5. Location, Location, Location
Terry Pratchett/DoubledayOk, so we've got the team in place. Writers have their pens drawn like long, pointy swords. The developers are hunched over their workstations, ready to wear their keyboard keys down to little stubs in a furious storm of coding and an outpouring of creative genius. Now comes the fun part: creating this magical world and the characters who inhabit it, and bringing it to life. The question here, though, is one of scale - do they go meta, and create the entire Disc for the player to explore? Or do we do things regionally, modelling the key locales and cordoning them off from the "dead space" no-mans-land areas. Beautiful stylised depictions of Lancre, Uberwald, the Klatchian Empire and obviously Ankh Morpork, fleshed out with hamlets, randomly generated inns and farms could all play host to a sprawling adventure. Alternatively, and this could work out to be the most feasible approach, the narrative could be cleverly restricted to Ankh Morpork alone - cleverly, since it's far too easy to throw invisible borders around a playable area and ruin the immersive quality of the game world. So the story and gameplay would have to be structured in a way that the player feels satisfied with a relatively limited area to explore. Key here would be to make this version of Ankh Morpork more dense, more alive, more detailed than any game city we've experienced before. We're talking about a level of interaction that makes San Andreas feel like a cardboard film set. Using Stephen Brigg's exquisite map, the Disc's greatest city could become a virtual world worth getting lost in. Wander (at your peril) through the Shades, quaff a flagon of lager at the Mended Drum, hurl Dwarven battlebread at a troll in Treacle Street, or tuck into an ominous sausage-in-a-bun from old C.M.O.T Dibbler's tray. For fans of the series, the idea of an authentic, fully realised version of Ankh Morpork, bubbling with life (and, in areas closer to the river, communicable diseases), would be a dream come true. It would take countless man-hours to create the city - the shops, guilds, infrastructure, economy, housing and of course the citizens which give it character - and would suck current gaming hardware dry, but it would be worth it.