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Broken Hourglass Developer Articles

Q&A With Broken Hourglass Composer Rob Howard

What does The Broken Hourglass sound like, and why? Rob Howard, the game's composer and honorary director of the Mal Nassrin Symphony Orchestra, explains. A new music preview is included in the article.

PWG: How do you view the role of music in games?

RH: The way I look at it, scores of games fall under two big categories: They can be very tuneful, with strong melodies, or very ambient and try very hard to stay out of the way. There's merit to both approaches, but I believe in the more tuneful approach. The way I can help a game is that when the player is not playing the game, those melodies stay in their head. I wanted these songs to sound like tunes you could play in your car, and it would make sense to listen to them that way. When I say ambient, I mean that the music is really in the background. You almost forget that it's there.

PWG: How did you know what The Broken Hourglass should sound like, musically? How did you begin?

RH: The process early on involved Planewalker giving me a list of different influences they wanted in the music, and it was an interesting set, so the first thing I did was check those influences out. And we had to decide what instruments would be involved. There's a good example of how that happened early on in the process. Because of some of the influences I was asked to follow, the very first drafts for the theme of the game have a rock-and roll-instrumentation, but Planewalker said it wasn't really what they were going for. So it became clear that I was not going to use any really modern instruments.

I wanted to use ethnic instruments throughout because the gameworld is supposed to be roughly like the Byzantine area of the world. One of the dominant sounds became the cümbüş [a sort of "Turkish banjo"]. Jason (Compton, producer) kept saying, "Man, I want to hear more of that," so it became dominant in the score.

We say there are two types of songs--the ones played by the "Mal Nassrin Symphony Orchestra" and the songs played by the "street band." The orchestra was something that made a lot of sense from the start. When you play an RPG with an epic feel to it, you want the power an orchestra can give. The street band came about as one of those happy accidents. As I was working on the residential music, the music that plays in the various residential areas of the game outdoors, I imagined a little street band. I had spent some time traveling in places like Italy where you see things like that all the time and I thought it would be a cool thing to represent in the game. So the street band plays some songs you might expect to hear in a neighborhood, or in somebody's home.

Last Updated ( Monday, 05 November 2007 )

The Numerology of The Broken Hourglass, Edition One

Some people profess a deep belief in the power of numbers, even as they relate to computer games still under development. We present here, for your amusement and exploration, some of the numbers affecting and being affected by The Broken Hourglass...

Number of players supported: 1 (but you can have friends over)
Number of primary character statistics: 4
Number of total character statistics: 35
Number of playable races, including subtypes: 6
Number of Broken Hourglass joinable NPCs: 9
Number of Broken Hourglass joinable NPCs whose name is a number: 1

Number of WeiNGINE versions compiled: 63 (and counting)
Number of feature requests and bug reports filed: 209 (and counting)
Number of unique WeiNGINE game modes: 3 (standard adventure, arena combat, infinite dungeon)
Number of source code files: 116
Number of megabytes of source code, uncompressed text, not counting external libraries: 2.17
Number of wscript script hook events: 77
Number of wscript library functions: 361
Number of wscript functions with "do not use this" warnings: 3

Last Updated ( Sunday, 29 July 2007 )

Why We're Developing The Broken Hourglass

The Broken Hourglass (TBH) is the launch title of Planewalker Games LLC, an independent video game studio founded in 2005 to create the kind of computer role playing games that we, the PWG developers, enjoy playing.

Most of the developers attached to TBH are long-time CRPG modders. After a few years, we reached the same point every long-suffering commitment-starved girlfriend in romantic comedies reaches—that moment of crisis when we asked, "Where is this relationship going?" It was time to move on to bigger and better things, one way or another. Yet, as flattering as it was to have thousands and thousands of people download our work every month, something troubled us about the whole thing. Sure, we did good work, but the industry didn't seem to be satisfying this obvious demand for content with new titles. The production of story-focused CRPGs with a strong focus on character development and party interaction has slowed to a trickle, despite a significant market clamoring for more.

So we decided to take on the problem directly, rather than wait around for someone else to do it. But it isn't exactly a slam-dunk for a band of amateurs to convince a publisher to back a new project in a market they have proven reluctant to explore even with established studios. Sensible or not, we still believed we could do it, with or without the mainstream industry which has largely turned its back. We believed we could deliver a new CRPG worthy of its predecessors, and worthy of the attention of gamers who can choose from a library of literally tens of thousands of titles to occupy their time.

That brings us to the present. Self-funded, self-developed, and self-directed, we are committed to the under-served CRPG market, and to making The Broken Hourglass an engaging, memorable experience. We look forward to taking you to the world of Tolmira.

Last Updated ( Sunday, 29 July 2007 )

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