Sergorn Dragon wasn’t just continuing his adventure in Serpent Isle last week; he was also digging up more information about the original design of the game, above and beyond the recently-released design documents.

As part of his efforts, he contacted Bill Armintrout, who was one the project lead for the original incarnation of Serpent Isle (see also: Sheri Graner Ray’s brief account of Serpent Isle‘s early development), and posed a couple of questions about the original intent and design that went into the game. Was it originally meant as a Worlds of Ultima-type game? Were The Black Gate and Serpent Isle originally planned as one massive game which various technical and logistical constraints forced the splitting of? Was it always intended as a direct sequel to The Black Gate?

Mr. Armintrout’s response:

The game that is now known as Serpent Isle originally began development as a World of Ultima-type game, and was to have been a fantasy pirate game. Very little work had been done on the project (indeed, the team was just being assembled), when the decision was made to make this project instead a follow-on story to Ultima VII. (This was at the same time that the Ultima VII team was finishing their game, but the game engine was considered stable enough to make a second game with.)

The “new” design was to have been a pirate game set in the world of Ultima. Preliminary design work had begun – the land was to be in the shape of the serpent, and the final scene would take place in the “skull” of the snake. But then Jeff George, the original team leader of the project (and a key developer of the Wing Commander series), left the company.

This really left us back at square one, so to speak, as no one left on the project thought “pirates” would work well in the Ultima VII game engine. So the team set out to come up with a new design from scratch, building on Ultima history and tying in with the Ultima VII plotline. Richard Garriott met with the lead designers (myself and Sheri Hobbs) for an afternoon to infuse us with the spirit of what an Ultima was. With the participation of the entire team, Sheri Hobbs and I came up with the core design of the game. All of the writers and TDAs (technical design assistants) also had portions of the game which they designed themselves. As the game was developed, everyone on the team had the chance to give feedback on the design details.

As an example of how everyone cooperated on the design: We really wanted to have a “value system” in the game, similar to those in previous Ultimas, but Sheri and I were really stumped on coming up with something that worked. The breakthrough came in a brainstorm between Sheri Hobbs and lead programmer Brendan Seagreaves.

It’s worth adding in Sheri Graner Ray’s (neé Hobbs) account of the development of the Ophidian virtues, I think:

It was during the reset of Serpent Isle that I came up with the Order + Chaos = Balance religion that made up the base of the current Serpent Isle. I had it all on a white board in the office and was trying to explain it to Bill Armintrout. Bill refused to see it and kept saying “You can’t add things that aren’t numbers. This makes no sense. Things like that don’t add together.”

I got SOO frustrated with trying to explain it that I pulled in Brendan Seagraves and explained it to him. He saw that it made perfect sense and then he explained it to BIll.. and only then did Bill “get it” and agree to put it in the game. Prem Kirshnan and I then worked on putting it together and coming up with the final components.

So there you have it, Dragons and Dragonettes; the developmental genesis of Serpent Isle.