Read the flipping manual

"If you put your weakest party member all by himself in the front row, armed with a kitchen knife, while your strongest warrior is gossiping with your all-powerful magician in the back row, don't be surprised if you are defeated by a turtle"

I love this. It sort of works as a proverb doesn't it.

This is a direct quote from the manual of Albion - which I have finally taken the time to read, so I thought I'd give you the jist here.

The above quote is from the combat section. I read that bit in the hope of finding that I was doing something wrong in combat and there is actually a "no, seriously, gouge his frigging eyes out" button somewhere I'd been missing. Alas, there isn't.

I don't think there are tutles in the game though so I WOULD be surprised if I was defeated by one... Although actually, I was surprised to find out that there's other humans in the game, so I clearly don't yet fully understand what goes on on Albion.

The most entertaining things about this line about warriors and magicians sat at the back gossiping is hat it makes me think of the cover of Dungeon master (y'know, the one where the chaps pulling on a candle to open a door, and the barbarian's looking terribly surprised and falling over backwards onto a grille). Here it is : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c7/Dungeon_Master_Box_Art.jpg

I love the idea of an alternative version of this where the barbarian and the lady with the candle stick are just stood at the back gassing away. Certainly it wouldn't be a very much less representative cover for the game than the real one - Doors that open outwards? Levers that look like torches? Women with candle-sticks? They certainly weren't in the version *I* played!

Actually, I should mention the lovely cover-art for Albion while I'm straying off topic. the only version that Google seems to want to provide is HERE: http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/object/003/003169/624687boxart_160w.jpg
But it's a really nice sci-fi-paperback style picture that gives you a pretty good idea of what the game's about. Space ship crash, spooky cat people. The only seriously mis-leading feature is that there's a human character in a cape seemingly walking away from the crash fine. *I* certainly never found the cape - I love dressing up in this sort of game so would've jumped at the chance to dramatically swish about the place.

Mind you, this might be someone else's crashed space pod - I've only just started playing I suppose, so matey the cape-botherer mightn't have turned up yet...

Anyway, from the looks of the credits only 19 people worked on Albion - which is incredible!

I can't remember if I put this in my first post - I probably did, as I'm quite proud of it - but I'm a professional games developer. Except I've only been in the industry 5 years so far - hardly anything really.

Still - the games I've worked on have all been much smaller in scope than Albion, but we've always had upwards of 30 people on our teams - that's before you even count out-source workers and people from the publisher, and QA etc etc.

I'm guessing that there was only a core team of 6 on Ablion (it's all guess work, but everyone after the first 6 sound like they're out-source workers, or maybe people on other teams in the same company whose work was re-used).

Tobias Richter, for example, is exclusively credited with "Intro". Even at the time, I don't think that making that (rubbish) intro can have taken all THAT long.

And Wolfgang Walk - I just don't imagine that Blue Byte took anyone on full time to do "Philosophical coaching and texts of the cultures of the Kenget Kamulos and Dji Cantos".

So really the bulk of this game must've been made by a phenomenally small number of people by today's standards! It's truly humbling!

ESPECIALLY since these days people make a LOT of fuss about high-minded design principals, the importance of seamlessly integrated story telling and other specialist game jobs that require you to hire someone to do one small aspect of the game at phenomenal expense. Yet people back only 15 years ago were making timelessly classic games without all that!

Anyway, back to the topic. Something intriguing on the credits page is the fact that "Marcus wants to thank all the fans of doodebroode for the moral support"

I don't know what doodebroode is EXACTLY - but it seems to be some old Atari RPG. I THINK this is an image from it - but I couldn't say for sure if it was the same Doodebroode Marcus is talking about (although, really, how many doodebroodes can there be out there?) http://www.atarilegend.com/games/screenshotpopup.php?screenshot_id=4484&type=screen&imgpath=../data/images/game_screenshots/4484.png&width=320&height=200&game_id=3882

Anyway - other interesting features of the manual include a forward that begins "no one likes to read long forwards" - except, my naive friend, for people slavishly logging their entire experience of your product 15 years too late!

The writer goes on to talk about how the formula for Albion is 1 part battles. 1 part puzzles in the dark. 1 part mysterious dungeons and 1 part reliance on the careful development of your initially weak characters.

I love how, after saying that, he justifies their decision to make the game in this way by saying "this has proven in the past to form the basis of many of the best role-playing games".

Can you imagine Cliffy B saying "Gears Of War is made up of 1 part shooting, 1 part running round and 1 part bromance. We think that this formula has produced many of the best shooting games we've seen previously, and so we thought it would probably work for us too"?

Anyway, after telling us what an RPG is, the forwardeer goes on to say "Many current role-playing games favour easily understandable action and plots, at the expense of story. In Albion, the game play and story-line work in harmony".

So I guess that he's saying their story is more complicated than what you usually got in the 90's. I don't know yet how true that is - I mean, let's look at the sublime Ultima 7 - that had a pretty involved plot that took in aspects of race relations, religious intolerance, time travel (a bit), nudism, murder, coping with bereavement, talking monkeys... Not to mention Ultima 7 part 2 with its prettynessocracy angle...

Still, it's quite exciting that this chap is promising a more entertaining story than that. I'm all set to love this game anyway - but having an exciting story to string me along would make it all the sweeter!

He does also mention how much work they've put into building a detailed alien world for you to explore. And they've definitely done that!

Anyway, moving on from page 5 (sorry, got a little bogged down) there's a story introduction! Most of the details are what I'd already worked out from in the game - but there's a few points I picked out of additional interest.

It turns out the game is taking place in 2229. This is only 2 years after scientists discovered the "over-c" drive by switching it on too close to a planet and exploding themselves in a nuclear blast!

There was a rush to plunder the stars via fater-than-light travel and as a part of that rush, the DDT corporation sent out the Toronto to plunder "Nugget" (the planet I've been calling Albion - although actually I'm not sure that anyone in the game has referred to it as that yet).

It turns out that Snoopy Beagle's name WASN'T snoopy though! He was called Jonathan Beagle and people just called him Snoopy for a laugh. I guess that makes sense, since having a character with a joke name would've been really weirdly out of place in the setting...

Apparently Beagle was a douche and Tom wasn't looking forward to having to share a shuttle with him - but "still, Tom kept his cool. As a pilot, he was used to dealing with bureaucrats".

This makes him sound like "pilot" is a futuristic word for "Chauffeur".

Anyway, that's it for the plot. Interestingly it sort of suggests that the human race has ruined aliens' lives at a rate of 1 species a year. At the start of the game Hofstedt told me about how we'd basically destroyed the two sentient species' we'd met so far - but it turns out we've only had faster-than-light travel for two years too. That's impressive considering the size of a planet - to have 100% ruined ONE planet in a year is pretty good going, even for humanity! These "giant metal organisms" that the space ships turn into to mine planets must be incredible!

That's basically it for the manual really. The rest of it is very basic instructions about how to use the game and none of it came as a surprise to me - they even say in there that there's no need to read the manual since the game's been designed to help you understand what's going on without referring to it.

There was one encouraging point they made in there though - apparently it's not possible to accidentally discard or destroy any plot critical items! This made me breathe a sigh of relief since it means that not having that gun from Beagle's murder-scene definitely ISN'T going to come back and bite me on the rump - preventing me beating the game down the line! Score! :D