The First Screenshot Is Ready
skizzo

01 Mar 2007 | 3 Comments

The following article is the first in a series looking at the production process of the upcoming fan game, Broken Sword 2.5. It was originally written in German by Sebastian Nisi for the Broken Sword 2.5 site. Resident Broken Sword 2.5 reporter extraordinaire, Skizzo, did all the leg work translating the article and making the deal with Sebastian for the rights to publish the articles here. Thanks again to Sebastian for allowing Revfans to host these articles!


"Der erste Screenshot ist fertig"
Originally written by Sebastian Nisi in the 3rd quarter of 2002

The first screenshot has now been published and you are surely wondering: "How did they actually make it?". In this special you will learn the unabridged truth about this and much more!
The history of this screenshot begins many, many months ago. At that time the whole thing –drawn by Chris- still looked just like you can see on the left.

At that time everything still looked rather bent and out of shape, but you could already suspect the wealth of details it would later have. As Rob and Christian started to colour and work over everything, many weeks passed in uncertainty. What were they doing behind their PCs so secretively? Quite simply: they took their virtual pencil to hand and traced every line very neatly and corrected things at many places. Subsequently they took out their paint boxes containing 16.7 million colours and started to paint everything beautifully. On the right you can see what it looks like on Rob's desktop when he's working.

It was a tiring job, which took several days. PhotoShop 7.0, a well-known program among specialists, was used for the colouration. The game sprites, like for example the door, were created with the programs Cinema4D 7.0 and 3D Studio Max. With Oohs and Aahs, Rob showed us his progress every now and then and the entire team delivered constructive criticism where necessary. And finally the well-known screenshot was delivered, which you can see on the left.

But what did the puzzle-designers do the whole time? Did they just dawdle or sleep? Not at all. Marius and Patte form the core of the team, so to speak. That said, in principle all parts of the project are core parts, because without one the others cannot function. Marius and Patte constantly kept in mind the concepts of Broken Sword 1 and 2 to be able to create the puzzles in the spirit of the originals. That however won't mean that you'll be able to play through the puzzles sleeping. The puzzles were inserted in the already finished storyline and are now ready to be provided with dialogues. When that has been done, three parts of the game will be 100% complete! Like you, we are excited with every passing percent as we get closer to the final version.

The sound department, led by Audiomaster and Duplica, had the intention from the start to compose most melodies with many strings and with a gentle nature. These samples were created with Steinberg Cubase and Wavelab. In both screenshots you can see what Audiomaster's desktop looks like when he's working on the project.

He tells us that it always takes him different amounts of time to create the music files; sometimes a melody comes to him while he's driving on the highway, while at other times he just thinks of one while he's behind his PC. "The development of the music can come about very differently" he says.

In the team the idea arose that we could make a complete dubbed version of our game. After every team member had professionally recorded a take, it quickly became clear: that didn't work!

We ourselves could never reach the level of professional voice actors or even imitate George or Nico. And thus we decided to contact the original voice actor of the German version of Broken Sword (Alexander Schottky). The sequences will be MOST CERTAINLY dubbed and we are currently working on the dubbing of the whole game. We will inform you of the outcome of the negotiations in time.