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Behind the scenes #2

This week we catch up again with Age of Conan lead designer Ole Herbjornsen as he explains a little more about how the design team works. Hi again! Following up from my previous article I wanted to go into the other designer ‘classes’ that we have in Age of Conan. (Especially since I don’t want anyone feeling left out!) So today we look at the roles of the item, special effects, quest and system designers.

 

Item Designer

The role of an item designer is a bit multi-purpose, supplying both support for other professions and also being the main source of player-oriented equipment and rewards.

As many other professions rely on items, such as quest designers, NPC designers, and scripters, a lot of time is spent on providing them with the various resources they may require to finish a task they are working on.

The other side of the job is working to create the various boss loot, item rewards, and trade skill items in the game, in addition to working alongside the NPC designers to determine drop locations and drop rates of said items. This aspect of the job requires a large deal of planning, as ultimately players will become quite concerned with both the item design (stats, graphical appearance, and general effect) and drop location (how hard it is to get what they want, and if the risk/reward is worth it.)

Accomplishing the various roles of the job requires working knowledge of most of the internal tools used, including many of the various quest, scripting, NPC, data management, and item creation tools.

Overall, it is a job with many facets—often acting as a “middle man” in tying various elements together in the game—which requires a strong overview of the various aspects of game mechanics and design philosophy.


Special effects designer

The special effects designer makes all kinds of effects happen on the screen - it can be something as simple as a burning flame, it can be as complex as a vortex of unholy power drawing the player into it and closing afterwards. Spells, elements, weather, combat impacts, blood - all of this must be made by the special effects designer. Essentially - It's his job to make parts of the game become more alive.

The special effects designer work most of the time in an in-house tool known as the Particle Tool. The name is misleading, since the tool has far expanded beyond the boundaries of particles and is now using everything from planes and meshes to animations and scripts. Special Effect designers also work a fair bit in 3DstudioMax, Photoshop and our scripting tools in order to create textures, scripts and paths.

Since the special effects designer creates a lot of diverse elements for use in the game, he needs to talk to quite a number of different professions. Artists provide textures, meshes and animations, while designers help connect the special effects to monsters etc. Sometimes you need new code support to show off new types of special effects and other times you need a tools programmer to support the new code in the particle tool. Depending on who requested the special effect.

They also need to talk to that person to find out what it will be used for. Also since the Art Director has the final say on the visual appearance of special effects in the game, they also have to review their progress with the Art team as well.


Quest Designer

The quest designer’s role on the development team consists of many parts. The fist part is designing the quest concepts, both keeping in mind the technical limitations and being creative. It is important for quests to evolve and not get stuck in the same old trends, so it’s important to keep up with the latest games on the market and keep “thinking outside the box”.

The best tool we use for designing a quest is Word. There is no magic mystery tool automatically generating good concepts. Once the concepts are done, we have an approval and feedback process, and once everybody is happy, detailed design and implementation can begin.

Let me use an example. I want the player to talk an NPC, inside a house. Let’s add some mobs too. The quest has to be implemented and linked up in our in-house Quest Tool. Dialog has to be written and added to our in-house dialog tool, Knubot where requirements are set for where and when what dialog should appear. The NPC has to be created, and the dialog has to be connected to him. He also needs to have a special ‘brain’ if he’s supposed to act in a certain way.

The next step is for a world designer to create a house and place it out in the playfield along with the mobs and the NPC. If the mobs are supposed to drop loot, the gfx has to bee requested from the Graphic artists and the items have to be requested from the Item designers and later placed out by the NPC designer. When the quest is ready for testing, often with placeholders while we are waiting for assets, the polishing begins. This part is usually what takes the most of our time, meaning we have to test and trace bugs, both in code and data.

So to sum up, the quest designer's role is not so much sitting in a hammock putting word to paper, it’s mostly running around being a “coordinator”.


System Designer

The system designer as the name implies writes system designs and deals with the RPG mechanics - formulas used, etc. Also these guys work on how character development should proceed and general balance issues. A challenge here is to keep as much knowledge about the mechanics of the game in memory as possible.

The system designer uses Excel, internal content tools, Excel and top that off with some more Excel. On good days, spreadsheets are open on both monitors – duelling spreadsheets!

The system designer has a lot of interaction with the game coders dealing with RPG related areas. Lots of working with the item and monster designers, but not so much with the scripting or quest designers. They act as a general font of knowledge for any RPG questions others in the design team have.

If someone were to randomly take a look over their shoulder, they would typically find one or more of the aforementioned spreadsheets open!


I hope you found this overview interesting, and hopefully it gave you some more insight into how we tend to break down the workload for the game designers. Remember you can also drop by my blog. If you have any questions on game design and I’ll always try and answer if I can!