Tuesday, November 16, 2010

No Screen Shots?????

The overland map is just about done.
-I need to work on the goodies. I am planning to create swamp specific placeables and not use the SOZ goodies. Most likely I will be using something similar to wyrin's foraging system.
-I changed the lighting a bit. I received a comment about another green swamp, so I have taken it and changed it to more of a brown area. The lighting I originaly used was the default swamp lighting from the OC, which is very green. I tweaked the colors making everything more grey and brown, generally making more of a drab area. The area fogs have also been changed from green and yellow to tan and grey. It is a darker lighting, but I do think it looks nicer. I did leave the water a darker green, but I figure there is just a high algae count.
-The wandering monsters are all set. I have created three areas within the swamp and each area has a specific creature. Slime, lizardfolk and undead. There will be an sub-area for each main creature type with a boss. Once the boss has been defeated that group of creatures will be gone. This next part I haven't started looking at too much but will give it a try if it possible with the system. I would like to go and if 1 of the groups' boss is killed then they will no longer spawn. But the balance of the swamp has been thrown off and I would like to increase the chance for spawning creatures in the other areas. Kill of the lizard folk and their chieftain and they will no longer have war parties to protect their territory and hunt the undead so the undead numbers will increase and cause the player more trouble. Once all three of the groups have been killed the chance of encounter will greatly decrease and mostly be natural predators: alligators, snakes and such.
-The final thing I need to complete is the area transitions from the swamp to the sub-areas. The placeables are all in the swamp so they won't be spawning like SOZ. I looked at the spawning in but with the true .5 scale I didn't like the look and I don't want all these big blue glowing placeables either. I am either looking at making a trigger that will start a conversation if the location has been spotted. With the spot an area transition VFX will be placed in the trigger location. The other option I am considering is using the SOZ system but instead of spawning in the location placeable spawn in a marker. So all the locations will have the marker outside them to start the conversation to enter. This is most likely what i will be doing, just need to come up with a nice looking placeable to mark these locations.

I have been working on 3 of the sub areas so far. 1 is 100% complete. A smaller cave complex filled with myconids (thanks to RWS). My 5 year old drew up the plans and populated the mushroom caves. I did have to redirect his original plot as it was complete and epic story in itself. The 2nd area is nearly completed. It needs a few conversations and loot. It is for much later in the game as the CR is well beyond what a starting player would be at in chapter 2. The final area is a set of ruins that is populated by a demon cult all it needs is to have loot added and lighting/sounds.

At this time modding has been going very well. I have only try a few areas in game so far. Most likely I will try to get the swamp area mostly complete then go through it tweaking and improving. So it will be a while to I put up a bunch of screen shots.

I would like to thank everyone who has played through chapter 1. The feedback has been great and I have been keeping up on the little bugs here and there that are found. Checking that page is definitely a great way to gain some motivated before jumping into the toolset!