Eyes of Eilistraee: NWN 1.69

Not found much time over the last week to work on Eyes of Eilistraee. I was going to post part of my ToDo list, so you folks have an idea of where I'm up to, but as it would give away a bunch of spoilers I decided not to ;)

On the plus side I've been looking into the new features available in NWN patch 1.69. It looks like this will be a major patch from BioWare (possibly the last for NWN?) as it will release a whole raft of new content. Since Eyes of Eilistraee is coming out in the twilight years of NWN's popular lifespan I think it kind of makes sense to utilise whatever I can from the new patch especially if it adds to my existing setting and style.

For reference here are some of the highlights from the patch notes for 1.69. I'm not promising that all of this will make it into Eyes of Eilistraee but some of it certainly will:

8 New Tilesets:
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Barrows Interior
Castle Exterior, Rural
Castle Interior 2
City Interior 2
Fort Interior
Sea Caves
Steamworks
Tropical

New Creatures (over 100 new apperances):
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Caladnei (NPC)
Cobra (Regular, Black and Gold )
Curst Swordsman
Gem Golems (Diamond, Emerald and Ruby)
G'Zhorb the All seeing Eye
Halaster
Harat, Lord of Darkness (Large and Small)
Horses (63 Different varients, plus mounted Humans, Elves, Half-Elves, Halflings, Gnomes, Half-Orcs and Dwarves)
Lord Antoine Baccha, Visier de Guise (NPC)
Maggris, the Hive MotherMasterius (Regular, Disguised and Powerful)
Mist Dragon
Nightmare ( Regular, Saddled and Armored )
Ogre Chieftan
Purple Dragon Knight Archer (Female and Male)
Purple Dragon Knight Blade (Female and Male)
Satyr (Regular, Archer and Warrior)
Wereboar
Widow Hagatha
Wyvern (Great, Adult, Juvenile and Young)

plus hundreds of new placeables..


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Eyes of Eilistraee: Go Henchmen!

After some messing around I've sorted out the levelling up of the henchmen as they join the party. This functionality is available in SOU scripts but I've abandoned those, due to bugs when trying to do stuff with more than one henchman. I had to start from scratch and recreate each henchman with a "pure" legal build so the LevelUpHenchman function would work. Now everyone levels up as they should so I have a party of 4 (3 henchies and one player) ready to kick ass. Now that the party is at the right level I can do a lot more in the way of combat balancing.

Most of this weeks work has been on creating more dialogue for the henchmen story arcs. Xanthea has had the most attention so far. Hopefully she'll be finished up soon and I can move onto completing the others.

I've also spent a lot of time reading up on the nature of CRPGs. Being a builder I'm always interested on how players feel about "what makes a good RPG". One key aspect that keeps cropping up is roleplaying through skill use. This is something that is implemented in EOE already, but reading about player choice and skill use in an article on the RPG Codex (sorry no link - easily googleable though) has given me a few more ideas on how to allow for skill use. I've now got plans to allow players with certain skills to discover hints about a puzzle and to allow other players to see the hints via another method - cryptic I know but it'll all become clear in time ; )

One screenshot before I go - some early dialogue whilst questing in Barrow Vale:

eR