Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Developer Diary #9

RPGDot has tossed up a ninth developer diary for Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, this time with Ascaron's Daniel Balster telling us how he goes about creating a quest in the game.
At Studio II we use our custom-made quest editor for implementing stories and quests in Sacred 2. In any game a quest basically consists of the following components: characters, items and interdependencies. You could very well program them using a scripting language, but it's a lot easier to just select all elements with your mouse. You still may use the scripting language for all the other stuff, but usually that's no longer necessary.

If a quest author starts the editor, they see the Sacred landscape in low resolution and from a bird's eye perspective. Thanks to many tools they may navigate the map as well as list and find quests, characters or items. The scrap heap you can see on the map above is one of the level designers' a test scenarios I like using it as a playground for quest techniques. All objects are stored in an SQL database the editor uses. That way all quest authors may work on the same game world simultaneously. To make the quests playable the database is simply exported into the game folder.