page_title: Traitors Gate (video game)
section_title: Production
hierarchical_section_title: Traitors Gate (video game) / Development / Production
caption_attribution_description: English: "St Edward's Crown, the Crown of England, which weighs nearly five pounds, the hollow gold Orb, the Sceptre with the Cross, Sceptre with the Dove, and the Ring." First colour photograph ever published of the regalia.
context_page_description: Traitors Gate is a 1999 graphic adventure game developed by Daydream Software. Set in a reproduction of the Tower of London, it follows the story of Raven, an American special agent trying to steal and replace the Crown Jewels of England to safeguard them from a rogue operative. The player assumes the role of Raven and solves puzzles within the Tower while evading the guards. Progression through the game is nonlinear and under a time limit: the player may solve certain challenges in multiple ways, but must win before 12 hours elapse.
  Traitors Gate was conceived in 1996 by Daydream Software designer Nigel Papworth, who saw the Tower of London as a natural setting for a game. The team sought to replicate the structure with near-perfect accuracy and began by capturing over 5,000 reference photographs on location. Pre-rendering the game's panoramic environments challenged the team, which averaged seven members. The game took roughly three years to complete.
context_section_description: In January 1998, Daydream Software announced "Project II" as Traitors Gate and scheduled its public unveiling for the following month, at the Milia festival in Cannes. Employment agency Octagon Entertainment, with which Daydream had signed after buying back Safecracker's rights from GT Interactive in November 1997, was set to begin locating distribution partners for Traitors Gate in February. Finished contracts were not forecast until May. As with Safecracker, the strategy was to work with a different local distributor in each territory. Jan Phersson-Broberg reported interest from distributors after Milia, but reiterated to investors that no deals would be signed before May, when a playable game demo was planned to appear at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). While the game was initially set for a late-1998 launch, by June of that year the release had been pushed back to early 1999. Distribution agreements remained pending after the game's E3 presentation.
  According to Nigel Papworth, development of Traitors Gate was "much more difficult" than originally expected, and a significantly greater challenge than Safecracker had been. The focus on reproducing the Tower of London left the team unable to alter the scope of the project, and forced Daydream to opt for realistic puzzles tied to the world, in comparison to the simpler task of designing Safecracker's more abstract puzzles. A nonlinear design approach was planned from the start, as Papworth noted that Daydream was "allergic" to linear gameplay, but this further increased the difficulty of Traitors Gate's creation for the designers and programmers. The average team size was seven members throughout production, although other employees cycled in and out of the project as needed. Despite the focus on realism, the team modified sections of the Jewel House at the request of the Tower of London's management, who were concerned that the game's accuracy could pose a security risk for the building. The sewer system was also partly fictionalized, although influenced by real data and the actual positions of manhole covers.
  Daydream elected to use pre-rendered graphics instead of real-time 3D visuals on Traitors Gate because the team preferred an "above-standard graphics environment to the advantage of free 3D motion", according to Papworth. The slow pace of the game was a contributing factor to this decision, as Papworth noted that the "loss of a little mobility" did not hinder the design. Animated cutscene transitions between screens were added to increase player immersion, in hopes of making up for the lack of free movement. For the character animation, instead of using motion capture, first-time character animators Fredrik Johnson and Leif Holm worked manually. Ultimately, the decision to use pre-rendering brought the game's final size before data compression to 10 terabytes. Papworth later said that the production methods used in Traitors Gate were seen at Daydream as "too costly and time consuming to be a viable long term solution" for the company, which led it, including members of the Traitors Gate team, to make the concurrently-developed Clusterball.
  Five members of Daydream handled the creation of Traitors Gate's models and textures. Modeling was initially delegated to Papworth, Holm, Johnson and Ulf Larsson. At roughly the 12-month mark, Papworth transitioned more fully into game design and writing, and his place on the modeling team was taken by Michael Nahal. The team began by drawing building plans on transparent vellum, based on information obtained from second-hand books, the Internet, the Royal Archives and Daydream's personal reference photographs. Working with Autodesk Maya and PowerAnimator 6.5, the team then created wire frames based on these plans, using four SGI O2 and SGI Indy computers. Textures were created in Painter, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, while the finished graphics were rendered on a farm of SGI Challenges and systems running Windows NT. Hardware upgrades were frequent during production. According to Papworth, the models and textu
caption: The Jewel House, containing the British Crown Jewels (pictured), was edited in Traitors Gate following security concerns from Tower of London management.
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