Mythos Developer Diary #2

GameSpy has published a second developer diary for Mythos, this time with lead artist Jason Beck talking about the advantages and disadvantages of working with a small team, how they go about designing the game’s classes and races, and more.

When I joined the team, Mythos had been underway for a little more then a year. For the bulk of that time it was a 1-man team with outsourced art. It then jumped to a 3-person team. I believe I was the 8th person added. My first task when hired was to make our playable classes work. We had designs for male and female versions of humans, elves, and gremlins. We had a model for the male gremlin that was incredibly close to something we were happy with, but the others hadn’t progressed very far. Originally, the thought was to “fix ’em”. But over a 4-day period our elves became redesigned into satyrs. It was a real easy decision to make based on our ho-hum reaction to including elves and ultimately one that should prove that Mythos is going to shoot for something different. An initial roster of humans, gremlins, and satyrs certainly hasn’t been done before, and our next round of playable races should prove even more unique.

Just as we’re trying to avoid the standard fantasy playable races and creatures, we’re trying even more so to differentiate our classes. You won’t find traditional warriors, mages, archers, rogues, or paladins or any of the D&D inspired archetypes in Mythos. Our classes are really determined by the gameplay then the sort of role-playing fiction that we’ve become so familiar with in fantasy games. We want each class to be uniquely different from the others, but, at the risk of sounding trite, the main focus is fun.