Building Takshendal

Takshendal is a ridiculously time consuming and overly ambitious project. Its literally half a years intense model building for a game which will probably not run for more than forty hours all told... but fortunately for me, the fun is not just in playing the game, but also in building the models and creating the characters. Setting the stage one might say. Indeed, it feels sometimes as if I'm creating sets for a movie. I do research online (see below: Firenze), watch movies I know have good scenery or ambience (see above from Doctor Who). I examine the buildings and streets around me to see how they are construsted and obsess over small details which will be utterly irrelevent in the finished game. I spend a good half an hour each evening just surfing for interesting faces or image sof old city streets. Yesterday I watched 'The triumph of the will' and all I could find interesting was the old German street scenes at the beginning. Old buildings long since pulverized and gone. Nurenberg was such a beautiful city. I'd be tempted to steal one or two of those buildings if they weren't so 'teutonic'.... I may anyway.

Every night as I go to bed, I act out small drama's in my head, or play with idea's, create characters and enact imaginary conversations revolving around the plot. This is essentially how I create all my games and short stories. I generate an ambience in my head first and then try to recreate it. This works well for me, but I'm not sure how well it translates to the players. One of the things I'm always worried about is if all the detail has remained locked in my skull and I'm just taking it for granted that every one else understands what I'm talking about.

The one thing I really miss not being able to recreate is the audio environment. It would be too ridiculous to have a looped audio file running in the background with 'ambient city noise', but it would be cool to try and make one.