Hi. My name is Nate, and I'm the lead artist on Demigod.

This is my first developer diary. The word "develop" makes me think of two things: condos and puberty. Actually, condos and puberty sounds like the name of a buddy cop show -- Miami detective Emilio Condos and his lantern-jawed Irish sidekick, Patty O' Puberty! His motto: "Nobody, not even the mob, can delay O' Puberty!"

I was the third guy to join the Demigod team. Before I showed up, the game had been in the custody of John Comes (lead designer) and Bob Berry (original producer and lead engineer). John and Bob had gone through the Gas Powered Games toy chest and raided it for tech, art assets, and animations, and they showed me a working version of Demigod on the day that I met them. Of course, it wasn't called "Demigod" yet, and the graphics consisted of box-headed bipeds running recycled Dungeon Siege animations. It wasn't pretty, but it was already fun. Stick man armies marched toward each other and were annihilated by much bigger stick men wielding gigantic stick hammers. The big stick men were special.

This was a whole new kind of game pipeline for me. The fun was there, the whole game was there, and not a single artist had been consulted. At that point, the game could have ended up as sci-fi, fantasy, steampunk -- if Mattel had come to us with cash, we could have gone on to make the world's most violent Barbie game. And there was barely any documentation. The game was the design. With many games, months are spent detailing backstory and characters before the first programmer touches the project. It's sort of like when you form a band in college, think of a name for it (the Vitamen), think of stage names for yourselves (Ray Boflavin), and then never get around to actually writing any songs. Demigod was exactly the opposite: what's the most important thing? Gameplay. How do we start making a game? Well, we just start making the game! I was blown away.

There were a few ground rules that popped up in that initial meeting: first off, we told each other that we didn't want it to look like any other game out there (this Declaration of Originality is to games what the "road less traveled" quote is to high school yearbooks: ubiquitous and ironic). John and Bob also had a strict no-guns rule (revealed after I submitted my first concept, of a gun-wielding fairy -- I still think she's pretty cool, so if anybody wants to make a fairy shooter, give me a call). The game needed to have fantasy elements, but there wasn't any need to follow the Tolkien/D&D canon. John's ideas seemed to cut laterally across a bunch of disconnected genres: he had vampires and angels and dragons and giants all partying together. I think I joked about werewolves at one point and was horrified that the idea wasn't immediately dismissed. I walked away from that meeting excited about the blank slate but a little freaked out, too.

One of our first character ideas had a giant with archers on his back. That led to a drawing of a traditional fantasy-type giant with arrow towers strapped to his shoulders, which we all liked a lot. I'm not sure how many days or weeks passed between that and the next insight, which was the biggie: let's just have the giant BE the towers. When the dust settled there was a big walking castle with a trebuchet on his head and some kind of laser crystal on his shoulder. We called him the Rook. I think a lot of Demigod's look grew from that character. Number one, he was big. Number two, he was ancient. His origin was mysterious. In fact, I'm still not one hundred percent sure he's even a he.

So from the beginning, story grew from art grew from gameplay. John and Bob could stick something in the game as soon as they thought of it (John is one of those very rare designers who can program), and none of us ever got married to anything. We were devastatingly honest with each other, but we also all knew a good idea when we saw one. Working in that little room with those two was tons of fun. The people on the other side of our wall once complained about all the singing.

This all leads to a discussion of Demigod's setting, but I'll stop here for now, since the sun is out and I want to go throw my aerobie.

If anybody has questions, I'll do my best to answer them. With any luck, this diary will become a regular thing.  I am almost certain I won't mention puberty again.