Behind the Scenes of the WC2 Demo (May 19, 2015)

[KrisV]

Wing 2 director and script writer Stephen Beeman recently shared some interesting facts about the WC2 demo, now almost a quarter century old. The awesome, 'alternative' intro animation is embedded below, or you can download the demo and check it out for yourself. Mr. Beeman also fondly recalled their rudimentary motion capturing efforts and the ensuing hijinks in an old Escapist article.

Yup, this is the WC2 announcement demo from winter CES in January '91. Those character closeups actually cost a huge percentage of our meager disk space, which is why the guard got cut from the final product.

This demo wasn't simply a promotional tool, it was a lab for trying out technologies for the game itself. Some of them worked--this was where I wrote what became WC2's voice system. And some of them didn't--Denis Loubet here was experimenting with sketching backgrounds, scanning them in and then coloring them in DPaint, and while it looks great in its own right, it wasn't clean enough to match the "pixel-perfect" style of the foregrounds.

You can find this demo on YouTube, where you'll get to hear some amazingly cringe-worthy voice acting. That's because we were crunching to get the demo done before Chris and Richard stepped on a plane, so the "actors" were just whoever happened to be around at 2am. The guard is Martin Galway, our audio lead; Prince Thrakath is Philip Brogden, designer/writer/programmer; and the Emperor, with the kind of gravely voice you can only get by sleeping under a desk three hours a night, is me.

--
Original update published on May 19, 2015

 

[Wedge009]

Interesting to know about the voices! Don't worry, Stephen, as I recall the early days of FMV, the actors seemed to be whoever happened to be around at the developers' studio as well.

Three hours a night... ouch.

 

[wcnut]

Shame the whole Thrakath walking down the throne room scene and guard had to be cut. Such a great scene if needed a little polish.

 

[Quarto]

Yeah. WC2 was certainly a poorer game because of space issues. The courtroom scene with Blair and Tolwyn would have been great as well.

On the other hand, though, comparing the dialogues between this and the final version of the intro shows some nice examples of how less is more. This early version is at times cringe-worthy because of excessive rambling. Had it been shipped this way, probably nobody would mind - but the cuts they did ultimately make resulted in a much tighter work. It reminds me of the cutscene writing process for Standoff. There are some bad scenes in Standoff, but there's also some dialogue I really like. And invariably, the scenes that I still like after all these years are those where Eder basically slashed-and-burned through my script, leaving about half the scene on the cutting room floor. I was always amazed how much better those scenes became after removing things that I had genuinely considered too important to remove

 

[wcnut]

Very true, a good editor is worth their weight in gold. But I liked how it set the tone, the and space. Also the animation on Thrakath is wonderful.