DESIGN DIARY - 11.03.00

A PD Intrigue

For the past few days, Tim Ellington has been very discreet. I have not seen him near anyone I needed to talk to. The very few times I actually witnessed the presence of the man, it was always a split-second before he would disappear around a corner or walk through a doorway. It's not like Tim to fade in the background like that. He's usually a lot more obstructive than that - as far as my reporting endeavors are concerned, anyway. And the weird part is that now that I could feel the obstruction was gone... I wasn't missing it at all. Still, what good is a nemesis if he's not making every single day of your life a waking nightmare? Worried, I decided to investigate.

Since Tim has volunteered (by a majority) to write lore for the Jedi Knights cards, I assumed that the assignment was the very reason he had kept out of my way for a few days. I hoped to be able to get an update on lore status, perhaps even catch a line or two I could reproduce here.

*
*    *

Upon scanning the Product Development floor, I see that every chair has been vacated (temporarily, I hope) except for one: Tim's. I can barely make out the back of his head behind one of the dividing walls.

"Ellington!" I call out. (Chuck helped me perfect my hollering technique for PD floor communications.) "What!" is the only reply I get. The man knows I'm on to him. Neither of us dares make a move. I'm pretty sure Tim's two hands are hovering above his keyboard, but he must know that I already have my pencil in hand. It's a standoff. A tumbleweed silently crosses the carpeting between us, before disappearing in Sandy's office.

"I'm here to talk to you about lore!" I continue.
Silence.
I'm not about to barge in like a fool. I approach cautiously. Ellington slowly rotates his chair and rolls out of his alcove to face me. He has truce written all over his face, which allows me to relax my grip on my weapon. He even invites me to sit down on his desk. Well, to sort of lean on it.

"So... has Jedi Knights lore kept you that busy this week? I almost thought you didn't work here anymore." Tim puts on the smile of the man who knows. (Knows what? He's not one to tell.) "In fact," Tim slowly replies, "most of my week was spent performing a duty essential to the creation of a new game from scratch; yet our players aren't even aware that such a process is going on."
This is actually interesting - I take my notebook out.

"I'm transferring our Filemaker database to our QuarkXPress database," Tim says. The puzzled look on my face prompts him to go on. "That's because we didn't have the finished card templates when we started designing cards for Jedi Knights." I think Tim understands I sort of caught the cake but that the icing fell on the floor. He presses on. "When we work on Star Trek CCG, for instance, we already have access to all of the card templates. We use those templates in the QuarkXPress software package, where we type the new text directly onto what will eventually become the new card. Then, when the Art Department is done with an image, we plug it in and we can see what the finished card will look like. But in the case of Jedi Knights, everything is being built from scratch. This means that we couldn't open card templates in Quark [as the software is affectionately called around the office, or maybe it's just laziness] and type away. Instead, we used Filemaker [no cute nickname here] to create and edit the text. But now that Art is done with the Jedi Knights templates, we can move everything over to Quark and work directly with the templates. And that, for the most part, is what I've been doing this week."

Tim feels confident enough to turn his back on me and display some examples on his computer screen. You have to admire nerves like that.
"As you can see," he explains, "I've made several copies of, say, the starship template, because I need one for every ship in the game." Some templates only bear text, while others are adorned with stunning 3D art. "For each card, I start by transferring the relevant text and numbers on the appropriate template. Then, when Art has completed work on a given image - or when they have a rough version we can use as a placeholder - I just add it to the corresponding card." Tim tells me there are over 150 cards currently in development, and that (he lowers his voice) the first Jedi Knights set should contain about 150 different cards.

Adding images to the cards does more than make Tim's computer screen look pretty, however. "It allows us to see what we're working on, which is always a great plus," says Tim. "It also tells us what we need to concentrate on, design-wise, because cards with finished images will be the first ones sent out for approval."

Alright, so he had a good excuse for not being around. "What I did this week has nothing to do with game design itself," Tim concludes, "but it has a lot to do with getting actual cards into people's hands at the end of the process."
One could call that a rather essential step.

*
*    *

Back at my desk, busily typing this Diary entry, I suddenly realize that Tim has managed to sidestep the whole lore issue by dragging me into something else.
Rascal.
I shouldn't have lowered my guard. Ah, he must be laughing now. But the duel is just beginning. I'll go back. Maybe not right now, but I'll go back.
I know where he sits.

Francis K. Lalumiere
The Juggler