Friday, June 01, 2007

Eyes of Eilistraee: Funky effects

After playing around a lot with some of my custom encounter spawns in the later part of Eyes of Eilistraee I decided to add a random delay to the spawning and spawn effect of individual creatures in a group.

This turned out rather well. I now have a set of scripts that I can reuse to "place" a balanced (I used a custom scoring system to determine encounter toughness) group of spawned creatures that appear one after the other at variable intervals. This not only makes the spawn in effects seem cooler (those are configurable as well) as they last for longer but it also means that the player doesn't know what his party is dealing with until the last monster has spawned - and by that time he's already in the thick of it. :)

Other stuff I've been working on includes the main hub of the last act. There's some stuff to add to the last act before it's complete, but once that's done I'll be able to start fixing and polishing the other acts one by one. In addition to this I managed to get some more party banter into the module.

During exploration of one of the crypt areas under her village Kyrie pipes up and starts to question why the tyrant buried in the crypt has such a majestic tomb. At which point Vai starts to argue with her, giving the player the chance to pledge his support for either NPC and gain affinity points through my influence system (another post on that in the future).

The only thing I need to master here (because HOTU provided a lot of custom scripts for party banter) is how to start the banter between two characters without the generic "Hey can I talk to you for a moment" conversation node.

Keep you posted
eR

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