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Asheron's Call: Developer Diary II
In three seperate entries, the team speaks in-depth about landmark AC events over the last year
By - The Asheron's Call Development Team

The Sudden Season Is Born
By - AC Content, Writer -- Chris L'Etoile
The Sudden Season event was born when we took a look at outgoing AC lead designer Toby Ragaini's treatment of the first three months of AC story, and thought that it would be too much, too soon. There were big things happening in it, many of which would require a great deal of development in content, art, and code. In order to do Toby's vision justice, we'd need a lot of lead time. The holidays were approaching, we had just shipped, and we though, "Hell, let's have a little fun to tide things over in December." Famous last words.

It was decided to postpone the big story until we'd laid some groundwork. The basic premise for the event was simply, "It's winter - let's cover the world in snow." I immediately brought up Greg Slovacek's Frore dungeon, which had been languishing unfinished in our database for some months.

Greg was a functionality programmer (weenie team) intern in the summer of 1999. While he was programming damage hotspots for us, he experimented a little with our worldbuilding tools, and Dng-Frore.map, what would become the Mountain Caverns, was born. It was his only AC dungeon. He also wrote the journals of a lost party of explorers, lead by Joffre Tremblant. The text narrated the Tremblant party's loss of direction in the frigid caves of Frore, and the way each, in turn, was hunted down by the undead that called it home. I took this evocative foundation and worked it into an island-spanning Indiana Jones style "find the lost city" quest that remains, in many people's minds, the defining moment of the game.

This was our first event on the Live servers, and it was, as you might expect, a learning experience, sometimes comical, often painful. It set a lot of groundwork for what was to come in the next six months.

The Good

First Cooking Contest

The first player to submit the correct trade skill process for newly added foods got the recipe credited to them in the in-game cookbooks. This went over really well, with hundreds of entries. That wasn't a completely wonderful thing - see "Mail Server Hell," below. We've held another cooking contest since, which was just as popular.

Game Backstory Got Out
Some thought we didn't have one. ^_^ When AC was shipped, it was lamentably content-light. The brutal truth was that the game had no dedicated content team until about six months before ship, at Eri Izawa's insistence. (In fact, I owe my presence here to her insistence.) Designers, artists, and programmers had added dungeons and quests on a catch-as-catch-can basis over the course of development. As such, the massive, intricate plot that filled a hundred pages of documentation … did not appear anywhere in the game.

For the first time, players got an inkling of some of Dereth's 40,000 year backstory. Many were instantly hooked, and have remained so as the story of Dereth has trickled out over the last year. AC's "loremasters" have devoted pages of discussion to certain ambiguous sentences in ancient letters, and organized a trivia contest to determine the most well-read player in the game. Since I've written perhaps 75% of the text that's actually made it into the game, I've found this personally very fulfilling.

Next: People Liked the Sprawling, Epic Quest...

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