Today the very last few remaining bugs were addressed, the update notes for the expansion were confirmed and given to the international community reps for translation into the various languages required, and from noon onward we were forbidden to change anything more without express permission. The live servers will go down at 5am PST tomorrow for the RoK updates, and folks from the Community team will be in from 6am to answer questions and concerns on the forums. Key members of the development and coding teams will be in early also just in case of any issues that come up and need addressing. By mid day we'll probably know whether it's all going to go smoothly or whether something will go horribly wrong -- we're all hoping for the "smoothly" eventuality, of course! And if all goes well, we'll be back to working normal length days, which means I'll have entire hours free in the evenings to do non-work things in. I'm going to have to figure out how on earth to fill all that time now, it's been a while since I had that problem!
So now I've (almost) lived through my first expansion cycle, it's time to contemplate what I have learned, and what I can improve for the next time around. Just knowing how it all works and what to expect will be a big benefit of course, and next time I'll have a better idea of how to time things, such as how long to leave for recipe and item creation (minimum two weeks each, preferably more). I want to create some better spreadsheets and scripts for the recipe and item creation also; the ones I was using were old and outdated, and caused much extra work because in many cases nobody realized they were outdated until all the items (or recipes) were created and then later discovered to be missing this or that flag, or incorrect in some other way. Getting spreadsheets and scripts set up to accurately automate as much of it as possible should save a lot of time and make for a lot less QA work catching persistent errors introduced by faults in the spreadsheet or script. And I think I should start working on the next expansion, oh, about next week, just to be sure! Mainly I think a good lesson learned is that I did try to bite off a bit more than I could chew this expansion -- trying to fix a lot of the more urgent tradeskill issues I wanted to address once I started the job, while at the same time planning an entire expansion, revising all the tradeskill reaction arts, removing subcombines, and implementing many new crafting quests, was probably a little on the ambitious side for my first expansion, even with the part time help of our tradeskill apprentice Olihin. All the combined bugs from all the large changes, while a very small percentage of the overall number of files checked in, still added up to quite a pile and without the help of people like Syzygy it would have been an uphill battle to get through them all in time. I think from now on I'll aim for just one major change at a time, for the sake of my sanity. It's hard not to want to do everything at once, when there's so much I still want to do, and patience has never been one of my virtues ... but I'll try and take that lesson away from this expansion at least. EQII is three years old as of this month, and any changes worth doing can wait just a little bit longer to be done with as much attention and care as they deserve. And there are still many changes still to come...
I guess this will be my last dev diary entry for Rise of Kunark. It's been interesting writing them, and I hope it's been an interesting read for whoever may be reading them, and perhaps it's given you a little more insight into just what goes on behind the scenes of a game expansion, and just how much work goes into each one. I haven't even seen the whole cycle; preparation for the next expansion is going to be starting as soon as this one's out the door (in fact, planning has already started). Things were already well underway for this expansion by the time I joined SOE at the end of April, so in the next few months I'll get to see what the early stages of a new expansion look like.
If all goes well, perhaps you'll be reading another expansion dev diary from me this time next year. See you then!
