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	<title>tradeskills Archives - The Escapist</title>
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	<title>tradeskills Archives - The Escapist</title>
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		<title>EQII: Rise of Kunark &#8211; Tradeskills Dev Diary #6</title>
		<link>https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eqii-rise-of-kunark-tradeskills-dev-diary-6/</link>
					<comments>https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eqii-rise-of-kunark-tradeskills-dev-diary-6/#disqus_thread</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dana Massey Legacy Author]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 14 Nov 2007 04:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[EverQuest II: Weekly Developer Diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[developer journal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[domino]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emily taylor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[everquest 2]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tradeskills]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eqii-rise-of-kunark-tradeskills-dev-diary-6/</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="v1PageContent"> <p>We polish off our behind the curtain look at EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark with the final set of four entries from tradeskills game designer Emily &#8220;Domino&#8221; Taylor. In the final entries she takes us from Halloween to yesterday, the very eve of the expansion&#8217;s launch.</p> <p>A special thanks to Emily for her detailed articles.</p> <hr/>  <div style='text-align: center;'><strong>EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark Dev Diary<br /><em>Article by Emily &#8220;Domino&#8221; Taylor (Game Designer, EQII Tradeskills)</em></strong></div> </p> <div class="inline_right"><a href="http://eq2.warcry.com/images/view/45252" target="_blank"><img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/eq2.warcry.com/images/thumbnail/45252.jpg?resize=182%2C136" alt="image" width="182" height="136" border="0"/></a></div> <p><strong>Wednesday 31 October</strong><br />Somehow October is entirely over already, although it feels as if it should still be summer.  I&#8217;m pretty sure it&#8217;s Wednesday today although I don&#8217;t really recall what happened to Monday and Tuesday.  On Monday the new content lock date was set: this coming Saturday evening.  Delayed a week due to the San Diego brush fires (which the radio this morning informed me are still burning in areas, but just about under control now unless the winds suddenly pick up and do bad things).  Nobody I know of at the office seems to have lost their home, nor been injured in the fire, and the people who were still evacuated last week are now back home.  So all in all we&#8217;ve been very lucky.</p> <p>Tonight being Hallowe&#8217;en, there are a series of children knocking at my door and asking for candy.  It&#8217;s kind of fun; this is the first Hallowe&#8217;en I&#8217;ve actually spent in North America for over 10 years, and suddenly it&#8217;s a Big Deal.  There were people at work in costume today, which seemed a bit weird to me to mix childrens&#8217; games with a professional work environment, but is apparently normal in this country.  Last time I was on this continent for Hallowe&#8217;en I was probably still trick-or-treating, or at least going to costume parties at university and not living anywhere that kids would come by.  I did actually go to a costume party on Saturday, which was fun, and the first time I&#8217;ve been out past 3am for more years than I can remember.  Tonight though I&#8217;m just fixing bugs and writing this, in between going to the door.</p> <p>The new furniture graphics from Kunark objects were finished by the art folks at the start of this week, and so I spent yesterday and part of today making them into house items.  Some of them are going to carpenters&#8217; recipe books, some of them are being made into house items for the collection quest rewards (I offered to do this at the same time as I was making the carpenter furniture, since I&#8217;m probably the most familiar on the design team with making house items), and one&#8217;s going to be a city merchant purchasable item for level 80 guilds.  It&#8217;s unfortunate, but there&#8217;s a strict limit on how many new house items can be added with an expansion, simply due to size restrictions.  The entire size of the expansion can&#8217;t be over a certain size, and only a portion of that can be allocated to house items, so that limits the number of new graphics we can have.  I never realized before, when I was just a player, the full reason behind why carpenters had been getting so few recipes in the new expansions.  No other crafting class takes up that kind of download space but the carpenter stuff just eats it up.  Fortunately I&#8217;d already prepared a bunch of other nice items from old world zones that will not add to the download size of the expansion, so carpenters should have more furniture in this expansion than they did in the last two.  </p> <p>Now that the remainder of the furniture is in, I&#8217;m just working on bugs from now on.  I have to try and identify any bugs that actually require adding new content (new files, or new text that might need translating) and get those fixed by Saturday.  Then there&#8217;s a few more days next week for other bugs.  But basically, we&#8217;re supposed to aim to be done and making no more changes by the 7th, which is when they start testing final builds to go live with.  That&#8217;s not a lot of time.  It&#8217;s only 7 days in fact!  Somehow I had been thinking I had more time for bug fixing &#8230; but time is flying by fast, and the week of fires ate up a lot of that in the confusion.  So, nonessential stuff gets postponed to the next game update after the release.  MissDoomCookie helpfully offered to handle any grammar/typo bugs that any of the team had outstanding, since she does regular coverage of the nightly typo reports already, so I passed a couple to her.  Syzygy, who is actually on the coding team, came around and very generously offered to help out with any of my more straight forward bugs that wouldn&#8217;t require a lot of explanation for him to figure out what needed fixing.  I had quite a lot left over from the removal of non-pristine products, things like some items not having had their crude qualities removed, or returning the wrong components.  So I passed a ton of these on to him, which was a huge help and most wonderful of him to offer.  Gallenite saw Syzygy&#8217;s bug fixes getting checked in tonight and just sent me a message saying &#8220;my god, either you have compromising pictures of him, or you&#8217;ve promised him more cookies than I can readily conceptualize&#8221;.  Clearly I do need to do some serious cookie baking once time permits!</p> <p>My tradeskill apprentice Olihin has taken the remaining quest bugs, since he did most of the quests that have outstanding bugs.  He only works with the design team in the mornings, then does a full shift on Customer Service during the afternoon and evening.  Even half a day having an extra person on tradeskills is a huge help though, and he&#8217;s been coming in after his normal Customer Service shift ends too on several occasions.  He hopes to become a game designer some day, and I&#8217;ve been trying to give him tasks like planning and creating quests that will help him learn the skills he&#8217;s most likely to need for that.  So he created the introductory faction quests for tradeskillers around Kunark, and is probably a better quest designer than me now since he&#8217;s done more of that.  I&#8217;ve been taking the more boring stuff and stuff that requires writing perl scripts and such.</p> </div> <div class="v1PageContent"> <div class="inline_right"><a href="http://eq2.warcry.com/images/view/45255" target="_blank"><img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/eq2.warcry.com/images/thumbnail/45255.jpg?resize=182%2C136" alt="image" width="182" height="136" border="0"/></a></div> <p>That leaves, as of tonight, 84 bugs still outstanding.  Assuming no more are added (an unlikely assumption, alas) I need to do 12 bugs per day for the next 7 days, or about 1 bug per hour assuming 12 hour days for the next 7 days.  I don&#8217;t know how realistic that is.  Some will take less than 1 hour but some will take more, not quite sure how they&#8217;ll balance out in total.  I don&#8217;t generally tend to be a particularly stressed-out or anxious person, but the volume of bugs remaining is definitely weighing on my mind.  Last night I went to sleep at about 11, but woke up at 2.  I&#8217;d been dreaming of nothing but bugs and people in beta having problems and not being able to do things, and I woke up remembering I&#8217;d meant to check in some bug fixes to writ quests before I went to bed, but I&#8217;d forgotten to.  Then I couldn&#8217;t get back to sleep because all I could think about was all the bugs, so I gave up and got my laptop and spent about 2 hours fixing more bugs, before going to sleep again about 4 and waking up at 7 to get ready for work at 8.  Not very restful!  I hope I don&#8217;t spend the next 7 days doing the same, though I probably will.  I&#8217;ve been dreaming about tradeskill bugs for most of the last month; that and coworkers doing random things.  A month or two ago when I was wrestling with my perl scripts I dreamed Ilucide was actually being created from running a perl script that was compiling him up from code.  Which was kind of disturbing&#8230;</p> <p>Yesterday we did a lunch time play test of Karnor&#8217;s Castle.  They ordered lunch in for us so we wouldn&#8217;t have to leave our desks, and could just play straight through.  We took two groups in (it&#8217;s not instanced) and went in different directions.  The quests aren&#8217;t in yet and there were some odd bugs with aggro that made it a bit difficult to pull, so we didn&#8217;t really get the feel for how it will be when those are done.  Overall though it was fun, and the zone was very reminiscent of the old EQ1 Karnor&#8217;s and looks great.  Jindrack was the tank for my group, playing a monk; I played a dirge as usual, which is my favorite class for grouping with.</p> <p>I&#8217;ve been relaxing in the evenings lately by making little model slugs out of Fimo modelling polymer while watching a DVD.  I watched &#8220;Flushed Away&#8221; a couple months ago, and that movie has cute little singing slugs all throughout it.  In the DVD&#8217;s special features they had a little tutorial on how to make a slug.  I&#8217;d bought the Fimo at least a month ago when I saw it on sale at Michaels, but it&#8217;s been sitting on the shelf for ages.  In the last week or so though my eyes have been getting so tired from staring at the computer screen for so long that I&#8217;ve been having trouble focusing when I drive home in the dark.  So when that happens I take a break from the computer screen and make a little slug or two.  I actually used to make little model dragons out of Fimo and similar modelling substances, but they are a lot more work and require a lot of fine detail.  Slugs about match how I feel at the moment.  I&#8217;ve made about 8 so far, and started leaving them around the office on random people&#8217;s desks just to add a touch of surrealism to everyone&#8217;s life.  Fyreflyte got one of the first; Feconix has one, Cat from the audio department has one, Tom in art who did the fantastic new graphic for tinkered fireworks has one.  </p> <p>Last night, following the play test, I made a slug that was feigning death, since at one point Jindrack used his group feign to save us all from adds on a pull.  It&#8217;s very cute &#8211; lying on its back, little tail curled up, tongue lolling out.  I stopped by Jindrack&#8217;s office today (Ilucide, Vhalen, and Jindrack share a corner office) when only Ilucide was in, and asked him if Jindrack would think I was completely insane if a feign deathed slug appeared on his monitor.  His answer was &#8220;Probably, but I think he needs to see that,&#8221; so I left it on top of his monitor, and a non-feigned one for Vhalen too for good measure.  Neither of them have said anything so far.  Ilucide stopped by late this afternoon to ask Fyreflyte something about item names, and I asked him if Jindrack had noticed the slug.  </p> <p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; he said, &#8220;he said &#8216;what the hell is that?'&#8221;</p> <p>&#8220;And did you tell him,&#8221; I asked.</p> <p>No, apparently he said he&#8217;d just denied knowing anything about anything.  And he didn&#8217;t know if Vhalen had noticed at all.  Men &#8230;  So Jindrack probably either has no idea what it is and where it comes from, or possibly thinks I&#8217;m too dangerously insane to risk mentioning it.  Hopefully he was amused at least.  Slowly but surely as time permits, more slugs gradually invade the office, at least until I figure out how to lead my newly created slug armies to take over the world &#8230; or until I get bored of slugs and start making something else.  Right now however I need to get back to bug fixing; three new ones have arrived just while writing this.  I&#8217;m starting to dread that new email beep sound.</p> </div> <div class="v1PageContent"> <p><strong>Saturday, 3 November</strong></p> <div class="inline_right"><a href="http://eq2.warcry.com/images/view/45254" target="_blank"><img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/eq2.warcry.com/images/thumbnail/45254.jpg?resize=182%2C136" alt="image" width="182" height="136" border="0"/></a></div> </p> <p>Today is final content lock, postponed from last week due to the fires in San Diego.  Today at 9pm, to be exact.  Currently it&#8217;s about 7:45pm, and I just got back from the office; there were still plenty of people there when I left, too.  Lunch was ordered for us, and dinner too, and various people brought in goodies from muffins to beer to cinnamon buns to keep everybody going.  Content lock means that after tonight, we are not supposed to add any new files or change any text that is visible to players.  So we do have a few more days to fix bugs that don&#8217;t involve that &#8212; for example, tweaking the stats on armor, which is one thing still on my list.  I went through my remaining bug list several times and I think I&#8217;ve fixed everything that involved new files and text changes, although sometimes you don&#8217;t know until you start fixing something.  I hope I got all the text changes done anyway, as the translating team are going to be busy getting all the text properly translated for the international servers between now and release date.</p> <p>Thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of many others, my bug list is miraculously down to only 20 items at the moment.  Syzygy in particular has gone above and beyond the call of duty helping out, especially considering he&#8217;s not even in the same department!  MissDoomCookie helpfully came up with some text for the faction reward letters for the Gorowyn tradeskill faction when neither Cronyn nor I had the time or inspiration to think of anything intelligible for them to say.  Jindrack was a huge help untangling some complicated hail handlers today too.  Hail handlers still give me headaches on a regular basis.</p> <div class="inline_left"><a href="http://eq2.warcry.com/images/view/45256" target="_blank"><img data-recalc-dims="1" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/eq2.warcry.com/images/thumbnail/45256.jpg?resize=182%2C136" alt="image" width="182" height="136" border="0"/></a></div> <p>I was very grateful when Jindrack said he&#8217;d finished up his bugs and would be happy to help with the three hail handler bugs that were sitting on my list.  The folks like him who write quests on a regular basis are much better than I am at spotting problems with hail handlers than I am.  Even if they don&#8217;t seem to appreciate slugs feigning death; Jindrack still hasn&#8217;t said a word and the slug has been moved aside onto his filing cabinet.  It may need to find a new home, poor rejected thing!  I&#8217;m sure it will amuse someone somewhere.  (Lyndro, Gallenite, Silverfrost, and MissDoomCookies have all acquired slugs of their own since I last wrote.)</p> <p>One thing I&#8217;ve noticed very much in the past month is how helpful everybody on the team is.  We all have different deadlines, but people are always offering to help out where they can, and I certainly owe thanks to many more people than I listed above for lending a hand here and there, not to mention to all of the QA team for being so thorough and catching so many bugs that I missed.  </p> <div class="inline_right"><a href="http://eq2.warcry.com/images/view/45257" target="_blank"><img data-recalc-dims="1" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/eq2.warcry.com/images/thumbnail/45257.jpg?resize=182%2C136" alt="image" width="182" height="136" border="0"/></a></div> <p>Where I was working before as an IT manager, I was really the only IT staff for a long time, and when I did get a contractor to help out, I never felt I could ask a contractor to work extra hours when they were being paid only on a 9 to 5 basis.  The rest of the company was basically sales and marketing, and couldn&#8217;t have helped out for the most part even if they&#8217;d wanted to, which probably wouldn&#8217;t have occurred to them since it was my job to support them.  So I&#8217;ve never been a part of a team this size who are all willing and eager to pull together and help out whoever needs a hand to accomplish a common goal, without worrying about whose job description is what and which department does which thing.  It&#8217;s a pretty good feeling!  Except of course for the part where I feel like I&#8217;m the one who&#8217;s needed the most help.  But by the next expansion I hope I&#8217;ll be more on top of the game and in a better position to lend a hand rather than need it.  I guess I did do a few things for people here and there &#8212; recipes for Srukin and Kander, collection quest reward furniture, stuff like that &#8212; but it&#8217;s mostly just been doing things for tradeskillers!  Anyway it&#8217;s pretty amazing how everybody&#8217;s so willing to help out everybody else, even between different departments and different areas, it&#8217;s all just a bunch of people pulling together to make the game great, which is the one thing we all want most of all.  It&#8217;s pretty cool, man, as they say here in California.  I could get used to this!</p> </div> <div class="v1PageContent"> <p><strong>Friday 9 November</strong><br />Just a few days till release date, and things are looking pretty good.  Tuesday was the last big push to fix issues, and I know that I, and probably many others, were in the office 15+ hours that day.  In theory all we&#8217;re doing since then is fixing bugs, and in fact that theory is close to reality since we pushed so hard up to Tuesday getting things cleaned up.  Since bugs are all we&#8217;re doing, we are starting to be able to work slightly less long hours, which is a nice change.  As things have been calming down a bit, we&#8217;ve been doing more play tests of various zones for some last minute tweaking of difficulty levels and identifying any bugs that might have come up.  Fyreflyte took advantage of the extra time to decorate our office with Christmas lights, making it look very festive and cheerful.  Cat, our audio lead, has been so enthused about the little slug that ended up on her desk that she persuaded me to show her how to make them, and since we actually were able to leave work by 7 last night, she and Fyreflyte came over to my place for pizza and cheesecake, and we watched the DVD of &#8220;Flushed Away&#8221; while making random slugs.  It was a nice break from bug fixing all evening!</p> <div class="inline_right"><a href="http://eq2.warcry.com/images/view/45251" target="_blank"><img data-recalc-dims="1" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/eq2.warcry.com/images/thumbnail/45251.jpg?resize=182%2C136" alt="image" width="182" height="136" border="0"/></a></div> <p>The majority of my bugs this week have been fairly non serious stuff, the kind of things that should be fixed of course, but aren&#8217;t going to break anybody&#8217;s game if they didn&#8217;t get done in time for release.  Things like having the wrong tint on some of the armor, or recipe names not exactly matching the item name.  I also did a bit of tweaking of some of the crafted item stats, to make them a bit more desirable, and to address some of the concerns raised by the beta testers posting in the beta forums.  There have been so many very helpful players taking the time to check all the items for their crafting classes and offer suggestions where things didn&#8217;t make sense to them, and identifying bugs where they found them, it&#8217;s been wonderful.  Although in most cases QA catches the bugs also, things that aren&#8217;t outright bugs but just inconsistencies aren&#8217;t things that are necessarily readily apparent to someone who doesn&#8217;t know that crafting class inside out, so this kind of feedback is extremely valuable and I have definitely appreciated everyone who took the time to do that.</p> <p><strong>Monday 12 November</strong><br />Tomorrow&#8217;s the big day; I was starting to think it would never arrive, but we&#8217;ve made it at last!  The Rise of Kunark release, my very first expansion and the fourth expansion for EverQuest II.  Of course, I&#8217;ve only seen the other three expansions as a player, not from the development side, but this one seems pretty solid to me and Gallenite has been telling us the same thing.  Each day for the past week and a bit he&#8217;s emailed around a graph showing how many bugs for the expansion are still open for the dev team and for QA, and every day that number has fallen dramatically, until at the start of this weekend we were down to two digits, and by today I imagine there were almost none at all.  (Of course, many of the QA queue bugs might not be bugs any longer, just waiting to be tested and signed off.)  I know that in my own bug queue there&#8217;s been very little left for this expansion in the past few days, and mostly pretty minor things like spelling errors or inconsistencies in status reduction amounts in furniture, etc.</p> <div class="inline_right"><a href="http://eq2.warcry.com/images/view/45250" target="_blank"><img data-recalc-dims="1" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/eq2.warcry.com/images/thumbnail/45250.jpg?resize=182%2C136" alt="image" width="182" height="136" border="0"/></a></div> <p>It being the weekend before release, we were all asked to come in on the weekend and ensure that any bugs that did come back from QA were promptly turned around.  Normally we make changes and fix bugs and add things all day during the day, and then overnight an automatic process rebuilds stuff into a new version, which then goes to our internal servers in the morning so QA can test our changes on that.  Over this weekend, however, we were turning over the builds much faster than usual, trying to get everything cleared up and tidied away.  The dev team and coding team would fix their outstanding bugs, and then a new build would be run.  This would take about 90 minutes to 2 hours and then QA would check out all the bugs we fixed, and either close them off or send them back.  Then we would fix any bugs that got sent back (or, occasionally, new ones discovered) and once those were all checked in, another build, another round with QA, and so on.  This went on for pretty much the whole weekend.</p> <p>There was a lot of waiting around in between times while the builds were happening.  Some people worked on new content for next month, some did play testing or chatted with players on the beta server, others who lived close went home in between.  Since we&#8217;re in really good shape regarding number and severity of bugs it wasn&#8217;t overly stressful, mostly a lot of anticipating and waiting.  I ended up going home during the build yesterday afternoon and baking some chocolate chip cookies to bring in today, which actually worked out pretty well for the folks who stayed late in the office, because when I had to go back in around 7pm last night to fix a bug that had come back, I was able to bring a batch of fresh baked, still-warm-from-the-oven cookies for the QA team and the remaining developers and coders to enjoy.  The rest of the cookies came in today and were divided between QA, who have been doing such a fantastic job catching and checking stuff I&#8217;d missed, and the dev and code teams, who have also been working flat out of course.</p> </div> <div class="v1PageContent"> <p>Today the very last few remaining bugs were addressed, the update notes for the expansion were confirmed and given to the international community reps for translation into the various languages required, and from noon onward we were forbidden to change anything more without express permission.  The live servers will go down at 5am PST tomorrow for the RoK updates, and folks from the Community team will be in from 6am to answer questions and concerns on the forums.  Key members of the development and coding teams will be in early also just in case of any issues that come up and need addressing.  By mid day we&#8217;ll probably know whether it&#8217;s all going to go smoothly or whether something will go horribly wrong &#8212; we&#8217;re all hoping for the &#8220;smoothly&#8221; eventuality, of course!  And if all goes well, we&#8217;ll be back to working normal length days, which means I&#8217;ll have entire hours free in the evenings to do non-work things in.  I&#8217;m going to have to figure out how on earth to fill all that time now, it&#8217;s been a while since I had that problem!</p> <p>So now I&#8217;ve (almost) lived through my first expansion cycle, it&#8217;s time to contemplate what I have learned, and what I can improve for the next time around.  Just knowing how it all works and what to expect will be a big benefit of course, and next time I&#8217;ll have a better idea of how to time things, such as how long to leave for recipe and item creation (minimum two weeks each, preferably more).  I want to create some better spreadsheets and scripts for the recipe and item creation also; the ones I was using were old and outdated, and caused much extra work because in many cases nobody realized they were outdated until all the items (or recipes) were created and then later discovered to be missing this or that flag, or incorrect in some other way.  Getting spreadsheets and scripts set up to accurately automate as much of it as possible should save a lot of time and make for a lot less QA work catching persistent errors introduced by faults in the spreadsheet or script.  And I think I should start working on the next expansion, oh, about next week, just to be sure!  Mainly I think a good lesson learned is that I did try to bite off a bit more than I could chew this expansion &#8212; trying to fix a lot of the more urgent tradeskill issues I wanted to address once I started the job, while at the same time planning an entire expansion, revising all the tradeskill reaction arts, removing subcombines, and implementing many new crafting quests, was probably a little on the ambitious side for my first expansion, even with the part time help of our tradeskill apprentice Olihin.  All the combined bugs from all the large changes, while a very small percentage of the overall number of files checked in, still added up to quite a pile and without the help of people like Syzygy it would have been an uphill battle to get through them all in time.  I think from now on I&#8217;ll aim for just one major change at a time, for the sake of my sanity.  It&#8217;s hard not to want to do everything at once, when there&#8217;s so much I still want to do, and patience has never been one of my virtues &#8230; but I&#8217;ll try and take that lesson away from this expansion at least.  EQII is three years old as of this month, and any changes worth doing can wait just a little bit longer to be done with as much attention and care as they deserve.  And there are still many changes still to come&#8230;</p> <div class="inline_right"><a href="http://eq2.warcry.com/images/view/45253" target="_blank"><img data-recalc-dims="1" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/eq2.warcry.com/images/thumbnail/45253.jpg?resize=182%2C136" alt="image" width="182" height="136" border="0"/></a></div> <p>I guess this will be my last dev diary entry for Rise of Kunark.  It&#8217;s been interesting writing them, and I hope it&#8217;s been an interesting read for whoever may be reading them, and perhaps it&#8217;s given you a little more insight into just what goes on behind the scenes of a game expansion, and just how much work goes into each one.  I haven&#8217;t even seen the whole cycle; preparation for the next expansion is going to be starting as soon as this one&#8217;s out the door (in fact, planning has already started).  Things were already well underway for this expansion by the time I joined SOE at the end of April, so in the next few months I&#8217;ll get to see what the early stages of a new expansion look like.  </p> <p>If all goes well, perhaps you&#8217;ll be reading another expansion dev diary from me this time next year.  See you then!</p> </div>]]></content:encoded>
					
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		<title>EQII: Rise of Kunark &#8211; Tradeskills Dev Diary #5</title>
		<link>https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eqii-rise-of-kunark-tradeskills-dev-diary-5/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dana Massey Legacy Author]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Nov 2007 23:54:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[EverQuest II: Weekly Developer Diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[developer journal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[domino]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emily taylor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[everquest 2]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rise of kunark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tradeskills]]></category>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="v1PageContent"> <p>EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark Tradeskills designer Emily &#8220;Domino&#8221; Taylor continues her epic series of developer diaries, exclusively here on WarCry. Today, in entries from October 16th and 25th, we get an update on both the development of the expansion and the antics of SOE.</p> <hr/>  <div style='text-align: center;'><strong>EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark Dev Diary<br /><em>Article by Emily &#8220;Domino&#8221; Taylor (Game Designer, EQII Tradeskills)</em></strong></div> </p> <p><strong>Tuesday, October 16, 2007</strong><br />Only ten days to go till the cut-off date for finishing up new content.  I&#8217;d say 8 working days, but I suspect quite a few people, myself included, will be working all ten!  I know there were a number of people in the office last weekend &#8212; though it was freezing cold, I&#8217;m definitely going to try and work at home next weekend instead.</p> <p>The black plague continues to make its way around the office &#8212; several people, including Feconix and Cronyn, have been sent home sick with instructions not to infect the rest of us.  From the sounds of the chorus of coughing and sneezing I hear from outside my office, though, that&#8217;s probably a bit too late.  There are rumours that the original source of infection was a friend of a friend at Areae, who met some of our staff at a bar two Fridays back and unintentionally (we presume) passed on the flu; if so, does this count as intercompany biological sabotage?  Of course, this then raises the possibility that we could send forth our currently sick developers to snog staff members of the competition, and thus continue spreading the plague throughout the industry &#8230; but I suppose that would be above and beyond the call of duty.  Not to mention morally dubious.  Clearly the best course of action is to conquer the gaming universe by outstanding improvements to EQ2 tradeskills &#8212; which will not happen if I catch the flu also, so I&#8217;m consuming very large quantities of orange juice at present.</p> <p>This weekend I was feeling very pleased with myself for getting the perl script completed to create the new tradeskill reaction arts.  It actually worked almost first try &#8211; only a minor typo to fix &#8211; which is remarkable as it&#8217;s by far the most complicated script I&#8217;ve written from scratch.  (Which isn&#8217;t to say it&#8217;s complicated, of course, just that I am a noob.)  It takes the data I&#8217;ve laid out in a spreadsheed and creates two files from each line.  The hardest part was actually filling out the spreadsheet.  It&#8217;s hard to ensure that every reaction art for every crafter is always receiving an upgrade as the level increases, without making them all identical, and yet also without giving any one class a clear advantage or disadvantage.  Finding a fairly balanced, consistently upgrading set of numbers for 90 different spells (9 primary classes + 2 secondary classes + 4 cross-craft skills, times 6 each) is fairly challenging on its own, but any duplications and remaining completely unique for each class &#8230; well, that&#8217;s a miracle a bit beyond my ability to pull out of thin air at 8pm on a Sunday.  The final numbers I settled on may still need some tweaking but I hope they&#8217;ll be different enough to give different archetypes a different feel, without being totally unique in every way.  </p> <p>Once the new reaction arts were created there was still a lot more work to do, of course.  It&#8217;s never that simple!  The new reaction arts had to be set up to correctly counter crafting events, and that meant some changes to the crafting events, of which there are even more than there are reaction arts, as it turns out.  For example since I&#8217;ve changed them to auto-upgrade, an armorer has six reaction arts, three giving progress and three giving durability (before the change he would have had about 21).  But the same armorer has 23 possible events that can happen while crafting:  slight heat wave, slight heat depletion, heat depletion, heat wave, hefty heat depletion, hefty heat wave, orange bead, red bead, white bead, orange hot metal, red hot metal, white hot metal, and a bunch of others.  I also had to create the new Favor of Innovation event for level 70+ for each of the 9 crafting classes; each of these has to be created uniquely since they have to give back the correct rare harvest based on the level.  And then hook up those 9 new files to the 9 new result tables for level 70+ recipes that I had to create so events would pop up at all.  Then all the new reaction arts had to be added to the list of spells automatically granted to artisans, and the old ones removed.  And &#8230; well &#8230; the list just continues!  When I checked in the tradeskill reaction art changes this afternoon, I added 506 new files, deleted 2116 old ones, and edited 105.  And I&#8217;m sure there will be more changes still to come once QA start bug testing and the folks in beta start submitting feedback.  All that just to change 6 reaction arts each for 11 classes!  Who knew.  </p> <p>I&#8217;m marginally ahead of schedule in where I thought I would be this week because I did a bit more on the weekend than I&#8217;d expected, mainly due to my expectation of a date being cancelled due to the flu striking again, but oh well &#8230; at least the game benefits from my loss of love life.  Next big item on the list is to finish up the tradeskill tutorial NPC.  Feconix was a big help with this, and Lockeye helped in getting me started before he left, but now the tradeskill arts are more or less done the tutorial dialog will need changing, and there were still a few areas where it wasn&#8217;t working yet.  But, I have 4 new CDs just arrived today from Amazon to listen to while I work, and I think the guy at the local Blockbuster is starting to recognize me from all the DVDs I&#8217;ve checked out to watch while doing boring data entry/changes.  Maybe they&#8217;ll put in a &#8220;movies for editing spreadsheets to&#8221; section if I ask nicely.  In retrospect, the subtitled French language film from last Friday was a poor choice as my French is too rusty not to have to check the text frequently, besides which the movie was just rather confusing.  But I have a suspicion tradeskill tutorials and Terminator 2 will go well together.  Wonder if I can make the tradeskill tutor look like Arnie?  I do live in the land of the Governator now, after all!</p> </div> <div class="v1PageContent"> <p><strong>Tuesday, October 25, 2007</strong><br />Well, it&#8217;s been a very unusual week to say the least, and definitely not how I think anybody expected our last week before content lock to be.  The moon in the sky tonight looks huge and is a strange yellow-orange colour from the ash and other particles still in the air over San Diego as we recover from terrible fires all around the city.</p> <p>But to step back in time a moment &#8230; Last Friday when I left work I was anticipating a long hard week&#8217;s work to get all the new content in before our content lock first thing Saturday 27th.  I joined a few friends and co-workers at a karaoke bar on Friday night and then played my normal Traveller RPG with my friends online on Saturday morning (to the tune of a cool 2 million credits&#8217; profit), then spent the rest of the day working.  I wanted to create a quest for Kylong Plains so that crafters who are not high adventure level could quest a sokokar mount; the sokokar quest for high level adventurers had already been done by Srukin, but since it required combat, it wasn&#8217;t appropriate for high level crafters who might be lower level adventurers.  Since I hadn&#8217;t known this would be needed, I hadn&#8217;t scheduled any time for this, so the weekend&#8217;s project was to try and slip in a crafter-friendly version of the sokokar quest before the content lock.</p> <p>Since I&#8217;m still far from familiar with quest writing, I just took Srukin&#8217;s quest and basically mirrored it, removing the parts where high adventure level was required and replacing them with crafting tasks.  I had a little fun at his expense in the process; where his first quest has Borbin Happens asking adventurers to go kill 24 drolvarg and bring back their fangs as proof, my first quest has Borbin&#8217;s assistant despairing about what to do with all the drolvarg fangs that are piling up and asking the crafters to make something useful out of them.  And so on.  There were a couple of complicated tricky bits, but fortunately (for me &#8212; maybe not for him) Srukin happened to be in working on Saturday as well and he was nice enough to explain the bits of his quest I wasn&#8217;t quite sure how to work with.  I spent most of Sunday in the office also finishing off the quest and by the end of Sunday I was pretty happy with it.  </p> <p>Sunday is when the fires started getting out of control around San Diego, but as I was mostly in the office I wasn&#8217;t really aware of how serious it had become.  It was Monday morning when I realized just how big the fires must be.  I don&#8217;t normally turn my alarm clock on; I&#8217;m a very light sleeper, and just the sky starting to lighten is generally enough to wake me up by about 6:30 at this time of year.  Since most people get to work around 10, that&#8217;s definitely not a problem.  On Monday morning though I didn&#8217;t wake up till 7:30 because it was so dark outside, and when I did wake up, I thought at first it was a cloudy, rainy day.  It was only when I looked out the window that I realized it was smoke in the sky, not cloud, and that the fires were much worse than I&#8217;d thought.</p> <p>The last three days have been pretty surreal.  There&#8217;s been a constant smell of burning in the air, and quite frequently there&#8217;s been ash raining down from the sky.  The swimming pool at my apartment complex looks as if someone poured a few ash trays into it; my balcony has enough ash on it to sweep off in clouds with a broom.  The office was closed from Monday to Wednesday since they&#8217;ve been asking people to stay off the freeways so that evacuations and emergency vehicles can move around, plus half the office staff seemed to be evacuating their houses and scattered all over the state staying with family and friends.  Gallenite said at one point he had about 7 people, 3 dogs, and a couple of cats at his place alone, a little mini SOE evacuation center.  </p> <p>Since my area didn&#8217;t have to evacuate and since I can get to the office without using any freeways, I ended up going to the office all three days anyway and actually got quite a lot of work done.  Monday and Tuesday were pretty quiet but on Wednesday a few more people came in.  Kander, who used to work in customer service before joining the design team, came in and spent a good part of Wednesday helping out the very short-staffed CS team.  I had contemplated going over myself, actually, but since I have no idea how to do any of what they do, I figured I&#8217;d be more of a hindrance than a help overall.  I spent my time creating faction writs, recipes, and quests instead, and working on the tradeskill tutorial.</p> <div class="inline_right"><a href="http://www.warcry.com/images/view/45079" target="_blank"><img data-recalc-dims="1" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.warcry.com/images/thumbnail/45079.jpg?resize=182%2C122" alt="image" width="182" height="122" border="0"/></a></div> <p>Today, Thursday, was the first day that we were theoretically back at work.  Work today and tomorrow is optional; those who are still affected by the evacuations and the fires are of course not expected to be in.  But, most of the rest of us were, and the office felt more or less normal, if a bit on the quiet side.  I can&#8217;t speak for everyone else, but I was glad to have some human company once again, having spent the past 5 days working in a mostly empty office with almost nobody to talk to, and the evenings in a mostly empty apartment watching DVDs and making model slugs out of modelling polymer (don&#8217;t ask).  Apart from the fact Silverfrost informs me I have apparently discovered a new way to crash zones, this time with tradeskill writ quests (go me), all is pretty much well once again in tradeskill land and now we just await the decision on when the new date for the content lock will be.</p> </div>]]></content:encoded>
					
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		<title>EQII: Rise of Kunark &#8211; Tradeskills Dev Diary #4</title>
		<link>https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eqii-rise-of-kunark-tradeskills-dev-diary-4/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dana Massey Legacy Author]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[EverQuest II: Weekly Developer Diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[developer journal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[domino]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emily taylor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[everquest 2]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rise of kunark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tradeskills]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="v1PageContent"> <p>Emily &#8220;Domino&#8221; Taylor, the Tradeskills game designer for EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark, continues to pen a series of journals for the site that recount the course of development for her.</p> <hr/>  <div style='text-align: center;'><strong>EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark Dev Diary<br /><em>Article by Emily &#8220;Domino&#8221; Taylor (Game Designer, EQII Tradeskills)</em></strong></div> </p> <div class="inline_right"><a href="http://www.warcry.com/images/view/45013" target="_blank"><img data-recalc-dims="1" loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.warcry.com/images/thumbnail/45013.jpg?resize=182%2C99" alt="image" width="182" height="99" border="0"/></a></div> <p><strong>Monday, October 8, 2007 </strong><br />Had a pretty good weekend, though they seem to be over so fast!  In my Traveler game I turned a cool profit of close to 2 million credits on a trade deal; in the Cthulhu game we managed to finish the scenario without any of the party going insane or dying, though there were some close calls.  And the San Diego Chargers won the football on Sunday by a ridiculously large score, so the whole city seemed pretty content.  I got the spreadsheet for the 70-80 tradeskill writs all filled out by the end of Sunday so I was feeling pretty good about coming in this morning, running the script to convert the spreadsheet into the individual files for each writ, and then moving on to tradeskill reaction arts.  But of course, it&#8217;s never quite that simple!  </p> <p>First I discovered that the spreadsheet I&#8217;d been using didn&#8217;t include the icons, so every item in every writ looked like a scroll.  That required modifying the spreadsheet to include the icon information, and then modifying the script to accept the extra columns for icons, and then spending quite some time looking up the icon number for each item in each writ and putting that into the spreadsheet.  </p> <p>Once the icons were working, I discovered that the script was out of date in a few areas &#8212; it was obviously created when tradeskill writs were first made, and a number of things have changed since then.  For example, back then, there were far less starting cities than there are now, so I had to modify the script to award faction and status to people in the cities that have been added since the writs were first created.  While doing that, I was suddenly struck by the thought that Gorowyn is our new starting city, and nobody had mentioned anything to me about tradeskill NPCs or factions in that city.  What if I were supposed to be doing that and I hadn&#8217;t realized!?  It was a horrible thought, I was almost afraid to ask for fear of what the answer would be (&#8220;why yes, you&#8217;re supposed to be creating and populating the entire crafting area of Gorowyn, didn&#8217;t you realize?  You should have been done 2 weeks ago!&#8221;).  In a minor panic I checked with Cronyn, who is doing the population and furnishing of Gorowyn, and fortunately  he had most of it under control.  Whew!  The only thing that wasn&#8217;t accounted for was a tradeskill faction merchant, so I sent some instructions on that   Of course, that did make me realize I need to dig up some furniture to put on the Gorowyn faction merchant, which I hadn&#8217;t though of till now.  But that&#8217;s a relatively minor thing, and if worst comes to worst, could always be added after the expansion launch.</p> <p>Once that minor crisis was under control, I realized I still needed to add the coin reward to the writs.  This reward &#8211; we call them &#8220;coinpurses&#8221; &#8212; is supposed to cover the fuel costs plus just a little bit extra.  Of course, in order to create the coinpurses, therefore, I have to finalize the fuel costs.  So the next detour was testing and setting fuel costs, and while I was looking at it, adding them in to the merchant lists of the normal fuel vendors around the world.  </p> <p>Then it was time for our Monday afternoon design team meeting, and following that, I got distracted from writs into fixing a few bugs for GU39.  I also logged in to Beta server briefly to grab a screenshot, and ended up with a number of desperate tells from various people who were stuck in Chardok and needed to be summoned out &#8212; apparently you can currently zone IN, but you cannot yet zone OUT, making it a rather one-way trip unless you can find a friendly GM online to extract you.</p> <p>Back to the writs, I also realized I still needed to change the dialog options for the NPCs who actually offer the writs so that they&#8217;ll offer the new higher level ones.  This is 18 more files to change, and looks as if they all need to be done manually, so that&#8217;s going to take a while.  It&#8217;s amazing how there&#8217;s always so much work involved in getting everything done than I expected&#8230; between setting the cash rewards for the writs, changing the NPCs&#8217; dialog options, and adding in Gorowyn to the factions, there&#8217;s probably another half day&#8217;s work to do tomorrow despite spending most of today on it.</p> <p>By this time it was getting late so I headed home to feed my cat.  Every day when I come home late, she&#8217;s sitting at the front door waiting for me, and informs me in no uncertain terms that she&#8217;s lonely, bored, neglected, and abandoned, not to mention starving, and hadn&#8217;t I better feed her and play with her all evening?  My apartment is on a corner &#8211; the front door faces west, and the balcony faces south, and normally when I walk from my car space to my front door, I pass along the path that leads under the balcony.  Today however I detoured via the mailbox, so I didn&#8217;t walk under the balcony.  And when I went in the front door there was no cat.  There was, however, a sudden meow from out on the balcony and she hurried inside to tell me the usual story about how neglected and abandoned she is.  Ha &#8212; I think she just didn&#8217;t see me in time to get into position.  I&#8217;m fairly sure she lies around the balcony perfectly happily in the evenings, and only runs inside to sit by the door and look pathetic when she sees me coming.  I&#8217;m going to have to try sneaking in from unexpected directions more often.  Currently she&#8217;s lying on my legs while I work, and helpfully shedding into the keyboard.  Kunark tradeskills, whatever else they may or may not have by the time they&#8217;re finished, are definitely not going to be short of cat hair.</p> </div> <div class="v1PageContent"> <p><strong>Thursday, October 11, 2007</strong></p> <p>Mmm, more spreadsheets!</p> <p>I got the 70-80 tradeskill writs finished and checked in by the end of Tuesday (though, inevitably, I&#8217;m sure QA will turn up some bugs).  My bug list is now up to 186 items.  I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s a normal number so I don&#8217;t know if this is good or bad.  Lyndro mentioned at our meeting on Monday that he had over 200 though, so I&#8217;m hoping this is normal.  When I skim over them they mostly seem to be fairly minor issues &#8212; still need doing of course, but can be done later, after the actual new content stuff is put in.  That needs to be finished up first, before tackling smaller bugs.  Of course, if the recipes had taken as short a time as I&#8217;d expected they&#8217;d take, I would have all the new content in by now and could be bug fixing &#8230; but alas.  Next expansion I&#8217;ll be able to plan much better I hope, with a more realistic understanding of what will be the long and painful parts!</p> <p>Yesterday Brasse from <a href="http://www.thebrasse.com" title="" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.thebrasse.com</a> spent the day with us, talking to everyone she could, and madly making notes for a few articles on Kunark that she&#8217;s writing.  She came out to our dev team lunch with us and we talked briefly about tradeskills, though there&#8217;s so much in the Kunark expansion that my little section will be only a tiny part of the big picture!</p> <p>Today (and yesterday&#8217;s) I&#8217;m back to staring at spreadsheet, this time for the tradeskill reaction arts revamp.  Tradeskill arts are actually spells, same as adventurer spells, at least as far as the back end is concerned.  Being focused on tradeskills, I really haven&#8217;t had any cause to look at spells yet, and they are very, very complex beasts indeed.  Scary, I would even say.  I decided to lay out the new tradeskill arts in a spreadsheet form and write a perl script to spit it out into the individual files.  This would be the first perl script I&#8217;ve written entirely from scratch, rather than modifying an existing one, and it&#8217;s taken me a while to get my head around it and figure out how I need to lay out the spreadsheet, not to mention the perl script.  </p> <p>Zoltaroth, one of those amazing guys on the coding team, is just a whiz at perl and seems to be able to make it do the most complex things with complete ease; he helped me out a lot when I started, and needed to pull out a lot of data to document various things and do bulk changes like the harvest drop rates.  However, the coding folks are all quite busy now with lots of last minute code requests and urgent fixes, and now I&#8217;m a bit more familiar with our file layout it&#8217;s time for me to quit being a newbie and start doing these things for myself.  Still, I can&#8217;t help but be painfully aware as I stare at the script, that it would probably take Zoltaroth 15 minutes to do what&#8217;s taking me a day to figure out.  But I wouldn&#8217;t learn anything that way, and next time I&#8217;ll be faster (I hope).  That&#8217;s what I keep telling myself anyway!</p> <p>Fyreflyte is off sick today, and wasn&#8217;t looking so hot yesterday either &#8211; he didn&#8217;t get in till afternoon, and when he did arrive, he deposited a HUGE pile of cough drops, throat lozenges, decongestants, and I don&#8217;t know what else beside his desk.  He says he&#8217;s been eating vitamin C like it&#8217;s candy, but he was still getting a sore throat and by late afternoon was sneezing too.  I&#8217;m a little worried I&#8217;m going to catch it next.  Our office isn&#8217;t that big, and I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s no way I could have avoided the germs in this small space.  Archonix has been off sick this week too and I&#8217;ve heard several others sniffling and sneezing &#8212; seems the black plague has picked just the wrong time to strike.  I stopped by the supermarket on my way home earlier this week and picked up a couple cartons of fresh squeezed orange juice, some oranges, and some multivitamins &#8212; here&#8217;s hoping I escape it.  I hear yet more coughing coming from someone down the hall as I write this though, so I don&#8217;t know how good the chances are.  Go go immune system&#8230;</p> <p>We had another playtest at lunch today, most folks were running around Kylong Plains but I and a group returned to Shard of Fear as we did last week to revisit it after the latest round of changes.  There have been a lot of changes just since last week, and on the whole it&#8217;s much improved, though we still found a few bugs and a few things confusing.  It&#8217;s surprising to me to see how much a zone like this changes before it goes live.  When we did the first playtest (or at least, the first one I participated in) 3-4 weeks ago it was totally different &#8211; visually it was pretty much the same, but the monsters&#8217; behaviour, the questgivers, the quests themselves, all totally different.  Last week there were no quests at all but the monsters behaved differently and in many cases were different, and this week the mobs had changed again and we had a new series of quests.  I guess planning out quests and concepts for a zone like that are all very well as a starting point, but the true experience isn&#8217;t appreciated till you play through it and see how it really feels.  I guess before I worked here I knew the devs did playtest zones, but I didn&#8217;t realize how much, nor how large the changes could be as a result.  It&#8217;s interesting to watch.  Though I&#8217;m also developing more of an understanding of why some of the devs tend to be more casual in playstyle.  After running through that zone over and over and thinking about it and discussing it and writing copious feedback from a testing perspective, I&#8217;m having a hard time looking forward to playing it again on my play account characters &#8212; it&#8217;s going to be very reminiscent of work, rather than play!  </p> <p>I don&#8217;t know how it got to be Thursday already; in fact I&#8217;m not sure how it got to be October.  But, time to head home now and see if I can sneak up on the cat.  With luck I can get some more done on the reaction arts spreadsheets from home, and be ready to try importing them with my new script on Friday.</p> </div>]]></content:encoded>
					
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">48413</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>EQII: Rise of Kunark &#8211; Tradeskills Diaries #3</title>
		<link>https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eqii-rise-of-kunark-tradeskills-diaries-3/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dana Massey Legacy Author]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[EverQuest II: Weekly Developer Diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[developer journal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[domino]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emily taylor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[everquest 2]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[expansion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rise of kunark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sony online entertainment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tradeskills]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eqii-rise-of-kunark-tradeskills-diaries-3/</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="v1PageContent"> <p>Emily &#8220;Domino&#8221; Taylor gets back to work with two more entries in her series of journals that focus on her role on the design of EQII&#8217;s tradeskills. The game is rapidly nearly the deployment of its next expansion, Rise of Kunark.</p> <p>A special note to the entire SOE San Diego team whose office and homes are close to the California wildfires. Our thoughts are with you.</p> <hr/>  <div style='text-align: center;'><strong>EverQuest II Dev Diary: Tradekills #3<em><br />Written by Emily &#8220;Domino&#8221; Taylor (Game Designer, EQII Tradeskills)</em></strong></div> </p> <p><strong>Wednesday, October 3, 2007</strong><br />Got that &#8220;eat your brains&#8221; song Rijacki sent yesterday stuck in my head this morning &#8212; possibly appropriately inspirational for populating a zone like &#8220;Shard of Fear&#8221; but unfortunately I was planning out tradeskill reaction arts, so it was just slightly disturbing.  There seem to be a few different ways technically to get the arts upgrading automatically, and Aeralik was very helpful in suggesting a few alternatives, but when I tested it out on a few the examine text didn&#8217;t seem to display in an ideal manner.  It may be an artifact of the way I was structuring them using a system designed to work off adventure level, but forcing it to look at tradeskill level instead.  Aeralik was busy for most of the afternoon so I&#8217;ll check in with him tomorrow and see if he has any other suggestions that might display better; if not, it may be possible to submit a code request to get it to work the way I want.</p> <p>Today being Wednesday (how did that happen already, I ask myself) we had a design team lunch, at a Thai place this time.  We placed our orders and they asked us how hot we wanted them, on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 was the hottest.  I picked pad thai at what I thought was a safe rating of 3, but it turned out to be definitely borderline.  I&#8217;m such a wimp when it comes to spicy food, but I wasn&#8217;t the only one who&#8217;d ordered a 3 and was struggling a bit!  Except MissDoomCookie, who ordered 6 and said she could have happily gone hotter.  Next time I think I&#8217;m going for a 1!</p> <p>After lunch I checked my bug queue to see whether anything was urgent and was horrified to discover that from yesterday&#8217;s 40 bugs, I was up to 115.  I spent the afternoon bug fixing &#8211; some were urgent-ish but most were fairly minor things such as rare recipes returning a few common harvests as a byproduct if you failed to make pristine, which shouldn&#8217;t happen but is hardly going to kill anyone or seriously imbalance anything.  Because of the way QA had done the testing, however, every recipe book that had this problem was logged as a separate bug, so instead of 1 bug saying &#8220;alchemist advanced level 70-79 recipes are returning ferrite as a byproduct and should not&#8221; I had 10 separate bugs, one for each book &#8212; so it wasn&#8217;t quite as bad as it initially looked.  I managed to get the bug list down to 70, which is still lots, but a good start.  Things like typos I&#8217;m really not that worried about right now.  That took me well through the afternoon however and into the evening and I was feeling a bit cross-eyed by the time I headed home.  I really don&#8217;t know how it got to be Wednesday already, and still so much to do in the week and in the expansion!   </p> <p>Tonight a friend&#8217;s been shooting me all sorts of old &#8217;80s videos on YouTube while I&#8217;ve been trying to work, so tonight&#8217;s contemplation of tradeskill reaction arts has been set to the music of The Pet Shop Boys, A-Ha, Culture Club, and other people with very big hair.  Hmmm, brain-eating zombies in the morning and &#8217;80s icons in the evening, it remains to be seen what effect this will have on the overall outcome of the reaction arts!  Woodworker art &#8220;Rhyme &#038; Reason&#8221;: +15 durability, -10 progress, and +10% hair size&#8230; maybe not.</p> </div> <div class="v1PageContent"> <p><strong>Friday, October 5, 2007 </strong><br />I&#8217;m not quite sure what happened to the week, I swear it should only be about Tuesday, maybe Wednesday at the latest.  Feels like I blinked and missed a week.  It&#8217;s been incredibly hectic this week, and I thought I was busy before!  But with just a couple of weeks to go till we have to finalize all the content, everyone is flat out busy.  There are so many things I need to be doing at the moment that I don&#8217;t even know where to start sometimes.  I&#8217;ll get started on one thing, discover something else that needs doing before I can finish the first thing, then discover something else that needs doing before I can finish the second thing, and so on recursively until it ends up time to go home and I have 1,397 changed files to check in but still haven&#8217;t managed to complete the thing I started doing first thing in the morning!</p> <p>Yesterday we had a lunch time playtest, which means that instead of us hunting down our own lunch, they ordered in sandwiches for us and we spent lunch playing certain zones.  Most people were in Kylong Plains testing out the new expansion content, but one group which included me did another run-through of the Shard of Fear which is due out with the next Game Update.  I have to say the zone looks fantastic, graphically, and people who were familiar with the Plane of Fear in EQ1 will definitely have some reminiscent moments when they see the place.  After we finished our playtest, we all had to write a summary of what we did, what we liked, what we thought could be improved, and any bugs we came across.  This helps the designers actually working on those zones to identify possible problem areas, and I also find it just generally interesting to read everyone&#8217;s comments.  It lets me see how different designers approach a zone and what features they look for and highlight.  It&#8217;s particularly interesting seeing what some people spot that I completely missed, or maybe didn&#8217;t miss but didn&#8217;t find worth commenting on, and vice versa.  As tradeskill designer, I haven&#8217;t actually designed any zones myself nor do I expect to be doing so in the near future, so it&#8217;s also kind of a glimpse into a new area of design from what I&#8217;m used to.  (If I can really claim to be &#8220;used to&#8221; anything, having only been here 6 months and still quite the noob.)</p> <p>Theoretically this week I&#8217;ve been looking at the tradeskill reaction arts, and I have got a good start on them, but I got sidetracked into fixing a bunch of bugs and also getting a start on the tradeskill writs for level 70-80.  So far this has involved filling out a gigantic spreadsheet full of item file names and recipe file names.  I have all the basic recipes and items in there now but I still need to lay them out to match into the writs, and then figure out how to get the script to magically generate them.  This will probably take a while longer still.  I finished up the basic lists this evening at least so it&#8217;s a good start.  </p> <p>Tomorrow is Saturday and in the morning I play a RPG called Traveller with a bunch of people via an online client specially designed for RPGs.  The GM is a guy I met years and years ago in EQ1, we were in the same guild together (along with 2 other of the players in the group) and have kept in contact ever since. Traveller&#8217;s a space-based futuristic game and we&#8217;ve been playing it on and off for about a year now.  In the evening, I&#8217;ve been invited to join a Call of Cthulhu RPG campaign that&#8217;s just starting up (an in-person game this one).  Should be interesting, I haven&#8217;t played that before but the rules look interesting, and definitely different from Traveller!  In between I hope to get a bit more progress done on the tradeskill writs.  If I can get those mostly done over the weekend then next week I can aim to finish up the reaction arts.  Once those two things are done, I need to create some new items for the weaponsmiths, and add some more faction quests to Kunark, and create a couple more recipe books for special recipes, finish tweaking the tradeskill tutorial, add some fuel merchants into the Danak area of Jarsath Wastes, and then I hope &#8230; and pray &#8230; I will just need to focus on bug fixing.  Hm &#8230; all that in about 3 weeks.  Ambitious &#8230; but we shall see!</p> </div>]]></content:encoded>
					
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		<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">48387</post-id>	</item>
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		<title>EQII: Rise of Kunark Developer Diaries &#8211; Tradeskills, Part II</title>
		<link>https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eqii-rise-of-kunark-developer-diaries-tradeskills-part-ii/</link>
					<comments>https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eqii-rise-of-kunark-developer-diaries-tradeskills-part-ii/#disqus_thread</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dana Massey Legacy Author]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Oct 2007 01:25:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[EverQuest II: Weekly Developer Diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[developer journal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diaries]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[domino]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emily taylor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[everquest 2]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rise of kunark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tradeskills]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.escapistmagazine.com/eqii-rise-of-kunark-developer-diaries-tradeskills-part-ii/</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="v1PageContent"> <p>Emily &#8220;Domino&#8221; Taylor returns with her second installment of her EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark developer diary series. Every Tuesday, we bring you chronological focused behind the scenes diaries on a specific aspect of the expansion pack. This wee <a href="http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/devjournals/eq2diaries/2325-EverQuest-II-Weekly-Dev-Diaries-Tradeskills" title="" target="_blank" rel="noopener">and last</a> have focused on Taylor and Tradeskills.</p> <hr/>  <div style='text-align: center;'><strong>EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark Developer Journals<em><br />&#8220;Tradeskills&#8221; by Emily &#8220;Domino&#8221; Taylor (Designer)</em></strong></div> </p> <p><strong>Monday, October 1, 2007 </strong><br />Had a surprisingly fabulous weekend, as my ex-boyfriend surprised me for my birthday by arranging to fly my best friend from university, who lives up near Toronto, down to spend the weekend with me.  I hadn&#8217;t seen her in 4 years, so we had a great time playing tourist and catching up.  Of course, I made her try out EverQuest II while she was with me &#8212; she created a Fae fury and played around in the Nursery area for a while.  She&#8217;s not an MMO player, but I always like to stick the word &#8220;yet&#8221; on the end of sentences like that &#8230;</p> <p>After I dropped her back off at the airport on Sunday, I checked in to see how beta testing was going and discovered that a couple of the recipe books that were causing a crash to login screen last week, had (a) escaped the fixes I did last week &#8212; thought I caught them all, but grr, a couple slipped through!  And (b), were not just crashing the character to the login screen, they were in fact crashing the ZONE.  Since I&#8217;d placed the tradeskill beta buffer in Kylong Plains to sell the books, thinking the crashing was fixed, this was unfortunately resulting in Kylong Plains being a bit unstable as eager crafting beta testers bought all the books they could and attempted to scribe them.  Zoltaroth happened to be online and was kind enough to kill the beta buffer on Sunday afternoon as a short term preventative.</p> <p>Monday morning was therefore devoted to tracking down the couple of renegade books that were causing the issue, and ensuring they are fixed!  In the process I discovered a couple of other inconsistencies that needed fixing (mainly books scribing at the wrong skill level) and fixed those also.  Then it was time to look at some of the more irritating beta bugs that may be preventing the community that&#8217;s slowly developing on beta from testing things &#8211; in particular, recipes weren&#8217;t recognizing a couple of the harvested materials properly.  This turned out to be because (a) I forgot to check one file in, and (b) in another case, because I can&#8217;t spell.  All fixed and checked in now, but due to the schedule of updating the beta server, today&#8217;s fixes won&#8217;t be updated to beta server till Wednesday morning.  I feel bad about all the bugs that everyone&#8217;s suffering, though I guess it&#8217;s a normal part of being in the early beta testing process, and the player community is being very helpful and supportive in testing things and submitting /bugs and posting information on the forums.  Still!  Wouldn&#8217;t it be nice if everything were perfect the first time around?</p> <p>In Monday afternoon&#8217;s design team meeting it was announced we&#8217;re going back into crunch hours (mandatory 10-hour days Monday through Thursday) starting today.  I&#8217;ve actually been crunching already to get the recipe books done, so no big change in routine &#8212; tonight I&#8217;m watching Bridget Jones Diary on DVD with the French soundtrack while looking over tradeskill reaction arts.  (I don&#8217;t like the voice they chose for Bridget Jones in French, it sounds a bit too old; but the guy dubbing Hugh Grant&#8217;s voice is really good, almost the same as his real voice.)  It&#8217;s nice to be able to do some work from home when work needs to be done late; in my previous job as an IT manager, there wasn&#8217;t that much I could do from home, so I spent a lot of late hours in the office, and even a couple of complete nights.  I remember one night I spent setting up a new email server in Buenos Aires, where the operations manager and I stayed working long past when all the other staff went home, and were rather concerned that we had no idea how to call for a taxi when we needed one, since neither of us spoke Spanish.  Fortunately as it turned out, we ended up working so late it was 7am by the time we left and the early morning taxis were out and easily available on the streets outside.</p> </div> <div class="v1PageContent"> <p>I was looking through some old letters I wrote to family while I was in that position and I came across the following anecdote from work.  Completely true, I swear &#8212; not a &#8220;friend of a friend&#8221; urban myth, I genuinely had this happen and have actually held the laptop in question.  What I wrote in the letter is as follows:</p> <blockquote> <p>So this guy, one of our sales reps, had his house burgled. Being naturally somewhat paranoid for the next few weeks, he took extra care to hide anything valuable out of sight when he left the house. The next Friday evening, rather than leaving his laptop out on the table when he went down to the pub, he decided to tuck it out of sight. The first place that came to mind (god knows what was going through that mind) was &#8230;. the oven.</p> <p>So, he slides the laptop into the oven and heads down to the pub for Friday night drinks. Comes back some time after midnight, feeling rather hungry as you do, and decides to make himself a snack before going to bed. Turns on the oven to preheat it so he can put in a meat pie. Of course, he forgot the oven was not empty &#8230;.</p> <p>By the time he opened the oven to put the pie in, the laptop&#8217;s bottom was pretty melted, and the plastic came away from laptop onto the oven shelf like cheesy pizza strings. In the morning he cut away all the bits of melted plastic and, amazingly, the laptop still actually worked &#8211; so he didn&#8217;t mention it to anybody but kept using it. The catch that held the battery in was melted too, so the battery kept falling out, and the laptop wouldn&#8217;t latch closed either, and it was naked metal on the bottom of the laptop where the plastic had stuck to the oven, but it worked.</p> <p>It was only when he left the company and had to return the laptop that the true story came out, and I received a rather sad looking laptop with a melted hole in the bottom.</p> </blockquote> <p>Yes, tradeskills certainly represents a new set of problems and a new set of challenges &#8230; but sometimes as they say, a change is as good as a holiday!</p> <p>Monday morning also brought with it the traditional Monday morning tradeskill cookies for the EQII team &#8211; every couple of weeks I bake up a batch on the weekend and bring them in.  At first, it was a great way to lure people into my office to meet them, since sometimes it&#8217;s hard to get to know all the faces when people stay in their offices or cubicles focused entirely on their work.  By now, I&#8217;ve met most people on the team &#8212; or at least, all the ones who can be enticed by cookies &#8212; but it is still nice to bring them in and help people de-stress a little.  Gallenite made at least 4 visits and consumed at leats half a dozen cookies today; Ilucide, who is feeling particularly overworked at the moment, had 4 or 5; and Lotus, still hard at work finishing up the character art, took some back to his desk to last the afternoon.  It does occur to me that if I ever get a bad egg or something, I could wipe out the entire dev team with accidental food poisoning in just one day &#8212; let&#8217;s hope that never happens&#8230;</p> <p>Of course, if we believe today&#8217;s xkcd comic (link:  <a href="http://xkcd.com/323/)" title="" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://xkcd.com/323/)</a> (and I always believe what xkcd comics tells me) I should possibly be providing alcoholic cookies.  But that&#8217;s probably not appropriate in the workplace &#8230; or at least not till closer to the deadline!</p> </div> <div class="v1PageContent"> <p><strong>Tuesday, October 2, 2007 </strong><br />Today was supposed to be reaction art redesign day; however, I was only able to spend a couple hours looking at them (mostly spent making a spreadsheet of what they are now, and trying to get my head around the best solution for what they should be).  Around mid morning Haohmaru, aka Tim our lead environment artist, stopped by to let me know that I should browse through the placeable objects art has now completed for the Kunark zones and assemble a list of what I&#8217;d like to have globalized so they will be available as house items.  </p> <p>The objects haven&#8217;t been available for long and the zone designers have only just started placing them out there in the world, so I hadn&#8217;t seen most of them yet.  Some of them are pretty cool looking and will certainly make desirable house items.  He told me to pick about 30; but of course, by the time I had gone through all the folders, I had a list of closer to 60.  Then I had to make the tough decisions and try and thin that list down, and put them in order of priority.  I&#8217;m very keen to avoid the situation where a house item carpenters make ends up looking the same as a collection quest reward (as has occasionally happened in the past), so I have checked with Kander, the dev who is doing this expansion&#8217;s collection quests, and will be making his quest rewards for him at the same time as I make the Kunark furniture.  I&#8217;ve picked out some pretty cool looking stuff for his collections and I hope we&#8217;ll be able to get them all globalized, plus plenty cool stuff for the carpenters too.</p> <p>Rijacki popped up on my instant messenger this afternoon to send me a link which turned out to be the &#8220;eat your brains&#8221; song from Shaun of the Dead &#8212; she thought I might need some light relief.  Since I was a reasonably vocal part of the tradeskill community as a player before I was hired here, several of the other tradeskill-focused players including Rijacki, Calthine, and Niami already had my instant messenger address as we used to discuss tradeskill changes and happenings, and they&#8217;ve all been very supportive since I took the position.  And of course, I know that if I start doing something silly, there are three members of the player tradeskill community who know exactly where to reach me and will not hesitate to give me a sanity check!</p> <p>Back on the beta forums, I noticed Slippery, one of the beta community, had spotted that somehow sages didn&#8217;t have any inquisitor spell recipes from 70-80.  This was a bit mysterious, but further investigation revealed that somehow inquisitors had been left out entirely when the sage recipes were created.  So, another good portion of my afternoon was spent tracking down that problem, creating those recipes, and adding them in to the books.  QA are hard at work testing out the recipes also, but they hadn&#8217;t reached the sage books yet so that was a good catch.  They have, however, been working through the other books and in between the time I left the office (about 6:30) and the time I logged back in from home (about 7) I was horrified to find I had over 30 new bug notifications in my email.  </p> <p>My tradeskill apprentice, Olihin, has been hugely helpful in getting things like the quests finished up, and I&#8217;ve passed about half the bugs on to him also to start looking at.  It&#8217;s hard to imagine how I&#8217;d be getting through a lot of this stuff without the extra help from him, not to mention all the stuff QA does for us!  When I think back to old computer games I enjoyed as a kid, and realize only one or a small handful of people made the games, I&#8217;m amazed at how they managed to do it.  Admittedly they were far less complex than EverQuest II but I&#8217;m still pretty impressed.  I feel a bit overwhelmed when I just consider the amount of care and attention tradeskills alone need to have.  When I was just a player, I didn&#8217;t appreciate just how much work went into making every little aspect of a game.  I definitely have a much healthier respect for the quantity and quality of work done by everyone in the game industry now, whether or not I happen to like the particular game they&#8217;re making.</p> </div>]]></content:encoded>
					
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