Development
Pre-production on Torchlight began in August 2008, shortly after the dissolution of Flagship Studios. Runic Games was founded by Travis Baldree (lead developer of Fate and Mythos) and veterans of Blizzard North and Flagship: Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer and Peter Hu. The "entire Flagship Seattle team" consisting of 14 people (the branch of Flagship which created the original Mythos) signed on to Runic Games at the time of its formation. Having lost the rights to Mythos, the Runic team saw the development of a new game as a way to "finish what started," although they would have to start over with none of the code or art assets from Mythos. From the start, the company's ultimate goal was the development of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game with gameplay similar to that of Mythos or Diablo, but before tackling the MMO, Runic's founders decided to "go back to roots" with a smaller game that they could refine and polish within a relatively short production cycle. This single player game was intended to introduce the Torchlight game world to the public ahead of the MMO. Further, it allowed the team to get a released game under their belts sooner than if they had immediately started on the MMO. Full production on the game started around November 2008, giving the entire project a development period of approximately 11 months. As of July 2009, 25 team members were working at Runic Games.
In a feature article on Gamasutra, art director Jason Beck explained that Torchlight's art style was inspired by comic books and classic film animation, using stylized character designs combined with painterly background textures. The developers have described the game's look as inspired by "Dragon's Lair meets The Incredibles." The team chose to give the game world a lighter fantasy tone to make it more inviting, rather than utilizing a "dark and gritty" style.
The game uses the OGRE open source 3D graphics engine and CEGUI system for GUI, although the rest of the game engine was built by Runic. The game was designed to run on a wide range of systems (including a 'netbook' mode) and does not require shaders.
Read more about this topic: Torchlight
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