Creating Warcraft (Part 1)

Introduction (from translator)

So it turned out that one of my favorite games is Warcraft II .
Every time when this game is mentioned somewhere, or someone remembers about it, I usually enjoy it very much. Before Warcraft II , of course, was just Warcraft .

And just recently an interesting thing happened - Patrick Wyatt , one of those people who stood at the origins of Blizzard, and the person who started developing Warcraft began a cycle of memories of those times. The first article that I suggest you read below - about the beginning of the development of Warcraft. About where the idea came from; about which network was organized by the guys in the office, while they dreamed about multiplayer; about EMS and the intricacies of aesthetics programming under DOS; about the project team and so on.
')
Alas, I am not at all an expert in the development of DOS, so if readers point out to me any inaccuracies in translation related to technical details, I will be glad and immediately corrected.

This applies, of course, and any other inaccuracies, typos, punctuation and style.

---

Long ago, at the beginning of time, when PC games were written under the DOS operating system, I started working on a game called Warcraft.

I am starting a project!

I developed several PC games, a couple of Mac games, seven console games for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, but as a junior developer. In other cases, games were generally ported, and not developed from scratch. “Porting” is the process of moving a game from one platform to another. For example, we take the game for Amiga, rewrite pieces of code, redraw the design, change other necessary parts and the game then starts on Nintendo.

My role in the new project covered two types of work. First: to lead a team of developers, as a Producer - in the gaming industry we call the project manager, designer, evangelist and cat shepherd. Second: write most of the game code, as required by the position of Lead Developer. Then, by the way, it was less difficult when ten to twenty developers were connected to the development of games, and not two hundred or more, as now.

Roots of warcraft

In a start-up company where I worked then - it was called Silicon & Synapse , but then it was renamed Blizzard , in honor of our unruly development methodology - the developers in their spare time played many great games. And thanks to this eternal gameplay, a spark emerged from which Warcraft was born.

We were inspired to create Warcraft by a game called Dune 2 , developed by Westwood Studios , which we were constantly playing at that time. Dune 2 was probably the first modern real-time strategy (RTS). With a scrolling map, with the creation of units and the management of units in real time; with individual battles between units. In essence, this game is not much different from any modern RTS, for example from Starcraft 2 , well, except for a certain scale, and the quality of graphics.

The predecessor of this game was Dune 1 - also a very worthwhile game, which combined the listed elements, but they were built into the quest game. Dune 2 focused on one mode of all the modes proposed in the previous game. The player represented a character who in real time controlled the collection of resources, the construction of the base, again the collection of resources, the formation of the army and, finally, the search and conquest of the enemy.

I, like other Blizzard employees, were thoroughly sitting on Dune 2 at that time. We played it during lunch breaks and after work; played for each of the three races, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and after that they discussed playing styles, strategies, tactics.

But despite the fact that it was very cool to play, I suffered from a number of obvious defects that hinted to be fixed (no, they even demanded it!). One of the most obvious mistakes was the idea that me and my friends could play Dune only against the computer. It was obvious that this game style would be perfect for multiplayer. Unlike turn-based games, where each player must wait until all other players make a move, in real time games, all players could be allowed to act simultaneously, and thus focus on speed and decisive tactical moves, instead of long-term strategic decisions and planning.

And with that one thought, the development of our game began. Without any serious attempts to plan a game design, without an assessment of technical requirements, without schedules and plans, without planning the budget for employees. Not even on a napkin. We jokingly called it “business plan du jour” (Fr. “for the day”) , which was then our standard process in Blizzard .

Start of development

As the only developer on the project, in the absence of the design team, at this stage I skipped the artwork of Dune 2 and used the thread from this game until I reached the point in development that allowed me to connect at least one designer to the project. Then the designers worked on a number of other projects, pressing them with deadlines and they had no time to be distracted - then it was hard for us to be distracted.

I focused my early efforts on developing the game engine on creating a scrolling map renderer based on tiles; sprite renderer to render units and other bitmaps; engine sprite sequencer, which allowed to animate units; event manager for the mouse and keyboard to catch clicks and, finally, laid a solid foundation of code for the user interface, so that all this can be tried in action. This set allowed us to assemble an early prototype and made it possible to “play” in single player mode, though without the possibility of creating new units, I introduced this later. In this version, I just entered commands from the keyboard and units appeared on the map.

Every day I spontaneously added new levels to the engine. Without any planned milestones, or external requirements for the project, I was in an enviable position, when you can choose which features to tie yourself next, and this very much motivated me. I already enjoyed the development of games, but the untamed field for development that opened before me in those days had a narcotic effect. Even now, and I have been engaged in the gaming industry for 22 years, I still love the creative moments associated with the development.

The first unique feature: multi-select units

One of the chips that I was particularly proud of was the choice of units. In Dune 2, the user could select only one unit at a time, which entailed a frenzied mouse click during the tactical organization of the battle. It seemed obvious that the user could select several units at once to speed up the process of issuing game orders and dramatize battles.

Before I started working in the gaming industry, I worked for a while with a number of computer-aided design (CAD) applications, such as MacDraw and MacDraft . In them, I designed the design of wine cellars for my father's business. Therefore, I automatically remembered the metaphor of the rectangular “click & drag” selection when I began to reflect on how to select several units at once.

I think Warcraft was the first game where this UI metaphor was applied. When I just introduced this idea into the game, it was possible to select and manage a large number of units at the same time; there was no limit on the number of simultaneously selected game characters.

Despite the fact that when I selected a hundred units at once and sent them to some point on the map, I immediately noticed the imperfection of the path finding algorithm, from the moment this algorithm appeared, I spent hours highlighting units and sending them hiking the map instead of writing code. At that time, it was the coolest feature I programmed!

Later, in the development process, after a lot of controversy about the design of the game between members of our team, we decided to allow the user to allocate only four units at a time. This was explained by the fact that we wanted to provoke the user to think more about the tactics of the battle, and not to allow him to simply gather a crowd and send them into battle all at once.

Later, in Warcraft II , we made it possible to allocate 9 units at once. Command and Conquer , the spiritual heir to Dune 2 , by the way, had no upper limit of choice, but the reasoning about these design ideas certainly deserves a separate article.

With the exception of the ability to control multiple units at the same time, at this stage Warcraft was nothing more than an extremely simplified version of Dune 2 . The similarity was so indecent that I even joked that despite the fact that Warcraft was inspired by Dune 2 , it was still a completely different game - we have a mini-map in the upper left corner of the screen, and they have in the lower right.

Foundation of brotherhood

In early 1994, I had already achieved enough progress in the project to connect more guys to it. I was joined by Ron Millar, Sam Didier, Stu Rose, Bob Fitch, Jesse McReynolds, Mike Morhaime, Mickey Nielsen and others. Many of them began working on the game after our company was absorbed by Davidson & Associates in February 1994.

Strongly built long-haired blond Ron Millar , it seemed, was a descendant of the Vikings themselves. Initially, he was hired as an artist, he was the author of many artwork for the Gameboy platform at Virgin Games , but his impressive creativity and designer sense led him to play a very important role in the design of many Blizzard projects and he played this role without a doubt developing warcraft .

Sam Didier , a strong, tall and squat character, resembling a bear, reduced to human size, the epic style of drawing his heroic characters determined the style of Blizzard graphics that you see so far. He perfected his drawing skills during the time of drawing 16-bit console tiles, but his craving for drawing fantasy sketches during all meetings and at any other free moment hinted to us that he would do an excellent job with the role of the art director of the project.

Stu Rose - it is his illustrator's background that resulted in the design of the Blizzard logo, which we still use today. He began by drawing background tiles for maps, and then playing an important role in the overall design concept of Warcraft . Stu is as familiar to you as the voice of the human Peona. And, I must say, his ideas about how the oppressed hard worker should speak revealed the comedic talent in him.

Bob Fitch started working for us as a developer and tech-lead in another project, at the very moment when I started Warcraft. Allan Edham , president of Blizzard , gave Bob a puzzle to write a word game called “ Games People Play, ” which would include crossword puzzles, a scholar, boggle, and other similar games. Bob showed so much lack of enthusiasm that the project was barely moving for many months. When Warcraft went uphill, Bob was hooked up to me and his enthusiasm helped our game step forward by leaps and bounds.

Jessie , a Caltech graduate, began working with creating a network driver for the IPX protocol so that the game could be played on a local grid (LAN). Mike Morheim , one of the two co-founders of Blizzard, later contributed to the difficult task - he wrote a driver for a modem that could work in "mixed-mode". Warcraft was a game for DOS, which worked in Protected Mode, and the modem driver could be called from Protected Mode and Real Mode at the same time only with tricks tied to DOS and to the architecture of the 80386 chip, under which the system worked. Mike sat in the office, staring at the monitors flooded with diagnostic data, dealt with synchronization problems. In the end, the code of the modem part became an armor-piercing, and this was an important achievement at that time, considering what primitive methods we used before.

Art of Warcraft

Allan Edham was hoping to get a Warhammer universe license to try to increase sales by recognizing the brand. Warhammer was generally a source of powerful inspiration for Warcraft designers. But for a number of reasons, we abandoned this idea. It was difficult to agree on favorable terms at the business level, and the desire to control the creation of our universe on our own was too hot so that no one interfered with the work of our team (and me, of course, including me). Plus, we already had a pretty bad experience working under a license - we did “Death and Return of Superman” and “ Justice League Task Force ” together with DC Comics and we cannot say that we would like to repeat this experience in our new game.

It is rather strange to imagine it now, but it could happen that Blizzard would not have owned intellectual property in the Warcraft universe. Then it would be even harder to imagine that we find ourselves in such confident positions in the gaming industry today.

A few years after we launched Warcraft , my father, returning from a trip to Asia, handed me a set of Warhammer miniatures, a squad of skeletons in chariots and said: “While I was traveling, these funny guys caught me, they very much reminded you of your games, you would tell your lawyers to contact the manufacturers, otherwise they seem to be carrying ideas. ”Hmmm!

Barriers to Game Developers

One of the interesting moments of the early development stage was that while we were sitting and developing a game that would presumably be great to play on the network or on a modem connection. In this case, we did not have a local network in the office. After all, before we were developing mostly console games that could easily fit on a floppy disk, so the network did not seem to be necessary, although it would have at times simplified the process of creating backups.

Therefore, when I began to work actively with other artists and developers, we usually used “pedestrian lokalka”, that is, in fact, they carried each other from office to office floppy disks with changes that needed to be introduced into the code or into the design.

Bob Fitch was the second developer on the project and we constantly copied files and changes in the code between us. From time to time we were mistaken with the integration and the bugs that we had already fixed were rediscovered. We caught them again and found that when we were copying files, making changes - we were overwriting something on top of successful bug fixes, and sometimes we had to remember how we closed these bugs again.

And this situation was repeated more and more often, because we were speeding up in development, and we didn’t have any other process to control versions besides the “memorizing where and what we edited” method. I was luckier to some extent, because my computer kept the “master” branch of our code, where we added patches, so my changes in the code were lost less often. Today, we use version control systems for this, but then we could not even imagine such joys of life!

When many developers, designers and artists joined the project, working on the project, of course, it became easier, basically, but we found another big obstacle in our path. The game was originally developed under DOS, in “Real Mode” (Real Mode), which meant that we only have 640KB of memory, and less, about 120KB for the operating system. Can you imagine what hellish conditions we had then?!!

As soon as the designers began to draw characters, backgrounds and user interface, we immediately faced with the fact that we are eating the whole memory. And we began to look for alternatives. The first idea was to use the mapping through the EMS page memory and store the game design “over” the 640K memory barrier.

The stories that programmers tell about EMS memory are similar to the stories of old men about how they went to school uphill and back barefoot in the snow. Only stories about EMS are much worse and all this is actually true.

In any case, the idea with EMS, fortunately, did not work for us; but a better solution appeared. A company called Watcom released the C compiler, which included a DOS-mode “extender” that allowed programs written in “Protected mode” to access linear addressing of 32-bit memory, that is, any programmer now it gets no problem when writing a 32-bit (or even 64-bit application). It took a couple of days to fix the source code and embed this module in it, after which we again got down to business, having access to a larger memory size.

No conclusion

In the next article in the series, I’ll talk about Stu Rose and the design coup; the first multiplayer warcraft battle and a bug that nearly killed multiplayer; how Bill Roper made Warcraft awesome by fitting it onto floppy disks; about the reaction of Westwood Studio to our game and about other details that are hidden in the game, which I and the other guys from the team developed eighteen (!) years ago.

Read further, second part →