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August 03, 2005

I'm Zyrca, I've been here at Turbine a couple of years now. When I got here, I started out working on the live team on Asheron's Call. If you played Asheron's Call, you may remember me from such things as the "Violet Ball" and for setting up the code that would set my monitor on fire should a 100% crafting interaction fail. Now I'm a game systems engineer helping build Dungeons & Dragons Online. Today, I want to share some of the things I've seen and heard while working on DDO that brought a smile to my lips.

Recently, I ran through our first several quests with a Halfling rogue to see how they have progressed. As Lily, a short-haired dark-skinned Halfling rogue, I descended into the basement of the Wavecrest Inn at the tavern keeper's request. There, I found a secret door leading into a cavern. I slipped into the shadows; my avatar turns dark, like a shadow herself. Keeping to the shadows, I proceed through the cavern until I spotted a kobold. From the shadows I shoot and kill the unsuspecting reptile with my bow. Then, I continue deeper into the cavern where I encounter more kobolds. I accidentally step into the light, I'm in plain view! The kobold runs right at me. I shoot and kill the kobold, thankful for my training in point-blank shot.

However, life was not always so easy for the Halfling. A few months ago, not long after I joined the DDO team, I was anxious to try out the game, and went on a similar adventure. I entered the cellar, hid in the shadows and searched around, but as soon as I tried to search, my whole body, neck and limbs stretched out to human size! Once I'd finished searching I shrunk back down into my nice compact little self. While it might be handy for reaching potions on those top shelves, Halflings don't have to go through that rather disorienting experience these days.

A few weeks ago one of my team-mates was doubled-over his keyboard laughing so I directed a querying glance in his direction. He had me put on the headphones to his computer and I listened while he equipped a pair of gloves. What do I hear? "Rrrrrreeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrr!" Who stepped on a cat? He moved the gloves in to his backpack and put them on another time. Again the cat screamed! The gloves were casting Cat's Grace on him and the sound was coming from the spell as it was applied to the character.

Some of the funniest things happen when art goes wrong. For instance, while the art team was working on faces, somehow the custom facial features got turned out of sync with the head. So for a week, whenever I made a bald dwarf, his eyes and lips ended up on the top of his head. I sure wouldn't want to be fighting a giant as that dwarf! I love playing around with character creation and finding all the new treasures that the art team has added recently. Especially now that they don't show up on the top of the characters' heads!

One of the neat things that we are implementing is meta-magic feats, which can be used to improve various aspects of your spells. Like anything else, though, this comes at a cost. The other day I was playing with our meta-magic feats after checking out my progress on tool tips for spells, to see how expensive I could get a Magic Missile to be. So I created the test skeleton and backed away from it... my sorcerer looked over her shoulder to see where she was going! I thought it was so cute that I just backed around the skeleton in circles for a few minutes before I launched my enhanced Magic Missile and lost almost two thirds of my spell points for the day.

For the curious, the meta-magic feats I had turned-on were Quicken Spell, Maximize Spell and Heighten Spell. For short spells that can't be cast much faster, the Quicken Spell feat currently makes the spell uninterruptible, and for longer spells it shortens the casting time. While Maximize Spell is active, damage spells will deal their maximum damage. Heighten Spell makes the caster's spells more difficult to resist. Each active meta-magic feat increases the spell point cost to cast spells, but when you have more then one active meta-magic feat, the additional spell point cost is multiplied with other active meta-magic feats. A base magic missile costs 10 spell points, turning on Maximize Spell increases it to 40, turning on Heighten Spell increases the cost to 100, adding Quicken Spell brings the spell point cost up to 400. As a 9th-level sorcerer, I have 690 spell points.

Those are some of the things that have made me smile since I've joined the project. As we move into public Alpha and Beta, the game is being polished and you'll never see the distortions and atrocities we inflict upon our characters. But I hope that you've enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at what we work on.

-Zyrca