Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks

So here I was plugging away on my maps for Act III just like I had for Acts I and II and then I check out Maerduin's blog page and see these magnificent shots of his upcoming mod. Instantly, I realize I have something to learn. I had the same feeling walking around Westgate, but I didn't really know what was hakpak material for that mod and what was part of the toolset. One quick e-mail to Zach later, and it turns out the toolset is so much better than I had ever thought for customizing interiors. In short, walls can be colored and re-textured and floors and ceilings have multiple textures as well. Suddenly, I have some reworks on all interior maps in my previous two acts.

I guess it goes to show that after working with the toolset for more than a year, I still have things to learn. It's just another example of how the NWN2 toolset is a serious upgrade from the NWN1 variety.

Mysteries of Westgate
It's been a while since there was any excitement regarding the upcoming Adventure Pack, but there was a new promo release recently outlining one of the major NPCs and the three companions. After months of only getting to praise the area designers - which is all you can really talk about with screen shots - we finally turn to something I as a designer put a lot of work into. I'm rather proud of the three companions, and I think that they will be interesting company for those who choose to adventure in Westgate. I don't think I can say much more at this point.

There is, apparently, some hubbub on the BioBoards concerning the fact that two of the companions are blonde. To tell the truth, I don't think a single one of the designers even thought about that during the development; it certainly wasn't mentioned. I must profess to being mystified as to why this is an issue. I count twelve companions for the NWN 2 OC: Ammon, Bishop, Casavir, the Construct, Elanee, Grobnar, Khelgar, Neeshka, Qara, Sand, Shandra, and Zhjaeve. MotB had five companions: Safia, Kaelyn, Gann, Okku, and One of Many. Of these seventeen companions, zero are blondes. That means only two of the twenty companions in the thus-far official material are blonde. Hardly a problem as I see it, but if that's the biggest problem some people have with the companions, then I'd say we've been wildly successful.

As an aside, as anyone who has played the "Saleron's Gambit" series can attest, my own personal preference is to have "normal" companions. Of the nine henchmen I wrote for that series, seven were human, one was an elf, and one was a tiefling, and that one was only introduced in the trip to Sigil in Part V. It's not that I'm against having a half-celestial dragon disciple in the party, but I think they should be as rare in modules as they are in Faerun - which is to say very rare. Modules that have a freak show running around tend to get my eyes rolling, as I think that is often a cheap method of making companions memorable as opposed to the writing or their personality. Anyway, I was quite content to write up some normal-looking companions for MoW.

Btw for completeness, my tolerance for freak shows goes up in epic adventures, as planar travel and such are more common in such adventures. Thus, I really didn't mind carting around a magic bear in MotB...

Maimed God Update
I've made some minor progress on the Act III dialogs, but most of my work has been mapmaking. I now have 8 of the 14 maps I need for Act III finished and two more started. In keeping with my pronouncement last time regarding the need for secrecy of Act III's content, I'll simply leave you with a screenshot of my newest map entitled "Glade of the Miracle." Oooh, that sounds religious, doesn't it?

Constructing Waterdeep: Part III

The main Waterdeep map's done. Previously, I've finished two other interior Waterdeep maps, so that leaves only two more interiors and a very small exterior left to complete all the maps for this section of the adventure. I'm guessing Waterdeep will comprise about 1.25 to 1.5 hours of the campaign, after which it will switch to the environs around the city. Essentially, the character is just here to learn some information, and that means slumming it in the Dock Ward for a bit.

Creating even this minor part of a city has given me a whole new respect for the area designers in Mysteries of Westgate, and as regular readers know, I already had huge respect for them! Cities are definitely more time consuming than nature, but ultimately very rewarding.

OK, no more words. Just pictures. First we start with the statue of Piergieron the Palidinson, one of the Lords of Waterdeep.


Next it's a small side alley.


Third, we take a walk along the docks with the Temple of Tyr dominating the backdrop.


Finally, Fishgut Court at night. The building in the middle-left (with the lamp post out front) is the rough-and-tumble dock tavern called "The Keel Hauler."

Constructing Waterdeep: Part II

And an update one workday later. I got to spend about four to five hours on the map today. This was spent working on:

• Restructuring the docks and adding ship placeables.
• Adding about a half dozen trees.
• Adding background buildings. Now characters will see random towers and spires in the distance as they walk through Waterdeep. On the map below, note that some of these are 1-dimensional cards that are not seen from the provided vantage point.
• Textures. This was the big one. All the area the player can walk in and those areas viewable by the player had to be textured. This was mostly the brick roads seen, but there's a lot of overlaid cracked stone, mud, dirt, and grass in there.

Major tasks left to do:

• 99% of the non-building placeables
• Walkmesh shaping
• Sounds
• Lighting
  

OK, here's the picture of Waterdeep one workday later. Again, the walkable area is outlined by the red square. That little square is Fishgut Court in the northern Dock Ward for those interested. The massive building at top is the Temple of Tyr. Yes, in the Maimed God's Saga, the shadow of Tyr hangs over everything.

Constructing Waterdeep: Part I

Another quick update. As opposed to what I said last time, I decided not to start scripting Act II, but rather to start on Act III. My output since then is 5000 words of dialog, three of the thirteen maps I project I'll need, and the start of a fourth (more below).

I also did a lot of tactical planning for Act III and began to get the impression that it was a bit too linear. To a degree, this is unavoidable given that the adventure will need to be driven to a conclusion at this point, but I thought it was nevertheless too much. Therefore, I revised a couple aspects to give the players some extra choices along the way, and I think the campaign is stronger for it as a result.

The nature of those choices - and of Act III for that matter - will have to remain a secret. There's a huge twist at the end of Act II that launches the final act, and any concrete information I give will have a seriously deleterious effect on player enjoyment, so I'm not even going to use my secret spoiler trick. Just silence.

However, I'll post the occasional screenshots. I began to think that maybe people might be a bit interested on the design of my map of the Waterdeep Dock Ward, so I'll post the map at different stages of development. It's the first true "city map" I've done, and I've already found it to present very different challenges from nature maps or even village maps. The attached screenshot represents about four hours of work yesterday and shows the basic outline of the ward. It's just the building layout along with a small bit of texturing to show the roads, and then I added the river-walk docks and the water. The red square indicates the area traversable by the player; everything outside of that is background scenery. More later as Waterdeep develops.

Quick Update

I can report that all the dialog writing for Act II is 100% done, though I'm sure I'll add the odd line here and there. The whole act clocks in at 80,028 words, which I've managed to write by my estimation in around 3.5 months. I'm exhausted I don't mind saying.

Normally, I would finish off the writing by knocking out the journals next, but somehow I just can't work up the enthusiasm for that right now, so I think I'll just dive into the scripting. When I'm done scripting what I have, then I'll go back to writing the journals and then finish by scripting those in one big sitting.

Lots still to do, but - other than the journals - all the creative "stuff" is there. Now I just need to glue it all together. Screen shots next time.

So Close, Yet So Far...
And I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout-out to the NY Giants, who are now officially the champions of my favorite sport. (That would be football, and I mean the real football!) Normally, I would never root for any NY team, but when the alternative is a perfect season and endless crowing about "the best of all time..." Well, that would have made me vomit. Thankfully, the Giants pulled it off and downed the Patriots 17-14 in what was damned near the most exciting ending to any Super Bowl ever.

It's got to suck to be the Patriots. They finished 18-1, but there's no way a single person on that team can be happy and consider it a successful season... Schadenfreude on my part to be sure.

I'm Back!

Yes, it's been a while since I posted. That's partially due to a couple real life emergencies, but mostly due to my wanting to complete a particular task before updating, and complete it I have. Yes, ladies and gents, I have finally finished... *drum roll*... the "chair" conversation!

Doesn't that sound exciting?

Something I conceived of was that, if I could pursuade the player to view the day/night cycle as the normal cycle of activity (or purposely campaign at night in certain cases), then it would make sense to have a "wind down at the end of the day" kind of conversation. If these conversations took place regularly, then it would be a natural way of developing the relationship between the PC and the companion over subsequent nights. I have visions of having the talks in letterbox format in the darkened room with the firelight dancing about... hopefully, it will turn out to be fun because, while there's not a whole lot of plot development in the chair dialog, there's a ton of character development.

I'm also using it as a means of allowing the player to "input" their character's past into the module without making it obvious. In the "Saleron's Gambit" series, which started at level 1, I invented that past for the character, but this campaign starts at level 5, so the characters could be coming from almost anywhere. The screenshot of the chair conversation included shows that, in this particular point in the dialog, the companion has asked, literally, where the player "comes from" and you can see the sheer number of responses I have allowed for. Subsequently, in Act III, which transfers from Navatranaasu to Waterdeep, there may be a character that says, "Hey, don't you remember me from XXXX" or "I knew your sister in XXXX!" And yes, there is another point where the companion asks about the player's family as well, so if a sister isn't applicable, it may be brother, cousin, friend, etc. And, of course, the companions also tell quite a bit about themselves during these fireside chats.

So the chair dialog is massive. On the dialog editor screenshot, take a look at the circled number. Yes, that's 15,000 words in the one dialog alone. That's what I had estimated originally, and what do you know? I was exactly right! OK, I really only came to 14,999 words originally, so I found a place to insert one more to make it even.

The chair dialog, for what it's worth, brings the total words of dialog in Act II to just under 77,000 thus far, and I estimate about 7,000 more to come. And then there's journals, etc. on top of that.

The second screenshot is a toolset-level view of the player's suite on the upper floor of the VanGhaunt mansion. The chairs in front of the fireplace are seen as is the map detailed in my last post. You can also see the two bedrooms in the suite, the nearby Tyran chapel, and the mansion library (not to be confused with the town archives), all of which will be pivotal in the adventure.

More later...

Let Me Show You My Map!

First... Farewell, Berliad
Some of you may have noticed that I link a few other NWN2 blogs on the left. For the most part, these are blogs operated by my Ossian-mates. However, there is one that isn't. That one would be Berliad's. Now, I've known for a while that Berliad's updates were... well, less than regular, but he had promised to return when he felt the urge again. Apparently, that urge will not be coming. He announced on his blog a couple days ago that he is effectively retiring from the NWN community.

I will miss Berliad. He was a tireless contributer to the community back in the closing days of NWN1 and the beginning of the NWN2 era. For me, personally, he was also important because he was the member of the Reviewers' Guild who reviewed "Saleron's Gambit: Part 3." When that review hit the Vault at the end of 2005, shortly before the release of Part 4, all hell broke loose. Though I was known in small circles prior to that, the download count really exploded afterwards, e-mails started coming in rapidly, and I never looked back. So though I credit Lebowski with pushing my modules from the very earliest days and giving me a minor amount of notoriety, it was Berliad's article that created quite a bit of buzz as I was finishing the series up.

So, Berliad, thanks for everything, and good luck in whatever you do next.

The Maimed God's Saga
As I have mentioned before, I have a little side business that I run (OK, it's not so little, but I digress...), and this past weekend was taken up with writing a major business proposal. What little time was left was devoted to making some small bit of progress on TMGS.

I can't believe it, but in all my previous updates, including my progress matrices, I had actually forgotten about a major puzzle I had planned for the VanGhaunt library! So I spent this weekend "writing" 24 books that will, in part, be the pieces of the puzzle. This actually wasn't easy because the wording in each must be exact in order for the puzzle to work... PLUS I had to write several other "normal" books for the library. And now there's actually another dialog that I need to write to implement the puzzle mechanics.

So in short, I actually blew my toolset time this weekend doing something that, for some ungodly reason, I had actually forgotten to include in all my tracking charts, spreadsheets, etc., but is nevertheless a major piece of the mystery!

Screenshots?
Yes, this is a screenshot from the common room of the player's suite in the VanGhaunt mansion illustrating the map. I don't have any scripting implemented in the conversation, so you can see most of the possible dialog options. I haven't looked too much into the scripting, but I'm hoping to be able to access the world map from here. If this isn't possible, then the player will be able to move to any part of the area they have thus far discovered from this point. This is part of my attempt to make it easy for the players to regularly utilize their "home base," which is otherwise located in the back of the upper floor of the mansion. In addition, it serves as a point where the player will be able to discuss the overall tactical situation with the companion; there is a lot of Tancred and Verona dialog attached to this map.

Rest assured that it's not the only interesting item in the player's suite... But I'll wait on talking about the other stuff in future updates.

Hakpaking!
These past couple nights, I grabbed a little time to cruise through the hakpaks available on the Vault again, as I do every three months or so looking for new content that might be useful. I found a group of 25 additional paintings that I merged into the campaign hak that I'm using. It just took me an hour or so formatting the 2da files. Boring work, really, but the in-game results should be worth it, as there are now several new, non-standard paintings to look at. Some of them actually inspired me to write small additional dialogs.