Dust Production Notes

A transcript of the production notes datamined by MeatServo.

Transcript

Somewhere on a glowing desktop monitor, a scene opens on the wide sky and blazing desert sun of the American Southwest. On the horizon is the ragged silhouette of a town. The name of the town is Diamondback, New Mexico Territory. The year is 1882. As the boundary lines of the American frontier begin to fade, slowly yielding to isolated pockets of settlement, an odd assortment of settlers fortune-hunters, renegades, drunkards, and fools carve out a new identity on a vast landscape. The history and danger that permeate this formidable terrain, and the rough-and-ready blend of heroes and eccentrics who make it their home, create a volatile mixture where the law reinvents itself daily and mortality is often just one pistol shot away. Such is the case in Diamondback a tantalizing but bristly desert flower.

In Dust: A Tale of the Wired West, CyberFlix's newest digital saga on CD-ROM, you'll experience firsthand the sights, sounds, and excitement of this offbeat time and locale. The award-winning creative team that brought you the futuristic action titles Lunicus and Jump Raven now reaches into the past to bring you a fresh multimedia title with an original voice. Using a new and unique technology to spin a tale of the Old West, Dust offers a great deal more than what users have come to expect from the typical CD-ROM. Highlights include:

• A fully navigable Western town rendered in three-dimensional detail
• 20 building interiors ready to be explored
• Three-dozen interactive characters, each with a distinct personality
• Heightened realism and playability thanks to CyberFlix's custom DreamFactory technology
• Cinematic high-resolution graphics
• Continuous real-time movement
• Easy, intuitive game interface
• Writing and art direction with attention to historical detail

With Dust, CyberFlix takes CD-ROM into territory where story and character are as entertaining as game play.

Welcome to Diamondback

Located in an isolated corner of the Rio Gordo Valley one populated chiefly by scorpions, gila monsters, and sagebrush Diamondback is a fledgling frontier town that has lived through civil war, drought, dust storms, and epidemics. Now it must face an influx of opportunists, drifters, and criminals mixing the noble with the ridiculous in a cultural gumbo that defies ready explanation. Among the characters:

• A ruthless long rider with a fast draw, an itchy finger, and one dark secret

a deathly aversion to anything that crawls on eight legs

• A scatter-wit of a storekeeper who can never find the dry goods he wants to sell his customers
• The mayor's temperance-crusading wife with a bulge in her pocketbook and a weakness for the occasional belt of nerve tonic
• A bevy of saloon girls too busy, inept, or haughty to give you the time of day (unless, of course, you play your cards just right)
• A hotel clerk more accustomed to ducking bullets than catering to guests
• A hell-raising mainstreet Romeo who is a nice enough fellow, but about as sharp as a sack o' wet mice
• An ossified newspaper editor whose rag's banner proclaims the stridently held motto: "We'll print anything."

This is only a sample of the offbeat characters you'll meet in Dust, each of whom carries out his or her day-to-day activities regardless of whether you talk to them. Once you do, however, keep in mind that the characters will remember your previous conversations and will adjust their temperaments accordingly.

Boot up and find yourself a wandering stranger caught in events that deposit you in Diamondback with no gun in your holster and not a cent to your name. Over the course of the four days and nights that follow, you survive by deploying your wits, your shooting skills, and, sometimes, your charm as you encounter the townspeople who in their turn may help, hinder, mislead, or ignore you or shoot you dead. The tack they take depends on you what you say to them, the tone you take, and how skillfully you learn to read the nuances of their distinctive personalities. Survive your encounters with the town's less savory inhabitants and you may be appointed sheriff, at which point your real troubles begin. As the story unfolds, you are asked to join forces with a beautiful Native American schoolteacher to help her recover the lost artifacts of her people's heritage a quest that takes you into ancient and mystical culture and that culminates in a final confrontation of passion and greed.

In Diamondback, you can wander about the town, entering and exploring buildings and residences, each one of them complete with the sights, sounds, and ambiance of the era. Visit the bawdy Hard Drive Saloon with its salty proprietess, roughneck clientele, and barroom piano; the curio shop with its heady mixture of exotic wares, Far-Eastern decor, and haunting wind-chimes; the beguiling Santa Marta Mission and its elegant courtyard and sculpted fountain; and the mayor's house with its Victorian-era furnishings and frontier-era amenities. In any of these environments you can approach, examine, and sometimes procure any number of objects that may be found there, many of which will impart some valuable information or prove otherwise useful in your adventure.

Though predominantly an adventure game, Dust offers various arcade-style features and "diversions" that accentuate the gameplay aspects of the title. Some notable features:

• Match wits against card sharks and desperadoes in an actual game of interactive poker
• Challenge the local storekeeper to a game of checkers
• Win or lose a pocketful of cash in the saloon slot machines
• Test your skills with a Colt .45 at the target range on the edge of town
• Find Old West excitement in a confrontation with a ruthless gunfighter.

You'll also find:

• A rich assortment of realistic sound effects
• The presence of interactive farm animals
• A sage curio-shopkeeper who serves as the game's help function
• A roving cowboy minstrel with a penchant for peculiar lyrics.

Such engaging details, coupled with solid storytelling, masterful art and production values, and the use of a novel production technology combine to make Dust stand alone as a unique experience in interactive entertainment.

The Characters

With a population of 36 (at last count), each citizen of Diamondback contributes a significant share to the town's collective personality. Some of the people you'll meet:

• Oona Canute proprietess of Diamondback's seedy tavern, the Hard Drive Saloon.
• Gus Callan Oona's three-fingered bartender who always pours three fingers of whiskey and was way ahead of his time in the specialty drink department.
• Nate Trotter a gruff rancher who suffers no fools, Easterners, sheep ranchers, or cattle rustlers.
• Cosimo Macintosh The town mayor whose future rides on resurrecting an abandoned silver mine.
• Marie Macintosh his daughter, bored with life in Diamondback, but her destiny changes when a stranger walks into town.
• Ruby O'Dowdle the redheaded chatelaine with a weakness for fools and fool's gold.
• Mountain Laurel a tough yet alluring woman trapper with no time for nonsense and less for you.
• Radisson Bloodstone-Hayes a rich Bostonian who aims to get even richer in Diamondback.
• Santiago Bolivar the checkers-playing shopkeeper who can't keep shop.
• Buick Riviera a fast-talking Fagin with a plan for every predicament.
• Jackalope Jones a rooting-tooting cow punk who doesn't raise corn, only hell.
• The Kid the nastiest long rider ever to roam the New Mexico High Country.

The Production

More than a year in the making, Dust is a milestone for CyberFlix for two reasons. First, it represents the first full application of the company's proprietary DreamFactory technology. Second, it signals something of a shift in focus for the company from the arcade-based action games that have become industry head-turners to full-blown adventure titles that are broader and more sophisticated in scope. "We've done action titles in the past, and we'll continue to do them," says CyberFlix founder and president Bill Appleton, "but Dust is really indicative of a larger direction for our company. What excites us most is the possibility of being able to create more character-driven, more story-driven, more cinematic titles, and to do so with continued attention to beautiful imagery and strong production values. This is not simply how we'd like to see our company grow; it's a direction we expect to dominate as interactive entertainment enters into mainstream. Tools and technical expertise are fundamental, but what we're really all about is telling stories. That's something people have been doing for thousands of years. We may be using new methods of doing it, but our end goal is the same as the storyteller's: to amaze people and touch their emotions."

Several factors distinguish Dust as an interactive title. Key among those are its actual level of interactivity. DreamFactory allows for the creation of interactive, fully animated, independent characters who speak directly to the user in response to statements or questions posed to them. The character's responses are lifelike and reflect their distinct personality attributes. Most important, characters move about the Dust environment in real time and independent of the player's own movement or perspective. These are not simply static computer-generated movies of characters; these are free-moving, constantly accessible characters moving about in rendered three-dimensional sets. Their actions and movement, when they are not being engaged by the user, are constant and continuing in real time whether or not they are in "camera view." The characters also possess memory, allowing prior conversations and encounters with the user to be reflected in subsequent dialogue and actions. They may possess temperaments that are cordial, comical, angry, or fickle; the user's ability to read and effectively respond to the character's personality will then affect subsequent outcomes. Moreover, the user's encounter with a character can set off a chain of events that will cause actions to take place off-camera or among other third parties. Such actions may only become known to the user at a later time. Consequences and repercussions, therefore, can be far-reaching and complex. In this way Dust achieves a level of interactivity that approximates the real world more closely than other CD-ROM titles. In creating Dust, producer Andrew Nelson was charged with two monumental tasks: inventing a living, moving Western town complete with its own history and cultural flavor and peopling it with distinct characters, each with a unique and believable voice. In this case, the second part may have been the most challenging, or at least time-consuming. Dialogue had to be written for each character that would be appropriate to a seemingly endless set of possible scenarios that can take place based on the player's choices. The script for Dust contained 400 pages of character dialogue, allowing for every conceivable plot branch or twist.

"Dust is more than the sum of its parts," says Nelson. "It's an entire world that has its own laws, past, memories, and collective consciousness. Creating Diamondback and its people was a challenge filled with equal parts head-banging and fun. But when the elements are brought together, then the magic happens and that's both compelling and rewarding."

The interactive characters, or "cyberpuppets" that appear in Dust were created, not using ordinary video or cartoon style animation, but from photographs of actors and actresses who were fully costumed to fit their roles. Using DreamFactory, photographs were turned into computer-generated animation, matched with recorded voices, and manipulated by a team of animators who give each character his or her own trademark personality.

Lead puppet animator Anie Chang describes the challenge of turning still photos into living characters: "When we first started, the sheer amount of work that went into each puppet was really overwhelming. There was nobody to tell us the right way or the wrong way of doing this. For a while, it was hit-or-miss, but we learned a lot as we went along ways of using lighting and composition and of juxtaposing various highlights and backgrounds to convey the proper mood for the character and the setting. In some ways it becomes like painting you start by capturing a visual image and then you manipulate it in a way that creates a desired effect or conveys something in particular about the image."

The Technology

Dust was created using CyberFlix's DreamFactory technology, a revolutionary set of authoring tools that is setting new standards in the creation of interactive entertainment. As an authoring technology, DreamFactory is genuinely unique in a number of key ways. First, it is the only set of tools that was designed specifically to make it easy for artists and writers, who may have little or no knowledge of programming, to create multimedia titles on CD-ROM. Second, the technology itself offers a number of advancements that allow titles created within DreamFactory to have a look, feel, and sense of realism that is not possible with any other authoring technologies.

The DreamFactory software is built on a framework that is composed of more than 1.4 million lines of programming code a foundation of immense proportions by any programming standards. Because of its extraordinary information-handling capabilities and design efficiency, DreamFactory makes it possible to construct interactive-entertainment products that do not suffer the same kinds of constraints that are typical throughout the rest of the industry. Whereas most authoring processes can focus either on visual accuracy and detail or on speed of playability (necessitating compromise on one or the other), DreamFactory titles allow both simultaneously. The digital sets, characters, and objects are all depicted with high resolution and realism. The rendered environment itself is not a static view or a movie depicting an environment, but is fully navigable the player can essentially "go" anywhere in the set and view the landscape from various perspectives. In addition, not only is the player able to move about freely within this rendered environment (offering a seamless first-person perspective), but so are the characters within the environment. The characters and images are not limited to a static depiction each time they are seen, but instead may be encountered at various times and from various perspectives as the player navigates within the set. All of this occurs at real time and with geographic continuity within the rendered landscape. No other computer-entertainment technology offers these capabilities with this type of flexibility.

Likewise, sounds and sound effects are handled by DreamFactory in a manner that adds to the realism. Though the sounds in most titles are handled discretely and often can only be played one at a time (frequently game action comes to a halt while a soundtrack element plays), DreamFactory can accommodate music, dialogue voices, and sound effects independently and simultaneously and in a way that is tied directly and immediately to the actions of the player. In addition, as the player moves through the environment, sounds that are heard in the distance will increase in volume as the player gets closer to the sound's source.

In summary, DreamFactory's run-time engine and enhanced compression capabilities allow for finished entertainment products to have striking 3D visual detail, full navigability, and real-time continuity within the computer-generated environment, fully developed soundtracks, greater operating speed, fewer delays, and faster, more fluid motion sequences. The net effect is one that allows a merging of the interactivity of electronic gaming with the narrative adventure and character development of cinema.

The Creators

Bill Appleton is lead programmer for Dust and creator of DreamFactory, the groundbreaking technology that fuels all of CyberFlix's interactive titles. Appleton has worked in programming since 1985 and is world-renowned in the field of authoring-tools development. Prior to founding CyberFlix, he developed SuperCard, CourseBuilder and WorldBuilder, all pioneering authoring technologies for the Macintosh. Apache Strike, Appleton's first game title (which he developed and programmed single-handedly) was released in 1988 and immediately became the number-one best-selling Mac game. The formation of CyberFlix in 1993 was a part of Appleton's commitment to producing substantive, resonant multimedia titles and to helping define interactive entertainment as a successful merging of the technological capabilities of the computer with the best elements of traditional storytelling.

Andrew Nelson is producer and writer for Dust, a role that involved creating the entire town of Diamondback and its inhabitants. He also wrote the interactive screenplay for CyberFlix's bestseller, Jump Raven, and is currently at work on an interactive adventure based on the sinking of the Titanic. Nelson is one of CyberFlix's founding members and is also the company's creative director. He was formerly an editor and staff writer for Whittle Communications' Special Report magazine. Before moving to Knoxville, Nelson lived in Los Angeles, New York, and London where he worked as a news correspondent. His articles have appeared in GQ, Conde Nast Traveler, National Geographic, and The Washington Post.

Scott Scheinbaum served as the music and sound director for Dust as well as all of the other CyberFlix titles on your dealer's shelf. He is a versatile technician and composer, having written not one but 12 separate scores for CyberFlix's hit title Jump Raven. Those varied in style from techno and hip-hop to grunge and death metal. For Dust, he drew on sources ranging from cowboy ballads to traditional Western film themes to the works of such American composers as Aaron Copland. In his previous life, Scheinbaum played in several bands including the pop-dance trio Stem, the ethereo-gothic Ministry of Love, and the punk-inspired Real Hostages (who toured with R.E.M.). It was Scheinbaum's flexibility that was emphasized in a recent article in Electronic Musician featuring several of the leading composers of interactive soundtracks. Aside from composing the music, Scheinbaum supervises the recording and integration of all voices and sound effects that you hear throughout Dust.

Michael Gilmore is CyberFlix's design director and (along with Jamie Wicks) is co-art director for Dust. Gilmore, who entered the project shortly after its inception, is responsible for much of the title's texture and artistic detail. Not only did he produce much of the original artwork, but he also supervised all design aspects and ensured the cohesiveness of its overall look. His handiwork is specifically in evidence in the game's beautiful animation sequences, decorative detailing, and player interfaces. Before coming to CyberFlix, Gilmore had worked with Bill Appleton at Silicon Beach in San Diego, where he helped with the development of SuperCard, SuperPaint, Digital Darkroom and Super 3D. He has a degree in animation from the University of Washington in Seattle and has lived in Tokyo where he was art director for PHP, a Japanese publishing company. As a freelance designer, his client list includes Pioneer Car Audio, Bullet-Proof Software, Honda Motor Company, and Japan Airlines. Jamie Wicks is the artist and 3D modeler responsible for building the Diamondback town set, the computer-generated environment in which Dust takes place. The set itself is of mammoth proportions and unlike any other game environments ever built. It is one single, fully integrated rendering that is entirely navigable, accommodates numerous moving actors, and incorporates thousands of individual movies. Wicks's mastery of modeling and animation software contributed greatly to the scope and realism found in this title. Dust was quite a departure for Wicks; whereas his last project had him outfitting futuristic battle-craft with advanced weaponry and navigation systems, this one found him outfitting a 19th-century town with the accouterments of the Old West. Wicks is a CyberFlix founding member and a graduate of the University of Tennessee with a degree in computer science. His most cherished distinction, however: all-time high scorer on the CyberFlix bowling team.

Another 3D artist who has left a distinct mark on the town of Diamondback is Michael Kennedy. Whereas Wicks constructed the town itself, Kennedy populated it with walking, three-dimensional characters. Making use of computer systems such as Alias and SoftImage, Kennedy rendered more than 30 digital actors who move freely about the environment and utilize a range of motions and gestures that mimic their flesh-and-blood counterparts. Kennedy, whose background includes graphic design and industrial illustration as well as 3D modeling, has worked in computer imaging for more than five years. Prior to joining CyberFlix, he worked as a beta-tester and developer for Electric Image software.

Scripting and additional programming were done by Todd Appleton and Ian McLean. Ian McLean has been programming computers since the age of 12 and is one of the leading Windows programmers in the field. He has been instrumental in helping ensure cross-platform compatibility of DreamFactory products, enabling CyberFlix's titles to be ported onto, and to run optimally, on the Windows platform.

The game's arcade elements the poker and checker games, slot machine, gunfights, and shooting gallery were designed and programmed by Todd Appleton. In addition to his work on Dust, Todd has also been working to develop CyberFlix's new arcade engine, a sophisticated addition to the DreamFactory technology that will allow the company's action titles to reach even higher levels of speed and realism. That new technology is scheduled to make its debut with the release of Jump Raven II. Before joining the CyberFlix team in 1993, Todd worked as a design engineer and software developer for Northern Telecom/Bell-Northern research. He has also worked with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he wrote image processing software and helped develop user controls and interfaces for telerobotic vehicles. He is also the only member of the CyberFlix team to have ever been inside David Letterman's office.

As lead puppet artist, Anie Chang provided the inhabitants of Diamondback with detailed human attributes, giving them personality as they interact and converse with the player. Using digitized photos of actors, her focus was to discern something distinctive about each character and then find ways of bringing that out visually through composition and movement. With a degree in fine arts, she brings the eye of a painter to her work on the Mac. Her favorite character: Buckboard Pete. "His character is supposed to be mean and aggressive," she says, "But when we met the actor, he was just so nice, with these big eyes. But he had a great face that was malleable and easy to work with, so it was fun finding ways to change his personality."

Jonas Tankersly, whose background is in computer animation and graphic design, created many of the more detailed objects or props appearing in Dust, many of which feature stylized ornamentation. For example, he designed the antiquated type style and layout for the book The History of Diamondback, which the player can examine and read to gather vital information. He also designed wanted posters, maps, advertisements, and other printed materials that the player may refer to, all with attention to period authenticity.

For additional information please contact Deena Kaousias or David Haynes at CyberFlix: 423.546.1157; fax: 423.546.0866; internet: [email protected]