Sunday, August 19, 2007

Act I Polishing Continues

I was engaged in Ossian work earlier in the week, but that slowed considerably this weekend. It looks like a huge chunk is coming in the next week or two, and my hope is to finish Act I and stick it on the shelf so that, when I can finally return to The Maimed God's Saga, I can just start on Act II.

I've done tons of polishing. I ran every conversation through a spell-checker, standardized a lot of my writing conventions and spellings, adjusted encounter CRs, and so forth. For the most part, the things I've been doing don't translate well into pictures.

However, I did spruce up some of my maps. For example, I was never entirely happy with Riverford. I had an image of the town in my head already because I had written it into the opening chapter of my now-aborted novel. Unfortunately, I didn't like the way it came out in the NWN2 toolset, so I took a step back, thought a bit outside my original concept, and remade large portions of the map.

A before and after is included along with a closeup of the temple. I added another street with some more houses in the background, tree-lined the main boulevard, narrowed all the streets and did away with the wagon ruts, added a gazebo used for public pronouncements in the main square, paved the pathway up to the Temple of Tyr and gave it a bit of a gradient upwards, and added a bit of landscaping to the temple grounds. I'm much happier with the result now.

Today I worked on one of the sidequests and spent a lot of time with the non-conventional paths through the quest. By that I mean when the player does something screwy like refuse the quest, do some of it anyway, then go to the next map, then come back and accept, then refuse again... the types of thing that 99.9% of players will never do, but one will, only so he can happily run to my Vault page to report that he's found a bug! I think such people are now officially screwed on this one quest I worked on today.

One thing I have not done is start on the camera corrections for the conversations I mentioned last time. Luckily, I think the number of instances that I'll need to handle is now very low - maybe about nine in total - and a couple will allow me to reuse some work between Verona's and Tancred's dialogs.

Companion Influence
It occurs to me that I've never outlined how I'm going to do companion influence. Suffice it to say, I will not be using the OC method, which is to have about ten points where you get a massive boost to your influence announced with blaring trumpets and so forth. Instead, there will be literally hundreds of chances to gain or lose influence, the scale will be between -100 and 100, and you won't be told when a situation has passed - though one will occur in almost every conversation, even with 3rd parties. Most of the shifts will be one point, but big events can lead to three or - very rarely - up to five points.

Act I is all about building the relationship (positively or negatively). Starting in Act II, the way the companion interacts with you will be based upon the sum total of your interaction up to that point. There really isn't a huge risk that they'll leave; the story has a very strong rationale for them to see things through even if they hate you with every fiber of their being, but their responses in that case will tend to be one word answers in clipped tones. "I don't like you, let's talk as little as possible, and just get on with it."

The other extreme is, of course, the romance, but there are going to be at least two and maybe three levels in between. I'm thinking the levels will be (1) Like a lot, (2) Like, (3) Neutral, (4) Dislike/Distrust, and (5) Hatred. If I need to, I'll dump level 5 and then 3 depending on how things go.

The more trust you build up with your companions, the more you'll move towards "Like a lot", and the further towards that extreme you go, the more forthcoming the companions will be in their answers. This will, in turn, reveal more information about them, which will then open up more dialog options. Again, some of this information may come out in 3rd party dialogs as well.

I tried to think about how real human relationships develop. Yes, there are big events that can build trust quickly, but these are (hopefully) rare in most people's lives. More common is the paradigm whereby a small non-threatening piece of information is given. If that is handled well, then a slightly bigger piece is given. If it's not handled well, then less is given in the future until the initial mistrust is overcome by future actions.

That's what I'm aiming for here. This will lead to huge dialogs even by Act I's standards, but I think it necessary to build truly dynamic characters.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Act I Wrapping Up

A big thanks to the three comments I received from the last post. I assure you that my lack of response was not for lack of interest, but rather for lack of time. In total, they've convinced me to purchase just the libraries for now and play with different sequencers when I get them in. It will be a little bit of a trial-and-error and a big learning curve, but I think the long-term benefit for my modding will be immense.

And needless to say, I'll post snippets here as I write them...

Act I Enters Alpha
I've actually been "done" with Act I for about a week. And by "done," I mean only that all the parts were in place. However, I didn't post anything as Ossian took a lot of time this week. It also looks like Ossian will take a lot of time next week as well, so progress will almost certainly be slow.

As I've mentioned before, I do a lot of work before testing, and that held true here as well. Other than a few tests on the initial map and some walkthroughs of different areas to make sure the maps looked right, I hadn't tested at all... until today.

That's right. Today, I did a couple pass-throughs and am generally pleased with what's there. There were a couple big bugs resulting from some differences between NWN1 and NWN2, but I knocked them out and was able to complete the whole act. I managed to do a little polishing and minor bug-squishing today as well.

Moving forward, the biggest single task will be all the new NWN2-style dialogs. I need to go back and add tons of animations, set some delays, and set camera angles, camera following, and so forth. The automatic dialog cutscene tool is OK so long as two characters are standing still, but I need a bit more for most of my dialogs.

TMGS Progress Matrix

TMGS Progress Report (in %)

Act I Act II Act III
Area Design 100 0 0
Dialog 100 0 0
Blueprints 100 0 0
Scripting 100 0 0
Journals 100 0 0
World Map
100
Intro Movie
5
Music
10

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Busy, Busy...

Ossian Update
In recent weeks, the pace of my Ossian work has slowed, allowing me to make good progress on The Maimed God's Saga. However, the last couple weeks or so, Ossian has picked up again, slowing TMGS back down.

I learned my lesson about making predictions, so I'll just say I hope that something is announced soon. I imagine that there will be a minimum of three blogs that will become a fountain of good behind-the-scenes information once the go-ahead is given (and I confirm what can be said and when). Until then...

The Maimed God's Saga
I've really only made progress on TMGS in two areas since last post.

Dialogs
I've finished all dialogs, including Verona's 9000-word behemoth. I also had to slightly revise many of the other dialogs to account for her more fully-developed personality. And that's the main artistic development with the new dialogs - I finally feel that Verona is as interesting a character as Tancred. Before this, I only had the broadest strokes of her character in my head. Suffice it to say that a lot more became ironed out this past couple weeks. I can honestly say that male players will now have a kick-booty romance as well.

Oh, and the total word count for Act I comes to a final total of 34,265. That will undoubtedly fluctuate a bit as I edit during play-throughs, but it'll be pretty close.

Music
I know most people reading this blog may be thinking something like, "C'mon, Tiberius, are you really sure about this music crap! What makes you think you can write music?"

The answers are "Yes" and "Because I've written hours of music for friends, quartets (in college), my wedding, and so forth." Yes, I'm an engineer (reluctantly), but I've actually had quite a bit of formal musical training at the college level - far more than formal literary training... and Ossian's actually paying me to do that!

Thus far, all my music has been composed in my head with the help of a keyboard, and I have a program that allows me to print sheet music that looks good. If I have the right tools, I have no doubt that I can compose a kick-ass score for TMGS. The problem is that the musical sound libraries that actually sound correct are expensive, and the sequencers aren't exactly cheap either. Nevertheless, after some e-mail exchanges with community composer David John, I'm convinced I know what I need, and I'm going to pull the plug on the purchases. As I've said, music composition is a hobby of mine beyond modding, so the expenditure is for more than just this. That's how I justify it anyway; at the very least, this will allow me to merge my two favorite hobbies.

Progress Matrix
I should say that I've done a minor amount of scripting. Basically, I've put the world map scripts together. However, I've remembered there's a little more scripting required than I at first believed. Therefore, the actual percentage for scripting in the chart has not changed.

I think I'm about one to two solid sessions from wrapping up Act I and beginning alpha testing. When I'll be able to get that time depends, in part, on Ossian and other commitments.

TMGS Progress Report (in %)

Act I Act II Act III
Area Design 100 0 0
Dialog 100 0 0
Blueprints 100 0 0
Scripting 35 0 0
Journals 100 0 0
World Map
100
Intro Movie
0
Music
10