Star Wars Galaxies: Dev Diary March 13th: Beast Mastery Expertise

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Dev Diary: Beast Mastery Expertise

Hi everyone, I'm Mark Halash (SWG-Tunso on the boards) and I am a game designer on Star Wars Galaxies. Over the last year I've been primarily working on the expertise system and I'm also responsible for designing the bounty hunter, officer and medic expertise trees. For Chapter 5, I added the Build-a-Buff system for entertainers and the Reverse Engineering system for traders.

I'm sure you've heard that our next chapter is introducing beast mastery and for that I am working on the beast mastery expertise tree. What follows is my dev diary that will give you a look behind the scenes at what I've been designing.

Over the next couple of weeks Ill post updates to my dev diary to share a little bit about what goes on behind the scenes with a game feature like this.

Beast Mastery Expertise

I spent the last few days writing my final design documentation for beast mastery expertise. From there, the design doc will head up the chain for final approval and/or revisions.

Right now, Loche is designing the incubation system, Shadowbrak is working on all things pertaining to beast special abilities, SWG-Swede is going to be picking up the loyalty/happiness game mechanics, Hanse-SOE is writing the back-end and related systems for pets and I've been assigned to do the expertise system.

For my part, beast mastery expertise is going to be the gate to unlocking your pet's personal potential for power! It is being added as a skill specialization that will be available to all professions and purchased with expertise points.

Since beast mastery will be available to all classes through expertise abilities, I'll need to make sure that the point system acts as a proper "control valve" based on how much or how little expertise you invest on the skills. In other words I need to ensure there is a good game balance so that it isn't possible to achieve say, 90% of a creature's potential power by spending 20% of your available points. Because of this, I've designed the Expertise tree to be much more linear in nature than some of the expertise for the main professions.

At the very front of the tree there is a block of skills I've clustered together that will allow players who just want to dabble in pet handling or might just want to be pet shop owners (the Mr. Peebles zone, I call it). For those skills, players only have to invest a modest amount of expertise points. This will give them full access to some really fun game play, providing them with the maximum potential for success at engineering new beasts and for keeping their personal beasts happy and healthy. This will also allow those folks who just want to collect DNA, engineer beasts, create mounts and who just want to enjoy all the beast mastery meta-games *except* combat to do so without having to sacrifice too much.

I hope you have enjoyed my first dev diary. I'll be back with an update it in another week!