Mimesis Online from Polish Developer Tannhauser Gate, is a role-playing game which transports you to a world where the borders between reality and illusion do not exist. An unimaginable catastrophe on a cosmic scale transformed this world, playing havoc with the natural order of things, twisting everything, even time itself, wiping out civilisation as we know it. For the Universe itself, everything changed and nothing changed - a new order was established, one where entropy rules, without intelligent beings working to hold it back. The beings who survived the catastrophe have tried to rebuild their world, each in their own way. They once again want to enforce on the natural chaos their order, their ways - authority, money, prejudice, cruelty and conviction of their own superiority. Once again, they are showing the unlimited ability of intelligent races to adapt and survive. The forgotten civilisation is waking up and slowly but surely emerging as the "new" civilisation - and how similar it is to the old one.

On a regular basis we will feature a developer's diary made by the Mimesis Online development team. In this diary Derek Handley shares with us how P&P Roleplaying helped the development of Mimesis Online and why there is a lack of headphones in the company.

Part 6. "Gamma Tests"

It's actually very hard to concentrate at the moment. The weather seems to be getting ready for yet another storm, so it's dark even though it's not even four in the afternoon, not to mention close - if I say the air is like jello, I think you'll get my drift. If that wasn't enough, the music that's being played right now - well, let's just say that I have no idea who is responsible for musical instruments being made to suffer like that, but there should be laws against it.
Now there's an idea - the International Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Musical Instruments...the heck with the musical instruments, what about my ears!

On Headphones...
You may wonder why I'm listening to music I don't like; basically, everyone has their own air-time to prevent arguments, and we put a ban on headphones. They cut people off from each other, and mean you keep having to get people to take them off - at this stage in the game's development, we need to be able to confer on a lot of little things. But maybe if it was just me with headphones, no-one would object...
We're busy as always - what else would you expect, this close to the Beta Tests? The closeness of the Betas means that a lot of what we do involves little details, changes, revisions, things like that. It's harder to see progress during this phase of the work - we've already seen the PC races on the landscape, worked through the monster animations and behavior, seen the special effects - the work we're doing now has much subtler results.

With the Betas just around the corner, I thought I'd write about another set of 'Beta Tests', which have been and will be going on in and out of the studio. They aren't open to everyone - you'd have to actually work here to take part in them - and I'm not sure how many other computer game developer's do this kind of test, but I think it's well worth it. These unofficial 'Beta Tests' are the Mimesis Online pen-and-paper roleplaying tests.

This was an idea which Marcin or Artur, I don't remember who, put forward quite soon after I joined the team, when I let slip that I do a bit of game mastering in my spare time. At the time, they were kicking around the idea of doing some pen-and-paper role-playing - it would be a good way of experimenting with the format, seeing what works and what doesn't, testing the balance between the races, and things like that. It would be a way of looking at the type and style of missions for the online game - you get the idea. The problem was that no-one really had the time to spare to prepare the game sessions - all of the team who could or were willing to run a game were very tied up at the time. Then I came along.
The decision was a no-brainer - I like running games, and they want this to be part of my job...didn't take me long to make up my mind, believe me.

...and P&P Roleplaying
The first game I ran at the company was not set in the Mimesis universe - at that stage, I was still reading the material and getting to know the world, and the parameters of the game were still being defined. So I ran a fairly generic science-fiction game, the aim of which was to establish one or two groups of players, get them used to me, and get me used to them. The adventure involved the characters being sent on a search and rescue mission to a frozen moon in orbit around a gas giant. What they didn't suspect was that it was a set-up - a trap, designed to eliminate one of the team so that what he knew wouldn't hurt someone else. The team managed to get through the ambush that was waiting for them by the skin of their teeth, but in the process they woke something up, something that no-one knew was there...

It was good fun, and got the guys into the rhythm of play. There was a big conversation about the fact that if your character died here, there was no return, no second life, whereas in computer games you can always try again. Which is the better solution? How should character death be approached in Mimesis Online? We decided not to go for the pen-and-paper solution, although it was close for a while there.
The next step was to try Mimesis itself. I'd gotten through all the existing material, added some stuff of my own, and was ready to try. So we went through the character creation process, and hit an unexpected wall, as it were. A funny problem - at the time - this was a while ago, remember - the Hirudon was the best defined of the PC races, having existed the longest. So, everyone had the clearest picture of the Hirudon. So, everyone wanted to play a Hirudon...
That didn't last long, and we managed to get two groups together to start play. At the same time, I tested out some ideas on the group I play with on Friday evenings. The results of all these games and 'tests' were looked at from the point of view of how they could be applied to the game, and, if I say so myself, we got good use out of those games.

Right now, game sessions at the firm are on hiatus - there's work to be done, after all, not to mention that the summer is a time to spend the evenings outside, not around a table. But we'll come back to playing when the autumn weather rolls in again. I'll tell you about one or two of those sessions in later diary entries - consider such stories a 'hints guide' when you come around to playing the game itself.
Okay, I'm out of time, except for a little request: there are plenty of topics that I've got planned for future diary entries, but what would you like to hear about first? What aspects of the behind the game process interest you most? Drop me a line at delkruk@thgate.com and let me know.

Till we meet again, take care.
Derek.