CREATIVE LEADER IN VIDEO GAMES •
AUTHOR • VOICE ACTOR
LORI HYRUP
I worked on many games at EA Mythic (Mythic Entertainment), and I was promoted many times over the years. But the game I worked on the longest, from concept phase through launch, through expansion packs, and live operations, was Dark Age of Camelot. At the time of the game's release, it was considered a AAA game. The art is now dated by today's standards, but the content and systems I worked on are still fun and, by some accounts, standards and/or foundations of some types of game design now found in other games.
Content below is listed from the most recent in history to the most distant.
A Dragon's Revenge
For this content-packed DLC, I led the project while also overseeing Live Operations. The title I held during this time was producer, but producers are Mythic were the vision holders and directors, as well as those responsible for the execution of the work. In this capacity, I led a small team of about 12 developers to develop new, episodic raid content and revise some of our older game art.
Live Operations
I took over as the Live Operations Producer for Dark Age of Camelot, and at Mythic, producers not only focused on coordinating the project but were also the vision holders and directors for all game content.
Labyrinth of the Minotaur
The goal for this project was to have the "largest dungeon in any MMORPG", and for the time, we accomplished that. My role for this expansion was to research the previous "largest dungeon" (Everquest II held that honor), make the concept of "Minotaurs" make sense for our world of Dark Age of Camelot, introduce Minotaurs as a playable race and Maulers as a class, design the layout and maps for the dungeon.
Darkness Rising
After some time on another project, I rejoined the DAoC team as an associate producer where I led strike teams to deliver content for our Darkness Rising Expansion.
Trials of Atlantis
As the Lead Content Designer for Trials of Atlantis expansion, I led a team of 20 content designers to design and build out all of the content, including the trial and all of the raid content. I, personally, built several areas of content, scripted and implemented raid content, and built several of the terrain areas. This included our first foray into water and underwater content.
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Note for fans: When I found an obscure Arthurian reference to Atlantis, I used that as justification to pitch the Atlantis expansion. The original pitch was supposed to be "urban RvR" in the Lost City of Atlantis. Folks liked the pitch, but it ended up deviating from the original goal during development. The leadership team didn't want to dilute the other RvR content. At the same time, raiding was big in MMOs, so we were asked to focus on an expansion with a lot of raid content.
Shrouded Isles
I pitched the concept for the Shrouded Isles expansion, and the team loved it as pitched! For this expansion, I was responsible for the creation of about 80% of the creature, AI, and enemies, two-thirds of the raid content, including my favorite—Caer Sidi dungeon (yes, clerics, blame me for making you fight Apocalypse)—and one-third of the overworld terrain. The rest of the content was built by up-and-coming content designers I was mentoring.
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Note for fans: The Valkyn were pitched as feather-head descendants of Valkyries (see: Hawk from Buck Rogers), and the Inconnu were supposed to be tall and lithe, inspired by Elric of Melnibone.
Darkness Falls
Named as an homage for one of our earlier text MUDs, Darkness Falls was our very first raid dungeon—an RVR raid dungeon at that—and our first ever DLC. It proved to be a pivotal piece in our overall RVR content strategy.
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I was responsible for designing the dungeon and designing, designing, creating, and implementing most of the raid content within the dungeon.
Original Game
I was one of 10 total developers who began the concept of what was to become Dark Age of Camelot. We took one of our older text MuDs and combined it with the graphic engine of one of our magic-based FPS games, and we quickly had a prototype. The game was almost a successor to our Darkness Falls universe, but we wanted a known IP that wouldn't cost us money. That sparked the idea of using Camelot, but we didn't want to be limited to the Arthurian legends people knew. We also needed two more realms, and I worked to make the fiction something people would get behind.
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For this project, I was responsible for all of the original research of the three mythologies we ended up using—Arthurian, Celtic, and Norse—came up with the zones of our world, physically built part of that world—in Photoshop using grayscale height maps (world and level editors were years away), designed and implemented 95% of every creature, animal, and monster across the entire game (three Realms of content, 14 zones per Realm). From start to finish, this project took 18 months. We almost had to cut Hibernia because we were running out of time, but we made it happen..