Creating Content For Star Wars: The Old Republic

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Written by BuckGB on February 6th, 2009

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For instance, the planet of Korriban (home world of the Sith) went through the following process:

• First the Writing team researched every single detail about Korriban. Having the lead designer from KOTOR as our lead designer helped a great deal but there's been plenty of fantastic fiction written about the planet since then and it's important to our fiction teams that we are accurate and embrace the legacy of the great content creators that came before us.
  
  
• Reams of history and look & feel documents in hand, the Writing team then set out to create the basic stories and quests for the planet. This involved first a high level overview document that detailed exactly what was happening politically and socially on the planet, as well as what experience we wanted the Players to have and what Classes were going to be adventuring there.
  
  
• After the prep work came the real writing, rewriting, peer reviews and more rewriting until we knew Korriban was exactly what we wanted it to be. Good writing comes from rewriting and the same fearless commitment to quality over ego that the entire creation team has to have. Though we knew more changes would come later, we finally had something to start the rest of the process with.
  
  
• Next the Concept Art team painted concepts for all of the major areas and art assets for the planet. Every single piece of Korriban from the furniture to the interrogation rooms has to have a particular look and the Concept team worked tirelessly to make sure they had captured the essence of the Sith Empire and what their most sacred planet would feel like.
  
  
• While Concept was working the Scripting team hooked up the stories and quests in a basic, box test level, so that a first round of feedback could be assessed. Revisions were made for pacing and structure. Interactive storytelling is far more than dialogue writing and at each stage we have to reevaluate how the experience feels.
  
  
• Once we were happy with the test level scripting, the Worldbuilding team laid out a simple version of the planet in our game engine (basic look, proper layout and size), ran through the grey world to plan game flow and visual storytelling. Again there were many revisions and whole sections of Korriban that needed to be rearranged because they didn't pass muster. Only then was it handed off to the Environmental Art team.
  
  
• The Environmental artists then took that simple grey planet and lovingly painted it, filled it with objects, created the terrain and brought it to life, finally lighting it to match the concept art exactly.
  
  
• Then came the Combat Systems team (design, art and programming) to build and test all of the character classes (abilities, combat effects, pathing, NPC behaviors, etc) that would be on Korriban and make sure they specifically played well on the planet that had been built. Spawns were moved, skills adjusted, to make the experience the best it could be.
  
  
• At the same time the Gameplay systems team (design, UI art and programming) built all of the complex RPG systems you would expect (looting, inventory, quest journals, maps, etc) that make it a complete game.
  
  
• Once everything was running as expected, the Audio team had to come in and add the sound effects and music that give Korriban its mood and style.
  
  
• And finally, the QA team had to play through the game at every single step and make sure it was all functioning as designed despite all of the groups above tweaking with things constantly. That's a huge job by itself.

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