How we did the island of the Mistress of Copper Mountain

Hello! My name is Andrei Saenko, I live in Voronezh, I work in the Allods Team and create astral islands for the game Allods Online. Astral Islands are adventures for 6 players, our analogue of well-known dungeons. I usually invent my own adventure concepts, but in my practice there was a very unusual experience - I happened to embody an astral island invented by one player. In his example, I want to talk about my work.

"And let's start the competition of the astral islands?", - once suggested to us a community manager. I agreed, thinking that we are talking about some kind of artistic competition: more than once I came across the fact that the fans of our game draw simply superb. But I realized the volume of the undertaken obligations only after I was shown a draft of the news about the beginning of the competition. Participants were not only asked to come up with a general concept, they had to think through every detail. And all this I had to realize in the game!

The volume of the proposed work has increased by approximately one and a half times, but this only added to the excitement. Worried another: will the contest participants cope at all? To think over in details an interesting game location is not the same as drawing a new sword, costume or riding pet for the game. To do this, you need not only to be able to competently express your thoughts, but also an excellent understanding of game mechanics. Honestly, I have never heard that any of the developers of the AAA-class MMORPG trusted the players such a serious job!
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Nevertheless, we decided to try anyway and published the news about the beginning of the competition. Over the next day after the announcement, players were poured onto a competitive e-mail in a continuous stream. Here is one of the very first letters (spelling and punctuation preserved):

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In the first hours of such letters, more than a hundred of these letters arrived, and I began to seriously fear: “Will I be able to adequately embody the ideas of the author, without losing the tradition of level-design adopted in the studio?”. But the more time passed since the announcement of the competition, the more I was convinced that it was worth spending a long time ago. No matter how difficult was the task of adapting non-professional projects to the requirements of production, it was more than compensated by the gratitude and courage with which the players seized the opportunity to feel themselves as developers.

In addition, among the competition projects there appeared surprisingly a lot of high-quality, skillfully designed ideas. Therefore, towards the end of the competition, we had another problem: to choose the only winner from a large number of authors who surprised us with really cool ideas. Preference was given to the island that most closely corresponded to the leitmotif of our game - Russianness. According to the author (a girl player with the nickname Merani), the Ural tales of P.P. Bazhov. Honestly, I myself love them since childhood, so this reference captured me from the very beginning. Reading the cover letter, I imagined how beautifully our artists would be able to depict malachite dungeons and a mystical forest, where precious stones grow instead of flowers.

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N. Meranova, the winner of the “Think Allode” competition

At first glance it may seem that I was faced with a not so difficult job: to take and implement a ready-made idea.

However, the path from the text description to the full gaming space is a job for many weeks. My task turned out to be even more voluminous: the island was decided to be included in the main story of global update 5.0.0, so the contestant's plan had to be finalized, creating a full-fledged quest location on its base. Of course, we also did not intend to give up the astral version of the “Abandoned Mine”, but first we should tell about the work on its plot incarnation.

In the first days of work, we practically did not part with the screenwriter — I thought up interesting tasks for the players (for example, conducting a chorus of singing owls), and he wrote the island’s history and harmoniously included my ideas in it. We definitely needed more plot characters, so we decided to dive a bit into the past - in those days when the mine mentioned above was not yet abandoned. So a team of cowardly miners settled on the island, a greedy merchant Zlatko and a funny old man, the moonshineer Pigidy.

We decided that the passage of the island would be a test for the player, at the end of which he would receive a reward from the Hostess herself. Therefore, in the “island” part of the plot, the main villain is the grandmother-Sinyushka, and the Mistress of Copper Mountain and her guardian, the Great Poloz, are not hostile to the guests.



All this time, our sketches on the island were stored electronically and, partly, on paper - their “digitization” began only after all parts of the script were agreed and accepted. In other words, the vision of all the quests and the players' route around the island was formed before I first launched the map editor.

Work on the game space always begins with the creation of a topological blank - a very rough version of the location where the landscape is marked and key objects are marked. It should be well read the future route of the players. It sounds pretty simple, but in fact we are talking about turning a 2D sketch into a three-dimensional game space.



The island of copper mountains wanted to make a truly atmospheric place, so I had to work a lot more than usual on its disc. I ordered a lot of unique visual artists - models, textures and effects. But at the early stage of development, all this was not yet at my disposal, so I had to use a record number of placeholders for myself - time stamps on locations indicating the location of future decorations and objects. The imagination and the help of the concept artist, who depicted for me a general view of the terrain, helped me to plan a spectacular composition. I received this “atmospheric-art” by going to the stone forest:



When the topological layout was ready, I began to “revive” the created lands. If this development phase did not take a few weeks, I would definitely take it on video (perhaps we will do it in the future). With my help, the monotonous surfaces looked like mountain roads, the rocks took shape, grass appeared in the forests, and bushes grew under the trees. Many objects were placed manually until I managed to breathe the soul of its “atmosphere” into my workpiece.



Then it's time to populate all the characters we have invented and start up the quests we have invented earlier. This work requires a great deal of forethought - players rarely act exactly as the screenwriter intended, and this must be considered in advance. Personally, I always assume that someone will definitely throw away the desired item, others will manage to jump into the astral plane, while the third will call the PVP battlefields at the height of the events.

Any of these events can create a situation in which the player will have to cancel the quest, and then perform it again. Of course, later my island will be checked by QA-testers - guys who will specifically try to break everything they get to, and will surely find these shortcomings. However, “it’s purely not where they are sweeping”, and from the very beginning I try to avoid situations in which the player will face a bug or fall into a stalemate.

I took the astral version of the island simultaneously with the start of testing of its part of the plot. Here, the goals of the players are significantly different - the heroes arrive in a group, wanting to get to the coveted trophies as soon as possible. Therefore, the route should also be changed - I cut the path through the stone forest, removing many paths and making new ones. In parallel, I made a few plot edits: the miners left the island, leaving the mine (in exact accordance with the competitive description), and the Great Poloz, previously peaceful, with the help of artists, acquired a new, military form. His militancy is explained very simply: in the past, the player was a guest in the possession of the Hostess, and now he has arrived for profit, having angered the guards.

While working on monsters and bosses, I found myself in an unusual situation for me: usually the designers themselves invent all the game mechanics for their islands, guided by their experience and the principles of the studio. The creature’s skills and characteristics are not just a collection of beautiful effects for dealing damage. This is a complex system that forces the player to analyze what is happening and to think tactically. Of course, Merani tried very hard, describing the characteristics of each opponent in the adventure she had invented. Therefore, by adapting her plans to the requirements of the Allods Team, I did not spare the time to keep them as recognizable as possible. I will not say that this task was elementary.

For example, in the original description, almost every monster had a control skill (“Fear”, “Stun”, “Dazzle”). It is believed that to endow enemies with such spells should be carefully and purposefully. “Fear” is often used where the tossing character can meet additional groups of monsters, “Stunning” prevents in time to avoid the damage that the boss does over the area, etc. For most opponents on Copper Mountain, I removed one (and sometimes several) control abilities so that the gameplay did not turn into a knock-down for the group.

When all the bosses are “armed” and ready to resist, the time for playtests begins. A group of game designers passes the island, fixing all the difficulties encountered, and exchanges impressions. Unlike QA-testers, participants of the playtest do not search for bugs, their task is to evaluate the gameplay and identify its problem areas.

“Is it too much time to pass?”, “Is the tactics of each boss sufficiently vivid?”, “Are there not unreasonably strong monsters on the island?”, Etc. - these questions can be answered only after the “live” testing of the game process. Each astral island "Allods Online" necessarily goes through this procedure several times, until it starts to "play" interesting and dynamic from the first to the last minute.

During the playtests of Copper Mountain, I tried to find a compromise between feedback from colleagues and the original ideas of Merani. For example, according to the original idea, Ognevushka was supposed to impose on the characters the effect of control, which increases the preparation time for the next spells. Playtest showed that this feature does not make the boss’s tactics more interesting, but significantly increases the duration of the fight - she had to be abandoned. And the Sinyuushka phases described in detail by Merani, like many other things, I managed to defend and keep almost unchanged.
Thus, even after three playtests, I can confidently call the “Copper Mountain” an island created according to the original design of an ordinary player. The task was not easy, but the result was worth all the effort, and I got a really interesting and unusual experience. As a token of my gratitude, in the “island” part of the plot one can meet Natalia Meranova - the game incarnation of Merani, the author of the island of the Mistress of Copper Mountain.

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N. Meranova, the winner of the “Think Allode” competition