Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa World Builder, Tom Potter, discusses creation of the Sanctus Grotto instance.

A look back over the development of the Santus Grotto Instance.

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Sanctus Grotto was an instance that was in development for some time before I started working at Destination Games. I joined the Tabula Rasa team late in development, so my job was to take the initial vision to completion. The conceptual foundation was already complete so you’d think that there wouldn’t be much left for me to do. But Sanctus Grotto is a perfect example of how even “final” designs are often in a state of flux, and how making a few small changes can quickly multiply into something much larger.

My personal design philosophy is to have a strong underlying theme to guide me, but at the same time remain flexible enough to change direction as ideas prove unworkable or if new, better ideas spring forth. In its current state, Sanctus Grotto was a large, winding system of caves and caverns culminating in a large underground Forean tomb. It had been some time since the instance had been evaluated, so the mission designer, Jason Ford, and I put our heads together to see if we could bring anything new and exciting to the table. After brainstorming for a bit it became clear that some of the things we wanted to implement would require some additional work. Actually a lot of extra work as it turned out.

The first change was to make the overall layout more linear to accommodate some of the mission requirements. That required me to essentially scrap the entire first third of the map and start over. What was once an open cavern system became a more claustrophobic underground pathway, which really altered and enhanced the mood of the instance. Of course, such a large change also meant there was now much more work ahead.