Game designer Dene Carter shared that when working on the scope of Fable he was heavily inspired by the structure of Devil May Cry.
Game designer Dene Carter who worked on the original Fable game recently took to Twitter to talk about his experience of making the Fable world and gave some tips to developers who might have problems with the scope of the game.
The game designer shared that when the team that worked on Fable was developing the game, it was carried away with the idea of making something "big" but didn't know what exactly to do. At the time, Carted played Devil May Cry a lot and noticed that its world consisted of about 82 zones.
"It didn't seem excessive. It re-used and re-contextualised areas. It worked for a relatively short, but high quality game," Carter said.
So what he did is literally counted the zones and their size, as well as the average time that the player spends in them. He used this data to work out the structure of the Fable world.
"Literally copying the scope of DMC, the interaction density of Silent Hill, and the encounter style of the first Way of the Samurai changed Fable from a floppy, undefined, never-ending deathmarch to something we could actually complete *without* ever having worked on a 3D game," he shared.
The game designer noted that he was not ashamed about it as he did not steal other people's ideas, but only borrowed the scale of the game. He compared it to watching a movie, noticing that it is 90-minute long, and deciding to create your own movie that will also last for 90 minutes.
Carter explained that the game cannot be 100% original. One way or another, it will feature some elements inspired by other works.
"Manga, anime, Star Wars, etc. nearly all rest on some kind of framework or structure set up by folks long before you. Focus on the bits that make your game yours, not 'avoiding using L3 for Run'," he concluded.
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