Producer letter/October 2004

06-Oct-2004 How the Magic Happens

Way back when the first computer games were created, the typical “development team” consisted of a lone computer geek with a big idea and a lot of heart. By day he might have been a college student, or he might have had a job working for the man, but most nights he could be found hunched over his computer, typing away into the wee hours of the morning.

These early game developers did what they did because game development was a labor of love, and the lone developer would lovingly craft every aspect of the game – from writing the story, to creating the art, to programming the game itself.

Twenty-some-odd years later, the game industry has grown up in a big way (don’t worry, the passion and heart are still here). Mainstream games are no longer created by one or two people, but by a team of several highly-specialized developers. MMOs in particular tend to require a small army of designers, engineers, and artists, broken down into several functional sub-teams.

Managing a large development team is easier said than done – it's my responsibility to make sure that everyone’s productive, that everyone has what they need to do their job, and that we stay on schedule and on budget. Another way to look at it: we’re a sleek, well-oiled engine of massively-multiplayer D&D-producing; goodness, and I’m the conductor. Or maybe I’m the caboose... it depends on the day of the week. But if you want to peek under the hood for a little bit, and talk about how we might create a piece of playable content, well, keep reading.

Let’s look at something basic: quests. Our ideas come from lots of different sources – they’re inspired by books, movies, our in-house PnP campaigns, Content Designers being hit over the head repeatedly, and so on. Once a quest idea is in place, the designer writes up a description of the quest detailing how it’s received, how it can be completed, how it fits into the campaign as a whole, and of course, the phat loot received for completing the quest.

The Content Designer also identifies the assets – NPCs, dungeons, items, special effects, etc., needed in order for the quest to work. We try to reuse existing assets whenever possible, but we usually have to create at least some of them from scratch.

Once the design has been pitched, reviewed, rewritten, critiqued, thrown out, retrieved, and revived with other team members – and approved by the Lead Designer – the new assets are assigned to the appropriate teams for creation: the Art team will review and create the new art assets needed for the quest, the Sound Designers will do the same for sound and voice, the Level Designers will build and populate any necessary dungeons, and the System Designers will create any new NPCs, scripts, items, spells, and/or effects.

All the while, the Content Strike Team, which is a group made up of representatives from all the DDO teams, reviews all content in development on a weekly basis. Their cross-team oversight helps make sure that all content assets in development get the resources they need. They also throw some really awesome parties.

Once all the NPCs, items and monsters are created and placed in their proper dungeons, we send the whole thing over to our QA guys, who are meticulous and cranky in the way that all good QA guys should be. As soon as QA gives the new quest a thumbs-up (which, given their skill at finding bugs and their overall crankiness, can take quite a while), the real test happens – the quest becomes a focus for our weekly playday.

Every Friday, the team identifies all the new stuff that’s made it into the game, and we play through as much as we can, running quests, finding bugs, and giving our feedback on all aspects of play. These suggestions are tracked as bugs, which need to be fixed, discussed, and/or hacked into a lot of small pieces.

(Yes, we play our game every Friday and then go home for the weekend. Yes, we love our jobs.)

When all is said and done, just about everyone on the team will have touched the quest in some way or another, and the quest and its supporting content will have been playtested and revised several times.

If this sounds like a lot of work, well, it is. But we’re committed to making DDO feel like a living, breathing D&D; campaign, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that good content doesn’t grow on trees.

Until next time,

Judith Hoffman Executive Producer Turbine Entertainment Software