Podcast: BioWare On 'Creating A Monster RPG'

Gamasutra is proud to present its latest podcast, part of our weekly podcasts, which include both the Tom Kim-presented Gamasutra Podcast show, alongside the best lectures, tutorials, and roundtables from this and previous years' Game Developers Conferences. Today's GDC Radio lecture comes from our extensive archive of Game Developers Conference recordings. This week's recorded lecture, "Creating a Monster RPG: The Light and the Dark Side of Development on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic," comes from GDC 2004, and sees BioWare producer/project director Casey Hudson discussing the development of the critically acclaimed console/PC RPG. An extract from the official lecture abstract follows: "BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic started development as an ambitious role-playing game set in the Star Wars Universe. In the end, it achieved almost all of its original design goals and went on to set sales records, becoming one of the most critically acclaimed RPGs of all-time. This talk will cover the entire development process at BioWare, from concept to completion, of this large and complex project. With a length of 40-60 hours, a complex rules system, 20,000 audio assets (including 14,000 lines of spoken dialog) and a 90+ man-year schedule, the physical size of the game alone presented a significant challenge to the developers. Further challenges faced by the development team at BioWare involved complex testing efforts, licensing and approvals processes, the support of large-scale Marketing initiatives, managing co-development of two SKUs (Xbox and PC) and management of the BioWare online community. BioWare’s Producer/Project Director of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic will discuss the challenges faced in development as well as the methods used to achieve the original design goals on this ambitious game while still keeping marketing, PR, and licensing responsibilities in balance." You can now download the 'Creating a Monster RPG' lecture (.MP3, 60 minutes, 15 MB). [In addition, you can subscribe to GDCRadio.net podcast using iTunes and searching the directory for GDC Radio or by clicking this link. You can manually add the GDCRadio podcast to your iTunes by using the Subscribe to Podcast option from the Advanced menu. When it asks for the URL enter feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.]