Career

Alan Miranda is a previous BioWare

BioWare

BioWare is a Canadian video game developer founded in February 1995 by newly graduated medical doctors Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip. BioWare is currently owned by American company Electronic Arts...

 employee, who had worked on Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy role-playing game originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. . The game has been published by Wizards of the Coast since 1997...

titles like Neverwinter Nights

Neverwinter Nights

Neverwinter Nights , produced by BioWare and published by Infogrames , is a third-person perspective computer role-playing game that is based on third edition Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms rules. It was originally to be published by Interplay Entertainment, but the publisher's financial...

and Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal

Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal

Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal is the expansion pack for the computer role-playing game Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, and is the final chapter in the Baldur's Gate series. It adds a multi-level dungeon called Watcher's Keep to the game and completes the main plot...

. In 2003, he left BioWare to form his own company, Ossian Studios, with his wife Elizabeth Starr. Miranda approached BioWare joint CEO Greg Zeschuk in 2005 to discuss the possibility of Ossian developing a "premium module" for Neverwinter Nights. Premium modules were adventures created for Neverwinter Nights by BioWare and other companies. BioWare had been given autonomy on the premium module process from the game's publisher, Atari

Atari

Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...

, and Zeschuk approved Miranda's proposal. 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

Neverwinter Nights: Pirates of the Sword Coast

Neverwinter Nights: Pirates of the Sword Coast is a premium module for the computer game Neverwinter Nights that features sea-voyaging, pirate-style, swashbuckling adventure. As of December 2009 Atari owns the rights to the module, which is not available for purchase.- Description :The module is...

. Miranda revised the concept and chose the Western Heartlands as the setting. 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

Darkness over Daggerford

Darkness over Daggerford is an expansion pack for BioWare's Neverwinter Nights computer role-playing game. It was released for digital distribution on August 16, 2006...

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. In May 2006, Atari cancelled the premium module program, with no warning to developers of the current projects. Miranda and his team decided to finish the game anyway, and in August 2006 it was released free of charge on IGN's

IGN

IGN is an entertainment website that focuses on video games, films, music and other media. IGN's main website comprises several specialty sites or "channels", each occupying a subdomain and covering a specific area of entertainment...

Neverwinter Nights Vault.