Thomas "Hanse" Eidson of Star Wars Galaxies has penned the fourth installment of his developer diary series giving a behind the scenes look at the beast mastery system.

Hey there! I'm Thomas "Hanse" Eidson and this is the fourth designer diary in the series I've been writing over the past several weeks. The first one outlined the specifics of what my job entails from a high level perspective. The second diary reviewed a player versus environment balance approach I used. The third diary sketched out how the Jedi expertise was created. In this fourth diary, I will go over my responsibilities with the beast mastery system.

As you may already know, I am a system designer for Star Wars Galaxies. A system designer, in short, makes broad decisions for entire sections of the game. Instead of focusing on small details, such as which way a building should face, we focus on how all the buildings should function. In this way, we are responsible for large changes to the game.

When the beast mastery system was first discussed, we simply called it a new pet system. Our goal was to allow a player the ability to control one creature at a time in the game. We wanted the pet to grow, eat, fight, learn, and have a personality. The range of pets available would be large and diverse. A system of discovery would need to be implemented so that the beasts would be craftable. Also, these pets would have special abilities and attributes.

Read the developer diary here.