For this book, I interviewed four of the central figures in Diablo 2's development: project leads Max Schaefer and David Brevik, lead designer Stieg Hedlund, and level designer Stefan Scandizzo.
But neither of those resources is as direct as a developer sitting down and telling you his or her intent. The walkthroughs are often astonishingly informative, thorough and well-organized, and without them I could not have written the books. The interviews are occasionally useful, but rarely thorough. Thus, most of the information I had about the development of these games came from commercial interviews or fan-made walkthroughs. But beyond that, Japanese developers are a little more reluctant than Western game developers to talk about their creative process in a highly detailed way. My Japanese is only conversational, and I have no contacts in the Japanese games industry. Of the five books written before this one, four of them were about Japanese games. The other way in which this book is different is the amount and type of information I had access to while writing it. Those algorithms are complex, but describing a few alorithms is a shorter task than describing several dozen levels, no matter how complex those algorithms are. So, instead of having to describe 70 levels, this book has to describe the algorithms which make Diablo 2’s levels. The levels in Diablo 2, on the other hand, are (mostly) created by an algorithm.
In Super Mario World, every single thing which appears in every level of the game was placed there by the hand of a level designer. That is, Diablo 2 does not have bespoke levels in the same way that Super Mario World has levels.
One of the reasons for this is that Diablo 2 is almost entirely made up of systems rather than content. For one thing, it is shorter than the previous three books (which were all around 50,000 words, while this one is closer to 40,000). This book is, nevertheless, a bit different from the previous books. You do not need to have read those books in order to understand this one, although the Final Fantasy 7 book provides some excellent context for the kinds of historical design trends which created both it and Diablo 2. Previously, we published books on Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World, Half-Life and Final Fantasy 7. The goal of the series has been to reverse-engineer all of the design decisions that went into classic videogames. This is the sixth book in the Reverse Design series and the final book in volume one. They are revised, profesionally edited, beautifully laid out, and expanded with new content. You can also support future work through the new Patreon campaign.Īlso, you can now get the entire Reverse Design Series in print! The print editions are the definitive versions of the books.
If you're interested in more research like this, most of it is going to be in video format over on the Forum's YouTube Channel.
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