Alan Miranda

Alan Miranda is a previous BioWare employee, who had worked on Dungeons & Dragons titles like Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal.[1] In 2003, he left BioWare to form his own company, Ossian Studios, with his wife Elizabeth Starr.[2] Miranda approached BioWare joint CEO Greg Zeschuk in 2005 to discuss the possibility of Ossian developing a "premium module" for Neverwinter Nights.[3] Premium modules were adventures created for Neverwinter Nights by BioWare and other companies.[4] BioWare had been given autonomy on the premium module process from the game's publisher, Atari, and Zeschuk approved Miranda's proposal.[2] Miranda's initial draft of the project was a pirate-themed adventure in the Sword Coast, which happened to be the same idea that BioWare itself was creating a premium module for, Neverwinter Nights: Pirates of the Sword Coast. Miranda revised the concept and chose the Western Heartlands as the setting.[5] Ossian estimated that a module on par with other large games like Kingmaker would take four to five months. Pre-production on Darkness over Daggerford began in April 2005 and took a month and a half. Ossian went through five designers in this stage, none of whom worked out. Choosing a designer required much of the time allocated for pre-production, and to compensate Ossian developers immediately began creating the game, fleshing out details as they went.[6] In May 2006, Atari cancelled the premium module program, with no warning to developers of the current projects.[7] Miranda and his team decided to finish the game anyway,[8] and in August 2006 it was released free of charge on IGN's Neverwinter Nights Vault.[9]