Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Interview at TabTimes
Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Interview at TabTimes
Interview - posted by Zed on Sun 6 May 2012, 00:36:56
Tags: Baldur's Gate; Beamdog; Cameron ToferTabTimes, a tablet news website, had a chat with Overhaul Games' Cameron Tofer regarding Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition. There are obviously some questions with a focus on the iPad/tablet side of things, but most answers should be interesting for PC users as well.
Read the full interview here.
How did you come to decide to work on the redevelopment of Baldur’s Gate for iPad and PC? Why not put together a new property?
Baldur’s Gate has been on my mind for a long time. 1999 was when it originally shipped, and since then, we’ve always wanted to return to it. Now with the iPad, it seemed more and more that we had to get back to it. Things fell into line for us. It wasn’t by accident though. We’ve been meaning to do this for some time now.
What’s your proudest accomplishment since you started development of the new version of the game for the iPad?
We’ve had some pretty happy moments. We spent a lot of time in the code and, for lack of a better word, butchered a lot of MSC stuff and old Windows junk out of there. I think we reduced the size of the binary by a third almost. It was originally 10MB. We were able to get it down to 2MB or something like that. We’ve made some major changes to it.
Of course, there’s the effort of making it portable too. Now we’re redoing the UI. That’s going to be really exciting because it’ll open the game up to UI mods and all kinds of other wonderful stuff. I can’t say exactly how it’s going to do yet. We’re still iterating it to find out.
With our first passes, we were reworking the UI to be more flexible, where we can start making different changes, and then see where it goes. The benefit in that is that we can do different versions and different themes—we can have a couple of different styles of interface.
Designing for a tablet is significantly different from designing for PC so we’re playing with it to make it really good. I don’t pretend to know exactly the way the interface should be and then make it that way.
Baldur’s Gate has been on my mind for a long time. 1999 was when it originally shipped, and since then, we’ve always wanted to return to it. Now with the iPad, it seemed more and more that we had to get back to it. Things fell into line for us. It wasn’t by accident though. We’ve been meaning to do this for some time now.
What’s your proudest accomplishment since you started development of the new version of the game for the iPad?
We’ve had some pretty happy moments. We spent a lot of time in the code and, for lack of a better word, butchered a lot of MSC stuff and old Windows junk out of there. I think we reduced the size of the binary by a third almost. It was originally 10MB. We were able to get it down to 2MB or something like that. We’ve made some major changes to it.
Of course, there’s the effort of making it portable too. Now we’re redoing the UI. That’s going to be really exciting because it’ll open the game up to UI mods and all kinds of other wonderful stuff. I can’t say exactly how it’s going to do yet. We’re still iterating it to find out.
With our first passes, we were reworking the UI to be more flexible, where we can start making different changes, and then see where it goes. The benefit in that is that we can do different versions and different themes—we can have a couple of different styles of interface.
Designing for a tablet is significantly different from designing for PC so we’re playing with it to make it really good. I don’t pretend to know exactly the way the interface should be and then make it that way.
Read the full interview here.
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