Jade Empire: A Labour of Love

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Production - Sheldon Carter, Assistant Producer on Jade Empire

What is your role on Jade Empire?

Sheldon: I have two main roles. The first one is managing game resources and creating playable builds from those resources. Jade Empire is no small undertaking. We're talking about a game that contains three novels-worth of completely voice acted dialog, the phenomenal amount of beautiful environments and characters delivered by our art team, and real time combat with more than thirty different fighting styles. Making these pieces come together seamlessly can be challenging, but the end result is absolutely worth it.

The other role I have is designing the Dragonfly mini-game. I get to work with some incredibly talented people in crafting the type of game that I have loved playing for years.

So you designed the cool flying mini-game in Jade. How did the idea for that mini-game come about?

Sheldon: Well, the idea for it really came from the core team brainstorming early in the Jade Empire's development when we were considering travel. A fusion of magic and technology made sense as a method of transportation over a huge world like Jade Empire. Once we had a few potential Dragonfly models past the concept stage, the idea evolved into having a mini-game in which the player could fly these contraptions.

All the members of the team had fond memories of the classic top-down shooters, and after confirming that this was possible with our new engine, that was the route we chose to go with. Once we had that decided, myself and the other members of the mini-game team started playing every top down shooter we could get our hands on.

What's your favorite top-down arcade flight shooter and which one would you say influenced you the most in developing the mini-game?

Sheldon: One of the best parts about working on this mini-game has been blowing the dust off of some of the old classics. My personal favorite has always been Legendary Wings. I loved the distinctive art style of that game and the great power-up system. Luckily, we have the arcade version here at BioWare so I was able to spend long hours "researching."

In terms of other influences, I have to mention 1942 and Xevious. It was great to go back and play through each of these 80s masterpieces. There are elements from both of these games that inspired some of the design we went with for the mini-game.

I also should also mention Ikaruga. While its style and difficulty are quite different than what we wanted to do with our mini-game, it gave use some great ideas for using 3d models and environments in a fundamentally 2d game.

What we want to do with this mini-game is give the player an enjoyable change of pace that continues the deep immersion of the main game. On top of having missions correspond to real in-game situations, we also came up with a weapon and power up system that is a great metaphor for the way the main game combat works. Combine all this with multiple difficulty settings, and I think this mini-game has something that every type of gamer will enjoy.

Are you going to offer any mini-games outside of the main game, like you can unlock them to play through the main menu?

Sheldon: It's funny, just about everyone that plays through a dragonfly mission in the main game ends up asking me that same question. We realize that this is the type of game that a player might want to play stand-alone. There will be more information about what this will look like in the future, but to answer your question with regard to the Dragonfly mini-game: Yes!

How much contact do you have with the different departments? Is communication critical throughout the entire development of the game?

Sheldon: To say that I have contact with other departments is like saying that Death's Hand is just misunderstood. Since my job is really to gather the resources from all the departments together, I end up dealing with just about every department on a daily basis.

With the size of our team and the scope of a game like Jade Empire, communication is very important. Luckily, we have an amazing group of people at BioWare. Everyone understands that to make Jade Empire the great game we want it to be, it takes a lot of dialog between departments.

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