Age Of Conan Community
Order Now UK site French German Spanish Russian Polish
Click Here to try or buy the game

Behind the Scenes #1 - What is a Game Designer?

Ever wondered what exactly it means to be a game designer? This week join Lead Designer Ole Herbjørnsen as he explains a little more about what goes into designing a game like Age of Conan! A game designer is actually a very generic term, especially so in MMO-terms owing to the fact that the teams are usually quite large. For any one person it is a difficult task to know everything about every single system and technology we are using. There are so many very different skill set involved that we actually have several very different types of game designer - our own form of classes if you will!

It's quite cool to get the opportunity to tell you a bit about their feats, pets, skills and special combos, so I hope you enjoy this little insight into what goes on here behind the scenes.

I thought it would be fun to start out with a theme of sorts, and explain the various types of designers that work together to bring a monster from concept to final implementation in the game.This is the realm of the npc designer, bcc designer and script designer...

NPC designer

The NPC designer is responsible for more or less everything alive in the game, from your friendly neighbourhood tailor to the gruesome cave-dwelling monstrosities. But they are all monsters in our eyes.

The most fundamental part of the NPC designer's job is to plan which monsters are going to be used in each playfield and the levels they're going to be.

This is information that other people like the quest designers depend on to get their jobs done, so it must be thoroughly and clearly documented. For this I use a combination of spreadsheets with various information and graphical maps with overlays depicting areas with information about specific monsters and levels as well as markings for camps, villages, bosses and such.

When the planning is done we use a special tool called the monstertool, which is written and maintained by our tool coders. Using this tool we can set and change many aspects of each specific monster, such as name, level, general looks (is it a human or a bull?), specific visual tweaks and combat settings. Every time any changes are done, we of course test them in the game itself to make sure it is working correctly.

The equipment and loot on each monster is also something that is handled in the monstertool, and here we work closely with our item designers. We have previewer tools that make it easier to see for example how a villager will look with different clothes, and even if it will have to be tested ingame in the end this makes it a lot faster to dress up our persons in a fashionable way.

BCC Designer

The guys working with the Behavioral Control Center don't really have a title in the design team, and are usually referred to as the BCC guys. Their job is to make sure the logics behind every character, animal, monster or animated item are correct. E.g. an animal can't hit someone when it's dead, or a character can't swim while he's climbing. The BCC designers are also responsible for "sewing" cool looking animations together, making the combat flow majestically.

The BCC designers work closely with the animators with directing what kind of animations they would like to see motion captured. They also work closely with the scripters, since scripters put NPCs in and out of different states, and need access to all the animations.

The designers working in the BCC tool are a part of the animations from beginning to end. Animations can either be motion captured or hand animated. All the character's and the human NPC's animations are motion captured, and there is usually a BCC guy preset giving directions. For all the hand animated animals and monsters, the BCC guy reads design documents from the NPC designers about the animal/monster, and then writes down which animations to capture and how they should look.

When the animations are done, it's time to add them into the game using the BCC tool. Here a skeleton, a mesh ("skin") and several animations are merged together into a monster. All NPCs have different states like 1H edge combat, swimming, sneaking and drunk. The BCC guy sets up which states the NPC needs access to and sets up the logics between them. After this is done, the NPC is ready to be spawned in game and can show off his new cool combos of death.

Script Designer

The scripters work is closely related to the work of the programmer. Perhaps more so than it is related to traditional design work. As games have grown ever more complex they have grown even more complicated to develop, it is no longer practical or desirable to program game logic directly into the code. This is where the scripter fits into the picture - part programmer, part designer - it is his job to implement game logic, such as character AI, quest mechanics, object interaction, cinematic cutscenes, etc. using a high level scripting language.

Often the script language is developed specifically for the game or the technology used. The scripter bases his work on the written designs developed by the character designer, quest designer, item designer and cinematic designer. Based on these designs it is the scripters job to get what exists only on paper into the game, functioning as a part of the overall game.

Often there can be many rounds (or iterations) of design and scripting of a game element before it is working within the game, both technically and creatively. Thus it is important that the scripter is both technically skilled as well as having a keen understating of gameplay mechanics.

Wrapping up...

So as you can see even just for creating NPCs there is a lot of very skilled people involved doing varied and challenging work, and thats just for the NPCs! There are still a whole other set of different designers I havent mentioned yet, like those responsible for creating items and creating quests, but that will have to wait for my next update!