The Bard's Tale Developer Diary #2

In GameSpy's second installment to their Bard's Tale developer diary, lead designer Eric Flannum talks about the design process of creating the action RPG. Check it out:
One of the advantages we had in starting the design of the game well before the other elements was that we could run through the game with the entire team several times, seeing what was and wasn't working. Early in this process we wanted the game to have comedic elements, but resisted making it into an outright comedy. During our various run-throughs it became apparent that what got the team most excited and seemed the most fun were these comedic elements. We started adding more of these moments and emphasizing the ones already present. What we ended up with is a game that is very comedic in tone and pokes fun of numerous clichés, yet still has a good solid story of its own, similar to movies like Army of Darkness and Shrek.