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May 06, 2005

My first dev diary was done in character, in a fun twist on the way the diaries were being done. This time around, I’ll do something more traditional and a bit more informative.

I am the Senior Level Designer for Dungeons & Dragons® Online, and have been working on the project since day one over two years ago. But my experiences with D&D go back much farther than that. I have been playing the pencil and paper game since first edition – I still remember purchasing the original hardcover books with my allowance and treasuring them more than anything else I owned. About 10 years ago, I entered the game industry working on various game and platform types. While I worked mostly on shooter games, my personal game-time was spent largely in MMOs. I played most all of them. UO, EQ, AO, SB, you name it, I played it feverishly.

Needless to say, getting my chance to work on DDO, an MMO based on the game I grew up playing for years and years, has been a culmination of all my favorite things. And now here we are, two years and five months later, entering alpha and beta and getting ready for the public to begin hammering on the content, the servers, the quests, the systems, and everything else that goes into bringing the game to life.

What is it I do on this project?

Originally I was just here to build dungeons and adventures to kill players. As the project has moved forward, my responsibilities have shifted quite a bit. While I still enjoy killing players, I’m also managing other designers, teaching them how to work with the tools and encouraging as much sadism as possible. I am responsible for ensuring they can create as much quality content as possible that fits in the game world without overextending themselves and keeping on schedule. I also do a bunch of work with the other departments to make sure they know what we are working on and what we need, as well as to find out if there is anything that my guys can do to support them. There are lots of other bits and pieces I handle, but that’s the larger part of it.

I’m sure a lot of you must be wondering about the current state of the game. Well, I would be lying if I didn’t say we have our fair share of bugs. With a game as huge and complex as an MMO, how could we not? But I have to say thanks to our Quality Assurance department, as well as to all of the other dedicated people working on the project, for catching problems as soon as they come up. The team does an awesome job of cleaning up the loose ends as they are found.

At the same time, we all work furiously to continue developing new and interesting content, so sometimes we get a bit overloaded. But every now and then we pause to play and look around in the game and see how all the parts are coming together, and it is so astounding how far it has come. I am quite sure I am not the only one on the team that enjoys playing DDO in its current state more then any currently released MMO.

So what's so different about DDO compared to all the other MMOs out there? Well, let me enlighten you! The upgraded Turbine Engine allows our designers to create elaborate scripted events and situations – imagine that as you and your group move near the center of a room, the doors slam shut, music picks up tempo and undead attack, crashing out of coffins and sarcophaguses. We are able to create traps that can be disabled by your party’s rogue and breakable objects that might contain small treasures, or even be trapped for the unsuspecting! Other fun things we have that will be seen at E3 are some of the puzzle bits, such as the “pipe dream” style puzzles that we can use to open locked doors and trip off traps. All these things are critical to creating a super immersive, intense, and driven setting.

The approach we have taken for the world is very obviously different. You can get in and get going pretty fast. The combat, the dungeons, and the landscape adventures are more aggressive then anything else out there, and they all look fantastic.

This project has been a pleasure to work on. We have super-talented artists, incredibly smart programmers, and of course, a hardcore and passionate group of designers. We’ve come a long way, and we still have some ways to go, but I for one am totally, truly, even extremely excited about DDO.

Rock on!

Dan Trethaway
Senior Level Designer
Turbine Entertainment

p.s. The following screenshot represents our ideal player situation. If you find yourself in this position a lot, then we know we're doing our jobs: