In the early '90s, they were virtually unheard of. Developers write them to explain a prospective game's art style, atmosphere, gameplay systems, production needs, costs, and a timetable with milestone dates for completing tasks and showing playable builds or demos of the game to the publisher. It didn't go into a lot of detail," Julian admits.ĭesign documents have grown into understood constructs. "When I produced an initial game design document for them, which was about twelve pages long-I'd never written a design document before, by the way-it was a very high-level thing. Julian was as confused by this request as he was by MicroProse's earlier appeal for a storyboard. Before, we didn't really have money."Īt the start of the project, MicroProse UK's Pete Moreland asked Julian to provide Mike Brunton and Stephen Hand, the designers assisting with UFO, a design document. "To have proper funding made a huge difference to us. Of course, it took a lot longer, almost twice as long as that, which got us quite worried, actually." "It was 18 months: That's how long these games take, so that's how long it will be. "They didn't really have any sophistication about planning a development release schedule for a game," says Julian. The agreement granted them approximately £3,000 per month (roughly $2,224 in 1991 US dollars) to tide them over while they developed UFO: Enemy Unknown, which the publisher estimated should take 18 months.
Julian and Nick Gollop signed a contract with MicroProse UK in 1991. In this excerpt from the book, Julian and his brother Nick coordinate with X-COM publisher MicroProse UK on the design of alien enemies and the game's cinematic intro. Monsters in the Dark: The Making of X-COM: UFO Defense tells the story of the early years of legendary strategy game designer Julian Gollop and the making of the original X-COM and is funding now on Kickstarter.