Age of Conan has published a new Developer journal.The lead designer Ole Herbjørnsen came to explain to us what exactly it is to be a game designer.

Ever wondered what exactly it means to be a game designer? This week join Lead Designer Ole Herbjørnsen as he explains a little more about what goes into designing a game like Age of Conan!

A game designer is actually a very generic term, especially so in MMO-terms owing to the fact that the teams are usually quite large. For any one person it is a difficult task to know everything about every single system and technology we are using. There are so many very different skill set involved that we actually have several very different types of game designer - our own form of classes if you will!

It?s quite cool to get the opportunity to tell you a bit about their feats, pets, skills and special combos, so I hope you enjoy this little insight into what goes on here behind the scenes.

I thought it would be fun to start out with a theme of sorts, and explain the various types of designers that work together to bring a monster from concept to final implementation in the game.This is the realm of the npc designer, bcc designer and script designer...

NPC designer

The NPC designer is responsible for more or less everything alive in the game, from your friendly neighbourhood tailor to the gruesome cave-dwelling monstrosities. But they are all monsters in our eyes.

The most fundamental part of the NPC designer?s job is to plan which monsters are going to be used in each playfield and the levels they?re going to be.

This is information that other people like the quest designers depend on to get their jobs done, so it must be thoroughly and clearly documented. For this I use a combination of spreadsheets with various information and graphical maps with overlays depicting areas with information about specific monsters and levels as well as markings for camps, villages, bosses and such.

When the planning is done we use a special tool called the monstertool, which is written and maintained by our tool coders. Using this tool we can set and change many aspects of each specific monster, such as name, level, general looks (is it a human or a bull?), specific visual tweaks and combat settings. Every time any changes are done, we of course test them in the game itself to make sure it is working correctly.