly one over there yeah yeah I just actually tested out someone in chat point out if you click r3 on the ps4 version you can switch between those first and for personal use so here's that first person Countians yeah yeah the other kind of figures out there at the bottom now can you do a forward roll okay it despite the new hardened do the pork list yeah yeah it's an aspirin as for me a skirt sorry so you so you can you can do the forward roll in first-person but your view just comes up goes forward yeah roll when it was actually attached the body was too disorienting it right on Oh

Chris Kraft mysterious interloper Chris Kraft who is also Gamasutra editor-in-chief would like to know are there any aspects of back in the day game that you look on fondly that don't exist today how long did it's being able to make a game in 10 months 134 people yeah we do talk about is back then we wore a lot of hats like I know levels I was in charge of the design team but I also had the light I was scripting right and we were doing all the continuity of everything and we were helping Eric make sure that when the dialogue went ended it all made sense given what we had to change around so we were doing tons of things a lot of times now we're a little more segmented like to be build the levels and we do whatever but somebody else is doing a Hollywood level lawyer and somebody else's you know a scripture that has you know 20 years of experience doing it so we kind of spread a lot of those tasks out so it means a lot more communication has to happen yeah I think it's I think

for me it really comes down to like when I started I think there was 13 people at Raven and now there's 2 something and that's a portion of what goes into making a game like you have 4 or 500 people like IBM making a game and I still love it is still love the people I work with and against I meet a lot of really cool people at different studios but there was just something about like Chris said I would I would be working on the narrative I'd be working on catchphrase I would be retexture in and talk to our artists I help with art like it was they were just more for you to do and I personally have not really been in an editor and I don't know how long and it's it's it's something that you really miss in rhyme is I need a minute to work on yeah yeah I play so I put this on

gamecube back in the day this is already like it feels better than it did back then because the GameCube controller was a proto FPS controller it feels the the looseness of the cameras is the only challenge but it's also just I have this realization yesterday if I go back and play halo I know exactly what I'm doing like the the shooter controls for halo have to find most of the shooters have played since then this game feels like kind of the end of the doom era like like with key hunting like kind of a floating gun I'm gonna walk around with the gun for a minute but like this kind of like there's no aiming down the sights there's no snapping behind cover like the most effective way to murder but the stormtroopers effectively do this - just Juke back and forth is with blasters I mean it through that part so I'm going to save real quick there's an interesting challenge with the ps4 version of this game where I'm accidently fill up all my saves and I may have to go delete some if that happens but we'll cross that bridge if we come to it yeah I'm just going to go back to the chat real quick

there's expression for the game quick shout it to mace man Dennis who's still modding a key Jedi Academy after 10 years dark shadow rage bought the switch version they love Outkast 10 years of modding academy yeah I'm gonna dive into my question pool again so you talked about going to fly out work with LucasArts and some of LucasArts been working with Lucasfilm I'm gonna ask a two-part question on this one what was what did it mean to work with an external partner like that back then in game dev because back in the day licensed games for a lot less riskier they feel a lot more riskier these days given the financial partnerships that have to take place I got shot I hate and the second part of the question is well what kind of resources did they have for making this Star Wars game feel like

Star Wars because the battlefield devs talk all about the battlefront devs talk about how they how they get to go and you know go out to install with locations and report audio from those locations and pick up sorry I was rushing through my question there but like what what resources they provide to make a Star Wars game look like Star Wars well they hit the library we had a massive text library and all and the reference library where you got a lot of shots and things what you had so when we when we started like I would say that we still we still had to paint all around textures in the river but most of the stuff that we had consider this was only the person with three movies this was before Jar Jar was introduced yeah and it was there was just a ton of they had their library and they had they had they had still do I think there's still have a division of people that are just there to you know tell you if it's usable or canon or not so we had to have a lot of yes or no conversations and there was a

lot of times where actually I could find I be like no they have to say yes to this why do they say no I will go find reference in a comic book to show them that it's already out there yes it is Canada yeah and then they'd be like alright fine you can have a gold protocol droid that's not you know stuff like that it was it was it was cool but at the same time it can get pretty frustrating I would say like as far as like what we came into they sent us books yeah these comics like they they had a lot of physical material that we could look at and look through and then like it I mentioned earlier I think I can't speak for all of us but Star Wars nerd would pretty much behind me growing up especially so I had all this you know Star Wars role-playing games stuff I had all these different things so I already had like this really like this was a dream come true this was seriously never in a million years that I think I get to work on the Star Wars icon and so I was

lucky enough to get to go out and work on the story and they took me to Lucas ranch I got to have lunch right next to George Lucas I couldn't look at him or talk to him because they warned us about that when we got there but you know as a as a nerdy boy growing up in Wisconsin this was like the most amazingly cool thing I'd ever done in my entire life so I like I like I am endlessly fascinated by how story and experience emerges from tools and and shapes what do you think was the biggest contribution you guys did for Star Wars in terms of but something that could kind of only happen in a videogame like because it's sort of easy to it it's easy big air quotes to make just make up story ideas and say oh cool this happen to Star Wars it's another thing to say because our game could only do this this is kind of the only thing that that could happen in this moment in this way now if you'll excuse me I'm going to snake these radians because I hate them

well we fostered hatred of proteins ok these rodents yes exactly yeah that's a really good question I mean there was a reborn the remnant yeah oh right it's things that kind of came out together they were I mean the whole expanded universe actually was was pretty cool how everything tied together and us obviously since we worked on it I was disappointed when Disney mixed it all on erased I can't expect me to seek island in Rowan County this is a one point yeah but you know I see Star Wars was it was was huge but it wasn't it as huge as it is not like now there's oh yeah like everywhere you go their Star Wars well we made it accessible through the game because you can actually then jump into Star Wars in this case and

actually feel like you were in the world I mean getting killed by Rodian the most exciting exact moment I accidentally loaded the game to where I hadn't killed them I wanna stick to the path of the modding the person you have mentioned before mining was really important to this game when this game came out and we saw how many people were making content for making character model supported lightsaber stat models for games and I tried our best to make Jedi Academy as mod friendly as possible internalizing a lot of the data putting it in text file me it's easy to mind because it was the first like external data most of it was scripted back then but yeah who did to text file so that you could break just change the values right and that was really important to me personally too because I started as a modern like I think when I applied that Raven it was

sending doom acquaint lots to them so I thought it was I wanted to see make make the game really easy to mom it's so her main is like really awesome to see that good to go on Moz real quick I'm actually gonna build off of that I saw a great tweet from Radiator yang his handles radiator gang I think his fault that I believe it's Robert gang is his full name talking about how how much level design tools that are available to the public have changed on the one hand anyone can delay since unity or unreal on the other hand there isn't quite that doom or quake mod for people to just play around in how do you feel I guess you guys obviously have made a very model game but how do you feel that games like doom and quake have were at the time for modders and do you feel like people still have those opportunities to show off their own skills they can in certain games I mean valves got their stuff for Team Fortress and obviously the black ops tools are

out of order now for four so they spent they did report okay but they were out for three and I mean people can go out there and make all kinds of mods and all kind of changes I mean I think the world sorry no I wasn't saying it's a it's a little different I suppose because you have a few more options but I guess you have to be really invested in the game to really want to do that I think the world wonderful if the game world changed when consoles became yeah the King like back when this working like this was built for PC mm-hmm we only were a PC studio and that's why you know the other company imported it and so it's a lot easier to use a keyboard and a mouse and be able to modify stuff and and offer tools that are supported that way than it is to do it for or like a console game so I think like that's that's part of it is just as we've gone along it's just we we focus more on console you just the entire industry in general really quick

instigator double-oh-seven points out that hallo Forge is an excellent resource still available to people so this fiend still I have a some nice using gtk radiant and I expanded the ladder map they may be used to test the I like I just scripted to spawn like it's like a increasingly difficult waves of enemies let me release that but I was using gtk radiant earlier this year to expand that and modify it so you can still - yeah this is still this things tools still work and we released pretty much all the tools for this it's a simile similarly yeah that's retracted me hey then I'm going to dive into the question pool again one of the things that I was fascinating on and revisiting this was the not only is this I feel

like a lot of people working in Star Wars outside of the movies have wanted to see that grittier side of Star Wars um I could die I'm a Luke I'm a Star Wars history nerd so I could dive into like the shortly on the crime show that was supposed to be made before the Disney bye but the idea of gritty Star Wars is not in and of itself fascinating but at the same time you guys are the you know you took a brand that the time was if anything getting more kid-friendly and released a a version where we discussed before people's limbs were getting dismembered extremely you are literally showing that just that we just watched a bunch of people get disintegrated what was kind of a the the feel at the time for that kind of storytelling a knack or in that kind of visual design in your in your Star Wars moment you get something on sale a [ __ ] I was gonna say from from something I remember specifically from that era I was talking about I we've just come from from the Elite Force where all the weapons and ships were super clean and shiny yeah and here we I remember having a conversation about how the whole world is different now and things are gritty and grimy and scratched up and get dirty hands addition to you star wars and it

was a very contrast stark contrasts which do this this world it's high-tech beat-up right and I think it's it's all well used in industrial I think we've got to like well that's not totally related but I I think one of the thinnest sent and then whether it be since we did you know licensed games wells because we were fans of every license that's right a lot of we new particles my Star Trek and Star Wars you know but over in the next minute to be fair like to be fair I know I keep saying that it's my new words apparently back to him license games where the king yeah if you had I think specially though but you were the king lake you were walking on water to get a new game up and off the ground with a brand new license was not an easy thing to do and working with Activision to I know that they were very much about trying to find marketing and getting people connected that way so it wasn't until probably right when we started we

just finished a Wolverine right x-men origin Wolverine that it was sort of the downfall of movie games almost without like or movie games because they had to be so connected to an actual movie they became really hard to make and they didn't give their returns that they used to and on top of the licensing fees it feels like just went up and saw the returns you'd have to make to keep your company doors open are you behind me - would you can dismember how much that was even having a video and then you go see and then episode 3 comes out yeah yeah Anakin cuts up opens hatch right

there at the end when we had to dial down the chance of dismemberment yeah ours per location and the neck was something like 10% but we had to take it down to do would make it zero actually what I wanted we couldn't unless it was a droid you connected that's right we made it actually zero we were like it's a really low chants and acknowledged - that's too much chance so you're right yeah zero you have to go up and jump down onto that thing I think yep got it thanks I did have game I have a game Paks guide open yeah I'm just gonna get you on on time all right how do I get up on this it is back at that front area yeah there's a little window chef is shooting this right nobody ya know only logical

yeah you know some of the other things that I've noticed when I play through was it you don't always get the best clue of which glass is breakable we try to have oh my god I'm grateful I am either the grenade it's unbreakable but if it's clear it's pretty cool yeah but there are some clear glasses here there and then we have that we're not breakable it just happens sometimes that big baby came bulletproof well exactly it just happens yeah there was there was a I think in the past especially there was sort of the designer mantra of harder is better yeah I mean you still see games that are really hard and they thrive on those start Souls yeah Sakura ice consider this the Dark Souls yeah everyone at home you were being introduced to my kitten Ellie she join us in the squeaking into the microphone so if you hear her say hi to her she

loves video games and she loves Star Wars she likes eating Star Wars like us so we only have 20 minutes left in our chat unfortunately I could go all day I could but unfortunately these folks in the room need to go back to making video games I'm told that I'm told that you can't just talk about video games although you need to actually make video games does not approve by the way this is my account the turn light saver oh I will polish for a minute just to admire this so I modified it to have this down the actual sound from the game uh-huh oh and that's just that's just a um that's not one of the new hilts from Disney right that's that's like a no this is a point that I think saber Forge made and then I modified it a bit to make it look more like cows' lightsaber

nice I I do my best on the stream to keep things related to game development but let's dive into the tweak we've danced around the topic Souls this whole time but I'm curious what were the tool you already mentioned the names of some of the tools but what were the tools like the use to make this game and what do you think worked well about those tools and what do you think that helped you in terraria quickly and what do you think they could have like what were the things you were trying to improve as you were making them radiant those are our editor for the levels yeah by this time at least radiant had more than a top-down view mm-hmm because when we first started working in the you know the quake editor it was only top you got the C checker if that was the only way you could tell floor of a floor or anything like and so as soon as we were able to actually have multiple users like God said it's a game

changer but really mean radiant is radiant and exact like at its core building brushes you know surface all of those things stain every solid it patches have changed quite a bit from the way they used to have to be implemented mm-hmm I mean ever like a nerve back then but we also had bending moments so we couldn't just grab point we and in a tool to take a pipe and actually bend it a specific angle then save it and make sure didn't crash because we clicked many parts and I thought hey it's a and this was before normal Maps this was a specular so we didn't you know textures were just painted we added GameCube motive did we fire is that it's at the very end yeah that's cool it was in the first ports and we had to write a lot of tools for ourselves we did for like a model viewer and the they would crack anything no tracks and I don't you know right thing would be stripping out

the script we did that for me first stripping out the dialogue out of the script to turn into subtitles and that's our thing and then settle files okay I had to hand afraid I had to hand go through for voice modulation for head oh I dunno mark what you got in the forum alright yeah we'll have you used for the animations for this one right the previous one we did texture phases for this with animation and tag there which you can which one in brackets what a phony Oni yeah which quality so that it will think I'm at home I remember I wrote a little I guess procedural kind of head bobbing as they would talk based on the volume of the right of the time of the building we would use the average volume to drive the animation oh really wait wait wait no I need to nerd out about that and I'm learning about the figure in a minute how did using the volume to drive the

animation work well so well I was talking about the same memory we don't store all the animations like the upper animations are with the separate from the lower legs so that we could do all those left-right attacks and running the facial animations were the same way we just stored what was it seven phonemes you know different mouth shapes that was to drive all the animations and then to make it seem more realistic we added some head motion yes they're not just puppets so they're not some puppets right trying to keep it trying to keep the interest like they're nodding and bobbing and so we just basically made it random but as an input to the random number generator with the volume so that if they're speaking more emphatically or have a loop right and now it's a free way to make on-the-fly animations I'm sure I'm sure that's a trick that's still used today to some extent but I just haven't heard of it being such a programmatic solution being importantly force and carry it over to this yeah there's a lot of programmatic solutions back then just because the memory list so time you look how many textures we have in this world

it's not a large set well trying to get some breathing room here okay cool forces with you black plate back to tanks I guess I'm so here we head back to take Stuart so really buy this this is an actual cafetorium action figure oh wow is that with a Yuuzhan Vong yes so I had to get that oh so it's called comic yeah like the way I could like I said I could talk too much about how the old EE to work the logic of it I'm gonna check check to make sure there's a see if there's any questions Oh Bucky 21 6 5 9 is a great question is there anything you can talk about as far as cut concepts or content or things that change during development for instance hurt a vm was going to be male I'm supposed to be encountered again near the investment that's right so this

gave me everything good I don't know your first guess as a real good user booster please sir I have to look something else easier why I just I mean there's a ton of stuff that they have a cutting room floor um I don't know how many stories I put together and are not many different locations like again this was like nerd Eric's dreams so I was pulling in like everything that I could possibly get character wise no we were lucky we got my you know and that was just like the holy Powe just to be able to have Lando when the game was amazing and it's kind of it's it's somebody's joke about what we were actually running us off star wars RPG game and so a lot of the characters in that game that's that's artist that's desaad those are those were characters that we had different things like that but I couldn't I don't even know where to start with things that were in and went away or never even made it to the to the

day so change they'll howl right EP yeah yeah yeah change opening on yeah yeah so I was um I was gonna say the the bad guys taken the story and that was I had suggested that we make a bad guy based on Bruce Lee but the specific Bruce Lee no one ever saw that was an audition he had done for Shaw Brothers films in it so we had like a very nice table others looked oh it was kind of like I don't know if this is gonna show up it's good yeah does that look right like that and we originally were going to do that and I think then it became a woman that the story changed everything but we did end up using something like that but this guy didn't see sometimes he's a Jedi trainer yeah I became but that was that's what something I remember that was a cop concept so we still used him somewhere oh yeah I think like you know I'm coming up with this on even being you know his own race was was coming up

with a new you know type of creature for Star Wars at the time was it was hard to get passed through and go to Lucas and we had all these Sophia to jump through what got cut for technical reasons I wanted to oh no that was for Jedi Academy yeah flying well yes so the finding we did that and I did that as a mod after being on the fly the chest yeah but really for Jedi Academy I wanted you to build your own lightsaber yeah that's right although for for outcasts I do remember like we can only have a certain amount of lights and right like in the didn't give her levels I can't went through and I started putting colored lights everywhere like every point in the world where there was a light really wanted to make it feel like a real place and it ran out of it ran out of entities essentially and those all got torn out in order for it just to run it was sort of indistinct and he was that good didn't some of the levels have to be split in half when

they were before do we I just put a whole lot of them yeah oh yeah whole bunch of them and pieces we're like where's a logical point where de Plank you're like here some of them you have a back and forth yeah we had to chop some of those that sponsor like this isn't optimal but it's but I was just going home forgetting that they could be see we were just like yep Wow arts alone actually art salad actually asked a smart question um couldn't couldn't you use shader lights instead of entity lights they cast light right right well yeah they were shadow casting and some of them were scripted deployments yeah so they were they were not baked and we didn't have shaders like GPU shaders back then mm-hmm the answer is detecting it exists yet right business his name was entirely on the Jeep on the CPU the GPU is just the try the next function triangle rasterizer right on closet it's a springboard off that chat while I deal with another pair of annoying radians this is so I do I

actually weirdly I've like as an adult now I pick them up on so many subtle design things that help make this game makes sense like um the concept of annealing stormtrooper and how dangerous they are versus the standing ones the the fact that each you've separated the species like it's easy to tell which species and what kind of gun you're facing based on that um which is like it's technically the phobic but whatever who cares a source there just story tells yeah I'm going to I guess I can ask this question from dark shadow rage did you guys spend any time playing fan maps like one called Atlantica from jka and if I'm gonna follow up as a deaf question on that what was it what was the difference pono another one what was the difference from like interaction with your community then versus interact with their community now

he said as Chris the wonderful community manager sits in the room and has been very helpful today like what's changed about interact with your community right you want to start with a mock question did you spend that money yes I don't remember that in that particular but I played a ton of Rods maps from the player mods multiplayer content that I got compare models you know like extra - laughs those are really cool I'm playing on a lot of servers and stuff like that I mean I remember one was so cool it was a it wasn't really a Jedi related because it was complete was a total conversion to a Roman Colosseum and so there would be this cheering and you would come out and you'd have like a short sort of like rose petals are falling and everything and they had like music from climbing it or something and you know you go out and fight and he was using all of our Savior get all of our animations but it was using not light servers of the swords it was so well done that was like this guy is amazing like this guy should get

hired and I think he ended up working it he's working yet respawn yeah yeah he ended up coming to anyway I remember just being super impressed with other mods that are out there as far as the second part was how we interacted with people like we came from I don't know probably all you guys had finger files playing with us yeah so we lived in a world where playing files ruled the earth where we can every day we would I mean it was a totally different place I would come into work and I would write hey today I'm working on this level with this character and this game play and now it's everything is a tightly held secret I get fired if I ain't no but screenshots not on her own it's not used to get colleges randomized wrong is all the time I get them from people working in magazine or interviewers no I hate you a quick question like sure and I answer the question yeah nowadays we're like we actually have to make sure

legally we're allowed to answer certain things and we don't want to give away things because we're not us throughout marketing but sometimes back then it was like oh here's the info late tonight that's probably okay look these fine line blues news yeah is one of those two well I'm pretty sure but it was it was cool like it was cool and at the same time it was pretty weird where one time I have a brother who lives kind of near me and he was wearing a Jedi or I don't know who's Jedi for it was a raven shirt and a UPS driver came off and and like had to have him sign for something he said beastmen would you work at Raven Software and that's when I my god I am NOT gonna be post online yeah I still have a mail posted on my door got like a few years ago I think from a group of people who still play multiplayer and they were just thanking us for how amazing it was and for making

the game and I was like oh man that makes me feel really good so it's now pasted my door my office yeah yeah I think that I think the biggest thing with that is and mace kind of hits on it and the chat is I wish studios were more open with communication like that still it's not that we don't want to be all everybody is very very even the projects we have right now everybody is very very passionate about it it's just it's a different culture now of the info sharing you know we're all you know once the game comes out you can certainly talk to us or there's there's certainly ways that we want to reach out with even newer titles and stuff like that with you know twitch and Twitter and all that type of stuff it's not that it's not that we've lost interest yeah I remember about the reveal it's about everything a bigger nest and early release development you know screenshots like you were saying like like a lightsaber we showed some pictures of it lightsabers a little Clinton stuff and I hope that was for our e3 or whatever but we released them and then I would go onto the forums and I'd see people were talking about the lightsabre effects and

hell it didn't look right I remember reading them like right or totally right it's like it's got the wrong blend mode or whatever and so you know there's no change the blend mode and you know what more you know we will be liking like oh that's great like that's something we wouldn't have known if yeah you know when I thought of that it's been it was positive like there's always the people online that are not they don't like anything yeah they just like you for some reason but I love I mean I would comment game ernhardt almost over span at heart like I want to geek out with people and I want to share her stories and you have talked about this stuff difficulty for this game for difficulty like I might my personal philosophy and difficulty was that I didn't like it when they just threw more enemies at you or did some of that but or like they just have more health like

I didn't want the Jedi you fight to have more health so what I did for difficulty was the higher difficulties they had better tactics like they like dodge they would start rolling they would start jumping they forced grip you over they did they pushing that have better reflexes and that's really our reaction times so uh maybe that's why this nice we're like players snipers aren't this good the computer dud it's allowed to be good look we're sitting there all day just meeting at that one spot and I combined this is we literally on paper we were supposed to be wrapping up the next three minutes we got a little bit of a late start so we can make sure we if you have questions get them in chat now and I will ask them if you repeat it if you had a question earlier and I missed it I rely apologize I'm I'm I'm

like a one-man band over here at the moment I'm going to ask my last question I'm actually kind of impressed you guys are such efficient answers that I've gotten to all of the topics I want to hit my last question is um most games in the era that vistas release had to ship with a single-player campaign and a multiplayer in order to be marketable um that's changed a lot there's all I talk about the death of single-player experiences there's a lot of talk of multiplayer only games y'all are an interesting place where because you still work on Call of Duty you're working on a franchise that sometimes does both and sometimes those recent has recently just did one what do you think has changed about the era of single and multiplayer design versus the era we live in today like we couldn't ship them single-player game right yeah for a lot for a long time of development of our Wolfenstein title we didn't the biggest

I mean speaking as a gamer the biggest thing difference is the progression systems you know the back back in this time I mean I I land this game in cop in college you it was a arena you got into and you played now it needs the multiplayer always needs that stickiness at least the multi players were working on you that stickiness of progression unlocking things feeling like you're invested it within the game in some point let's be very technology has allowed us to connect everywhere all the time so that online presence a community that's that's something that all the games are interested in bringing people together that's growing a lot you know I think so we got kind of lucky in that be and thence we were using the engine and multiplayer it was magnetic you know a Cikini to you wasn't actually qui 3 right built in business my predecessor businesses of all multiplier so quake 3 was was still in development while we were working on the leave for us which is everything for

this one night and that didn't have any single fare at all we had to had the concept single flavor too bit different I do it these are the routine things like that you guys were playing around with rolling but I mean we were always yeah it's gonna be guys I like kind of mad yeah let things go and everybody's like horse Bush is really powerful multiplayer life yep yeah make more places where you throw man is extra life land party I'm going to pause the game and get in it's questions and checks that's more important than me I'm getting somewhere hi I'll eat you back again dark shadow Rafe wants to say thank you again Raven software for making such great games and they and poke a spur to update the PC D versus 469 a spur if you're tuning into this folks and chat have had some

comments for you there are folks that Raven Software cannot help with this port other questions before we leave today oh yeah Chris Kraft is back again I'm going to check it this question what were the key parts of the games design there were points of contention among the team during the game's development we're all fans but we all have the same vision I hope the only thing I think that people were you're gonna laugh at this that had issues with were some of the jumps because some of our guys were insanely good at making jumps oh yeah people were like tone it down like that doesn't make it fun for the snipers this one was especially but later on in Academy is when we have one jump in the riff to where nobody could make it and our designer said what I could do it just funny he does it is desperate like nobody else could do it he tried it somebody else's desk and he couldn't do

it and it had to do with the combination of and I think his keyboard and mouse settings or his keyboard and mouse it was because most of the other computers we had if you held it the control key along with one it didn't register the interrupted you couldn't hit both Keys simultaneously except on his age peers and he was allowed to make these crazy strafe jumps but the only other thing that I think ever came up with those people having a grumpy time with some of the 80s T combat back and forth there's a lot in the 80s you can do more stuff yeah yeah yeah but honestly I think we have more disagreements with LucasArts then yeah than or so yeah and none of those were I mean didn't LucasArts was great to work with yeah talent like the Michael Stanley wrote the dialogue and damn petted and Brett toss stealing all the people that were there were and they had a composer that would take the time wings pieces and putting together personalized it needed like yes and that's someone we have rotate and any

music system that would that's right go between go between like kind of the Bellas exploration musing that actually is trying to blend in and match with the tempo Brad was we had a whole dynamic music action we're gonna go down memory lane system yeah most of most of the disagreements we had work that I can remember or just be trying to get other Star Wars movie references in the game we didn't have enough time to you yeah but made it but I think the thing is that Star Wars is such a your vision right Star Wars is such a visionary concept to begin if we all knew what we're making right now we all have the same mission that's the hardest part I think making it a game is make sure everyone's got the same vision for him and if you don't then you for speed every time every time I remember how a puzzle works in this game that I solved in childhood itself as a teacher I'm

just like I knew this I knew how to do this anyway I'm gonna ask one last question for you guys from my end um work-life balance is a huge topic among game developers I supposed to go over here I really hope it was it's a huge topic among game developers these days it has been a long time since this game was in reduction do you women working on this game did you have to pull crazy hours an order to make it work or and do you think was it necessary you think your team is improved by that by then do did you learn anything from working that hard that you now are able to work more efficiently what are your thoughts on how hard you worked on this game Ben versus how hard you work on games now for me like this was a passion product yeah so there was a lot of self-defined extra time it made it a lot easier and my wife I guess I'm trying to remember I was married then yes my wife at the time him she was virtuous that's my life but

very caring and very understanding about it but you know definitely there are times when it is not the suppose this was a product where I actually did not mind yeah well I had a boot time in my office that I use but kind of live on what we were doing Star Trek and what kind of Star Wars I'm like I got myself a new pillow because I knew I was going to be spending so much time because it was so much fun to work on everything and I'm just gonna say this time you're Kelly if you're listening you know thanks for putting up with all that because I spent so much time at work and it was it was a labor of love them like this level isn't quite where we wanted it to be I'm gonna spend the evening just trying to rework it and then we rework it in a particular what do you think and then somebody to give us feedback and then you spend you know the next night at work again and then stumble off couch in the morning and hope that we actually were coherent the rest of the day in that a lot I'd say the same thing it was a passion project

for me they can jump down to that room you know I'm trying to figure out I think I need to jump down to a room but I don't know what room it is I have three that's it console thing you're trying to get into before the has all the class okay it's really really far below you good luck to you say it's nothing like something I think I think I did work a lot I honestly don't remember I do remember and I would take the game home with me on weekends and come back in a stack and oh yeah I would play it over the weekend and take a bunch of notes and then I come into work on Monday and do it all so I think like everyone said it's a passion project and yeah I think we've all gotten probably more efficient as we've gotten older it worked smarter not harder we've also gotten a lot more time I mean this game was we did it really as it the thing I remember was because of sort of the end was spending crazy long hours just doing the final burn we had to burn it to CD we gotta drive it out to FedEx to get it on the last plane out of here to get it over to you know to California for review yeah those are some crazy long

nights that we don't have to do that anymore because now we have blazing fast internet so that's a giant time saver we're on just one more game it has actually a really good question that I really should have that I really should get to before we go what was the thinking behind creating a completely unique demo for the game how much extra time is that add to development a lot of product like it was our partner right yeah they're all happy to LucasArts to prove that we can do it does the stylet most of our freedom yeah that's where we were playing around with you're like hey you can use we have the we're Department get it ready for public consumption but go back to it really said we wanted to do it they went okay sir yeah yeah notice something we wanted to make sure what happened it doesn't has nothing to do with an actual story right it does having not having the reflective Wars because we use them though at the beginning we tested out the reflective

floor so you can see similar because there's walking the demo and it was all reflective with the shots too but I think in the demo would just turn it up just being reflecting shots like yeah on the second or very how it finally shipped but I know that when they first did it was because we built that one hangar just to show it off and show the death moving on Rosh Hashanah the closet in the garage all right I would love to I guess there's a secret place back on this 45-degree ledge I guess I'll try getting to it but then I'm probably like nope Wow you gotta get my denied no man this dude's level yes Oh is there like secrets yeah Oh oh my god I use this so much easier for me with those extra shields thank you I'm gonna bring our few more clothes thank you so much for the folks from Raven Software for joining us thank you for everyone from watching thank you for

your good questions as a former member of the Jedi Academy community thank you all for showing up I hear on the GGC twitch channel we talked to developers about how games get made we are mostly talking about newer games occasionally we had the opportunity to go back and revisit the classic game and I'm so thankful we got to do that today it seems weird that 2002 is now an era of classic games but it is I'm thankful for at to a spur media for porting this game to new consoles that new folks have a chance to check it out if you enjoyed the stream please click the follow button down below we have some other great streams with some other great devs throughout the next month and throughout the end of the year if you're a developer yourself or developer adjacent we invite you to come out and join us at GE see if you are a active developer talking right now we are still taking submissions for the GDC summits those closed September 30th so we would invite you to supply go to our website to check all that out yeah hey yeah hey could you pitch to the people in the room if you have a good talk for the summit's submitted we'd love to hear it

from their verbal in it for folks in the room in the ED raven if people have more questions about Jedi Knight where can they ask them they can ask them at our Twitter I Raven software they can ask them at my personal Twitter Raven underscore Lynn Li nn and I can get them to the right people right on with that I wish everyone a have a good day and of course may the force be with you hi everyone thanks a lot I think long president what zeth rollin