Choose Your Own Adventure

Robot Entertainment has released a unique interactive gameplay video featuring their upcoming PC and Xbox LIVE Arcade game, Orcs Must Die!™ We know that many of our most devoted community members here at the site didn't get to make it by our booths during any of the summer conventions, so we devised a demo video that is the next best thing to playing the game! The video allows viewers to choose traps between successive waves of enemies with each choice changing the final outcome. The 30 possible avenues for completing the demo highlight the enormous variety of methods to kill orcs and defend your towers. Check out the demo below:

How it Was Made

Since you guys have been so patient with us, we wanted to give you a little more info about this unique demo. We've actually been planning this video for a long time. It was one of the first items that went into our marketing plan before we announced the game earlier this year. Building it, however, was a very long process.

The video was inspired by the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books from years ago. In fact, the working title on the project was CYOA. We planned to do this video demo from the very beginning, but we didn't quite know how much work would be involved when we started. This is where dunkman comes in. If you haven't met him on the boards before, let me introduce you. Dunkman is our Community Coordinator, and since earlier this year, he's been our VideoGuy™. Dunkman is responsible for capturing and editing all of the videos and trailers you've been enjoying in the lead-up to Orcs Must Die!, which means that he spent a great deal of time with this little video. And he started right here:

This was where the video was born, with a flow chart of every possible variation of the path the viewer could take. Each horizontal colored area represents a wave of the level, and as you can see, things get pretty hairy by Wave 5. If you want to get the full effect, click on the image above to view it at actual size. The flow chart gave us some very important - and very daunting - info about what we were making. This single interactive trailer, which could be played through once in just a few minutes, would mean recording over a hundred minutes of gameplay, playing through the level more than 30 times consistently.

When it came time to record the videos, we needed a way to ensure that the multiple options of Wave 5 had all of the same previous trap placements on Waves 1 through 4. It was a consistency issue. We couldn't simply record individual waves and splice them together. This meant many meticulous playthroughs and re-playthrough's by dunkman. It also meant creating the chart below on one of our famous whiteboards:

This was our basic placement chart. We labelled the major areas for trap placement. This ensured that we were generally putting traps down in the same places as we progressed. For example, on Wave 1 you choose to Fight, then Wave 2 you choose Spring Traps, then on Wave 3 you choose Fight again. At the end of the wave, you have a choice between Spike Traps and Spring Traps. This meant we needed two playthroughs of the level that went Fight, Springs, Fight and then had different Wave 4 playthroughs. We would assign trap placements to various areas on the chart above. In this example, the fighting could happen wherever it needed to, but we had to ensure that the Spring Traps in Wave 2 were placed in "Zone 2" both times for consistency across the playthrough. This way, regardless of your choice at Wave 4, you'd still see those Spring Traps in about the same area that you originally placed them . It was a crazy, glorious ballet of coordination, recording, and editing. 

Here's some interesting stats to put it in perspective:

• 3 hours and 24 minutes of recorded gameplay
• 226 gigabytes of video
• 1.85 gigabytes (405 files) of audio narration
• 63 completely unique videos (seriously, there's not a single video clip or narrative clip that was reused)
• 32 possible pathways to complete the video

If a single demo of Orcs Must Die! can offer this much variety, just imagine how many possibilities will open up when you get your hands on the game this October!