Saturday, October 10, 2009

Back to Some Area Design

I have taken a break from conversations and started working on one of the last two area. A mountain fortification filled with an growing army. The bulk of the soldiers are goblinoids and orcs lead by a Grey Dwarf with the help of minotaurs and ogres to help keep the goblins and such in line.

A bunch of the conversations I still need to complete will be your companions advice on how to infiltrate this base so I figured having the area mostly completed would help with those conversations. There will be three ways through the fort and to reach the commander of the army.

The first and perhaps most difficult will be the stealth approach and will include more problem solving stuff to create diversions and remain unseen. Maybe having you necromancer companion raise some of the dead from the the burning piles outside the fort will be one such an option to hop the first wall unseen but then who knows.

The second will be for those of you who just can't get enough of beating things over the head. While you will not be able to assault the fort you will be able to challenge the champions and fight one on one battles up through the various groups of the army. So if you beat the worg riding goblin champion you get to fight the orc champion until you are fighting in the audience of the army's leader and he brings out some half-breed beast of a creature for you to fight.

The final approach will be talking: diplomacy, bluff, intimidation and probably a few other things as well and being able to asking your companions to jump in and help out. A half-fiend bard would probably excel in a situation like that.

For the fort I have been using Barry the Hatchet Watchtowers . A couple of small to medium sized forests were definitely clear cut in the creation but sacrifices must be made. The walk up to the fort I wanted to show the barbaric nature of it's inhabitants and their lack of value for human life. On the NWN forums Chaos Wielder pointed me in the right direction by using visual effect models and I was able to create rotting corpses standing in elevated cages and skeletons on pikes as well as a dead horse. Using the hanging copses and funeral fires included in the MotB and SOZ blueprints I was able to create a rather ghastly entrance.

So here they are the screen shots. The area design is still in it's early stages. Only three textures have been placed with little blending. Also in some of the screen shots the elevated cages are all funky. For some reason when I set the portcullis (what I used for the walls) to static they revert back to their default scale and when I then uncheck the static box they return to me assigned scale.














Elevated corpse cage, uses a zombie VF, no ambient idle animation and no walkmesh issues

Corpse Cage, impaled skeleton and hanging tree all in one screen shot.





The hanging tree. Hag spawns make nice discolored and bloated bodies


The main entrance with corpses and fire pits placed


Final gate to the inner walls and the fort's main hall



Main entrance, no corpses placed, slightly out of order but oh well.


Raven picking any last bit of flesh from the skull


A barricade by the main entrance and a dead horse


Another view of the cage. Zombie's head sticks out of cage so it's shoulders will be resting against the bars.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The raven beaking the skull is really tasteful! Better, I's say classy! ;-)

Shaughn said...

Classy, I like that.
I have to keep minimizing the screen when ever my kids walk into the room while working on this area.

EC said...

Gameplay for this sequence sounds interesting. Love the raven pic too.