Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach

My Roles:

  • Senior Content Designer
  • Senior Quest Designer

Skills Used:

  • Level Design
  • Mission Design
  • Scripting
  • Writing

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(Images taken from tentonhammer.com and engadget.com)

Achievement Highlight:

  • Identified workflow inefficiencies, and proposed solutions to the project’s producers. My solutions resulted in dungeons being created 25% faster with 30-50% smaller team-size.

Tools:

  • Proprietary Turbine level editor
  • Bugzilla
  • TestTrack Pro

Genre:  MMORPG

Platforms:

  • PC
  • Mac

This was the original subscription MMO that was released in 2006, before Dungeons & Dragons Online was revamped as a Free-to-Play game in 2009.

I was first brought on to Dungeons & Dragons Online to work on the last two Module live updates of the subscription game. During my work, I realized that a different dungeon creation pipeline would let us make dungeons more quickly and with higher quality. The new process would combine the Quest Designer and Dungeon Builder roles, and require new tools and training.

I made a proposal to the project’s producers on how to combine the two roles and the new process, and they agreed to give it a try.  The new combined Content Designer role significantly decreased the hours it took to create a dungeon, while it improved our average dungeon quality.

We kept the development system that I created, which was also used to create content for DDO’s free-to-play relaunch, and content for its two expansion packs. It’s still currently used to create content for DDO’s live updates.