Eric Flannum on the Design of The Bard's Tale

The Initial Design

The first step in designing a game is, of course, deciding what type of game you'd like to make. In the case of The Bard's Tale we knew we wanted to make a game that was a sort of spiritual successor to the original without being directly related to it in any way. The original game was essentially a dungeon hack that upped the ante in several areas on its contemporaries. Using that model we decided that our game would take what the current generation of dungeon hacks were doing and try to improve on them in the areas we felt were being neglected or underutilized, as well as inject some old school sensibilities that had disappeared from the current crop of games.