To commemorate writing about death, I killed all of the pictures that I was going to use in this blog post.
Death can be a controversial aspect in story telling. There are a plethora of ways that death can be done poorly; many of which I myself am guilty of. However, I have my own policy about death in stories which I try to adhere to, which is this: the dead don't come back to life. There are a few caveats to this rule and a bit to explain about, but the long and short of it is that the rules of death in your story can seriously impact the believability and tension in a negative way if you're open to the idea of people coming back.
First off, why do I believe that people who die in a story shouldn't come back? Mainly because characters who return from death tend to cheapen it for "the rest of us". If someone is very clearly dead, and then they return, then that opens the door for everyone to return. You then lose your tension, at least when the threat of death is on the table. Is someone captured by a villain? Don't worry, we'll just bring 'em back to life, no harm, no foul.
This is especially true if a person's death was supposed to mean something or be very impactful. You remember that character's life and the way in which they died, the death is used as a tool to motivate other characters and to move the story forward. However, if that character then returns (looking at you, Superman), it cheapens their death and makes all of the emotion meaningless; going forward, your readers won't take any other deaths seriously because they know that at any point that character could be brought back to life. There's no permanence in the actions of the author.
This is why a return from death would have to be done very carefully. Gandalf in Lord of the Rings is a great example. He was thought to have died, but actually returned specifically because he's freaking Gandalf. No one else could have done this, so the risk is still there when Aragorn is in danger or when anyone else is in danger, because they can be killed. However, if someone comes back in a way that seems can fit multiple people, you have the problem of, "well, this new character was revived, why not use this method on this other character who is dead?" "Because." "Because...?"
The question of "why" in this case is also important. You should rethink things when you find yourself coming up with very complicated explanations as to why a method of resurrection would only work for this one character. The more complicated your explanation, the more holes can be poked into it for other characters, although likewise, the simpler an explanation, the more unbelievable it would be. There needs to be a good middle ground; Gandalf came back from the dead because of the nature of who he is. Not so simple, but not complicated in the sense of, "well it was the right time of the month, the moon was in the right place, etc."
Returning from death is only one part of the problem - killing a character in a proper way is another. This is something that, anyone who is familiar with my writing in City of Heroes will know, I'm very familiar with. When you're trying to kill a character off for good, their death has to be believable. I was sad about a certain character's death in LOST, but then when I thought about it, I felt, "wait, that could have EASILY been avoidable". That bit there takes the sting out of it a bit. If you want someone to feel for a character's death, you can't have that "oh man they're so stupid" idea. On the other hand, however, if that stupidity is due to an inherent character flaw, i.e. pride, lust, etc., then their death is tragic. It goes from a, "they could've easily avoided that" to, "they could've easily avoided that... if that person wasn't the way they were."
Statesman and Sister Psyche's deaths are ones that I think about a lot; not in a, "their faces haunt my dreams" way, but in a way of looking at how they could've been done better. I'll say it right now for everyone - in retrospect, their deaths could have been done better, but I am happy with how they turned out. The two of them show the difficulty with killing off powerful characters - how do you explain their deaths without opening up the, "but wait, they could have done...". I can't say that the ways I killed them covered all of that, but I did my best. This goes into my final point, actually!
When you're writing a character in a scenario where you want death to be taken seriously, ask yourself if there would be too many ways where they can "cheat" death. Sister Psyche is a great example - there are literally a ton of ways that she could have avoided her death, even with all my "but's" and "if's" put in there. How are you supposed to kill someone who can jump into other people's bodies at will without it feeling like a cop out? Even catching her by surprise isn't fully gratifying, as I saw from feedback from players. Granted, there were probably more holes I could have covered with her and Statesman's death, but it's an example that you should be careful about writing characters who are so powerful that you need long, complicated explanations for their deaths. You should keep your deaths and character's abilities simple and balanced.
In the end, death is a very powerful tool for story telling, but one that needs to be used wisely. Too much death makes people not care for characters, i.e., "oh there's a new character that I like, I bet they're going to die. Sigh.". This is something that I've been guilty of in the past. However, too little death takes out the tension if you're trying to use it as a tool. It's a very complicated subject, one that I admit I don't fully have a handle on (as I try to admit about most things on this blog - I'm not a master. Yet.). However, I'm looking forward to exploring the nature of it more and trying to understand better how to use it as a method of storytelling that is believable, useful, not cheap, and meaningful for the story. My last rule of death, and this is my own personal one, is that it must have meaning. A meaningless death for a major character is just depressing, in my opinion. That meaning doesn't have to be clear right away; it can take a while for it to settle in, but there should be a meaning to it.
This could also get sad. Also, this'll contain spoilers for LOST!
Going Rogue was an intense expansion to work on. I could write several blog posts about it, but I'll save that for later. We were in a situation where a lot of content had to get done in a short amount of time - we're talking roughly the equivalent of 44 story arcs in about 2-3 months. John "Protean" Hegner and I were on a break neck pace making these in what you would call crunch mode. We'd both get in at around 8 am and leave around 11pm or midnight, sometimes even 1 am. But, we did it because we were excited about what we were doing and knew it was going to be better than what was originally planned. One of my favorite memories during that time was working on the live and death of a character, Aaron Walker, who I had based a bit around Charlie Pace from LOST.
I was handed the responsibility and warden storylines in Neutropolis, mainly because I had written the power and crusader ones in Imperial City. Nate "Second Measure" Birkholtz didn't want me stuck in a rut where I wrote the more selfish content. I looked over Aaron Walker, who was set up as this smarmy hacker whose brain could move a mile a minute, making him a genius. I don't know why, but I instantly connected him with Charlie Pace from LOST. They were connected in the sense that both had a past where they basically messed around and didn't do many useful things, Charlie being a drug addict and Aaron Walker being a powerful hacker using his skills to just annoy people. Both characters, however, had the chance to put themselves to use - Charlie helping people get off the island, Aaron Walker helping the resistance fight the regime of Emperor Cole.
Everyone wants to fight the man.
Charlie's fate in LOST is that he was killed. Now, his death was something that really made me sad, but you also sort of saw it coming; there was a character who literally said that he was going to die. Charlie spent most of the season running from it, but eventually accepted his death in order to help save the people he cared about on the island. I looked at Aaron Walker and wanted to try to improve upon that, mainly since I thought Charlie's death, while being pretty intense, also had some holes in it.
I decided to set up Aaron Walker from the get go as having a death sentence; his brain was moving too fast due to experiments done onto him, so he would eventually die. After his main story arc, I wanted Aaron to periodically appear to help the player out, after all, he was the best hacker in an area that was primarily run by a scientist who relied on technology to keep things under control. I wanted Aaron to be fresh in the player's mind after his first arc and not someone they forgot, or else his death wouldn't further motivate the player to push on.
The hammer came down in an arc down the line where you're supposed to talk to Aaron Walker, but he's gone, kidnapped by the Praetorians because of all the help he's been giving the player character. The player runs to rescue him, but discovers that even through rescuing him, they can't save him; his brain condition has been overloaded by Neuron, meaning he will die at any moment. The key point here is that I didn't want his death to be meaningless, otherwise I'm just being a jerk and going, "haha, I killed your dude". I wanted Aaron to show the player that he wasn't really sad about his death, and that somehow, even with him dying, things were going to be OK. Here's the dialog from his death, thanks to the guy over at paragonwiki.:
Aaron Walker's eyes dart back and forth wildly, his arms shaking violently.H-hey... Character... didn't think I'd see you here... funny you're the l-l-last person I see, huh? N-n-neuron, he caught wind of what I did... what we did... I c-covered up for you, e-erased any track of you helping me. B-but Neuron... h-he accelerated my brain... it's m-moving t-too fast now. G-gonna... it's gonna snap any minute now... t-then I'm a goner... t-that's gonna be it for me. Hang on, Aaron, I'll get you help!Aaron reaches up to grasp your shoulder.It's too late! It's... too late... Aaron slumps down to the ground.No time... no time left for me... just minutes... seconds... then I'm done for... I'm not sad, though... I'm actually... kinda happy. Weird... huh? I was always... just doing random things, never really... fought for anything. But you and me... we did something good... right? We put a stop to some of Neuron's freaks... we saved James Noble... that was good... wasn't it? I got to finally do at least... one good thing for someone... before everything came crashing down. Just focus, Aaron, I need you to-Aaron cuts you off.I-I know why you're here. You're here to find out what's in that data. Aaron laughs sadly.T-that's how N-neuron got me... I found out everything... he zapped my brain... pulled it all out of there... but t-there's a guy, t-there's a guy who can help you. I-I wrote it down... before Neuron tapped my brain... Aaron hands you a piece of paper. On it is written the name, 'Steve Sheridan is here'Who is Steve Sheridan?T-that Dark Watcher guy'll know... Y-yeah... I know he's here. I'm the... I'm the best, r-remember? Aaron's body jerks wildly before coming to a rest.T-the T.E.S.T... T-they're coming... They're coming to get you... I'll... I'll do one l-last thing... one l-last thing to help you out... Just... just... remember me... okay... Character? R-remember me for... the g-good stuff I did... not for all the.. r-rotten... useless... things I did with... m-most of my life. P-please... please... Aaron Walker lets out one last gasp before his body lays motionless....I'll remember you, Aaron. And I swear, I'll make Berry pay for this.You hear the sounds of several PPD T.E.S.T bearing down on your position!
After this, a huge squad of soldiers ambushes the player. However, I wanted to give the players that last thing to remember Aaron Walker for, to remind the player's that he was, essentially, a jerk hacker who was on their side and enjoyed making jokes. As the soldiers were swarming in, I had several large Clockwork robots activate to help defend the player, who, if they were solo, would get absolutely destroyed by the ambushes. I had the Clockwork say the following phrase, which I'm still pretty proud of:
THIS IS THE LAST, BEST, FINAL PROGRAM BY AARON WALKER HIMSELF.EVEN IF PRAETOR BERRY KILLED HIM, HE'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO BE BETTER THAN WALKER.REMEMBER TO TELL THE WORLD. BERRY IS A LOSER. AARON WALKER WAS THE MAN.
So! There you have it. Aaron Walker. I wrote his finale probably around 10 or 11 o'clock at night, but I was spurred on almost through the entire Neutropolis arcs to get there. I won't say it's perfect, because it's not, but I'm pretty proud of it and I look forward to trying to outdo myself in the future after everything I learned writing for Aaron Walker, who was the man. Oh, and a fun fact, I listened to the following music as I was writing Aaron's final dialog, which ended up almost making me tear up. But I didn't, because I'm a strong person.
PS:
Something that people in the studio would sometimes tease me about was that we were going to bring Aaron Walker back from the dead. Or, really, anyone else who was killed in my stories (Statesman, I'm looking at you). This almost always got an infuriating reaction out of me, as I was a very hardcore believer in characters staying dead, something which I'll wrote a blog post about sometime.
Yelling, "Why won't anyone STAY DEAD?!" didn't help me look less villainous to people in the studio.
Sorry for the lack of pictures and the shortness of the post. Sometimes, a man needs to admit when he's defeated, and I admit now, I'm defeated. For now, I'll need to pull back my postings and keep it to 1 post a week, which will either be Monday or Wednesday, but most likely Monday.
Missing the blog post on Wednesday made me realize that I was trying to churn out too much stuff on a weekly basis, which was starting to hurt the overall quality of the posts, and I don't want that. Plus, I've been starting a side project of mine, which is working on a novel about super heroes. Why not? I'm pretty excited about it, as I've gotten to page... ten. ...sigh. But it's something I'd like to work more on!
In addition to that, the big thing in my future is MARRIAGE! My fiancee and I have been preparing for things, which is all very exciting.
So, basically what I'm saying is that I'll be pulling back the posts on this blog to be once a week instead of three times in an effort to up the quality of the posts and also to maintain my own sanity while preparing for marriage and working on some other things. I still have a list of ideas that everyone wanted to see, and I promise I'll do my best to make posts about as many of them that I (legally) can!
Many games come out with selling points that they will have difficult decisions for the player to make; Mass Effect 3, the Fallout series, Infamous, etc. (I could be completely wrong on this, but stick with me). However, making an honest to God difficult choice in a game can be, well, difficult. The choice can sometimes end up being too black and white, or such a useless choice that it doesn't even matter at all. What are some ways to make your choices difficult and still compelling? I'm going to use The Walking Dead series by Telltale Games as an example of difficult decisions done right. In an effort to keep my blog down from a novel, I'll be keeping this brief.
A key to difficult decisions is that said decision helps define your character. Another is that both choices come with good and bad consequences, along with the fact that the story can continue with either choice. Nothing screams "bad choice" than one that sends you to a dialog tree saying, "try again". One example from the Walking Dead is a dilemma between two factions in the survivors camp; one faction wants to leave the camp to go to a better area. Another faction wants to stay in the camp, as it has been proven to be safe and is the best way to survive. The game has set up that both people representing the ideas have their good points and bad points; neither one of them is the clear winner, or at least in my case, I didn't see a clear winner. Whichever choice you decide defines the character you're playing, Lee, both to himself and to the others. The choice is making a statement. That choice is then carried on, and people remember what you did, giving your choices more weight. Characters in the game bring it up later when other decisions are being made, making you realize your choices have an impact on the story.
Small talk or cursing someone out. You decide.
This is another big point with difficult decisions. If they're not going to impact your story at all, then they're not difficult; they're weightless. Of course, the player may have difficulty making the decision at that point, but when they realize that nothing has changed because of that decision... well, then the rest of their decisions in the game won't be taken seriously. The Walking Dead has a story that has to progress from environment piece to environment piece, so your choices don't necessarily change the story dramatically, but it changes how the characters in the story react to you. The game, being a very character driven story, feels hugely different when you know a character is reacting to you based off of the choices you made. Your choices feel important, and your future choices force you to pause and think, is this really what I want to be known for?
To wrap things up with this, either choice should lead to an equally interesting result. They don't have to be the exact same event, but the player shouldn't feel cheated that they made a specific choice. I can't remember the game I played, but I remember I made a certain choice that ended a mission. I found out if I had made the other choice, I would have gone on to another ten extra minutes in the mission to see a cool scene; needless to say, I felt like I had made the "wrong" choice because I didn't get to see anything cool. This can be a difficult thing to back as a developer, but it'll be rewarding to your players when they discover that both choices lead to something interesting.
This theory, much like my previous two theories, is far from complete; that's why it's a theory and not a law. It could very well be that I look back on this in a few years, months, weeks, or days and see that something I said was incomplete or outright wrong. But that's the beauty of learning - you're always going forward and trying to understand more. I love designing choices in games for players, and it's something I hope I can continue to do and to refine; it's never going to be perfect, but that's what makes things interesting - it can always get better! I hope people reading this impromptu trilogy enjoyed it and got something out of it. If not, I promise I'll do better in my next trilogy, which will help expand on the backstories of several major and minor characters in this series. I will also go back and edit these past series of posts to be done in the way I had originally envisioned it but could not deliver due to budget restraints.
Remember that great blog post I wrote about how to make the player feel villainous? Well, one method for making the player feel heroic is similar to that of being villainous. That method is choice. However, this is a bit more difficult. If you have a character base that is supposed to be heroic, i.e. the character is a super hero, then you don't want to necessarily give them the choice to do something outright evil. It wouldn't make sense from a story perspective that your superman would kill the old woman instead of rescue her. In my experience, I've found an interesting addition is what I call the "do the crazy thing" choice. I'll give an example.
In the Dark Astoria arcs (I'll make sure you're all tired of me referencing these), I had a mission culminate in two characters being held by a bunch of enemies. The situation was that they were going to kill both of them. However, they tell the player that, defacto, they'll just let one of the characters go free, but the other one dies instantly. The player is given another option, which is to try to save both characters. The stipulation is that the player has two minutes to save both, and if they don't succeed, both characters die. The choice here is take the sure answer and let one die, or take the risk of both of them dying to save them both.
At its heart, it's the choice between the safe answer and the dangerous one, where the dangerous one risks losing everything. The feedback from players regarding this was very interesting; many people found it thrilling to have to go against the odds to save everything and knowing that they chose not to take the safe route. It's what a hero does, right? If they're given the option to save person A or person B, their option is the third one, which is to save all the people, even if it means losing everything. Of course, this is totally up for debate - it might not be terribly smart to try to save both people. But in this case, super heroes are supposedly to defy every day "smartness" to do the incredible.
I'm looking forward to exploring more about this theory and using it in different ways. It's important that it's not just a theory of, "put a time limit to make them feel heroic", but that the essence is putting the player in a scenario with a safe answer vs. a risky answer. Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of creating a difficult choice, one that has a person chewing their nails over which is right and which is wrong. I'll cover that in my next post on Monday, which will probably be a bit longer too!
Antagonists in stories have always interested me, especially the ones portrayed in a way that you see they were just one choice away from being the hero. I think that's why I always liked running good content in City of Villains, particularly ones that handled villains who fit this characteristic. It also drove me towards a theory as to how you can make a player in a game feel villainous, specifically a player who is on a faction or side that is supposed to be villainous. The rub of the theory is that giving the player an option not to be villainous is the exact way to make them be villainous.
The idea behind it comes from a conversation I had with a friend in high school regarding the nature of sin (Catholics!). Basically, it boiled down to sin being something that is a choice to do what was evil when you knew what the good was. Very simply, this is what makes good villainous content - making your villain have an out to not do what's wrong, what's evil.
You know he's evil because of the goatee.
An example of this was from my very early arcs in City of Heroes. The player villain has a cloning facility that is being destroyed. They're fleeing from the burning wreckage and come across a dying clone. The villain has the option of killing the clone, saving the clone, or leaving it to die. Now, there were two ways of writing this. There could've just been one option, "kill the clone", since you're supposed to be the villain. The second way of doing this was providing choice. I believe by providing choice, the player character can feel more villainous by consciously choosing to do what is wrong; on the other hand, they could also feel really good by consciously choosing to do what is good. The feedback I received from the arc helped to emphasize this.
This isn't a be all and end all solution, however. Some games do well with making the player feel villainous, others need a more grey moral quandry, like we did for our expansion, Going Rogue. A lot of complaints have been levied against games for having black and white moral choices; this theory doesn't really solve that. What it does solve is when your game outright creates the "bad guy" race and is trying to cement those players who want to play them.
I'll actually be making this a three parter, something which I decided one minute before typing this sentence! The topic of making compelling/interesting choices in a game is one that's really fascinating to me, and I would hate to just leave it be. Tune in on Friday for my theory on making players feel Heroic, and on Monday for my theory on making difficult decisions in your game. See you all then! Maybe?
Find out next time if I still have anything useful to say!
Monthly content. It's the holy grail for MMO's. It's the thing that keeps players around between big releases. I haven't played many games that have done monthly content, so I'll only be speaking about my experience when we worked on monthly content in City of Heroes - specifically the Signature Stories. This isn't covering things like additions to the Paragon Store, bug fixes, etc. In a nutshell, monthly content can be incredibly rewarding if you can pull it off, but it's also very difficult to pull off, as it requires a very focused effort on the part of nearly every department in the studio.
PS: I'll be talking about the experience of writing the signature story arcs in a different blog post. If that was the reason why you were reading, well, thanks for increasing the post count anyway!
The Content Plan
First, we make it awesome. Then, we make money.
We knew we had to get everything done ahead of time to pull this off. We wanted to release 2 arcs a month for 7 months; this means that we should be roughly 3 months ahead of each arc. This was a big deal, as I was also working on finishing up content for our free to play release, as well as getting ramped up for Dark Astoria. Now, before anyone thinks I'm saying it was too much work, I wasn't - it was the amount that I personally agreed upon. However, there was a plan. In order to avoid work overload, we decided that we would try to split the arcs between multiple designers. I would do the first episode, another designer would work on episodes 2, a third designer would do episodes 3, 4, and 5, and I would come in to finish off episodes 6 and 7. This was done to avoid overloading my schedule and allow me to focus on major releases. As I was working on episode 1, I was helping the designer working on episode 2 get caught up up for how the story should go, what the plan was for everything, etc., making sure we were all on the same page.
Unfortunately, this didn't really work out. I took over work for episode two, as the designer who was supposed to work on that was too swamped with work to do it. While I was working on episode two, I was getting another designer, up to speed on where the story was heading, what the future plans were, what beats had to be hit, etc. He started work on episode 3 while I was wrapping up episode 2 and continuing to finish up work on our free to play release.
I was already feeling a little bit of the heat/realizing what I signed up for after working on taking what was the equivalent of 3 arcs from start to complete on top of everything else; I say 3 instead of 4, as the hero and villain arcs were roughly equivalent. I was relieved to get reprieve from the other designer doing arc's 3-5, although I was worried, as I realized we had a lot of ramp up time to get him up to speed for the arcs; this was not his fault in the slightest, as he was busy pounding away at other content. I wondered if that time would've been better spent if I had just done it myself, looking at the amount of time spent getting two designers up to speed for the arcs.
One day, Matt Miller called me in to a conference room. He said he had bad news for me. The designer who was supposed to work on episodes 3, 4, and 5, was not going to have his contract renewed due to the titanic commute (almost 2 hours) he had to take to work each day, and that I would need to get those arcs done. This is roughly what I looked like when I heard the news:
I'm Jim in this picture, not Pam.
I still had to do all my other work, as that all had to get done. However, I had now inherited what were essentially 6 story arcs on top of that. I realized that these arcs, along with the ones I was working on, needed to be handled smartly. I scoped down parts of the arcs that were a little crazy and focused on using core features that wouldn't break (hopefully). I also enlisted the help of Jeff Hamilton to help with some of the systems work for episode 3. I won't lie, of course, there were a few late nights, even with this, and the occasional coming in on the weekend - I specifically came in on a Saturday to finish the last mission for arc 4.
This was how the rest of the signature story content work fell into place. The scheduling wasn't pretty, but it was done. I wrapped up signature story 7 while also working on Dark Astoria. However, one thing I didn't account for was testing.
I found that my work on the arcs were never quite done. You never truly find all the bugs in content on the first pass, and since we didn't release it to the test server before going live (something that we changed for the second signature arc series), we ended up finding bugs that weren't caught the first go around. So, while I was technically working on arcs 3 and 4, I was also working on fixing arcs 1 and 2. And on the new player tutorial, and Atlas Park, and Mercy Island, and the Death From Below trial. I'm not saying this to garner sympathy from anyone or to pin the blame on producers; none of this was anyone's fault. I'm saying this to demonstrate to everyone the realities of monthly content development. It was a constant stop-go-stop-go of development, working on arc 5, stopping to fix some small thing in arc 2, starting again to do arc 5, stopping to work on Atlas, etc. etc.
This also involved a lot of falling on my part.
Now, this is all just purely from a design perspective. Next, we'll handle a tougher part: art.
The Art Plan
Myself, David Nakayama, and Andy Maurer had implemented what we called comic book loading screens for the new tutorial. We were trying to think of a way to convey the story of the tutorial without using a cutscene, as our lumbering beast of an 8 year old engine couldn't do that. I came up with the design for a comic book loading screen, which would be a versatile system that could be used in any mission or zone. Andy Maurer implemented it in lightning fast time, and David Nakayama did the art for it.
I mention all of this because we used the same system to do our loading screens for the signature story arcs. We wanted to have a comic book cover for all the loading screens in a particular issue. There was also a request that each signature arc contain at least one new piece of art. Finally, we had the two big death cutscenes to handle - Statesman and Sister Psyche.
The main issue with art is that it can take much longer than design work. This can kill you with monthly content; a brand new final room or completely new enemy can take an artist more than a month to do. We had to use our time wisely. We formed a strike team of artists to handle the workload for signature stories.
Character art: Jay Doherty
Environment art: Chris Gregory
Animation: Colin Brown
Effects: Keetzie and Leo Braz da Cunha
Audio: Adam Kay
Composer (Statesman and Psyche's death music): Jason Graves
Doesn't have much to do with party formation, but it's Suikoden, and Suikoden is awesome.
The very first thing we did was scope the art needed for the entire series. Custom rooms and entire characters took a long time to make compared to props, and this was all work being squeezed in to current schedules.
Environment art would make a new lava geo, lava islands, and a dark obelisk for arc 1. We put a bit more into this as it was the first arc, aka our season opener. We wouldn't use environment art again until arc 4, and there we were taking a room that was made for end game content and re-texturing it. Arc 5 was the next big work for environment art. We were going to take an existing map that was supposed to exist in Roman times and "modernize" it as ruins. This was also done to save time, as not a lot of new geo would have to be made. Finally, environment art would deliver the final set piece, which was a giant floating island in space. Luckily, the very talented Ryan Roth had already made the Earth for previous content which was cut, so this saved us a lot of time.
Concept art was entirely done by David Nakayama. He, myself, Matt Miller, and Nate Birkholtz would get together and talk about our ideas for each comic book cover. David began work on the comic book covers around the same time that I would begin work on the arcs. I can't comment about how hard the pieces were for David, but I know we saved him time by never requesting more than two characters on the covers. He also gave us a ton of support on character concept art, which you'll see up ahead.
Character art was a tricky beast. We wanted to do a new villain group, the Rulu-Shin, a new character, Marshal Blitz, and a final end boss, Rula-Wade. The Rulu-Shin and Rula-Wade were going to need concept art. Concept art is, in general, extremely helpful for artists. It saves them a ton of time, as they have right in front of them how the character or environment should look, so they can just get to work right away instead of doing research on what they need to do. We saved time with the Rulu-Shin by making 3 or 4 costume pieces for them instead of an entirely new character; I built the base of them with existing assets, then worked with David Nakayma and Jay Doherty on what I thought the new pieces should look like. Jay confirmed that it was all do-able with the engine, and David went to work busting out a concept by drawing the new pieces on top of the current in-game models. Jay then banged out the Rulu-Shin in no time flat. Rula-Wade was done in a similar way. We took an already made costume, Rularuu, and altered it. Jay also prettied it up while he was there since it was a little older.
Animations and effects were focused mainly on the death cutscenes for Statesman and Sister Psyche. This had to be done way ahead of time, as this needed approval from basically every important person in the studio. Our art lead at the time, Gilbert Martinez, and myself story boarded both cutscenes on a whiteboard around the time that I was working on arc 1. We worked with Colin Brown to make sure none of the animations were too crazy, then got it approved by Important People. Once we were set on that, we put the requests in. Animation was done around the time of arc 3, and the cutscene was all hooked up when I was barely working on arc 4. Keetsie and Leo came in and did the effects once they saw how the cutscenes were supposed to go. The final bit was audio.
This was not our audio booth. But imagine if it was.
We had a contract with Jason Graves ( http://www.jasongraves.com/) to compose new music for the signature arcs. Adam Kay and I sat down and talked about what the music pieces should be like for the cutscenes. Adam then spliced together existing pieces of audio behind the cutscene music to give Jason an idea of what we were looking for. In the meantime, Adam was also working on doing the ambient sounds for the cutscenes - footsteps, rain, thunder, etc. Jason nailed the feeling of the piece on his very first try and only needed to make slight alterations to it - this was a big help, as it saved us a ton of time on iteration for both pieces. Below is the piece done for Statesman's death.
Fun fact: I had been trying to get a piano piece into the game ever since I found out I could make audio requests. Adam Kay teased me at the end of this, "All it took to get your piano piece was killing off the main character of the game. I hope you're happy."
That just about sums about the art time for the signature arcs! They involved a lot of pre-planning and smart usage of art. We had to see how we could get miles out of work that wouldn't take months, and I think we pulled off the art really well. The last part of all of this is publising.
The Publishing Plan
Signature arcs were going to run separately from our regular content updates, meaning that we had to publish them to the live servers every month, followed by patches for them, if needed. We also needed to make sure that they were up properly on the Paragon Market. I wasn't too familiar with the amount of work done for this, but I know that it was no walk in the park for our team, as the arcs wildly deviated from our regular content schedule and were their own beast to handle. Towards the end, however, I know we worked our a good system for getting them in, especially when we decided not to worry about contacts being in the game ahead of time.
Overall Lessons
This was the first time that most of us on the team attempted to do monthly content. I can only speak for myself regarding the lessons that I personally learned. A lot of these lessons were also learned talking with Melissa Bianco, Matt Miller, and Nate Birkholtz as we were finishing up the signature stories and figuring out how to move forward with the process.
Become one with the monthly content.
First, if you're going to do monthly content, you need a small, dedicated team to get it done. This team should be focused purely on monthly content. It shouldn't be a large team, however, as monthly content needs to be lean and fast. Concept art, effects work, and programming should be considered a shared resource for this team, programming especially! Adding new code can be risky, especially on a month to month basis, so you'll want to be very cautious with the amount of new code you're doing. The team should consist of one designer, one environment artist, one character artist, and one QA tester. (This is purely my opinion, by the way.)
Second, play test early, play test often. We didn't have as many play tests as I would've wanted, and that's my own fault. Your core team should be playing what you've done several times throughout the arc's life. This'll help give your arc that polished feel and bring the team together in the project.
Third, don't keep the same team forever. Developing monthly content is taxing work, as you're working on smaller projects with a faster rate of iteration and production. It's nice to be able to catch your breath and work on content that has a bit of a bigger and longer scale. This part is the one that's more opinionated than based off of experience, as there are dangers with team swapping; we had switched designers for signature series 2, but still were shuffling around artists etc.
The main takeaway with this is that the team designing the big ticket content items that are delivered every 3 to 4 months in an MMO needs to be different from the team making your monthly content. Your monthly content guys are the ones helping to keep users around month to month. Your big content guys are the ones who will release something to help generate new users to come in. Then, those users are kept around by the monthly content guys. It's a circle of life! Unless you mess up, then it's a line of death. And no one likes lines or death.
