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This Developer Blog is copied verbatim from the RuneScape website. It is copyrighted by Jagex.
It is written by Mod John A and is dated 3 September 2009.
Within The Next Few Weeks...

Forgiveness of a Chaos Dwarf is scheduled for release within the next few weeks. Actually, it’s scheduled for a particular date, but if I were to tell you that date I’d probably jinx it, so "within the next few weeks" is all you’re going to get out of me.

QA

As I write this, the quest is coming to the end of the WIP QA stage. By the time you read this, that stage will probably be over and the quest may even be in RC.

There’s not much I can say about the QA stage that wasn’t in the QA dev blog. From my point of view, the QA stage consists of lots of little jobs appearing in my job list, which I have to fix.

Text edit

One of our editors, Mod Osborne, has edited the quest’s text for spelling, grammar and house style. House style means that where there’s more than one correct way of doing something in English, there will be one way that we prefer, just to keep things consistent. For example, "all right" and "alright" are both correct, but our house style prefers the latter.

When an issue is clear-cut, such as a mis-spelled word, Mod Osborne will simply correct it without informing me. For more difficult issues, such as a sentence that could be punctuated in more than one way, the two of us will quickly discuss it and reach an agreement.

Translation

While the text edit is happening, the quest also goes to the translation teams who create the German, French and Portuguese versions of the text. I’m not involved in this stage at all, since I don’t speak any of those languages.

Lores and Histories story

Lores (The Coat Thief)

An image from 'The Coat Thief'

While the edit and QA stage were going on, I took some time to write a short story that could go live as a Lores and Histories page. I’m a keen writer, so writing this story has been the part of the project I’ve enjoyed the most. A Lores and Histories story gives me the chance to expand upon the narrative of the quest without the restrictions that come with putting the story in a quest--I don’t have to worry about puzzle difficulty or rewards, and I can describe a cool thing happening without worrying about how much time it would take to code! It also lets me expand on the story for people who are interested in it, without forcing people who aren’t so story-focused to read it.

The story is titled ‘The Coat Thief’, and it deals with something that happens to Commander Veldaban that sets the stage for the new quest. The plan is for it to go up at the same time as the quest.

Knowledge Base pages and news post

Mod Osborne has written the new Knowledge Base page for the quest, and made all the necessary changes to other Knowledge Base pages. I then checked these for accuracy.

Meanwhile, I wrote the news post, which is something I always find surprisingly hard. It’s like the whole project with its months of development has to be distilled down into a few sentences that will explain it and make the reader enthusiastic about it.

Launch day

The next big event for this quest, of course, is launch day. Which, like I said, is within the next few weeks. Making the launch happen is out of my hands; like a screenwriter at a film premiere, all I can do is watch. Even after years working at Jagex, a launch day can be nerve-wracking. I’ll spend a lot of the afternoon on the forums, looking at whether or not people like the quest--and, more importantly, what people like or dislike about it. For the most part, it’ll be too late to make this quest any better, but I can always learn for next time.

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