Dungeons & Dragons on Microsoft Surface Interview

Gamasutra has cranked out a Q&A with Michael Lewis, one of the team members at Carnegie Mellon University who has been working on that sweet-looking Dungeons & Dragons interface on a Microsoft Surface table.

Did you start out by identifying all the systems you would need to integrate, or by trying to figure out what kind of overall end interface you’d like to see, or some other way?

ML: At the high level, our original pitch was just tabletop gaming on the Surface, not necessarily Dungeons & Dragons. It was a proof of concept: “We’re going to show that tabletop gaming has a future in this space.” Then we had to pick a system we were going to use, and Dungeons & Dragons 4.0 lent itself nicely towards that, in the way the rule base is structured and the fact that it definitely relies on miniatures usage.

Once we had that picked out from the design side of it, we really focused on the player experience — what happens on the table — because if we didn’t make that engaging, then it wasn’t worth it. That was the first goal. In the time that we had, we really worked on the user interface from the player’s perspective, developing the control objects that the players use and the menu system that goes around it.

I would imagine one of the most difficult parts from a design standpoint would be ensuring it doesn’t become so cumbersome that it feels more difficult than simply playing the game normally.

ML: Absolutely. We always wanted to make it quicker to play D&D. The table can handle all the ongoing stats, it can calculate line of sight, it can calculate movement for you, and it can provide feedback for all that. Getting all that in there was a goal, [as well as developing] a menu system without too many nested menus, so players could take their turns quickly enough that it keeps moving, keeps the gameplay streamlined, but still feels like the players have control over it — that control is not taken away from them.

If this gets properly supported and a Surface table can be purchased for a semi-reasonable amount, it would definitely get me back into tabletop gaming.