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Bruce Harlick on City of Heroes story design: Cimerora
Creating missions and particularly story arcs for City of Heroes/City of Villains is a much more involved process than you might imagine. Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Alec Meer talks to NCsoft's Bruce Harlick, Senior Game Designer about this involuted, and sometimes arcane process. Harlick waxes at length about the Cimerora story arcs (for both heroes and villains). Lead Mission Writer, John Morrissey, provided the seed ideas and set Harlick to flesh it all out as a part of learning the tools and process to produce the missions with "the mandate of no new assets or code". Harlick's account of the process gives a revealing look into the way it all works, the frustrations and obstacles, how he clothed his ideas in the MMO's digital flesh, and how he went about breaking Morrissey's mandate in the end. All in all, it is a fascinating look behind the scenes of this popular super-powered MMOG, and we recommend it for those who would like to be enlightened about the process that brings us some of our favorite story moments in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles.
Tabula Rasa dev journal: Sanctus Grotto
Tabula Rasa has received a lot of buzz over the last few weeks. Some have stated that it's an incomplete game, others have erroneously called it a financial disaster, while others (like myself) enjoy it for what it is. And all of this fallout (some of which reeks with the taint of hidden agendas - anyone who actively cheers for the demise of a game must be questioned) comes after only being live for four months (the game launched on November 1, 2007). NCsoft has reiterated that they are far from abandoning this sci-fi MMO. To prove that point they gave us their latest developer's journal to pass along to you. What follows is a retrospective written by Tom Potter, world builder for the new Sanctus Grotto instance. Sanctus Grotto Retrospective Tom Potter, World Builder Sanctus Grotto was an instance that was in development for some time before I started working at Destination Games. I joined the Tabula Rasa team late in development, so my job was to take the initial vision to completion. The conceptual foundation was already complete so you'd think that there wouldn't be much left for me to do. But Sanctus Grotto is a perfect example of how even "final" designs are often in a state of flux, and how making a few small changes can quickly multiply into something much larger. %Gallery-9822%
