2010 Yule Festival

By: Lauren 'Budgeford' Salk

The Yule Festival was an enormous undertaking this year. It has been controversial in its reception during testing as it takes the festivals in a new direction for LOTRO. This festival looks different, feels different, and is different. It is not the usual event-in-a-box that we have been making again and again since my first festival, in which we introduced the Hedge Maze. This one is bigger, more immersive, and doesn’t just layer more content on top of the existing festival areas. It features a number of quests, a story, a moral choice at the end, and several mini-games all contained in a new wintry region.

Phase I - Planning

The first phase of Yule Festival Planning was the most difficult for me to date. Festival production is on one of the most aggressive schedules we have for LOTRO, and is often subject to a very squeezed release milestone. Festivals require four solid updates per year that leave me time to get all of the work in, get the art planned and requested, etc. Sometimes our updates don’t always work out that way; the schedules don’t revolve around festivals, so festivals need to be planned according to how much time we have left to put into developing them.

For this update, I was working simultaneously on both newbie Ered Luin and the Yule Festival for an already tight schedule. Newbie Ered Luin was my priority, and I needed to scale down my ideas for the festival in order to make sure I had time for everything. This wasn’t a terrible thing, because the Yule Festival already had the Bar Fight, which seemed to go over very well last year. (By the way – the Bar fight is coming back! It’s not in this festival, but it will appear again soon.) No new “events” was the goal. Events (by our definition) are things like the drunk races, the hedge maze, the shrews, the Haunted Burrow – mini-games. No matter how simple we think they will be, the events always end up being crazy, requiring new tech, taking forever, breaking and needing re-designs at the last minute, and anything else that can go wrong.

The hard part here was actually coming up with the inspiration to do something new that wasn’t a game-in-a-box. I hit one of my worst creative blocks to date at this job. I was an artist before coming to Turbine, and I remember having a creative block for nearly two years. Scared that this was happening again and already losing time, my lead (who is awesome) set up some brainstorming meetings with other members of my team. It was Jeff Libby (aka Made of Lions) who had the wonderful idea of doing a mini-region for Yule. It was perfect!

A region meant that we could put snow on the ground and do landscape-style quests, the tried-and-true bread-and-butter of any MMO. This type of content is much less risky and time-consuming than making a new kind of mini-game. Easy! No problem! Perfect! And in the meantime, we got the good news that for the first time since I started on the content team, another designer from another project had some spare time and was going to help by adding something to the Yule Festival.

Paul “Rhidden” Simon was brimming with crazy ideas and crazy skills to back them up. With the Bar Fight, Rhidden’s ambitious event, and this new region of light festival questing, I was sure that this Yule Festival was going to come together perfectly and harmoniously.

Phase II – Development

Naturally with the belief that everything was going to be just dandy came the inevitable fall of the Other Shoe. Why must there always be another shoe? With time flying by and work on Ered Luin taking a lot of energy already, I began to flesh out the new mini-region -- the town of Winter-home nestled in a valley called Frostbluff. Do you know what isn’t really easy, no matter what? Making new content in a game, even if it is a simple region. I have high standards for the quality of my work, and I’m never satisfied with so-so or boring quests. Not everything I make can be a great success, but I need to try my best to make things as good as they can be. Early on in the development of Winter-home, I felt that the content was boring. I worried that it was just another Othrikar or Combe, so I started thinking about… events! The very things I intended to avoid in the first place.

I’ll use this section to talk about the different pieces of content in Winter-home:

The Snowball Fight

The Snowball Fight came first. It was simple, and I thought it would be a fun diversion. It will serve as a way to fill up this big region and give players a reason to hang around when they were done with their daily quests. It is an alternate way to acquire barter tokens and ramp up deeds in Frostbluff.

It did come with a few logistical problems. When we were implementing the event, the snowball fight was impossible to test beyond ensuring that the skills worked. On our own computers we can generally only dual-client, so in a competitive game it is very difficult to gauge how something should be balanced. It was our QA team that saved the day here, along with wonderful feedback from Beta. Our QA testers did a wonderful job of making sure this event got plenty of attention so that it could be polished before release.

The Eating Contest

The Eating Contest came after I had a sudden panic and believed that a Snowball Fight, a Theatre Event, and a handful of standard quests wouldn’t be enough to make this area feel like a festival. At this point my workload was making me swiftly lose my sanity. The Eating Contest was created in the same vein as Ale Association and Inn League quests.

World & Art

Ross “Iceman” Glover was the world builder for this phenomenal space. Our art director once again came through with his vision for a beautifully decorated winter festival, giving us brand new assets to place. Ross then spent a long, long time fighting with me over the space while we were both trying to implement and bugfix at the same time.

Pictures are worth much more than words, so here is my tip-of-the-hat to Ross and to the art team for once again making a beautiful and captivating festival atmosphere.

Quality Assurance

We’ve been using a development process for a while that has us working very closely with QA and I’ve never remembered to include them in my dev diaries. When I think about the people who have contributed, I usually walk through and look at the area and remember which facet came from which person or team. I have so far managed to forget to think of one of the most important contributions, which is the LACK of something: bugs. A few bugs always get through because everyone who works on a game is human, but QA has been doing a great job of catching the serious issues long before it’s time to actually ship the final product.

The QA rep who works most closely with me right now is Mara, and Mara is awesome. Mara was thrown under the festival-testing bus for the Fall Festival and has been loyal to festival work ever since. She deserves much sympathy for doing this job. Festivals are VERY difficult to test. (I remember this from when I was a tester.) As I’ve mentioned, festival design always scribbles outside of the lines and breaks rules – otherwise, the quests would be “Go kill 10 boars and collect 8 flowers.” Mara is usually the first to notice any raging fires and she also boldly goes looking for the hidden fires that will raze everything to the ground as soon as everyone looks the other way. On the occasions when you’re having fun in LOTRO and nothing is going wrong, QA probably logged at least 20 bugs on that instance and made us fix them all.