Making of zao 3

Jan mentions that the request for a steppe- or savannah-like environment came from the content team and was flying around as an idea for a very long time: "We felt that this would give us a very interesting mix to work with in addition to the corruption theme and a shot of visually Asian looking influences and also allow us to create something new and different to the existing areas in Tibia. The pool of environment graphics in Tibia is vast and can already be combined in many different ways to achieve all sorts of atmospheres, but we expanded on that a great deal again with this update with reusable more generic floor textures. Even the rather big landmark stone dragon statue that can be found at the big gate can be put together in different ways." While Jan is mainly responsible for creating ingame graphics and textures, the content team plans and assembles everything and builds all the beautiful landscapes in Tibia. In the case of Zao, it was already set since the Yalahar update that the new map expansion would take place east of Vengoth. At first, the general shape of the new continent was created. Just on the floor level, without any mountains and dungeons. Then, everyone in the team got a printed shape of the new area and drew his or her version of the map: where the mountains are located, the cities and how the area should look like in general. Different designs were talked through and after having come to a conclusion, the areas were assigned to different team members. As soon as they had received the graphics they had requested from the graphics department, they started to build the new areas. "First of all, the general floor tiles and shapes were set, followed by houses, ruins, quest areas and unique landmarks. In the end, decoration such as plants, stones or even rubbish were added," Denson Larika explains. "For the Dragonblaze Peaks, for example, I worked from ground level to the top. Level after level. Then I hollowed the peaks and built the caves for the dragons." The monsters were placed after the whole map work was done. What followed was a time of adjustments and fine-tuning, hopping on and off the internal test server to test hunting grounds. With the start of the external test server, the whole content team was then busy with bug fixing and tweaking things further. The ideas for the quests and missions in Zao came along with the development of the new continent. Certain quest types were necessary to introduce players to the new area, its inhabitants and its lore, and to guide them around. Other quest ideas evolved around the given themes. The Tomes of Knowledge quest, for example, is a nice way to unlock things like nifty furniture and creepy dungeons. At the same time, the content team could use them to make some selected excerpts of the massive background story accessible in smaller bits for those who are interested in it.