World of Pets

Responsibilities:

Pitching minor live-service updates that engage the title's community during periods of content development.

Using editor tools to create, test and iterate the main questlines for two major updates.

Writing all NPC dialogue and quest descriptions while maintaining an overarching narrative.

Monitoring and maintaining the in-game economy via quest rewards, item drop-rates and pet spawn rates.

Case Study: Frozen Fields Quest Design

I was tasked with creating and writing the mainline quests for World of Pets third major update, the Frozen Fields, an ice-themed zone. The art pipeline in place meant that level geometry had already been created and I had to use the existing quest tools to create a narrative through-line that would surprise players and provide a meaningful amount of new quests and rewards to experience.

To accomplish this, I took a step back and outlined some major goals for this series of quests:

Use quests to guide players through the map so they can successfully navigate and socialise.
Maximise the amount of time spent in the stage without overblowing content scope.
Surprise the audience and delight them with new ideas using relatively few new assets.

Upon entering the portal to the Frozen Fields, players are immediately met with one of the core NPCs and the quest "Snow-Cone Catastrophe" which tasks players with collecting a number of dropped snow-cones. By following the trail of snow-cones, players are taken on a guided tour of the zone and into the core social hub, the village. The aim of this quest was to immediately push new players towards where other players will be chatting and trading pets, with the additional benefit of providing glimpses at the other unique areas of the zone, if one wishes to veer off track and explore mid-way through the quest.

From the village, players can complete the quest "Melting Maps" to access the zone's map which, in turn, can be used to find other series of quests designed to help discover the zone's more difficult and secluded areas. Unique to this zone, quests could all be repeated again every 24 hours for additional rewards, this helped extend our gameplay time with a limited scope and provide opportunities for players repeating quests to help teach new players how to navigate the zone.

The overarching plot I created for the new zone involved an approaching giant, fire-dragon coming to melt the village. By completing the repeatable-quests each day players would progress a long-term main quest 'Snow Problems'. The climax to this long-term quest's story was in summoning a giant, ice-gorilla to fend off the fire-dragon. The quest editor was simple, and this functionality was all approximated using existing tools- by merely scaling two regular pets, spawning them with existing PFX and having them repeat idle animations I successfully created the illusion of two behemoths battling for the fate of the village.

The trail of snow-cones guides players from the zone entrance and up into the village.

The Frozen Fields broken bridge obstacle course provides a skill-gap that must be overcome to complete the later quests.

The climax of the main quest-line shows off pets in a way players hadn't seen up until that point.