Abstract
Problem: How was The Temple of Elemental Evil developed in just 18 months with a skeleton crew, and what went wrong along the way?
Approach: Tim Cain walks through his and producer Tom Decker's production notes month by month, revealing the full development timeline from January 2002 to September 2003.
Findings: Temple was built in roughly half the time of Fallout or Arcanum with a team of just 14, plagued by late publisher payments, scope creep from Wizards of the Coast content demands, a forced mid-development switch to D&D 3.5 Edition, and Tim suffering a four-month kidney stone during the final stretch. Despite all this, the team delivered an impressively accurate D&D adaptation.
Key insight: The game's troubled development stemmed not from incompetence but from an impossibly compressed timeline that Tim knowingly signed onto — a decision he openly takes responsibility for.
Background and Contract
In late 2001, Activision approached Troika to begin work on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, even paying them before a contract was signed — an almost unheard-of arrangement. When Atari (really Infogrames, who had acquired both Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast and the Atari brand) offered a D&D game, Tim couldn't resist. He signed the contract in January 2002, knowing the 18-month timeline was "crazy insane."
The deal meant splitting Troika's tiny team. Bloodlines got Leonard Boyarsky, Jason Anderson, and most of the Arcanum veterans. Temple got Tim as project lead and lead designer, Steve Moret stepping up as lead programmer, Mike McCarthy as lead artist — and everyone else had to be hired fresh.
Tim chose the Temple of Elemental Evil module for several reasons: it was self-contained with a big dungeon and surrounding villages, it started at level 1 and went to level 10, it was set in Greyhawk (which had never had a computer game), and it was one of his favorite modules from his high school D&D campaign. It also led naturally into sequels (the Giant/Drow/Queen of the Demonweb Pits series).
Code Ownership
Tim owns the source code for both Arcanum and Temple of Elemental Evil. This is why there has never been a remaster — any remaster would require licensing his code. He gave Atari three different offers; they never countered. He also explains why he can't simply release the source code: it would make it trivial to remove legally required DRM and splash screens.
Engine and Technical Innovations
Troika reused the Arcanum engine with major modifications. The biggest change was replacing 2D sprite characters with real-time 3D models that could be rotated and animated in the scene, while backgrounds remained pre-rendered 2D (the same approach later used on Pillars of Eternity). Brian Warmack created culling masks so 3D characters would properly pass behind 2D background elements. Cloth simulation was added for armor, robes, and flags — uncommon at the time.
The radial menu was created to handle the complexity of D&D 3rd Edition's many spells, items, abilities, and multiclass options, where hotkeys alone wouldn't suffice. It proved divisive among players.
Development Timeline
Early 2002: Rapid Staffing and Building
The pace was extraordinary. Lucas Feld interviewed, was hired, and within one week of starting (April 22–29, 2002) had finished the interior map for the Church of St. Cuthbert in Hommlet. Tim contrasts this with his later experience at Carbine Studios, where things that Temple's team would design, execute, and finish in a single week would still be in discussion after a week.
By June 2002, the Moathouse map was fully playable with a party, NPCs, and dialogues. It became the test bed for every new feature — lockpicking, traps, particle effects, new player classes and races.
Mid-2002: Features and Concerns
By August, the Moathouse was shown with full masking and initial lighting. Discussions arose about distinguishing male and female bugbears (they behaved differently in combat). By September, map fogging was added, the first exterior Hommlet map was done, and a concerning pattern emerged: features were being marked "done" that weren't fully working across all maps and creatures.
In October, cloth sim went in, Tom and Tim began designing the Elemental Nodes (which were blank in the original module), and they discussed the True Seeing problem with Zuggtmoy's shapechanged form. A new pathing system was started — a decision that would consume significant programmer time with mixed results.
By November, all main story arc dialogues were written (just nine months in), the world map with random encounters was functional, and the opening cinematic's first pass was complete.
Late 2002: The Radial Menu and Payment Issues
December saw completion of the radial menu. Tim wrote QA test plans for the external testers arriving in January — plans that would ultimately be ignored.
Early 2003: Crisis Points
By February 2003, twelve months in, Atari was two milestones behind on payments. Tim called them about the contract breach. Their response: "If Troika is so desperate for money, go get a loan to make payroll." Tim's retort: "If that's what you think, it's you who sound desperate for money." Atari paid two days later.
March 2003: The Lists and GDC
Wizards of the Coast sent content removal demands: swear words (even mild ones like "damn" and "hell"), TV/movie references (subtle Buffy and Legend nods), NPC names from the original module (a bartender named "Dick Wrench"), and children who had been in the game since the beginning. Making children invulnerable created D&D rules problems with flanking and cover, so they were deleted entirely.
A lesbian NPC in the Nulb brothel was ordered removed for the teen rating. Rather than just removing her, they deleted the entire brothel — along with all its associated quests and NPCs, losing hours of content. However, Bertram the pirate (a gay character written by Tom Decker) survived because the removal request was never sent in writing, and the contract required written directives. Time Magazine later wrote about Bertram as a gay character in a major game release.
At GDC, Tim pitched post-Temple projects. He had a meaningful encounter with Phil Adam (Interplay president), who apologized for how Tim's departure had been handled and claimed to have helped Troika get the Infogrames contract by praising Tim as "wonderfully passionate and intelligent." Tim also met Doom/Quake programmer Dave Taylor, who knelt down and kissed Tim's shoes, saying Tim had changed his life.
April 2003: D&D 3.5 Bombshell
The game was now fully playable from character creation through vignettes to the end. Then Wizards of the Coast revealed D&D Edition 3.5 was releasing at the same time as Temple's planned ship date. They'd known about this for a long time but only told Troika a few months before. Tim asked for six months to convert; they offered two. He took it, believing shipping a 3.0 game alongside 3.5's release would be ignored by players.
May–June 2003: Black Isle and Crunch
All sound effects and music went in, and most 3.5 adjustments were completed. News of Black Isle's shutdown devastated the team. By June, cinematics and end slides were in, and internal start-to-finish playthroughs began. A production note records that art intern Daniel Albert completed the entire game in five hours (Albert later became lead artist at Obsidian on The Outer Worlds).
July–September 2003: The Kidney Stone
In August, Tim woke up in agonizing pain from a kidney stone that lasted four months (August to early December). The severe pain medication noticeably muted his personality; the team worried about him, and his production notes thin out during this period.
In September 2003, Troika submitted gold candidates to Atari. Atari chose one with known bugs and shipped it. Troika created additional patches, but Atari refused to pay for testing or releasing them. The contract prohibited Troika from releasing unofficial patches. A rumor spread that Troika refused to patch the game unless paid — the reality was they were contractually forbidden from releasing patches independently. The modding group Circle of Eight eventually filled the gap with community patches.
The Weekly D&D Sessions
Tim instituted weekly hour-long D&D sessions so the team would learn the rules. They didn't use the Temple module to keep scope contained. In the team postmortem, one programmer noted that the teaching module Tim created for these sessions would have been a better basis for the game than adapting the published Temple module.
Phone Call with Gary Gygax
In early 2003, Tim had a phone call with Gary Gygax to resolve issues that had been in the original module since publication — including a paladin using a chaotic good-aligned intelligent sword, and the Elemental Evil lore. Gygax revealed that the bottom temple layers were originally intended to contain an Elder Elemental God, not Zuggtmoy. Tim took extensive notes.
Team Postmortem Insights
The team identified several lessons: they should have demanded more time or reduced scope (though Atari would likely have stopped paying them); the pathing system rewrite consumed too much time for marginal improvement; external QA ignored the test plans and never played bards, leading to a nasty crash bug shipping in the final game; and adapting a published module may have taken more time than creating an original one.
Multiple Starting Points
Tim highlights party alignment-based vignettes as an underexplored RPG innovation. Different party alignments would start in different story vignettes — multiple beginnings to complement multiple endings. He notes this concept still hasn't been widely adopted, over twenty years later.
Source
Temple Development Timeline Coming Soon — Tim Cain's YouTube channel (July 2024). This short video announces the full 42-minute Temple of Elemental Evil development timeline, available first to channel members.