Designing the missions for City of Heroes
With more than seven years of content, there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes of City of Heroes when new content is being developed. The regular developer dispatch newsletter, The Intrepid Informer, has just kicked off the first in what promises to be a series of writeups about the process of creating new task forces, missions, and other content. In the first entry, John "Protean" Hegner details the role of the Lead Mission Designer in the process.
As Hegner explains, the game's storylines and overarching foci are all planned out, with certain elements coming into prominence or moving to the background depending on the focus of a given issue. The early part of development centers around figuring out which parts of the game's ongoing story will be explored and how much space the designers have been given to do so. If you're a City of Heroes veteran, the full dispatch is well worth a read for a look at how missions get made at Paragon Studios.
