Sacred 2: Fallen Angel Blog Update

Ascaron Entertainment's Daniel Balster has added another entry to the Sacred 2 blog on IGN, this time demonstrating the tools the team uses to create a single quest in the game.
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.

For testing purposes I have created a very small and easy rescue scenario here: a man asks you to save his daughter. To get the quest the hero first has to pass a trigger area (an area triggering an event when entered) to activate the quest. The question mark over the man's head tells players that he has a quest for them. Since this game character "gives" a quest to the player's character, the term "quest giver" has stuck with us.