Paul Gower Interview with Jagex

About the developer
How long have you been with Jagex?
I’ve been working on Runescape since about April 2000, when Jagex was basically just a trading name that my brother Andrew used.
I’d done a bit of work on some of Andrew’s games before that too.
I worked on Runescape, in a self employed capacity until December 2001, when we formed Jagex as an actual company and I became an employee.

What position do you hold with the company?
Well I am a company director though on a more day to day basis I’m a content developer.

What advice do you have for those fans who would like to get into the area of gaming, specifically within development working in a position such as yours?
For a content developer, you will need to have some programming experience (Java, C++, game scripting etc) Experience in some capacity of doing role playing game design, even small hobby projects is very valuable too, so take the opportunity to do this where you can.

What areas of responsibility exist within your position that should be considered when deciding to enter this field of work?
I feel that content development is often like being the project lead on lots of small projects. You need to design a project, code a project and get the correct input from various people in other departments. At the moment there is actually a content developer position advertised on our Jagex site which gives a fair amount of information about the job.

What is the most fulfilling part of your position and why?
It’s great that I have the opportunity to come up with lots of creative ideas – which I can make a reality, and have many people experience, especially when they really get into what you have done. On this project for example, it’s great to read threads of people speculating as to what will happen at the next mahjarrat ritual or what the true nature of Zaros is.

What education or background do you have that brought you to your current position.
I used to design games as a hobby with Andrew when we were teenagers. Andrew was already a bit of a coding whiz kid. Mostly I did level design work and some graphics at that point. Back then our focus was shareware/freeware for the Atari ST.

About the quest
Where do you get inspiration for quest storylines? Do they come from books, TV Shows, Movies, etc? Life experiences? Just random thoughts that pop into your head?
All of the above really, plus a little from traditional pen and paper roleplaying scenarios. I do try and come up with original material as much as possible, but I do get a lot of subconscious influences from various things. Runescape does have quite a lot of homages to popular culture though. Ali’s description of Zemouregal’s security systems was deliberately meant to be in the style of things like Mission impossible and Ocean’s Eleven.

What was the inspiration for this quest series and do you plan/write the entire story line or do you do it in parts and then add additional content later to develop the story line to its conclusion?
This quest series is largely about tying together a lot of loose ends from various quests and things written for our website. Some of these loose ends were written by me originally, some weren’t. Mod James especially has written quite a lot of material which has had a lot of impact on these quests.
A lot of it comes from backstory information that I’ve had knocking around for a long time and have been looking to get into the game for a while. What goes in each part of the quest in this series we planned roughly before hand, but there’s a lot of details to be filled in so things can change quite a lot.

Has there been sequel quests develop that was not originally planned?
There have been some. Kings’ ransom is a sequel which was not planned with the release of murder mystery nor with Holy Grail.

How long in advance are the quest story lines developed and what assistance, if any, do you receive in writing a quest series as involved as this one is since it is associated with multiple other quests?
This varies a lot from project to project. Often the skeleton of the quest line will be planned out directly before writing the first in the series, but with a lot of the details missing/subject to change. Often quest series will be written by one content developer, though we’ll always have plenty assistance from QAers, graphics artists, the audio team, design reviewers etc.
In the case of this series I did get other developers to write some individual parts. (For example Mod Rod did Tale of the Muspah and Mod Newmatic did Missing my Mummy)

Describe your worst moment during the development of this series.
The fight scene with Arrav, was harder than I anticipated. QA kept finding different ways to break it, such as finding ways not to receive the information from him, finding ways to kill him or finding ways that he wouldn’t teleport away. I rewrote that bit of code rather a lot.

How were the names for cities, monsters, and characters developed for this story line?
I chose names in a variety of ways. For mahjarrat names it is mostly a case of putting together syllables and letters which I think have a mahjarrraty sort of sound until I get something sounding good. Mahjarrat often have some of Z, L ,R , K , S and H in there names

What type of involvement does the coding team have in story-line development?
The content developer role is great because generally we get to design our plotlines and then code them ourselves. We do get input from other people which can change the direction of things and often we have to bear in mind what other people have written in related quests which can influence what we do, but the core of quests is normally coded and designed by the same person.

How are quest rewards developed? Are they experienced based on skills used in the quest or are there times that you do experience rewards based on skills you notice players don’t seem to be as interested in and you are hoping to build an interest?
Rewards are these days based on skills used in a quest. It makes sense from a flavour point of view that you would learn something of the activities you had just undertaken. Plus if you want to give out something like a 30k mining reward then a player would go all the way to level 37 in one jump if they’d not got any mining xp to start with. We try to get all the different skills into one quest or another. Some are easier to get into quests than others. Combat, Thieving and Agility fit naturally into lots of storylines. Other skills we need to write things specifically for them.

Does the quest idea always come before the quest reward idea or have there been times that you thought of a great item you wanted to add to the game and then built a quest idea around that item?
Normally the quest idea comes first, but there are definitely quests where the reward has come first. The most obvious examples being quests required to unlock entirely new skills.

How was this different from previous development you have done for the game?
The main thing that was different is that we have had different developers developing subsequent parts to the series simultaneously (hence we managed to get this part out so quick after the previous part.)

What development can players anticipate for future quests based on the Mysteries of the Majarrat?
There will be more tying together of loose ends from a number of different existing quests, they’ll be at least two more parts, I’ve got ideas for stuff after that too.