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Expected Quest Guidelines

Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2023 5:10 pm
by Kayak
For an aspiring quest dev, these are the guidelines we generally look at.

General Quest Creation Guidelines

1. No set rare enemies.

2. Limit spammable/farmable sections of enemies or boxes. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but we want to try to limit the farmable nature of some enemies. Having a large amount of the same enemy in the first few rooms of a quest may not be the best for the long term health of the server.

3. No set boxes for rares or specific uncommon items. Items like Atomizers, Mates, Fluids are acceptable. Scape Doll is acceptable if it's late in the quest. Again, keep the long term health of the server and economy in mind.

4. Try to space out enemies within a quest, don't place tons of enemies in a single room in your quest. A New Hope is an example of what not to do.

5. We want to maintain some sort of professionalism when it comes to quests. This includes good grammar and limiting offensive language. Refer to the guidelines on language in the main Schtserv rules. Do not make an NPC that represents a community member that paints them in a negative light. If it's a quote the person said, it may be acceptable. If English is not your first language, please talk to any of the Devs for help to get grammar fixes. Using google translate or any other translator programs/applications may not produce the most accurate results.

6. All NPCs on Pioneer II (or anywhere else) must be fully functional. This includes the shops, bank, nurse, guild lady. If you have a quest that omits one of the normal set NPCs such as those previously mentioned because of a story reason, then this is fine. However, we do ask that you make sure the bank lady always be accessible.

7. It goes without saying that the quest must have a proper beginning and ending function. Failure function is optional and will depend from quest to quest. Quests traditionally start on Pioneer 2 but there are few cases where they won't. If your quest doesn't start on Pioneer 2, consider allowing the player to pipe as soon as possible so that they can get items or gear if needed. Regarding ending quest rewards, all quests give out 100,000 meseta or less on Ultimate. If you are awarding more than that, then it needs to be justified. If you want to award server sided things such as Lucky Coins or something else, consult the Devs ahead of time.

8. Once your quest is released, if at some point players start experiencing numerous crashes, the quest will be taken down until it can be addressed. Soft locks are never preferred but sometimes unexpected bugs occur within Qedit or the import functionality in Qedit. If soft locks are found and occur, they must be addressed immediately.


Retrieval Quests

1. What are you retrieving? Make sure to have a clear objective. Hopkins series of quests are good examples.

Extermination Quests

1. Sega followed a specific format when it came to these. Steady flow of enemies throughout the entire quest, then have a "Nightmare" room at the end of the quest or at the end of each area. This is a good format to follow.

Event & Shop Quests

1. Event quests have a wide reach of what they are and what they do. It ranges from mini games to full on games like Suguroku.

2. Shop quests are general trade in quests or quests that have various features inside them. Gallons Shop and Photon Lab are examples of this. We tend to stay away from making trade ins or features that would invalidate other features/trade ins in other quests. Shop quests, because of this may be scrutinized more heavily. We aren't saying that making a Shop Quest all together is outright not allowed, but it will fall under heavier review because of the nature of them. It might be a good idea to contact the Devs ahead of time with your idea(s).

Virtual Reality

1. Quests in these categories have a wide variety of what they accomplish. Some do different sets of parameters, some are full on simulators, these are generally different formats than quests in other categories.

2. If you're trying to accomplish something unique that isn't done in other quests, maybe this quest section is for you.

Tower

1. There's a fine line of difficulty for tower quests. For Sega quests, a good example of something on the easier end is East Tower, the harder end would be Phantasmal World #4. You have more difficult custom quests like Lost Heart Breaker or Twilight Sanctuary as well. Being that they will mostly be played in Ultimate, you want to make sure that none have abusable spawns, or insane difficulty.

Solo

1. You'll want to make sure that the difficulty is balanced for solo play.

2. If you plan on spawning NPCs for cutscenes or fights, you will want to make sure that you check player slot, or force player slot to be player 1. You'll want to make sure when spawning NPCs, you triple check what slot you are spawning them in. You do not want to NOL someone by mistake.

3. If you're planning a series where you want to require a quest to be completed before playing another one, this can be arranged. The dev must let the main devs know that they want to use a server flag.

4. If you are ever planning a Seat of the Heart or Memory of the Hero size quest, we implore you to ask for help. One person should not have to shoulder the burden of making such a huge project. Splitting up the project could cut dev time by half, or even more.

Server sided features

The following features are available for quest devs on Schtserv. Note: You will need to leave R240 and R241 free to use to use any of the following.

1. Reading server side flags. If you plan on reading a already existing flag for whatever reason, please let us know ahead of time.

2. You can also read a server side flag and the last time it was written. It tracks by hours.

3. Writing server side flags (you can also make them cumulative by reading then writing, adding or subtracting the new value from the old one.

4. You can make messages get broadcasted to the ship and also the drop bot. Registers, values, player name, and team name can be sent as well.

5. You can load whichever drop table you want. (Episode 1's or Episode 2's). This is assuming you do a cross episode quest. (GC only)

6. You can use the server to generate random #s. You can make all clients roll the same number or different ones.

7. You can change the drops in the middle of a quest.

8. You can do a server side stack push or pop. This is only useful in using reset_map.

9. You can create items via the server. This allows GC Devs to make mags with the 4 missing bytes.

There are more features available with the server than those listed here. The above are the most commonly used ones.

If you are someone who is interested in developing a Multi-Team quest, just keep in mind that we have templates written for it, as well as additional guidelines.