Meet the Team, Vol. VII

Greetings again, Dev-Log Readers!

Today we have an interview with a well known member of the community. Of course we focus largely on his works on the MMO to offer another little pearl to the interested members of the community. Dorganath shares with us this week some of his contributions to the game.

rowana: Alright, accepting vague answers on these first two questions for the curious. How old are you and where about do you live?

Dorganath: I'm 38, for as long as I can manage it, and I live near Chicago.

rowana: That managing part gets a little tricky...

Dorganath: True, and eventually I'll just stop acknowledging them. *grins*

rowana: Ah yes, and eventually forget them all together! *smiles*

Dorganath: Forget what? *blank look*

rowana: Hehe, while we are talking about age and before you forget.... How long have you been with Layonara?

Dorganath: On October 1st of this year, it will be five years exactly.

rowana: Long time! Who do/have you play(ed) during that time? NPCs don't count but you can share there too if you like!

Dorganath: Well my main character is Connor. He's my first one here and has really grown organically from a rather poorly-defined concept, due largely to my unfamiliarity with world lore and such, to a rather complex thing shaped by his interactions with characters and NPCs and just the events in which he found himself involved over the years. My most recent character is Bree and then there's the relatively unknown Eldain, both of which were more purpose-written characters and which don't see the kind of play time they deserve. As for NPCs...bunches. I'd have to look up who they were, though to be honest, a couple of my favorite ones have been a Satyr chief and a deer.

rowana: A deer... Sounds like a story there. Could you share with us a favorite memory of your time here?

Dorganath: Hehe! Yeah well, it was less the deer itself and the way the characters on the quest interacted with the deer that stuck in my mind.

Dorganath: As for a favorite memory... There's so many that have been real "Oh wow" sorts of moments, both with good and bad consequences, but I keep coming back to an evening way back when I was first getting started. I had an opportunity to take my low-level character to Dregar on a mining trip with some more experienced characters (and players, for that matter). It started with a portal trip, and in those days, a portal trip cost 4000 in gold, which I didn't have but someone paid for me. I made a lot of mistakes but was helped and encouraged every step of the way.

Dorganath: At the end, most of the rest were logging off for the night, but the "leader" of this group wanted to make sure everyone was safe and/or could get back from where we stopped. I, of course, had no idea. So what happened is that one of the other characters walked me all the way back, since there was no network of houses with portals available for general use back then, from what is now the Wandering Dunes to Hlint. It was a pretty amazing experience all over and really gave me a great feeling about this community.

rowana: That is a piece of history indeed! Hard to wrap the mind around four thousand for a portal trip, one way. Kudos to those players too, that was a great real introduction to the world. Alright, well on to the future of things then! Can you tell us about what you are currently working on for the MMO team?

Dorganath: Sure! It's primarily a lot of core, low-level sorts of things dealing with fundamental game mechanics. My first project on the MMO was to take the existing framework we licensed and convert it from a class-based system to one that is fully skill-based, adapting the core mechanics of things like combat to this model and then further adapting it to Pankoki's mechanical designs. In actuality, much of what I have done and continue to do is taking Pan's designs and making them work. The types of things range from things like combat, swimming, spell and active or triggered skill effects (the mechanical effects, not glitzy visual ones) and that sort of thing.

rowana: That sounds like a pretty meticulous task. Is it fairly tricky, or require significantly more technical know how then the adaptations that are done on NWN Laynoara?

Dorganath: Well the major difference between working on the MMO versus NWN is that with NWN, we're for the most part building on the mechanics that NWN makes available to us. We can (and have) script a whole lot of custom behaviors and systems, but in the end, we're shackled by NWN's mechanics. There's nothing wrong with that, but it limits our flexibility ultimately. With the MMO, we're either creating those mechanics from the ground up or fundamentally altering those that were in our initial framework and adapting them to something more fitting of our vision. So yes, it takes some more technical workings to dig down a layer or two and really make changes to the game engine rather than just using what the engine provides.

rowana: That sounds like very promising news! I'm sure that's reassuring to some of our readers out there. Alright then, something a on a totally different track to wrap this random interview up. If you could have any super power.... what would it be? A little bit about why would be great too!

Dorganath: Hmm... That's a tough one. So many fun things to choose, though I think that since I live in a major metropolitan area and commute to work, some form of rapid travel would be nice, be it flight or teleportation or something. It would save on trips back to the grocery store for that one thing that always gets forgotten.

rowana: That certainly would be handy! Well thank you for setting aside this time for the Dev-Log Readers. I'm sure they appreciate it.

Thank you all for stopping by this week and catching up with us. We look forward to seeing you again next week with another random interview.

~row, on behalf of the writing team