No More Horsing Around

Following the launch of Mines of Moria, we started discussing the prospect of giving mounts their own system and embarked on some basic investigation to understand the scope of what it might take. There was really no safe method of tacking on more features or special conditions to the channeling system to get everything we wanted from mounts. In fact, doing so would likely contradict the original intent of the channeling system and still not guarantee a satisfactory outcome. The decision we made was to give mounts a system of their own with two main goals to guide its development:

Restrictive, then Flexible

One of the first things we decided to do when developing the system was to maintain all of the restrictions of the original system. The day we flipped the switch there was literally no difference between the two. Little by little, we eased the restrictions to test usability, file bugs, and polish the experience. This worked out fairly well as we were able to separate the design into components and concentrate work on one feature at a time. If we ran out of time then we could simply keep some restrictions in place and polish the features we had completed in time to ship.

Lastly, to save development time, we wanted to re-use as many of the previous assets and scripts as possible without having to reinvent the wheel. We were able to re-use items, icons, animations, sounds, content, and underlying scripts, again allowing us to focus almost entirely on usability. In the end we were able to provide a system that allows you to live life fairly comfortably while saddled to your favorite mount.

Extendable

One never knows what the future will bring, so the system should support incremental changes without risking stability or the original design intent (as we undoubtedly risked if we augmented the channeling system further).