The All Consuming Halloween Module

So since joining the Community Halloween Project I have done little to nothing with Risen Hero.
I have found some time for a little more play testing over the past week with another page of little updates and changes. It is nice so far nothing game stopping more of little changes, tightening up cutscene or little preference changes that the player most likely won't notice one way or the other. I have two characters working through the first two modules one evil and one good. I want to see exactly where they are before I start populating the third module to maintain balancing.

The Halloween Module is a medium size interior of my basement. No combat or skill use so a player of level 1 or 30 can come in and have the same experience. Playing a lot with the sounds and lighting, Oneofmany's voice set is great for random spooky sounds. The game itself will be more of exploring, small puzzles, a mini scavenger hunt type thing and fun visual stuff with a fair amount of humor thrown in.

I believe that as of last night I have most of it completed. The areas are all put together. Conversations and scripts are written. Now I just need to work on play testing to make sure everything is doing what I intend.

Here is one screen shot of the starting area. Being that it is only one area I want to keep most of it a surprise so you'll have to wait till Halloween to see more.



Community Content:
Cobwebs by Hellcow/Spajk
A Cloud of Bats by Amraphael
Lip Flappers v1.0 by Rogue Dao
RWS Deep Hall Tileset http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=119651&id=327

An August Update

So the goblin side track was fun but nothing really came from it. I have a campaign and hak all setup and ready to go but nothing else.

Nothing too exciting happening with Risen Hero. I have been going back to the start and tweaking the areas. It is nice to have the sound and light spheres working as well, surprisingly I had to do only a little adjusting with my guesses being fairly close to correct.

Playing a little bit more with area lighting and bloom in some areas and adding creatures to the creature cache, not quite sure while I ignored these originally should of figured they would eventually be fixed.

Downloaded Wyrin's Foraging system and while I'm tweaking the areas I have been adding a few plants and mushrooms here and there. This is a great system that he put together and I'm trying to place the plants in partially hidden areas so you won't be able see them all by pressing the "z" key, instead you need to do a bit of looking.

Also downloaded Companion and Monster AI by Tony_K and was very impressed while play testing, it adds so much to the game. I no longer feel like I need to babysit my companions to keep them from killing themselves or dropping a fire ball in the center of the party wiping everyone out. The monsters also offer more of a challenge.

And finally pulled my load screens back into the photo editor and went with the sepia setting to clean them up and try to create a darker mood.

Something just a little different

The giant boulder toss Hak and override have been released on the vault http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=359

Now I should of returned to Risen Hero like a good designer but something happened.

Somewhere between searching the vault and reading the bioware forums an idea struck me. I had discovered what the game was missing . . .

It was time for a goblin module.

No more elves, dwarves or those silly half-breeds. It was time for the underdogs to have their day. No longer would they be experience providers just to get your character through those first few levels. No more will the goblins give out 7 experience points instead they will be collecting the experience points.

At character creation there is only one choice for race. Goblin.



Custom color 2da allows for a varied color scheme that matches the above description.
Unfortunately only the skin is tintable and there is only one head and one hair style.

But to make up for the lack of physical alterations there are six goblin gods to choose from. They may not all be from the Forgotten Realms but these are what my internet searches found.

The last bit of changes made gave the goblins more appropriate sound sets, they now grunt, groan and hiss. I was hoping to get into the random name generator so you could be offered a name like "Foul Toe the Rank".

Now I am not really sure what I am going to do with this since I already have little time to work on my main project, Risen Hero.

But the idea that I have floating around is a small noncombat module that is made up of various puzzles. The goblin PC will have to interact with other humoniod and giant races either helping them or getting around them; what chances will a goblin have against a troll? This would be the type of module where you wander around collecting all those bizarre items because you may need them all for different quest and puzzles. Something that is fun with a different challenge (opposed to the usual kill your enemies) and has a bunch of humor thrown in.

But there is the time issues, and this may never come to be.

There be boulders in the air!

Duck and cover!


A whole new element has been added when battling giants. Sure you have a helmet but don't expect it to help too much. Just ignore the ringing in your ears and get ready for the next volley. What is a good adventure without a few concussions and some traumatic brain injuries.

This is also the introduction for the ever popular hill giant. He has returned to the game after being left out from the NWN2 release. He's big and ugly with s huge club and yes he does look vaguely like a half-orc.




Now onto the boulders. . .

First is the hill giant

He lifts

He throws

You find your yourself standing in a pile of rubble

The fire giants animation sucks so he does't have a lot of screen shots. For whatever reason he was never given a casting animation, but 2 out of three giants works for me.

The frost giant doesn't even need to do the overhead hurl, he just holds the boulder at his chest then sends it flying at you.

I sure hope the this guy has a good reflex save . . .

So there it is the Risen Hero boulder throw.

Thanks to:

Tony K for pointing me in the right direction at the start

Dirywick and his post on user defined events on the BouncyRock forum

Little Baron and his Cowtapult! LB's Ballista projectile demonstration

I have a little more testing to do but right now everything seems up to par. Once it is complete I plan on releasing a erf for other builders. It will contain the three scripts: Boulder throw, the giant on spawn and giant user defined events. Three blueprints of the giants with their scripts and variables assigned (yes you get a copy of my outstanding Hill Giant). And spells.2da. It is used for the animation of the projectile. I was unable to find a way to have the boulder fly through the air without referencing a custom boulder spell. The script does work without the 2da, it is used only for the animation CastFakeSpellatLocation.

Lost in the Mountains

Well summer is here, and I have been trying to take advantage of the weather to get stuff done outside and enjoy myself. I continue to work on the toolset but not nearly as often.

I have been moving my campaign into a more mountainous region. This is proving to be quite a project working with the camera controls. With the large incline of the terrain at the bottom of the screen will be clipping to blue as I am trying to place objects and such. A little bit of rotation and I find myself inside the mountain side looking through the ground at tree bases. But the over areas are shipping up.

The main idea to this mountain area is the PC and their party are lost trying to find their way I kind of stole the idea from that swamp in IWD II. I have one large main area that makes up the bulk of the mountains. I have taken it and divided it into 9 separate sub areas. Each of the sub areas has two area transitions, one is right and will move the party to the next subarea and the other one is wrong leading to badness. If the player goes the wrong way they have a chance of a random encounter and then will be placed randomly in one the subareas that they have already visited.

To help the player and not make this a total act of frustration trying to navigate the mountain side each sub area will have a conversation. Companions will give hints and PC skills will be used to find the right way. But just to make things fun some of these hints will conflict, this will be the exception though. I have no intention of have the player have to guess which way to go at every turn, that would be tedious and just generally obnoxious.

A river fortress that the player will need to find a way through. Still working on the conversations but I hope to have numerous ways of getting through for multiple skills, classes and alignments. Fighting your way through will hopefully be a last resort.
The banners were made using Cloaks of Faerun (pk2) by Wild Bill

The subareas in the mountain are defined but a slightly different texture on the walkable path. Then boulders, trees and dense grass set up the boarders. The subareas are placed so that they don't line up; so there isn't a linear progression through the area and the area map will not be the cheat sheet to navigate through the mountain.

Beware which path you choose certain death could be waiting for you and your party, or maybe just a bunch of filthy goblins and such.

I couldn't help myself with this one. One wrong turn in the mountains will lead to a wandering monster screen. 6 deactivated encounters are here and one will randomly be activated each time a player finds themselves very lost.

One of the encounters will be hill giants, but don't get your hopes up too much though. I don't have the same talent as other community members and my custom monsters are just tinting and scale jobs. I don't currently have a screen shot but I have used a half-orc made them really tall and gave then very broad shoulders (for throwing boulders).

Giants will be throwing boulders in Risen Hero. Each giant should have three boulders to toss at adventurers. I found the script used in NWN1 and tweaked it quiet a bit. The giants will use a range touch attack and the PC will be given a reflex save to dodge and reduce damage should the giant hit them. The main script is working but I am still working on the User Defined script which will fire the main script.

Bioware forum post

http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/myviewtopic.html?topic=638602&forum=114

Bouncy Rock Forum Post

http://forum.bouncyrock.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=127&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=10

I did try to create a custom ranged weapon for giants but due to hard coding you are unable to link new ranged weapons to ammunition and the throwing boulders will show out of ammunition when they were used in battle.

So that is where Risen Hero is at now.

Back at it, whatever it is?

Well the short break didn't last long, but I did get a chance to play test Dark Avenger Chapter 2. It is an excellent game and a great continuation of the story from chapter 1. Anyone who hasn't played this or the first chapter needs to give it a play through, Wyrin has created a good solid and enjoyable story.

I never got around to playing any of the other games that I wanted to though, Risen Hero started calling to me again. I went from DA to play testing the second module of Risen Hero. Found several big bugs that I was able to quickly squash. Know what is a bad idea, placing a script on the fail to open of a lock door that assigns the PC to open that same door. A few speak triggers that didn't have the speak now turned to true so the NPC would run up to the PC and all the cutscreen cameras showed a bunch of different angles of nothing. But overall things are coming together, a bit more hack and slash then I originally planned but I feel that there is enough substance between the battles and reasons for the battles so they don't dominate the story.

Below is a collect of random screen shots in no real particular order from both module #1 and #2.

A little break

Module #2 is now mostly complete and I do believe that Risen Hero has reached the half way point. (Not sure but I may have made this same halfway announcement before but oh well.) The completed module reveals a lot more about your companions personalities and their back stories, though most of the main plot is still unknown to the PC. I was able to wrap up the the side area mentioned in a previous post, the 12 cave area. Several side quest were created; some tried to explain why the area is so large as well has provide some area history and some others are indirectly tied into the main plot and the companion back stories.

I need to do some play testing of the game to make sure that there are no game stopping bugs or other weird stuff before moving on to the next module.

But it is now time for a little break from modding, I will be taking some time to play some of the other games out there. I will be staring with Dark Avenger Chapter 2 then I need to actually complete Asphyxia and Harp & Chrysanthemum. I was able to get about half way through but trying to play and working on Risen Hero just didn't work. I kept forgetting to move overrides in and out of the folder and made a mess out of everything multiple times.

Once I get through the testing of the 2nd module I should have some screen shots to show.