Editing Gaerlan: Design to Going Live

{{Turbine 2001
 |  Link = <nowiki>http://acdm.turbinegames.com/featuredarticles/?action=view&article_id=135</nowiki>
 | Title = Gaerlan: Design to Going Live
 |  Text = By Orion and Alicia Brown<br><br>
Design: Orion and the ACLive Team<br>
Implementation: Zontar, Speed, srand, gBro and Orion
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Intro<br>
The September 2002 Event, named Verdict, featured one of the most complicated and involved quests that has ever been released by the ACLive team. The Gaerlan quest led players through a series of dungeons filled with elemental creatures, culminating in an assault on Gaerlan, an Empyrean bent on wiping out all Isparians.
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A quest of such epic proportions required a high level of coordination and extraordinary efforts of every team member. With Zontar on vacation for the majority of the implementation period, Orion stepped up to the plate to deliver a quest which the players of ACDM are unlikely to forget; indeed, many of them have already described this as one of the best quests in the game. Here now is a behind the scenes look at the work that went into creating the Gaerlan quest.
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Phase 1: High-Level Design<br>
At the outset, Orion says he was exhilarated yet nervous about how his first truly epic quest was all going to work out. Of particular concern was the fact that this quest needed to be duplicated and modified for repeat versions. Orion presented his ideas three weeks before implementation then began working nights to come up with quest basics.
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"It began with a conversation in a lunch-time car-ride," Orion explained, "Huxt, Speed and I were talking about what we could do to make this quest different. I had a mild epiphany when we got back. I stood up, went to the center of the design area and said, "I want to make this quest unique! I want more than the typical quest. I definitely want puzzles - but no jump puzzles, because people don't like jump puzzles.'"
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During numerous meetings (the bread-and-butter of making content), the team discussed what would be fun and how things they proposed would work. They agreed that Orion's flow would work, but expressed considerable concern about it being so big. Further brainstorming evolved into the creation of the Proving Grounds.
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"A host of ideas that came from that session might be used in future quests," Orion said. "We drew from movies, role-playing and wherever else where we'd seen puzzles used. Then I went back to my desk and began the process of writing the mechanics for these puzzles."
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Phase 2: Specification Design<br>
The Specifications Document (spec) began three weeks before implementation at 40-odd pages of mechanics. One week later, the mechanics were nailed down to 45 pages but the spec was monstrous at 190 pages. The final week prior to implementation, the spec had reached massive proportions -- 290+ pages!
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When implementation began the spec was well over 300 pages long. By the end, it was trimmed to 278, whereupon it was catalogued and filed away. All the while, the team continued to finish up the implementation for August and run Live Ops through the month.
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[[File:Entry80plus.jpg|left|100px]]
Phase 3: Implementation (Creation)<br>
Now the elements outlined in the spec needed to be turned into reality. The work was divided between members of the team and they began to tackle the tasks one at a time. To start with, they needed to blast an area of the landscape away into a large crater where the downed Citadel could be sequestered.
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Zontar had returned from vacation and became instrumental at this point. "Until I returned, I was only in a support role," he recalls. "But once I got back, my specific tasks were to create the impassable mountainous crater around the Citadel and, later, to help with dungeon decoration, plus a number of other tasks that are quickly becoming one big haze."
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Speed created all 180 event-controlled generators, as well as the Riddle Statues, and painstakingly worked out the details of the Rolling Ball of Death.
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"I did a lot of behind-the-scenes work for the Gaerlan Proving Grounds to help Orion get the huge Gaerlan Quest in," Speed said. "The team really pulled together for the quest and shared a lot of the work or else it would never have been possible."
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[[File:gswordconcept.jpg|left|100px]]
Huxt and gBro were responsible for crafting the art, including: ruined versions of the Citadel; all the new weapons, armor pieces, items, robes, magic items; the balls of death; floor pieces; unique looks for NPCs, including the Phylactery and Nuhmidira; undead versions of Gaerlan; the new creature skins; the door of doom pillars, texts and
the Harbinger. No small number of tasks.
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"The concept for Gaerlan's sword," gBro explained, "came from the mind of Orion, mostly, since he gave me a fairly detailed description of what it should look like. Basically a black hilt with a blood red blade - and it was a "Human Slayer." So, of course I got all excited! I drew the concept right after the meeting, scanned it in, colored it in Photoshop and sent it to the team. It was approved and I went into modeling it. Players receive the sword after defeating Gaerlan. They're not able to wield it but they can hook it, so they can display it to all as proof that they defeated Gaerlan."
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[[File:gsword.jpg|right|100px]]
Srand provided much-needed technical support while also addressing code fixes that enabled the team to achieve more with this quest than they had with any before -- as well as juggling bug fixes, from tinkering and figuring out the imbue systems. She especially remembers correcting the bug in the Phylactery - which was suppose to deliver rewards to worthy players - but failed to do so, due to not having enough "strength" to hold the objects it was creating to give them.
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"I was useful here," mused srand, "because instead of trying to figure out what was going wrong just from the Phylactery's behavior, I was able to go into the code and see what conditions could directly cause that kind of behavior. The problem was, the NPC kept right on going, so the creation of the object was good (or it would have aborted the entire script) - but it never handed the object over. Looking at the code, I saw that the object created just fine, then deleted when the NPC couldn't handle it because it was overburdened - that didn't interrupt the script. "
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Orion handled the writing of the spec, creation of the lore pieces, flavor, dungeon building and decoration, play balance and the new Phylactery (a modified NPC), all of which had to be "specced" before they could be implemented. He also came up with a most elaborate flow chart to document the flow of the quest - a first for him. In addition, he placed and positioned each square in the dungeon individually and then decided on the placement of the traps with them.
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Phase 3: Implementation (Testing and Fine-Tuning)<br>
At this point, most of the items in the documentation had been created. After seeing the effects inside Dereth, the team began testing and fine-tuning the results. Every morning the team's internal tester, The Wumpus, would send the latest build of the game to Microsoft (MS) Test and they would all begin hammering away, creating items, making sure everything was to spec and that they all worked. When MS received the copy of the flow chart, 11 pages across, they printed it and began to follow it along their test routes. Turbine's team did the same. Only recently has Orion pulled it off the wall where it hung during this testing phase and gotten rid of it.
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The Wumpus was invaluable to the process, given that he is an AC player and so was familiar with the varying levels of the game and was thus able to assess the growing quest for balance and difficulty. Each day he would send Orion updates on errors he had found and allow him time to fix them.
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Three weeks later the team was at their milestone for having the monthly event ready for final pass testing, including the first leg of the Harbinger quest. They were a bit behind, but they pressed on with confidence that they would meet their goal. Speed and Orion spent a few really late nights at the office or, in Orion's case, overnight to make sure their confidence was justified. Zontar had returned and was already helping out by getting the team on track for October, as well as assisting Orion with additional dungeon decoration and miscellany.
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Internal play days began. Each of the parties went through the quest at the different levels, found bugs, squashed them and moved onward. One week later they reached freeze and were done on time.
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Two days after that, they found a bad bug that broke the freeze. It was fixed, however, and the quest went live - while the team held their collective breath.
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Phase 4: Going Live<br>
There were no problems with the quest when the team conducted its tests - all of the events worked correctly from start to finish. In the live world, of course, there are human variables that virtually ensure that things will not work quite so smoothly. Neither Turbine's nor MS's testing had caught a mountain adjacent to the valley's mountain where a player could, if skilled enough, leap onto a ledge that they would not slide from. Strike one. The team had an emergency conversation with Ken Karl to devise a solution. He approved the Live-Ops to clear people away from the valley.
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With that underway, the countdown began. Next, Orion discovered that the event triggers were missing! An emergency phone call to a sleeping and jet-lagged Ken Karl in Seattle, frantic emails to the team on Saturday morning and another call to Turbine's new Producer Tim Holman - and Orion had the okay to manually trigger the events.
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Just when it seemed things were starting to work well, the team found out there was an issue with the way the Live worlds worked with the controllers for the quest after the first failed attempt on Gaerlan. For the rest of the month Orion had to trigger the portal events and world emotes for the quest. This, however, was remedied in the next month's patch.
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Oddities<br>
The players have a penchant for wanting to change the world - and had very nearly done so at one point. When they began to rally behind Gaerlan, the team was caught in an awkward and unanticipated situation.
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How could they complete the story arc if they didn't destroy the last crystals? The team reasoned that they would need to reenact the assault on the Shard of the Herald that took place during the Bael'Zharon story arc. So they prepared to suit up and make a run at destroying the remaining crystals.
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The Live-Ops team consisted of Orion, Speed, Huxt, Keth, Zontar, srand, Kujo and a few others.
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The citizens of Dereth saw Elysa and her royal guard, Aun Hareltah, Lord Kresovus, Martine and Gaerlan enter the world. Elysa and her royal guard, Aun Hareltah and Lord Kresovus began their assault, knowing that they had to destroy the crystal.
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On Darktide, there were several crystals to destroy. Elysa and her party were assisted, ironically enough, by a band of intrepid heroes. Within half an hour they took down the six crystals that needed to be destroyed, then left the world.
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Harvestgain and Thistledown were very different. On Harvestgain they had assistance from several different people. It was an amazing fight. They held the room where the crystal sat for nearly 15 minutes while they slowly whittled away at the construct. They had all but won when a final wave of defenders loyal to Gaerlan pounded through and, with the aid of a betrayer (who until seconds before had been assisting them), were defeated and sent to their lifestones. Elysa and her party had lost Harvestgain.
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Thistledown was more prepared for the assault and showed it right away. Elysa and her party's first attempt to get into the portal was thwarted, as was their second. On their third try, they made it through the portal and held the first room for a moment - but then, as they drew closer to the crystal, they were sent back to their lifestones. Finally Elysa and her party relented on Thistledown as well.
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So what were they to do? The team had lost. Did that mean the story arc was forever altered?
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Well, actually, no. The truth is that the team had prepared for this possibility and had mechanisms in place to account for those worlds that sided with Gaerlan. There was still time to destroy the crystals before the players gained access to Gaerlan's Citadel! Defenders were caught unawares when they heard the final crystal shatter. With that destruction, the hopes of seeing what could have been were shattered along with it.
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The team is not planning on ever telling how this was accomplished.
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Conclusion<br>
In all, the quest was a daunting and draining task -- but one which this team pulled together to create. Each person contributed much to make this event the huge success it was, despite the minor problems encountered. Without everyone pitching in the way they did, the quest would have flopped completely - which, naturally enough, was something Orion did not want to see happen.
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"Personally, I still think that the best quest put into this game is Aerlinthe," Orion said later. "But at the same time, there's a little piece of me that's very pleased and gratified that players seem to rank this as one of the best, perhaps the second best, ever to be placed into the game. A little pride wells up, but it's mutual pride 'cause this team did so well on this!"
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