2010 Yule Festival

By: Lauren 'Budgeford' Salk

The Yule Festival was an enormous undertaking this year. It has been controversial in its reception during testing as it takes the festivals in a new direction for LOTRO. This festival looks different, feels different, and is different. It is not the usual event-in-a-box that we have been making again and again since my first festival, in which we introduced the Hedge Maze. This one is bigger, more immersive, and doesn’t just layer more content on top of the existing festival areas. It features a number of quests, a story, a moral choice at the end, and several mini-games all contained in a new wintry region.

Phase I - Planning

The first phase of Yule Festival Planning was the most difficult for me to date. Festival production is on one of the most aggressive schedules we have for LOTRO, and is often subject to a very squeezed release milestone. Festivals require four solid updates per year that leave me time to get all of the work in, get the art planned and requested, etc. Sometimes our updates don’t always work out that way; the schedules don’t revolve around festivals, so festivals need to be planned according to how much time we have left to put into developing them.

For this update, I was working simultaneously on both newbie Ered Luin and the Yule Festival for an already tight schedule. Newbie Ered Luin was my priority, and I needed to scale down my ideas for the festival in order to make sure I had time for everything. This wasn’t a terrible thing, because the Yule Festival already had the Bar Fight, which seemed to go over very well last year. (By the way – the Bar fight is coming back! It’s not in this festival, but it will appear again soon.) No new “events” was the goal. Events (by our definition) are things like the drunk races, the hedge maze, the shrews, the Haunted Burrow – mini-games. No matter how simple we think they will be, the events always end up being crazy, requiring new tech, taking forever, breaking and needing re-designs at the last minute, and anything else that can go wrong.

The hard part here was actually coming up with the inspiration to do something new that wasn’t a game-in-a-box. I hit one of my worst creative blocks to date at this job. I was an artist before coming to Turbine, and I remember having a creative block for nearly two years. Scared that this was happening again and already losing time, my lead (who is awesome) set up some brainstorming meetings with other members of my team. It was Jeff Libby (aka Made of Lions) who had the wonderful idea of doing a mini-region for Yule. It was perfect!

A region meant that we could put snow on the ground and do landscape-style quests, the tried-and-true bread-and-butter of any MMO. This type of content is much less risky and time-consuming than making a new kind of mini-game. Easy! No problem! Perfect! And in the meantime, we got the good news that for the first time since I started on the content team, another designer from another project had some spare time and was going to help by adding something to the Yule Festival.

Paul “Rhidden” Simon was brimming with crazy ideas and crazy skills to back them up. With the Bar Fight, Rhidden’s ambitious event, and this new region of light festival questing, I was sure that this Yule Festival was going to come together perfectly and harmoniously.

Phase II – Development

Naturally with the belief that everything was going to be just dandy came the inevitable fall of the Other Shoe. Why must there always be another shoe? With time flying by and work on Ered Luin taking a lot of energy already, I began to flesh out the new mini-region -- the town of Winter-home nestled in a valley called Frostbluff. Do you know what isn’t really easy, no matter what? Making new content in a game, even if it is a simple region. I have high standards for the quality of my work, and I’m never satisfied with so-so or boring quests. Not everything I make can be a great success, but I need to try my best to make things as good as they can be. Early on in the development of Winter-home, I felt that the content was boring. I worried that it was just another Othrikar or Combe, so I started thinking about… events! The very things I intended to avoid in the first place.

I’ll use this section to talk about the different pieces of content in Winter-home:

The Snowball Fight

The Snowball Fight came first. It was simple, and I thought it would be a fun diversion. It will serve as a way to fill up this big region and give players a reason to hang around when they were done with their daily quests. It is an alternate way to acquire barter tokens and ramp up deeds in Frostbluff.

It did come with a few logistical problems. When we were implementing the event, the snowball fight was impossible to test beyond ensuring that the skills worked. On our own computers we can generally only dual-client, so in a competitive game it is very difficult to gauge how something should be balanced. It was our QA team that saved the day here, along with wonderful feedback from Beta. Our QA testers did a wonderful job of making sure this event got plenty of attention so that it could be polished before release.

The Eating Contest

The Eating Contest came after I had a sudden panic and believed that a Snowball Fight, a Theatre Event, and a handful of standard quests wouldn’t be enough to make this area feel like a festival. At this point my workload was making me swiftly lose my sanity. The Eating Contest was created in the same vein as Ale Association and Inn League quests.

World & Art

Ross “Iceman” Glover was the world builder for this phenomenal space. Our art director once again came through with his vision for a beautifully decorated winter festival, giving us brand new assets to place. Ross then spent a long, long time fighting with me over the space while we were both trying to implement and bugfix at the same time.

Pictures are worth much more than words, so here is my tip-of-the-hat to Ross and to the art team for once again making a beautiful and captivating festival atmosphere.






 

Quality Assurance

We’ve been using a development process for a while that has us working very closely with QA and I’ve never remembered to include them in my dev diaries. When I think about the people who have contributed, I usually walk through and look at the area and remember which facet came from which person or team. I have so far managed to forget to think of one of the most important contributions, which is the LACK of something: bugs. A few bugs always get through because everyone who works on a game is human, but QA has been doing a great job of catching the serious issues long before it’s time to actually ship the final product.

The QA rep who works most closely with me right now is Mara, and Mara is awesome. Mara was thrown under the festival-testing bus for the Fall Festival and has been loyal to festival work ever since. She deserves much sympathy for doing this job. Festivals are VERY difficult to test. (I remember this from when I was a tester.) As I’ve mentioned, festival design always scribbles outside of the lines and breaks rules – otherwise, the quests would be “Go kill 10 boars and collect 8 flowers.” Mara is usually the first to notice any raging fires and she also boldly goes looking for the hidden fires that will raze everything to the ground as soon as everyone looks the other way. On the occasions when you’re having fun in LOTRO and nothing is going wrong, QA probably logged at least 20 bugs on that instance and made us fix them all.

 

The Story of Winter-home

I believe that there cannot be a story without conflict. I also believe that there cannot (and should not) be a region in LOTRO without a story. This wasn’t something I was really taking into account when agreeing to do a region. I just thought it would all fall together cleanly and simply like all the other region content I’ve worked on, and didn’t consciously remember how important it was for me to have solid stories with all of that content, which was why it came together as easily as it did. When I began planning the festival region, it dawned on me that I wanted to have a story that players could engage in. It then dawned on me that I’d never really done a festival with a background story before. I’ve had to think of quick contexts to use as wrappers for events, but nothing like what’s involved in making quest arcs and drama scenes. Shrews attacking an Elf garden wasn’t going to cut it in Winter-home.

Inspiration

The first major inspiration for this story was Tolkien’s own writings, as always. I think about my favorite parts of his books, my favorite characters, and my favorite places. Working with people who know Tolkien well (and also reading the LOTRO forums) has impressed upon me people’s many different takeaways from themes in the Lord of the Rings. Some see a complete black-and-white in that storytelling – a true good vs. evil, which, in my experience, is not the way people work. While the Enemy in The Lord of the Rings is undeniably evil, I always got the sense that a lot of nudging needed to happen to ensure that the good forces of the world could continue to exist. There was so little solidarity for most of the story, and so many obstacles from good and evil. There was a great deal of grey, and characters that were lovable despite their flaws. None of the heroes were entirely pure, but they were entirely sympathetic.

Middle-earth had ordinary problems, with greedy, rude hobbits like the Sackville-Bagginses, nosey neighbors, and judgmental millers like Mr. Sandyman to ruin a perfectly pleasant evening at the Ivy Bush with unkind gossip.

There were also the Bill Fernys and squint-eyed southerners of the world, who began to get mixed up in the creeping shadow of evil. There does not need to be a force of Sauron’s malice and power in the world for such unfriendly characters to exist, sadly. These are unpleasant folk who make life more difficult, but they aren’t so evil that they deserve to be slain by a hero. A hero who killed someone just for being unpleasant or malicious wouldn’t be much of a hero. Frodo’s early belief that Bilbo should have killed Gollum when he had the chance didn’t translate to reality, when he looked on a mortal creature worthy of his compassion.

It was this moral grey area that became my inspiration for Winter-home. The second piece of my inspiration was the Holiday Season. The Yule Festival was a good setting for a look at the holidays, with all their stress, hopes for peace, opportunities for charity, and opportunities for selfishness and cruelty.

The two themes rolled together to make Winter-home. In this new town, we have a Bill Ferny type for a mayor, someone who has no problem selling out others for his own gain. He is hosting a lavish festival in his town, and from his perspective, it is all about perfection and profit. He has no time or concern for the real problems in his town.

But the player who comes to Winter-home for the festival probably has different expectations. It is probably hard for them to be so blind to the problems in this place. (That’s my hope, at least…but how much or little you care is up to you!) During this Yule Festival, you get to choose your own experience and define the type of role your character is playing. I love having the ability to role-play in games, and it’s something we haven’t done much of in LOTRO.

Characters

I already told you a little about the mayor of town, but he’s not the first person you’ll meet. You will first be introduced to the town by Albert Yule, a helpful Town Crier in Winter-home. He plays the role of the narrator.

The mayor and his wife are the unfriendly people in town. They care only about their profit and the comfort of the patrons. Comfortable patrons, in their eyes, will surely give them more money.

 

The town’s Watchman is not a bad fellow, but he is a stickler for the mayor’s rules. He enforces the law, and his day’s work often involves some very unsympathetic tasks.

And everyone knows there can be no festival without hard workers to remember all the chores there are to do. I like to think of myself as existing in this category! (Not the lazy one, mind you.)

Then there are the good guys. There are many hardships for them to overcome, but such is the way with good guys.

I hope you enjoy your time in Winter-home if you decide to travel there this Yule! There are many choices to be made, titles to earn, sights to see, and people to get to know… some nice, and some not-so-nice. There is a new mount, a new cloak, and several new outfits. And don’t forget the snowmen.




http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/939-developer-diary-2010-yule-festival