Everquest Online Adventures Web Presence
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Featured in the IGDA 2004 Online games white paper
The brief for the EQOA online presence was to represent the key attributes of the PS2 game in an online experiential website. After researching the title, two unique aspects of the title really stood out: the great sense of community that Everquest generates, and a strong feeling of teamwork and the need for “parties” of characters to overcome large obstacles. These parties need to be assembled from a variety of character types that complement each others strengths and abilities.
Part of the brief was to attempt to widen the appeal of Everquest to non-core gamers, and so we looked to genres that appeal to casual gamers - more specifically to puzzle games. A puzzle game that relied on teamwork and making the use of the abilities of different elements seemed to be a perfect match and so the design was developed from this initial idea into a combinational-logic puzzle featuring three classes of character, each with its own set of simple rules. The game rules could therefore be easy to learn but could provide complex puzzles when combined by taking advantage of emergent complexity.
In order to represent the community aspect of the title, players were provided with a set of level design tools that allowed them to create and upload their own puzzles, as well as the ability to rate other people’s puzzles and keep track of their own success. Each player’s score was based on what percentage of all uploaded puzzles they had beaten combined with the average rating of each of the puzzles that they had created. Balancing the scoring system to keep it fair and encourage repeat visits to the site was one of the biggest challenges.
Developed with Macromedia Flash, PHP, MySQL
Art assets created with Maya, Photoshop, Illustrator
The Everquest Online Adventures Web Presence is online at:
www.eqoa-game.com
