Planescape Chant

Progress on Risen Hero has slowed down to a crawl over the last month and will definitely be slow for the next few weeks. Several reasons for this: First and most obvious is the holidays. The season of shopping and weekend parties is here. The second new time sink of mine is the game Left for Dead 2. Normally I have minimal interest in 1st person shooter games, but this one is like crack. So my nights are often spent shooting zombies instead of working in the toolset. Finally Kamal has released an updated Path of Evil to playtest. He has modified a bunch of stuff and added a number of new areas that I am looking forward to playing.

With RH I have been kicking around the idea of adding another companion, because apparently I like to torture myself with massive conversations that have too many branches. I have been mulling this over for a bit and knew if I was going to add this companion I needed to do it very early in the creation of chapter 2. The second chapter will open up and come away from the linear play of chapter 1. If I wait too long to add the companion, updating conversations would be a massive task to include them correctly.

That idea has come to pass but instead of one companion I am adding 2. In a moment of pure genius I figured how to limit conversations, one of them is a mute. He will still have a base conversation and interjections into NPC conversations with probing stares and dramatic fist shaking. The two new companions will be found together and will be using the relationship system. Their relationship will be between level 1 and 2, so they will join with individual bonuses if they are both in the party.

As I started writing their intro conversation, their history and personalities started to emerge. About half way through the conversations I discovered that they were not native to Faerun, but instead came from the Hive in the city of Sigil. This called for a immediate rewrite or modification of the first half of the convo. As I needed to work a bit of chant into the conversation. So now the new companion gets to call people fun things like Berks, Bashers and Cutters. She also gets to tell people to shut their bone-box, or pay up some jink, all while avoiding being added to the dead book.

The key as a research chant is having her conversation lines remain understable. It would be very easy to turn her conversation lines into complete gibberish very fast. Luckily not being overly familiar with the dialect helps, as I need to be able to read and understand what I am writing. For the most part just a word or short phrase is replaced with the chant. These are often easily figured out using the content of the conversation. So my approach will be little pieces here and there and the phrases and words used will be fairly consistent. If she uses a phrase she will generally use it for that saying instead of switching back and forth between common and the chant. I have included several lines with a lot of chant and those will be difficult to understand. But with the PC responses if the player has a high enough lore skill they will translate the line (and earn a small xp bonus) or they can either ask a companion or just say what and have the line translated. These will be very limited. Right now I have two such lines. One is a side-quest opener and the second is how the player discovers where they come from and kind of why they left. "We lived in the Hive half a turn back, but a cony-catcher peeled us into some slippery business and we had to bolt from the Anthill."

At some point I will put together some decent screen shots of the areas I have been working on to break up these rambling posts.

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!

Swamp Overland

Since the last post, I have been working on the swamp overlandmap. At this point I think I have most of the area design all set. May need to reduce a few VFXs to lower some of the memory usage, maybe too many interior tan fogs over the mucky water. I borrowed the OC swamp day/night cycle and just increased the fog and decreased the daytime light intensity.

For the area I tried to maintain a true 1/2 scale, unlike SOZ that uses 1/2 scale for visibility but isn't a true scale. As for creating a swamp it was a true challenge figuring out how to create the land with a workable walkmesh and have minimum dips and bumps. I found what would be nice rolling countryside in a normal area turned into massive hills and holes. After a few different attempts to on how to create the random walkpaths through the swamp I discovered a fairly easy way to do it. I had created all the major points within the swamp first and just had to connect them. I flattened the ground so it was .1 higher then the water, with with a massive brush I used the noise feature at 100%. That created the random low and high points then it was a matter of raising and lowering the terrain to connect the low spots and smooth out the high spots. For doing that I used a inner of 3 and outer of 4 at around 15%. The water is all unwalkable for a couple of reason. The first is there are alligators in there and the second was trying to maintain a walkable height so characters wouldn't disappear just wasn't going to happen.

So now onto the terrain triggers, spawning 2das and whatnot.

Does anyone know of a good overland map tutorial. I search the vault and come up with very little. The official one is garbage and barely tells you anything. Right now I am going through the global scripts and poking through both SOZ and WPM to figure this out.

Below are some screen shots:

Chapter 2. Back to the toolset

I have mostly wrapped up play-testing kamal's Path of Evil. It was a fun game and should definitely make every one's to-play list. He did a great job creating an evil game. Until this game I always was never able to complete a game playing evil. I definitely plan to use some of his approaches to evilness when creating evil routes in Risen Hero.

Below is a screen shot from Path of Evil. It is the general area from Risen Hero. In the upper left corner you have the Trielta Hills where the Ruined Village was. Then off to the right is the Sunset Mountains, where the monastery and Dor'Gallon's fortifications were. What took a whole game to cross, my character in POE was able to do in 1 to 2 seconds. But then again that guy was a hell of a runner. When I found the scale in the bottom cornor he could run 120 miles in like 4 seconds.





So building Chapter 2.



I made a bit more of a suspense or suprise ending to chapter 1 than I originally planned for. But it seemed to fit best in that spot and trying to place it into the beginning of chapter 2 wouldn't have worked as well.



For chapter 2 I am trying to grab the player and bring them right back into the game with the start. You get to return to a familiar area, had to do just a little updating to show the passage of time. The bigger twist I withheld for the beginning of this chapter. I won't give it away, but it was something that was very hard to do and I've been thinking about it for quite a while. I've been trying to see if I could avoid it or change it, but for the story demands it so it is happening whether I like it or not. But enough of that.



First day back and I updated an area, spent a bit of time in the visual effect editor, wrote and scripted 2 cutscenes (still need to do static cameras), created a new club with a on-hit script and a bunch of other stuff. So it was probably one of the more productive times I've had with the toolset. Maybe being away for a month just having this stuff rattle around might have helped.



With chapter 2 I plan on opening up the play, breaking free of the linear play of chapter 1. The player is now more powerful and the marauding army has been broken. The player has more allies and is no longer running for survival. To create a bit more of this free play I am working on a wold map. Yes, a world map, I don't really like overland maps. Too much walking and waiting. You have to load the overland map then trek across it then load the area you trying to go to. If there are wandering monsters you need to load the battle area then reload the overland map. So I will use the world map, click and go.



I do plan on using the overland map but more for individual area. I have a swamp that the player will be mucking through. For that area I am looking at using the overland map. There will be the plot area they are looking for and numerous other areas of interest they can look into. I am hoping to create more of a vast feeling to the area and offer more side quests. The swamp will be similar to the Waste area in chapter 1. A bunch of non-plot areas to gain experience, develop the character and just do and find neat stuff.



An another thing I have been thinking about (but no plans yet) is using the overland map to create a city. It will decrease the time needed to develop the city and reduce resources need to run a full busy city with wandering NPCs yelling out speak strings and such. In the overland map I could see some guards, or other NPCs wandering around to interact with. Then the individual areas accessed through the overland map could be a single street, alley, park or building interior. I think creating a single vibrant street would be much easier and a better experience for the player then trying to create a block or two that have maybe 1 or 2 points of interest and the rest is fluff. I hope to cut down on the 3 dozen NPCs either that don't talk or all use the same random talk tree.

So there it is. Chapter 2 is in the works.

Update done just need to pack it and upload it.

Risen hero has been out for two weeks and over two hundred downloads. I am also very excited that the majority of feed back has been very positive. Fortunatley there appears to only been three larger bugs all of which have been corrected.
I managed to break an appearance slimming down the model hak pack
Left out a condition check for a companion that caused a plot conversation to fail. A fair amount of people decided to kill the half-orc barbarian thug.
And for some reason one script didn't fire based on int checks. Added a redundant journal check and everything went fine.

Spent the last day cleaning up some grammar, punctuation and bag spell check choices. Kamal created a great list of things to cleanup.

I have also added a few weapons and suits of armor in my ooze cave so a player isn't left swordless right before the end battle. The items were fun to create. I didn't want to drop mundane items in there but i also didn't want to reward the player for having their armor disolved by a bklack pudding. So a player can now walk away with a suit of dented plate mail, some modly leather armor, a rusty long sword and a bent mace. The moldy armor is by far the ugliest thing I think I every made. I tried to keep every color slightly different and it is a big mesh of clashing greens and browns.

I should have the update up in the next day or so.

I have been playtesting kamal's Path of Evil. This is a great game and does a really good job of making an evil game. Most of the time the evil path choices in other games are just random, meaningless and rather boring.

Release!!

Chapter 1 has been released and is up on the vault. So I figure I will have a short break then get back to work on the second chapter

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2ModulesEnglish.Detail&id=458

Taking the Challange

On a whim I decided that I would take a deep gnome and try to run through the campaign. I was doing just plot stuff, ignoring all side quest and doing only the minimum to move along. I made it 3/4 of the way through without ever leveling up. I still needed about another 500 xp for level 2. If everything was done at that point a player would normally be closing in on level 7. I will have to recommend that: (1) players try to take advantage of as much as possible to maintain balance. (2) avoid character races with more then +1 level adjustments unless a greater challenge is desired.

Below are the screen shots showing how well that gnome fared. The thing that kept this gnome alive for so long was her insane AC. With kaedrin's ninja class and combat expertise she was up to 26, not bad for a level 1 character with no armor.