The Battlescape interface took place on Earth and gave players control over their soldiers, where they deployed and positioned them to search out and exterminate aliens. Players started with a base in a random location on the globe and built others to more quickly research technologies, build weapons, train soldiers, and more. The first, called the Geoscape, showed a view of Earth from space. Players would fight back against aliens through two interfaces. The meeting illuminated Enemy Unknown's grand scope. "I think they were happy enough with the explanations I gave, but clearly the document wasn't good enough." Julian returned to the MicroProse UK office to walk them through his plans. ![]() The design document was so poor, he declared, that if not for his love of Laser Squad, he would have dropped the project. In the early '90s, they were virtually unheard of. Developers write them to explain a prospective game's art style, atmosphere, gameplay systems, production needs, costs, and a timetable with milestone dates for completing tasks and showing playable builds or demos of the game to the publisher. It didn't go into a lot of detail," Julian admits.ĭesign documents have grown into understood constructs. "When I produced an initial game design document for them, which was about twelve pages long-I'd never written a design document before, by the way-it was a very high-level thing. Julian was as confused by this request as he was by MicroProse's earlier appeal for a storyboard. Before, we didn't really have money."Īt the start of the project, MicroProse UK's Pete Moreland asked Julian to provide Mike Brunton and Stephen Hand, the designers assisting with UFO, a design document. "To have proper funding made a huge difference to us. Of course, it took a lot longer, almost twice as long as that, which got us quite worried, actually." "It was 18 months: That's how long these games take, so that's how long it will be. "They didn't really have any sophistication about planning a development release schedule for a game," says Julian. The agreement granted them approximately £3,000 per month (roughly $2,224 in 1991 US dollars) to tide them over while they developed UFO: Enemy Unknown, which the publisher estimated should take 18 months. Julian and Nick Gollop signed a contract with MicroProse UK in 1991. In this excerpt from the book, Julian and his brother Nick coordinate with X-COM publisher MicroProse UK on the design of alien enemies and the game's cinematic intro. Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense tells the story of the early years of legendary strategy game designer Julian Gollop and the making of the original X-COM and is funding now on Kickstarter.
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