Sunday, September 09, 2012

1st TSW Meeting Notes

I came over this sheet while unpacking a box at home: My notes from the very first official The Secret World (TSW) production meeting.
TSW was released by Funcom earlier this summer. I left the production back in 2009, but already then I had been working on it as a concept artist for about three and a half years.
I believe this note is from early May 2006. We were just a handful of people attending the meeting and we were planning a demo level taking place in Transylvania, Romania. The player would move through the forest, come over a gypsy camp, have a chat with a gypsy king before visiting a gypsy woman living by a lake. Finally the player would end up in a cemetery and would have to fight werewolves and vampires.
And, the most important thing, it had to be KICKAZZ (and more comic than Van Helsing).
Deadline: 26nd of July 2006 - or even better: mid-July. That sounds like a tight deadline, but TSW had evolved from a FPS idea which had been in the works at Funcom even earlier which meant some work had already been done on a very similar demo. But now the game was called The Secret World and was going to be an MMORPG.
After this meeting I would sit down and do a sketch of a werewolf which would be my first concept for the game... It wasn't very good though. I might post it for the 10th anniversary... ;)

2 comments:

Enno said...

I remember when we were making that demo, Cabal, with Tommy, Morten, Christian B and Christian T. By the time you had this meeting, the graphics engine vendor had gone out of business, Morten had left Funcom, Christian T was making Dreamfall with the Cabal art team, I was back on AO. That deadline didn't seem plausible to anybody.

Olve Askim said...

I can't remember how much we got done before the 26th of July, but I do remember things happened very fast in the beginning.