A Time for Focus: Dialogue

With the development of custom content progressing (see the previous post), it's about time for me to hit some design milestones on Eyes of Eilistraee. Until recently I'd almost forgotten that building a NWN (Neverwinter Nights) module can turn into a huge task, especially if you're trying to do it right!

Right now I have to focus on some key dialogues that introduce the main quest to the player. The trick, as always, is to give just enough information away to dangle the carrot in front of their noses whilst not turning on the hint fountain and soaking the player in obvious clues. Wish me luck in making sure Holgar the Settler doesn't sound like a reader on the news at six.


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Zioni gets Custom Head Model and Portrait

One of the more mysterious characters in Eyes of Eilistraee is a Parai called Zioni. Without giving too much of her storyline away, I can say that she is something of an enigma for her race (Parai rarely leave their home plane of Mechanus for a start) and she has a very peculiar interest in the player and his/her progress through the module. Not many clues there eh? Sorry, but you'll have to wait until the release of EOE to see just what she's up to ;).

What I will reveal are some of the assets used to represent Zioni in the game. The inspiration for the character actually came from her portrait (not the first time that's happened) which was originally produced by James Adams as part of his work for the CODI team.

I've always been a huge fan of Jim's work (I've used a lot of his work for Henchman portraits) and this portrait really caught my eye. After many hours of research on the Parai (Visilight in 3E), I developed a backstory for Zioni, and gave her an interesting (if not key) role in the main plot.

However cool portrait and storyline weren't going to be enough to get Zioni into the module so I had to inlist the help of someone to build a specific model to match the rather unusual cranial structure of her head.

I was pretty lucky that one of the best modellers in the community stepped in to lend a hand. So Zioni now has a character, a portrait and a head model and thus a real and distinctive ingame presence - not bad going for a secondary antagonist with a glowing ball of light for a brain.



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Cool Custom Content Coming along for EOE...

I have a couple of guys producing custom artwork and models for Eyes of Eilistraee. They're both exceptionally talented people and it's a real joy to see my requests come to life in their hands. I got a real kick out of some new artwork (to be posted in the near future) emailed over from Ulises (my man in Mexico) this morning. The quality is superb and I really hope he has time to make the few edits I asked for.

The rest of the module is coming along - a little too slowly for my liking - and I'm still slotting new stuff into the toolset whenever I get chance. The main task at the moment is getting to the point where the module really kicks of in terms of narrative and story development. As ever dialogue is the big bottle neck - maybe I just need to learn to type faster!

Watch this space for more concrete info on EOE (Eyes of Eilistraee) soon!

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