September 23, 2004
Hi, my name is Justin and I’m the Lead Engineer on Dungeons & Dragons Online. I’ve worked on pretty much all of Turbine’s games over the last six years, but I’ve been waiting for this project for the past 20 years.
You see, D&D and I go way, way back – when we play here at work, I still use the dice from my old basic red box set. Sure, the wax has fallen out of the seventeen making it look like eleven, and the corners of the d20 are chipped, but they still work. These dice have seen me through so many adventures over the years that I don’t think I could ever replace them, unless they literally fell apart.
When I’m not telling everyone how old my dice are, I enjoy reading about zeppelins, trying to keep my dragonmarked wizard alive, and fighting Orc hordes in the name of the Emperor.
My name is Justin Quimby and I'm the lead programmer on Turbine Entertainment Software's Dungeons & Dragons Online. I have been with the project from the beginning, from the initial pitch over a year and a half ago to our current full-bore production. I grew up playing this game, rolling d20's, and poring over the Fiend Folio. In college I adventured with a group of friends for four years through the Temple of Elemental Evil, Tomb of Horrors, and various other modules and home-built dungeons. As you can imagine, it's an absolute thrill to work on this project! Over the next couple months, I will write on a variety of subjects for these developer diaries. Today's installment focuses on the joys of programmer art and development philosophies.
When I wrote the first pass of the shortcut UI in D&D Online, I needed some art for the shortcut buttons and the background. The artist primarily in charge of UI textures was hip-deep in work on city stuff, so I had to forge out on my own. Bravely, I fired up Photoshop and began to push pixels. I have neither a Wacom tablet nor one of those fancy tablet monitors, so I relied on my mouse skills. Behold my artistic handiwork!
Stunning isn't it? Behold, a wonder of composition, color and style! I could have spent more time on it, but that would have been wasted work. If there's one thing we hate on this team, it's wasted work. That's why we first hone in on good gameplay and then address flash and polish issues.
So what does this development philosophy mean for actual development? Iteration! Our first focus so far has been the "moment to moment" experience of combat. We ignore everything else that does not apply to that combat experience. Once we are happy with the experience, we then move on to the "hour to hour" game experience. This includes things such as quest mechanics and traps, things that give purpose and structure to an adventuring session. When we are satisfied with that, we refocus again, this time on the "month to month" play - our guilds, and the social experience. And so development continues, ever-onward? By spending a tremendous amount of time iterating on existing features before moving on to new tasks, we can be sure that the team is developing a great game -- nothing is "done" until it's fun! As part of the iteration process, we have weekly "playdays," where the team stops development and plays the game for several hours. We put the latest artwork, engineering systems, user interface and content under the microscope. Not only do we find bugs, but we all experience the game from the user's perspective. As a result, we are constantly tuning and tweaking the current focus of development. I am incredibly excited by our game and I look forward to sharing it with you!
That's it for now. Stay tuned for more ramblings from the team as we develop D&D Online!
Justin
As a side note, the funny thing is that now whenever I mention that I'm working on UI, multiple members of the art team will literally drop what they are doing and hustle over to my desk to see if I "need anything." So if you are a programmer and you need artwork in a tight schedule, do something so outlandish that it offends the art team's artistic sensibilities!
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