Odyssey Developer's Journal #2

A busy day at the harbor of Gallomarket. With recent events in Balfiera routing more ship traffic through the already bustling port city, the dock hands hurriedly work to ensure that all things in the harbor are up to snuff. There are many adventures to be had.

Working the last couple weeks on two particularly challenging quests implementation wise resulted in me hitting a bit of a "limit break" personally. With the stress of some business challenges and RL stuff along with being the sole implementation team member while fighting through these challenging quests had be almost throwing in the towel. I made an appeal to my team and several stepped up to encourage me and to try and help alleviate my work load a little by learning some basic quest implementation. They set up a "self teach workshop" where several folks showed up and worked on some side projects and went through the Creation Kit wiki tutorial on quest making to get a handle on the basic ropes. The effort and gesture was much appreciated to be sure.

In this effort to reduce work load we decided that some of the content planned for Act 1 will be spread out over future acts instead. A few dungeons and points of interest felt a little "shoehorned" into act 1 frankly and this actually gives us a better chance for better development of that content in future acts and even offers better tie in's. This is an ongoing series with open world travel back to these places we are going, so why not take full advantage. This also means that some elements playing out in Act 1 can occur more gradually and immersively as the overarching story progresses. Some interiors were retired for later use as mini-excavation locations in future acts for the explorers, and some quests simply moved to future acts because they made better sense there. Many of the retired spaces in Act 1 will be picked up as mini excavations by explorer members in future acts.

After these changes I am actually feeling pretty optimistic about the current state of quest implementation and think we'll be able to make solid strides and see an end goal in view more than before.

After a couple mishaps this week resulting in having to rebuild several complex dialogue flow charts in the CK, I came out with a new method of organization after having an option in the CK pointed out to me that I never noticed before which made the process much cleaner and easier. Having just finished the basic build out of the last of the two major side quests here, I have then began the initial pass of testing.

Generally with quest implementation I read through the quest docs exhaustively to get as solid of an understanding of the flow as possible and work closely with the writer of said quest to ensure I have a full understanding and clarify any iffy points along the way. 

Once that's been managed I begin implementation of the quest. In standard vanilla this is a straight forward linear process but in Odyssey, leaving most quests with branching options or conditional dialogue leaves a lot more moving parts to account for and more to keep track of mentally (thank goodness for dry erase boards). I tend to implement from start to finish until I hit a branch or diversion point and follow one option through to the end before coming back and implementing each branch that occurs. 

Once the fully laid out quest is in place I do my first phase of development debugging in game as I test the quest. This isn't what I would term "play testing" at this point but rather more an initial pass to make sure all the intended parts are hooked to from start to finish in every contingency. Later down the road people can then fully test it and stress test for any holes or hiccups.

I'm pretty much at the half way point of the developer debugging of the current quest and at the end of the day it's nice to wander through, testing a quest and seeing how lively and all a bustle Gallomarket is becoming with all the comings and goings of the imperial navy and the citizens going about their daily routines, all while the nearby Thalmor at the embassy look down in disgust as they are prone to doing.

In forward planning news, this week's team meeting got a bit heated between a couple members as we struggled through to understanding future development of the worldspaces in future acts within the context of writing and world design. We are intending on taking a little more of a "forward planning" approach especially since the boundaries of the worldspaces we are working with have much more area than we are actually intending to develop for. So determining the footprint of where we are staging things and how to immersively boundry them in is critical. So using the great Tamriel height map resource, we are laying down worldspaces that center around our key areas of activity and then defining a clear boundary to develop within. The level design team will create any of the canonical and required places based on what has been written for and the writing team will develop side quests that are designed for specific locations within the boundary. Anything on the map that has no content for it within that boarder area will be culled, built as ruins or otherwise repurposed in a more simple and streamlined way to maximize the focus on the level design team. It ultimately goes back to our standard banner of "quality over quantity".