I’m Patrick Blank, the Lead Level Designer here at Runic games. I am one of the newer additions to the team. I joined Runic back at the very beginning of March of this year. I’ve been in the industry about 6 years now, and this is by far the most rewarding, fun experience I’ve had working on a game to date.

My typical day usually starts with coming into the office, checking email while getting the latest build, and reading check in notes from the night before to see what new things are in. Once I have the latest build I’ll jump into the game and play for awhile, and take notes of anything I notice that I need to tweak or fix. I always end up playing for way to long… the game is just too much fun, and I can’t stop once I start getting really great gear and weapons. I blame Erich for creating such cool items! But eventually I must force myself to quit and get back to work. Luckily creating levels in the editor is just as much fun.

Recently my main tasks have been trying to make sure everything level design related is in the game and working to allow a complete play through from beginning to end. There are several different level types in Torchlight that all fit together to create the overall experience. There are the basic rooms which make up the bulk of the levels, these are the main rooms players run through most of the time, and can have randomized variations of themselves, and or certain elements within them randomized. Then you have treasure rooms, secret rooms, puzzle rooms, boss rooms, scripted story event rooms, etc. And they are all randomized during a play through! It never gets old.

We are very close to being finished with all the levels in the game. The next few weeks are the final stretch, and things are looking great across the board. I can’t wait for PAX next month to be able to watch people play the final game and see the reactions.

Hi, I’m Erich Schaefer, one of the co-founders of Runic and a designer of Torchlight. This is the first time I haven’t been the lead on a game. I’m taking more of a support and mentor role and it feels great; passing the baton on to a younger and smarter team.

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been knee-deep in item design, giving stats, names and powers to what feels like millions of magic items. More accurately, I just cooked up 20 ‘Sets’ which are groups of armor, trinkets and weapons that combine to give additional magic properties to a character as they equip more than one. I’m sure this is a familiar dynamic to players of Diablo II, but I think we’ve handled it better this time around. They are certainly easier to make! Anyone firing up our mod tools will see that creating 20 sets is not such a tough job. I struggle most with the names. In any session, I usually come up with a few powerful sounding examples, like Ophidian Fang Grips or Magma Destroyers, then as I lose my ability to focus I go to joke-y ones, like Blue Steel, and finally degenerate further into nonsense with ‘gems’ like Leone’s Shootin’ Gloves. You’ll probably scoff at these actual examples of my brilliant design style, but I’ve been doing this for years, so listen up!

With the end of the month on the way, we approach our most critical deadline: Finishing this thing! We are in major batten-down-the-hatches, damn the torpedos, full speed ahead! mode.

Our lofty goal is to finish the nuts and bolts of content for Torchlight by the end of the week! That way, we’ll have plenty time to polish and test before PAX. It’s going to be a doozy, but we can do it, with the help of our friends pizza and Mountain Dew.