Wrapped up another series of conversations. A player can now talk their way through the final fortification to to the final battle using either bluff or diplomacy with the occasional perform thrown in there for good cause.
Two of the three paths now have completed conversations and I have started the final path. The end game conversation is also written. So I estimate probably only another 5000-7500 words left for that last path, unless the companions start throwing in all sorts of interjections. At the most it shouldn't be more then another 10,000 words. The majority of the scripting still needs to be done, inlcuding the conversation switches for all the three paths. I have a script outlined and mostly created for the sneak path with a pseudo heartbeat checking if the player and the party is found; it needs a little more tweaking but not much. The base area design is done. The fortifications need to have NPC placed throughout, all the unique NPC already have blueprints created. In the sneak path all the usable placeables need to be added and scripted and several still need to be discovered or figured out. Currently there are 2 out of about 6 conversation/distraction points that still need a bit more inspiration. Right now they are at this point something should happen.....
So once all that is done and a character can play through the 3 paths I will move onto spelling (spellplug) and grammar checking. Exciting stuff.
So this is just a short post of what is happening, no screenshots. The conversation editor just isn't exciting enough.
Episode 83: Alpha Testing (Stage One)
1 week ago
5 comments:
Good to hear. Just repeat to yourself, "Only 10000, only 10000." It'll eventually get smaller.
So after 10000 words the campaign is done? (10,000 plus the scripts that is) ?
Conversations ... oh they can be very tiresome to get right. That's what pushes the word count up I find.
I had to laugh the other day when my wife said she had a 1000 word essay to write. I said that was merely the length of a title in NWN writing. ;)
Good to hear you can see an end in sight. :)
Lance.
Chaos: I'll try to say only 10,000. I have six conversations left and 5 of them involve crouching and hiding while formulating your next move and the last one is more of the main bosses ego-centric paranoid rant with little options for companion interjections.
however, when typing away it is too easy to add a companions opinion here or there then another companions response to that idea then the drop throughs. I am amazed how much stuff a player can miss by which companions they have.
EE: You make it sound so simple. There is still a fair amount to do before I can shout out in the streets that "yes, it is DONE!". This time I broke from my usual approach of area design, scripts then conversations. I have the base area design done with no interactive items, then the conversations (in my opinion the most difficult and time consuming part of building). This leaves scripting and placing interactive placeable and NPCs. Then I need to move onto cleaning it up and completing Alpha. I have 4 modules. The first 2 have completed alphas with no errors I can find, but I'm sure someone will do "something wrong" that I will have to fix. Number 3 has several errors I need to work out but other wise work. And # 4 has no play testing as it is missing almost all the scripts for the final 3 areas.
And final why I can't say it is a complete module. This is a single story arc of my grandiose plan. It has a definite end but the story will continue.
Lance: When I can commit the time and can get on a roll conversations are that bad, but it is the starting that I have troubles with. I do have a love hate relationship with them. They are time consuming and often difficult to get right but I hope that they will bring the companions to life and create a decent role playing experience in a fairly linear mod.
I agree, the convo editor is not that exciting... Which might be the main thing stopping me from jumping right back in for now. ;)
Glad to hear about your progress.
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