Post:The High Level Creature Thread - 06/17/2012 - 08:42

Re: The High Level Creature Thread · on 06/17/2012 08:42 AM CDT	863
>>Whenever someone presents this (what I consider wonderful) idea about copying critters and moving them to the mainland the answer is always well dillo's are not the type of critter who would live in Theren/Crossing/Mainland. So before a GM pops in with that answer I would like to chime in here and say copy dillos (all 3 types please) but just don't call them dillos. We don't care what you call them!!!!!! The first flaw is that not everyone wants to hunt the same type of creature. Some want boxes, some want skins, some want undead, some want constructs etc etc. More importantly, the major flaw with taking a 'dillo and calling it something else is that you've only removed the quick part of creating a hunting area, while leaving all the ones that take time (Redoing all the creature's messages, designing a hunting area, building the hunting area, writing up a special attack, going through the proposal and QC processes...) This comes back to the blank 10 x 10 hunting area filled with level 150 peccaries I was talking about earlier. I think there's some serious misconceptions going on (Not just in this thread but in general) about how much work some things take -- and that's understandable, you don't see behind the curtain and sometimes it's surprising where the time consuming steps are. Less often something you'd think would be time consuming really isn't. Say you have a GM who's decided they want to create a new hunting area. Here's the (minimum) amount of steps you have to go through. 1) Proposals. The GM has to write up and explain what they want to do and give it enough time to ensure that the Powers That Be approve the plan and that it won't conflict with anything else going on in development. As a general guideline this will usually take at least a week. Sometimes it can take much longer if the project ends up undergoing a lot of revisions -- my nimbus hunting area for example ended up using almost nothing from the initial proposal and went through three or four majorly different revisions. For a complex hunting area this can involve multiple proposals and quite a few GMs to cover the area, release events, multiple creatures, unique features of that area that may need to be coded, making sure the lore fits and so forth. (This is where one of my two high level hunting projects is at right now, because I only came up with the idea for the specific area a few days ago). 2) Map out and build the area. This can involves a reasonable amount of creative writing, even for a fairly simple area. For a complex hunting area (say Oshu'ehhrsk Manor) this can involve a LOT of creative writing plus coding up anything special for the area. Speaking from personal experience the Assassins expansion took me about four hours, the 'dillo expansion has already has several hours sunk into it (cleaning up the old area so they hopefully won't leak anymore while getting a feel for the existing writing so my expansion will fit with it) and I haven't yet begun construction of the expansion (I'm unhappy with my initial map and may redo it), and the nimbus hunting ground took about two full days (including all the script work). That's actual in front of the keyboard working time -- planning for me tends to go on while I'm at work, driving etc, but sometimes I just need to spend a few hours mapping out an area to get a sense of what it's actually going to look like. (This is where my other high level hunting project is right now, the entire thing exists, you can wander around it but there are no room texts and it still needs several special features coded. But it's a MUCH larger area including a half dozen creatures that I've been dying to actually build -- it's been rattling around in my head for about a year now). 3) Physically build the creatures. Putting the stats on a creature is a couple of minutes of work, plus some time to try and hunt the creature to dial it in. This step and the next two are fairly interchangeable as far as order. 4) Write messaging for the creature. We have a template to follow for messaging and sometimes we go simple, and sometimes we go complex (As you've all surely noticed). Either way you're looking at a lot more creative writing here -- this tends to be one of the slower steps for me. Nimbuses were my first creature (And they're fairly far on the "complex side") and involved several days of mostly just working on them to get the first draft done (though that included coding as well). The bulk of the glass construct was done in about a day, but a fair bit of the messaging and code was based on an existing creature, and I spent another half dozen hours or so updating them for this year (Never mind the bug fixes). 5) Code the creature. This is everything we do that makes a creature special. For a low level creature (Say, a ship rat) this involves almost nothing. For a complex creature this can involve a great deal. All high level creatures are at least somewhat complex since they must have at least one special attack. The time needed for this step is incredibly variable. 6) Get the whole thing QC'ed. This is usually a minimum of two QCs (The area and the creature) plus an additional one for each additional creature and can involve more if the area is using unique mechanics or is particularly large. Generally speaking QCs consume anywhere from a few minutes to many many hours of the QCing GM's time. Sometimes this process only takes a day (There's someone available and willing to look over the project right away, there are no major corrections to be made, and the project is fairly small is scope). Since a creature always involves new code you have to have a Tech QCer available and we're only a small percentage of staff. QCing can also take much longer due to the current load on staff (Festivals and Quests in particular tend to crank the QC workload up a great deal). As a general rule we try and keep the turn around to a month or less (And it usually is less). 7) Run any release events. This is another incredibly variable step. For the nimbus the event ran over a few days and only involved on other GM. For assassins I didn't run an event since it was a minor area. Sometimes release events can take a really long time and a lot of staff, but in those cases the event is usually why the hunting area exists and not the other way around. 8) Bug fixing :P -Raesh
This message was originally posted in Creatures of Elanthia \ General Discussions - Creatures, by DR-RAESH on the play.net forums.