Alternate Title: How I learned that making manly men scream like little girls is fun for everyone.

Scott: I am SO VERY EXCITED about what we’re going to work on today. 

Scott: We are *finally* getting to the Opera House. 

Me: The what?  

Scott: The oper… *looks at me to see if I’m serious* oh, hush, you.  

Scott: So, here’s the three encounter concepts that got approved between Metzen and Legal: 

• The Wizard of Oz
• Romero and Julianne
• The Big Bad Wolf

Me: Har, har. How are we breaking this up?

Scott: I’m going to focus on working on the cross-week scripting and setting up the voice overs. Joe, you or Geoff take Romulo and Julianne. I’ll start working on the Wizard of Oz and Brazie…. uh, figure out something for the Big, Bad Wolf. 

Me: Oooooh. What kind of fight should it be?

Scott: Well, Romulo and Julianne should be a controlled timing/ability usage fight.  The Wizard of Oz will be about proper crowd control spell usage and tanking.  So, it makes sense if it’s a single-target tank & spank with a cool gimmick. 

Me: Hmm…. We should definitely do something involving little red. 

Scott: Yeah, but I’d rather avoid having you deal with a friendly NPC in the fight. Those kinds of encounters are really difficult to setup and this is only your second raid boss. 

Joe: Maybe we could dress Alex up as little red riding hood and include a copy of him in every box. 

Me: pfft. (I wasn’t very good at snappy comebacks in those days.)   

Me: Maybe he could just scare you the way that Onyxia scared Joe’s Shaman into the lava on our raid last week. 

Joe: At least I wasn’t tanking half the time on my Warlock screaming “Heal the Voidwalker” over Ventrilo. 

Scott: *AHEM* Alright kids, that’s enough.  Those aren’t terribly bad ideas though. They certainly sound wolfy. Tank and spanks get boring after a while, what can we do to break them up?

Me: If one of the players turned into Little Red once in a while, then the boss chased her, that would be pretty sweet.  It’s actually really thrilling when you pull aggro on the boss and the whole team needs you to react quickly to survive. 

Joe:  Yeah, but most casters don’t have the tools to survive if they get hit. 

Scott: Hmmm… it would also really suck if you were a rogue and got insta gibbed because he turned to fight you. 

Me: What if we tuned the boss such that a caster wouldn’t just blow up. 

Joe: Tanks would just sit there and tank the whole time and just ignore the mechanic entirely. That would be pointless.

Scott: What if you simply had *no* armor when you turn into Little Red?

Joe: And we could make you run faster. But you’d still just sit there and use shield wall.

Me: Fine, we’ll just disable all of your abilities and make it really clear that running away is the right thing to do. 

Joe: Yeah, and he can fear everyone once in a while to reset threat on the fight. 

Scott: I’ll even get some VO where the wolf scares you off and tells you to run away. 

Me: I’ll go get it done.  Uh, is there anything else to discuss?

Scott: No… I actually think we’ve got it. Be sure to stick something else on the fight that shows off the cool “swipe” animation those wolves have though.  You can just copy a spell from the outdoor zone. 

Joe: I’m just glad we finally have a fight that will make Bjorn (our main tank) run around like a little girl. 

Scott: I think I know what that voice-over line is going to be…

So what’s the important story here?

Well, the first point is that your team is your first source of inspiration. You’ll often get great ideas from a little bit of discussion and an open environment that encourages strong growth. Once you hit upon a theme that resonates with all of you strongly (In this case, running away) it becomes safe to break the creative build-up to critique the idea a bit.  

You can see here how we each inspired an idea from the other – Scott recognized the opportunity of accusing players of running like a little girl. Joe recognized the need to fear people to keep them spread out before transforming someone into the little girl.  … and so on. 

However, there was an element we didn’t discuss that we really should have:

• How could players who were NOT little red help her survive?

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Me: The Black Stalker is … what?

Metzen: She’s the mother. The mother of all spore walkers in Zangarmarsh. Think psychic power meets fungus meets those tripods from War of the Worlds. 

Me: So what kind of things should she do?

Metzen: Shit. I have no idea, that’s what you’re here to do right. Maybe she could grab people, shoot lasers out of her eyes, sporify people. 

Me: Hmmm… okay, well that sounds kind of cool. She has lots of arms. Let me ask Geoff for some ideas too. 

Geoff: sup?

Me: I’m trying to come up with ideas for the Black Stalker. Chris said she should be psychic… but this isn’t exactly pokemon, we don’t really have a psychic kit.  

Geoff: Damn… did he like want you to have a brain battle with her or something? 

Me: Hahah, perhaps one of those Dragonball sequences where the two beams of power go surging back and forth?

Geoff: Well, I’m not sure exactly what you should do, but the Spore Walkers I’m using in the Lady Vash’j fight cast Chain Lightning. It would be cool if we pre-taught that idea somewhere else. Maybe we do lightning instead of psychic kit. 

Me: Sure, that’s no problem. 

Geoff: It would be really cool if we had grapple tech too – imagine if she could juggle the players in her hands then toss them somewhere. 

Me: Oooooooh.  Lets just do that. 

Geoff: Wait, what? 

Me: Yeah! I’ll just juggle them. This sounds like a great idea, Geoff!

Geoff: Wait… what? I didn’t… mean…  well, okay, I guess. I hope I didn’t just create a monster. 

I went back to my lair, a small closet-sized office that I shared with Stuart Massie, a QA Liason and began working.  I slapped some chain lightning on the Black Stalker, along with a channeled beam which nuked the target with even more electricity. 

Then I had the Black Stalker electrify all of the players, making them deal damage to each other if they stood too close. More electricity! More power! Ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh!

Then I added an ability that pulled players up into the air, bouncing them up and down, flipping and bouncing around erratically! This seemed like a great idea to me! How realistic!  

So I proudly slapped the Black Stalker into the dungeon and we did a designer-only playtest. The first few bosses went pretty well, some comments about needing better debuff icons, so-on.  Then we got to the Black Stalker.  I was super proud when I watched the Black Stalker fling Jeff Kaplan into the air, merrily bouncing around my screen in the air, well out of sight of anyone else on the team. 

It was about 10 seconds before I heard a girlish scream, “AAAAAUUUGGGGH!!!!”  And Jeff tumbled out of his office into the hallway, rubbing his eyes in agony. 

“Oh god! What happened?! Oh god,” as he stumbled into my office. 

Me: “You okay??”

Jeff: “You will NEVER believe the bug that just happened. I suddenly went flying, my camera went spinning and I couldn’t do ANYTHING.”

Me: “Oh. Yeah. That’s intentional. Pretty cool, right??”

Jeff: “WHAT?!! Dude, you just made me motion sick! Holy shit! You can’t just DO that.”

Me: “… wha?”

Once he realized I was totally clueless, he sat down. 

Me: “I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean to make you sick.”

Jeff: “It’s okay. But let’s talk about this. What were your goals?”

Me: “Well, I wanted to sell a psychic squish shrimp mushroom thing and create an experience no player has seen before.”

Jeff: “Okay, so that’s good, but can we do that without making them fly all over the place?”

Me: “Probably… but why not.”

Jeff: “Well, let’s look again at what’s going on here as a player experience instead of a designer experience. Instead of focusing on what’s cool for you, what’s cool to THEM?”

Me: “Well… uhm, flying through the air is cool.”

Jeff: “The first time, yes. Doesn’t it get pretty repetitive though?”

Me: “That’s true. Maybe it could be toned down a bit…”

Jeff: “What happens if the healer or tank gets lifted into the air…?”

Me: “Er… well… I guess the party has a rough time… probably dies.”

Jeff: “So, lets fix it.”

So with a new mindset, I went in an made a few small tweaks:

• The Black Stalker only lifted one person into the air
• Someone who wasn’t the tank
• The person lifted could cast spells 
• This let the healer keep doing their job
• This let the party move closer to the healer if grabbed
• The person lifted would stop after being yanked up
• The Static Charge could be dispelled
• This gave the players an additional form of agency over the situation
• Only one person could be the “Static Charged” target
• This made it better for melee characters too

The result was an encounter much more playable, still a bit annoying, but gave players the ability to use tools to improve their situation. 

The important part though was the change in focus – an encounter is meant for the players, not the designer.

Daelo: You did what?

Me: I stuck a hydra in the water tank. You know… it’s like swimming down there. 

Daelo: No, no, not that part. The next part. 

Me: Oh, I made entire thing a timed event. If you make it to the end before the Hydra. 

Daelo: And how are players going to figure this out? 

Me: Well… it runs up the pipe and kills the NPC. That won’t happen if you’re faster. 

Daelo: *facepalm*   

Me: What?

Rob Pardo used to say:  “Events are hard. But few people realize what the hardest thing about an event is. “

What is that, Rob? What’s the hardest thing about an event. Is it the itemization? Periodic reward structures? Resources? 

“No. No and sort-of.  Actually, the hardest thing about an event is getting people to recognize that they are there.”

When you stop and think about it – it seems obvious. If nobody notices an event is going on… there was no point in creating it in the first place. So when you are going to put the time and effort into creating a scripted experience – you want people to notice it. 

In fact, this art of the “sell” is where most of the time and resources go when you’re setting up an event. It’s easy – no, trivial, to spend a day setting up a comedian who tells in-jokes and silly references in Shattrath.  It’s a whole other matter to teach players that he’s only there from 8-9 pm on Tuesdays.  

Take a look at Wildstar and some of the more recent MMOs in the past five years. These games are saturated with creative spawning and unique events. They also go out of their way to ensure you see all of the major events – there’s even a little introduction to each zone when you first arrive. (In my personal opinion, the timing of this zone-intro is poor, literally the same time as a million other UI elemnents, but the idea is great!) Check it out:

Furthermore, you can see how much effort is put into drawing player attention to the important areas of the game. While overwhelming, the initial starter events in many WoW zones draw your eye and use quests to pull you to the most dramatic and well-constructed areas. 

Important events sometimes even use UI, like this challenge event I’m about to fail because I’m too busy writing this post to pick up fat bird eggs. 

The importance of selling an event cannot be understated. The more important the event, the more time spend developing it, the more important it is that players notice. This doesn’t mean you can’t do subtle hits or little touches that add life and flavor – it just means that you should be judicious about making smart choices in general about what you invest a lot of energy into. 

So what was the issue with Ghaz’an? 

1. The event wasn’t sold
2. Player fixation on what’s ahead of them meant no-one noticed the fight going on in the background
3. Addition of VO would have required recruiting another voice actor (pricey back in those days…)
4. Addition of the event would drive rewards, doubling up the work for the item dude

You know, sometimes you just have to own up to what you’ve done. In this case, I totally phoned this guy in. He’s a hunter with deterrence, enrage pet and an aimed shot. 

Now, he’s not *completely* devoid of gameplay. You can swap targets when he’s got deterrence up… but yeah, not really. If I were do to him again, I’d made his aimed shot deal super high damage, but someone else can jump in the way to split the damage in half with you.  

However, this guy existed for a reason…. what was that reason, you might ask?

Well, a quest designer wanted to stick a quest NPC in here to be rescued. So I slapped in an above-average toughness NPC to guard the Druid in bear form… who forgot he was a bear. (They’re druids, they’ve been sleeping forever, sometimes you have to overlook these things.)  

Anyways, when Travis ran through the dungeon, he just assumed it was a boss by the name and slapped boss loot on him. So I cranked up his stats a tad bit and Musel’ek the Swamplord came to be.  I’m not sure what he was lording over exactly… but he’s not exactly dressed to be a king. 

Sometimes in development it’s best to roll with the punches. An unexpected thing happen? Don’t sweat it. Maybe its OK to have an extra boss in this one.  As it turns out, the Underbog was extremely long and the extra loot didn’t hurt. 

Do you guys have any questions? I’m mixing up the formula a bit here with this one. What kind of posts would you like to see more of? 

Thanks!