The latest Stygian Sentinel update from OtherSide Entertainment gives us a bit of a look at some of the pressing issues that the designers of Underworld Ascendant discuss over lunch:

There are lots of great things about working at a game development studio, especially a small scrappy studio like OtherSide Entertainment. Cool people, casual dress, the chance to build the game of your dreams…

One of the best perks is the quirky discussions you find yourself in on a regular basis. From conversations about the latest movies to recent scientific discoveries to which fantasy author is the best of all time, these discussions are an entertaining hotbed of nerdy fanboy fun. Especially when the group starts talking about whacky design directions for the game they are making. Things start to get weird and quick!

For example:

“How do you tell time in the Underworld?”

Since the Underworld exists underground, how would its inhabitants know what time of day it was without a sun, moon or stars to go by? When this question was casually asked one afternoon it immediately spawned a slew of responses ranging from reasonable to …unorthodox. And before we concluded that this wasn’t necessarily an issue we needed to solve (after all, people got by perfectly fine in the real world for thousands of years without watches, even on cloudy days!) we went down so many design rabbit-holes we started growing cotton tails.

The first solution was to have a character, likely a dwarf, be the “Time Keeper” of the Underworld. His sole job, day in and day out, would be to watch the one functioning hourglass in the Abyss and to turn it over immediately when its sands ran their course. All other people in the Underworld would rely upon this esteemed figure to determine when to pull their bread out of the oven, or how long they had been on guard duty.

Reasonable but perhaps a little boring. So, someone brought up flatulence.

Yeah. It gets a bit weirder from there.