- Developer Diary Archive -

Welcome to the F:BoS Developer Diary Archive! 04/30/03 | 05/22/03 | 07/12/03 | 07/25/03 07/25/03 Developer Diary #4 Hello Vault Dwellers, Great to see you back for another installment of the old Developer Diary. The Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel team has been busy bringing the Fallout world to life in beautiful Technicolor 3D. All three chapters with their respective locales are finally completed and getting all spruced up for your enjoyment come October. Updates on what we are doing lately……Carbon, the town our story begins in, is just about completed and has just entered some serious testing. Everyone is happy to see the Brotherhood take in interest in their little hamlet, well not everyone. Los, the second setting of our story is coming to life on a daily basis. The inhabitants of the ruined city are chomping at the bits to get some player flesh to gnaw on. When you get to the bridge area, be careful not to fall off, we don't want any players drowning before you complete your mission (or the locals get some dinner). And for the final chapter, the local Vaults have opened their doors to the initiate's. The old civilian (mostly) personnel of the Vaults could not be any more tickled pink to see new faces, except some of the locals may have something to hide. In addition to the locations being finalized, some exciting things are brewing over in the programmers' corner. New effects are going into the game daily. The Turbo Plasma Rifle and the Laser Pistol are too much fun. Watching ghouls disintegrate from a burst of focused energy is quite satisfying. An announcement for all of you fans out there, the Lollapalooza tour is back and is being presented by Xbox this year. That means they are going to have some of this years most anticipated titles at their GameRiot facility. Make sure to hit the traveling show and play Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. Well that is it for now. I was hoping for one of the designers to visit with you, but they have been extremely busy banging away on the game. Maybe a few more questions to the FAQ will get them out of their shells. Take it easy! Chuck Cuevas - Producer 07/12/03 Developer Diary #3 Hint: Launch the official flash site, go to the restricted section, and type in "Vault Dweller" Howdy, My name is Ruby. I'm the only "entertainer" in this town and I thought I'd just drop a quick note to let y'all know that us folks here in Carbon are hard at work getting' this little Fallout filly all done up right. Things is a goin' pretty smooth and real soon like we should have some little ole talkies for ya. We got the Radscorpions working and ready to sting ya, some rain and lightning storms are rollin' in and I think I even saw a few, what do you call them huge clawed thingys… oh…Deathclaws running around the old ruins. Pretty ferocious stuff I tell ya. Saw a fella get attacked by one a' them sumbitches once; wasn't enough of him left to feed a puppy. It has been real excitin' seeing the town come to life. We been havin' such a good time I think we have attracted a few… undesirables. Them nasty raiders are actin' like they own this town. That no good Raider Matron has got them twisted around her little ole finger and they do anything she tells them to. We need someone to teach her a lesson. Well, listen to me ramble on about our problems. I am sorry for puttin' the burden on y'all; I shouldn't ought to be bothering you with our problems. I should be tellin' you about some of our citizens. Armpit, the bartender over at the old diner, he sez he has a new recipe for some good rotgut. He says it's the Radscorpion tails that give it that extra kick. Trouble is, nobody's got the stones to go huntin' them scaly bastards. I don't trust him myself; I watched a fella go blind after drinkin' his last batch of "special brew." One of the artists here, he just dropped in a purty little thing named Vidya. She sez she's here to set up a medical practice. Ask me, makes about as much sense as me goin' to church; most people drop dead or die before they can make it to her. But I guess it can't hurt to have a little medical healing now and then (as opposed to the kind I give) Then there's Jessie. That old coot has been salvaging for as long as…well as long as I can remember. I think he has a few tricks hidden in that old ice cream truck cause ain't nobody ever f@#$ with him (oh excuse me, that wasn't very lady like). Well, I gotta run Sugar's. It looks like there's a line forming… Town like this, my work's never done…. Take care and we'll see you real soon. Y'all come back now. Ruby 05/22/03 Developer Diary #2 Hey Fallout Fans, Welcome back for our second installment of the Development Diary. The team has just completed the long weeks of pre-E3 and E3 itself, and we are wiped. But no time for wimping out yet. Our Alpha date is just around the corner and we are back in the full crush of things. E3 went really well for us. In the Microsoft area, we had the game showing in a prime location and it got plenty of traffic. Every time one of the team members stopped by to check it out, there were two or three people playing or waiting to play. It was nice to see people having fun strafing with the mini-gun and blowing stuff up. PSM, FHM and TeamXbox, among others, stopped by for some private time with us and the game in Vivendi's back room. I think they all enjoyed what we had to show them. Look for future coverage in these mags or on their sites! As we head for Alpha, the art team is striving to finish up all of the level artwork so the level builders can finalize their visions for your playground. Lots of alleys to explore, rail yards to decapitate some guards and catwalks to toss some grenades around on (not to mention a few vaults). The new camera/targeting system has been installed, and so far the thumbs are up on this set up. I will try to describe it for you. As the you enter target mode (by pressing the right trigger or R1), regardless where the camera is, the camera will swing around to place the player character between you and the target. This way, the enemy that is targeted is always on screen. The system feels smooth and soon we will have some movies up demonstrating how this works. Well that is it for this installment. I think the next one will come from one of our designers, so until then keep checking back as we will be releasing some more info, art and concepts on the game. Sincerely, Chuck Cuevas - Producer 04/30/03 Developer Diary #1 "Hey, why don't we make Fallout for the console?" Excuse me? Did you just propose what I thought you did? Fallout as an action game for the console. Holy crap. You mean I get to run up to a rad scorpion, hit it with a super sledgehammer, hear the crack of it's shell and see the guts go flying all in real time. I can then switch to my back-up, a mini-gun and slice in half a Super Mutant with a hail of lead. Oh yeah, I'm in. Oh-oh. Wait a minute. What about all those fans who want Fallout 3? But what about all those fans who would love to see Fallout expand? Better yet, what about all those gamers out there who have heard of Fallout, but turn-based RPG's are not their bag? I want them to see what a cool universe Fallout is. I want them to experience the Brotherhood, the wasteland, and the 50's sci-fi culture gone haywire. I want them to be able to see what the 1930's World of Tomorrow looks like after World War III. Oh yeah, this could be great. Those were the first things I thought of when Future Shock (later named Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, but that is a story in itself) was proposed during a concept proposal meeting. It had not occurred to me to bring one the most famous post-apocalyptic settings to the console (let alone two of them). Here I am ready to propose a squad based first person shooter and I am blindsided by this idea. So with this we set out to make a game based on the wasteland of Fallout. Well it has been about 12 months since we completed the prototype. We started with a small team of 8 or so guys, tore into the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance engine, defined what we wanted to change in the gameplay aspect and designed a game built around action. Our lead designer then wrote a story designed to fit the Fallout universe. Our programmers changed how the whole ranged combat system worked - gun friendly and moving while targeting. The artist banged away at making a dirty world look polished (not an easy feat). But most of all, we all set out to make an entertaining and satisfying game experience. As F:BoS continues in its development, we will strive to keep you informed of strides and changes and keep new information flowing to you. Interplay hopes you find this game as fun and as exciting as we do. For all those players who ever wanted to shred a Deathclaw with a laser Gatling gun in real time and in 3D, your day is coming! Chuck Cuevas - Producer Back to the top