Horizons: Empire of Istaria Peek #7

RPG Vault has released the seventh installment to their ongoing “peek” feature for Horizons: Empire of Istaria, this time with Tulga Games’ Heather Rothwell discussing the time she’s spent working on the MMORPG with author Peter S. Beagle.

It would initially take us multiple gaming sessions of three to four hours at a time just to go through. In that time, I really got to know Peter and David, trying too hard not to seem like the over-excited fan meeting a celebrity for the first time. After all, it was only a few weeks before meeting Peter that I’d read The Last Unicorn for the first time. So, I was rather star-struck for those first few gaming sessions, in awe of the fact that the man who was such a brilliant author was looking to me to teach him the game. During those first few weeks of working together, we would talk about the writing process, character development and how different it was for Peter to write a story that players could experience in a relatively short period of time.

After we’d run through the quest, oh, a half a dozen times or so, we’d worked out most of the actual bugs in it… everything from a character not talking when they were supposed to, to a teleport not working, to figuring out how each of the different endings played out. One of the things that Peter hadn’t included in the initial dialogue was directions to help players get around. Of course, he really couldn’t do this in his initial write-ups because he didn’t know where the new NPCs would be placed, and what existing ones were going to be used. As we made our way through the quest, Peter would spend time writing out directions from one place to another to assist players in getting around.

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