You can read Solving Problems and Making Friends, Part I here! 

Unknown Territory (Week4)

As the final week of development began, I pulled on my floaties and jumped into the deep end of the pool. Even though I’ve been working on LOTRO for over 3 years now, I had never had the time or opportunity to delve into the details of our Quest System. So this was both exciting and terrifying.

Building on examples from previous quests, I began creating the new quests, associated items, NPCs and instance-related files I would need to call my project complete. It was around this point in time that Game Systems time was available to me to aid in the creation of my reward scheme (as I mentioned earlier, the calculations in our loot system hurt my head and I was quite happy to hear they were willing to assist).

One thing you learn when developing risky features is to keep your work local – which is a lesson I learned while building Angmar and one I am glad to have had now. While the set up of all my quest-related work was simple, the fixing and debugging of it made sure that it randomly bounced between working and not as I tweaked aspects of my quests.

Once everything was in working order, my content was packaged up and sent off to our Qualitative Test team to get their feedback and opinions on my efforts.