Star Wars Galaxies develop team released new dev diary for the game, which focus on game characters movement and so on.

Hey there! Im Thomas "Hanse" Eidson and this is the fourth designer diary in the series Ive been writing over the past several weeks. The first one outlined the specifics of what my job entails from a high level perspective. The second diary reviewed a player versus environment balance approach I used. The third diary sketched out how the Jedi expertise was created. In this fourth diary, I will go over my responsibilities with the beast mastery system.

As you may already know, I am a system designer for Star Wars Galaxies. swg credits A system designer, in short, makes broad decisions for entire sections of the game. Instead of focusing on small details, such as which way a building should face, we focus on how all the buildings should function. In this way, we are responsible for large changes to the game.

When the beast mastery system was first discussed, we simply called it a new pet system. Our goal was to allow a player the ability to control one creature at a time in the game. We wanted the pet to grow, eat, fight, learn, and have a personality. The range of pets available would be large and diverse. A system of discovery would need to be implemented so that the beasts would be craftable. Also, these pets would have special abilities and attributes.

Blixtev asked me to code the backbone system for the beasts. A backbone system is pretty much the heart of any system.star war galaxies credits  It keeps track of what is going on and what is possible in a system. Ill go into this in detail further into this diary.

When the brainstorming for the system began, I shared an office with Tunso. I began writing what would be needed for a backbone pet system. Blixtev told me that he did not want to reuse the old pet system code. This system would need to be created from scratch. Since we could not call this system a pet system, as a pet system already exists in the game, Tunso and I brainstormed up the name "beast" to describe the system. My brainstorm sessions with Tunso all had filenames referring to the beast system written on the grease boards we used. After that, the name stuck and the system was officially called the "Beast System".