Rogue Modules

Eyes of Eilistraee update

2009-01-29T14:37:00.002Z

Been a long time coming I know. This week I got chance to work on the mod! Yipee! I managed to add in some changes that have been planned out on paper for a while and well as some spur of the moment new content. The first act now features a new module starting point that make a lot more sense for the story and sees the player reunited with a former friend who acts as a focal point for delivering background narrative and insights into the player's own story.

The changes I've made mean that the PC is now more rooted in my game world. As a former villager living in Barrow Vale the start of the story sees you returning home following a 15 year exile. For the story I'm trying to tell this works much better than the mysterious stranger approach to defining the player character. There's still full freedom over race, class and alignment it's just now that your actions have context and you have a secrets from your past to uncover.

Will try and post a few new screens next time. Seem to have a problem with images at the moment so may have to fix that first.

eR

Happy New Year!

2009-01-09T15:56:00.002Z

A Happy New Year to one and all! Yet again I fear that further roles against your patience skill are required before we'll see the completion of Eyes of Eilistraee. Due to time limitations and the death of an Operating System (XP died on my home PC) the last quarter of '08 saw very little in the way of progress. I can only apologise to the faithful for this.

On a brighter note the New Year has seen the full recovery of my home PC (following a painful re-install) to be followed by the restoration of my NWN dev environment - fear not, recent backups meant that nothing was lost when XP died.

Because Eyes of Eilistraee is becoming a stranger (even to me) I've decided to review the current build from scratch before doing any more work on it. I've already decided to cut the prologue from the mod as it never really made sense for the story and frequently caused me headaches. Since it's departure I feel that, free time permitting, I can now focus on the core of what was and is good about the mod and make the story ring truer.

In the hope that more mod time is on the horizon, I'll say "more to come soon". But for now my thanks for your continued interest ; )

eR

Has it been that long...

2008-08-01T14:48:00.002Z

Clearly it has. Too many things have gotten in the way of my beloved EOE project for me to make significant progress since the last post. There are a number of revisions in the pipeline that will improve the overall gameplay experience, but most of them are still stitting in my note book for the time being. Things will change, I will get this mod done but once again I ask you to make a roll on your patience skill and hope that you all pass ; )

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: NWN 1.69

2008-04-24T07:38:00.002Z

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:
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Barrows Interior
Castle Exterior, Rural
Castle Interior 2
City Interior 2
Fort Interior
Sea Caves
Steamworks
Tropical

New Creatures (over 100 new apperances):
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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..

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Go Henchmen!

2008-04-10T14:46:00.003Z

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:

Eyes of Eilistraee: Progress, progress

2008-03-31T08:40:00.003Z

About a week ago I took a long hard look at my "todo" list for Eyes of Eilistraee. A lot of it was really simple stuff that could be sorted out quite quickly. These things got done over the last week; fixing minor bugs, adding or correcting scripts, deleting redundant NPCs, moving triggers etc.

There are still small things that need sorting out but now the list contains mainly core stuff that still hasn't been done yet. This actually makes it look scarier than before : (. There are some fairly big tasks on there that I still need to think carefully about.

Time to take stock I think and look at the value of adding the features on the list versus polishing and improving what is already in the module.

Despite the work left, a big success story is that the introduction to the story has had its overhaul completed and the swine of a cutscene that I could never get to work has been fixed. The beginning of the story feels much more natural than it did before.

On a final side note NWN podcast guys have an interview with Adam Miller that is worth checking out. Adam doesn’t give away huge insights into his design approach but there’s some useful general advice on mod building – and it’s really cool to see such a well respected module maker turn out to be actually quite humble, and pretty funny.

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Argh! Mind Flayers!

2008-03-07T10:51:00.007Z

With the huge choice of monsters available in nwn (including custom creatures from the CEP) it's easy to pick a bunch of cool enemies to throw at the player - what is harder is fitting them into your story.

I've never been a fan of having generic caves that feature bugbears, drow, goblins and the odd grey render. If I'm going to use a creature type it has to have a motive for being there, whether it's simply ecological or because it actually has a role within the story.

Anyway enough chatter on to the screenie!

Mind Flayers make a few appearances in Eyes of Eilistraee for very specific reasons - this allows me to add fun battles to the mod and helps in the telling of the story.

Along with the addition of the Illithid encounters I've added in a whole bunch of new dialogue for existing characters and generally spiced up some of the earlier areas of the mod.

The next thing I need to do is to get back on top of VO as it's something that takes time to get hold of and can be tricky to manage.

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Fixes and scripts

2008-02-25T08:56:00.002Z

Just a quick update this morning - larger ones to follow this week when I get the chance to re-size some new screenshots. My main focus over the last couple of weeks has been fixing a few long term bugs and adding bits of missing content (adding effects to creatures, removing content no longer needed and tweaking scripts).

The biggest addition to the module as a whole is the use of the Bioware tilemagic system to apply different tile effects to areas. I'd always planned to use this but just hadn't got round to it until now. Tilemagic has let me create ice caverns with ice and pits that actually look like pits! I now have a tilemagic system that uses variables on the area to determine what tile will be changed and where, whilst a default script takes care of the rest. So far it works well apart from some issues with tile effects not showing up in the city interior tileset.

Thanks for the comments on the previous post - it's good to know there are nwn players out there! Regarding the level of Eyes of Eilistraee - well it's not set in stone but I'm aiming at a starting level of 10 -12 (although encounters should balance to a wider range). As usual the player will get bumped to the minimum starting level if required at the start of the mod.

That's it for now. Just a quick plug for the guys over at http://www.nwnpodcast.com/ - keep up the good work guys. For anyone who hasn't been tuning in, the podcasts are well worth checking out.

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: News

2008-01-21T13:54:00.000Z

Not made much progress since the last post - the hostage quest is still shaping up though developing both good and evil paths is challenging. One bit of news that I've not mentioned yet is that a new Drow Outpost has been added to EOE.

This area offers players a nice side quest and some background history to the main plot - as well as the chance to fight nasty drow (always a good thing - even/especially if you are drow). I'm happy with the layout of this multilevel outpost, although at some point I need to add a few encounters and set up the scripts required for a fun side-boss battle.

Until next time ;)
eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Crypt battles

2008-01-16T08:26:00.000Z

I've recently spent a lot of time implementing some custom battle scripts that I did a while ago. The battle is the first major boss fight in EOE and I wanted to add in a few special rules to make it more interesting. Though I'm still not 100% happy with it, it's pretty much done and functions as required. It was good to finally get this one out of the way as it's been waiting to get done for a while.

Yesterday I received more cool VO for Casmir. I still need to get reads from my other actors but hopefully next week I'll have a bunch of sound assets to add into the module.

Next on my “to do” list is an encounter with a band of ogres holding hostages. The player gets a number of choices as to how this plays out - the tricky part is balancing the choices so that an evil decision has both a negative impact, but also has a good reward - whereas a good decision results in giving up the reward and facing greater trials to save the day (it's not supposed to be easy being a hero!).

I've taken a few screenshots that I'll be releasing over the coming posts, so here's the first, showing an encoutner in the terrible tanar'ri fortress:

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: First VO has arrived!

2008-01-14T17:14:00.000Z

The good news on the VO front is that one of the guys has come up with the goods and sent over some lines for Casmir. I've uploaded a couple of these on to his profile so check them out!

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Banter, banter

2008-01-08T09:52:00.001Z

Well the Christmas break gave me a good chance to put in a lot of work on Eyes of Eilistraee. After some exploring I found that the HOTU random and non-random banter triggers for conversations with party members didn't quite do everything I needed - so I wrote a new one. This has turned out to be a wise move since now I can quickly add in banter conversations between henchmen at appropriate points of the story, just by laying down a trigger and setting 3 variables on it.

Eyes of Eilistraee now has a new sort of prologue area that introduces the player to one of the main characters and helps to set up motivation for the main quest, as well as giving them a mini intro quest to get stuck into. Speaking of the main quest, I've added a number of elements that make the story a bit more of a personal journey of discovery. The player can now learn how to unlock and wield special abilities that are stored up inside strange rune-like scars on the palms of his hands.

With a lot of new stuff going in, the next job is to tidy it up and make sure the module is stable from start to finish - with the new content.

My hope is that the end is in sight - after almost 2 years of on and off development I really want to be getting close to something that can at least go out to beta and then released. Then I can start *playing* games again ;)

eR

Happy New Year!

2008-01-02T09:39:00.000Z

Happy New Year to one and all.

Hope you enjoyed the holiday season. Stay tuned for updates on Eyes of Eilistraee coming soon.

eR

Henchman Profile: Vai

2007-11-28T11:50:00.000Z

Vai (neutral evil, human female, cleric of Malar) is a mistrusted local cleric whose prowess in divine magic has seen her rise to the rank of Spirit Seer within Barrow Vale’s Wolfguard. The villagers fear and loathe Vai in equal amounts, although this concerns the priestess little.

Vai rarely consorts with other villagers as she believes her path will lead her to a higher purpose than any common folk could hope to aspire to. Following a vision she had as a young girl she is adamant that her destiny is to become one of the Beastlord’s chosen – an avatar of Malar.

As Vai regards the village and its inhabitants as worthless peasants she only involves herself in their affairs when her actions bring her closer to the unholy destiny she has foreseen for herself.

VO and new henchman profile for Eyes of Eilistraee

2007-11-28T11:43:00.000Z

After a few polite emails I think I might have got some people interested in doing VO for some of the main characters in Eyes of Eilistraee. I have one very talented male voice actor confirmed and I'm hopeful of a positive response from two female voice actresses - who are also very talented.

In the meantime there's a new henchman profile on the way so stay tuned!

eR

Slow going, but still going...

2007-10-26T07:47:00.000Z

No update for a couple of months again! Sorry about that.

If I could summarise the state of Eyes of Eilistraee I'd say the critical path is almost done but a lot of polish is still required to many elements of the module. Combat balancing is something I need to tweak as is making sure all of the party members have their storylines fully implemented and bug free. Still a fair bit of work to do.

The worst part about it not being finished is that the migration to NWN2 appears to have really picked up pace, since some of the newer high quality modules have been released and with the event of MOTB and the announcement of Mysteries of Westgate. If more people playing NWN2 mods means less playing NWN1 mods then I'll be releasing the mod to a much smaller audience. Although that's something that does concern me, I can envisage a situation that would see me port Eyes of Eilistraee to NWN2 in the future so, in theory story, dialogue and scripts would not be lost and therefore the bulk of the project wont be wasted effort.

Since I've had 8 interruptions since starting this post (that is why I never get time to update the damn blog) I'm going to have to abandon this update. Sorry guys. They'll be more as soon as I can grab some time to post it.

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Battle Scripts

2007-08-24T12:39:00.000Z

Been a long time coming this post, so apologies for the delay. I have so much other stuff going on right now it's hard to keep this up to date.

Over the last few weeks EOE has continued to take shape even though I've not been posting about it. The main highlight has probably been the addition of the double dealing demons quest in act 3 and the custom battle scripts that I've added to the final showdown with the player's nemesis.

For the demon quests I've taken a fair amount of inspiration from the Underdark section of Baldur's Gate 2. The player gets the chance to work for and double cross a number of different fiends (a Pit Fiend, a Glabrezu and a succubus to be precise) whilst trying to obtain a key item that allows him to progress to the end of act 3. It's my hope that the various paths through this quest will highlight the "Tanar'ri Fortress" as one of the most enjoyable sections of the module.

With the battle scripts I've managed to change the way the final battle plays out depending on the tactics adopted by the player. They'll also be ways to make the final confrontation easier by completing various quests throughout the module. More to come on this later.

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Player Choices Part 1

2007-06-11T12:35:00.000Z

One of the hardest things to get right in an RPG is the creation of a story that accommodates meaningful choice. In EOE I'm trying to allow the player to make decisions that have an impact that can be both recognised and appreciated. I'm not talking about simple mechanical gameplay choices where the player chooses to use a +2 Axe to get better damage. I'm talking about choices made at the story level and character level that have the potential to cause change.

After some thought and a lot of research I've come to the conclusion that significant player choices should be able to change the following:

1) The environment - i.e the gameworld in which the story unfolds.
2) The story itself.

In terms of changing the environment the task at hand is actually pretty simple. For example if the story featured an evil red dragon who ate the local townsfolk, the player's choice to take on and then defeat the dragon would be easy to reflect in changes to the town environment previously under threat.

For example before the dragon was defeated the town:

1) Had a group of brave but arrogant knights each boasting of how they would be the one to defeat the dragon.
2) Townsfolk too scared to hold the annual summer fate for fear of attack
3) A merchant going out of business because people are either leaving the town in fear or staying at home rather than visiting his shop

Following the dragon's defeat all of the above features of the town change:

1) All but one of the knights leave. The remaining knight pledges his loyalty to the player due to the player's bravery.
2) Upon the player's return from slaying the dragon the summer fate gets into full swing as word has reached the town that the dragon is dead. The player is made the guest of honour at the fate
3) The merchant invests in a new line of dragon scale plate armour which he sells to the player at a heavy discount

Whilst these are only examples - some of which are pretty unoriginal - they all serve to highlight the fact that aspects of the environment have changed due to the player's actions. The pre-victory features of the town carried the theme of fear and despair whilst the post-victory features draw on features that were already present, but changed the theme to happiness and success.

If areas have a theme based on the circumstances of their inhabitants, then guidelines to consider for environmental change are:

1) Change to existing features allows an old area theme to be replaced with a new one based on the players actions i.e the environment has changed from bad to good. Adding new features offers the potential for greater emphasis of a new theme but sacrifices the connection with the old theme - i.e things are good now (but we don't know what things used to be like)

2) The feature that is going to change must be noticeable by the player. If the captain of the guard changes his tunic from a red one to a green one after the defeat of the dragon and the significance of this is not communicated directly to the player then the change was too subtle and the opportunity has been missed. If the town guard all wear red, are heavily armed and patrol the town before the defeat - but then change to all wearing green, carrying light or no arms and are all stood in line listening to a speech about how everyone should be grateful to the player, then the change is clearly easier to notice and draws attention to itself.

3) The change should be in keeping with the story or the quest the player has just undertaken. If in the above example the player learns that red tunics are worn when times are bad to remind townsfolk of the blood spilled by their ancestors fighting dragons the change feels more significant on a number of levels. Removal of the red tunics symbolically communicates that the danger has passed, no more blood will be spilled, the war is over, the guard are now focused on the "green shoots of recovery".

4) The player should always have an idea that their choices may have good or bad consequences. Unforseen changes can take place but they must not appear to punish the player's actions particularly if the players actions were good or neutral. Unforseen change should be good or neutral in the eyes of the player. If the player's actions result in something terrible, or a number of terrible things, happening to the town the player may well feel unfairly punished for their actions. Changes like this are along the lines of the defeat of evil the dragon leads to an orc invasion and the enslavement of the town - something a good player could not have forseen.

Well since this post has turned out longer than expected I’ll split the discussion of story changes into another post and leave you with the new logo for Eyes of Eilistraee – minus the background image (which is coming soon).

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Funky effects

2007-06-01T14:25:00.001Z

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

Eyes of Eilistraee: Bug stomping

2007-05-11T11:56:00.000Z

Bugs are the most annoying thing in the world. I've spent a chunk of time trying to figure out why a certain NPC wasn't spawning to deliver some plot critical dialogue. Turns out the variable I was checking was... er... the wrong one. Argh! That's a real basic error that I should have picked up on. Ah well, the good news is that now this bug is fixed key parts of the storyline can be reached and many more aspects of the module are falling into place.

Before I go, and because I'm sure everyone loves a good ogre screenie - here's another ;)

eR

Blog update: New layout!

2007-05-09T15:12:00.000Z

Since the old layout was getting quite popular with other boggers - *cough* Alazander *cough* - I've gone for a new template to give my blog a fresher feel. It needs a fair bit of tweaking to re-add some of the old links and my traffic monitor but hopefully I'll get all of that sorted out over the next few days.

eR

Ogres! Waaargh!

2007-05-08T07:21:00.000Z

Just a quick update following some progress I made over the weekend. My time was taken up by a lot of other stuff last week so I didn't make the progress that I wanted to. Having said that two of the player's henchmen got updates and re-writes to their dialogue to make it more in keeping with the character of the NPC.

The first NPC who received attention was Lina Ghostwhisper, the first henchman the player can hire. She has a strong dislike for the streets of Sundabar, it's smell and the lack of good soup. She's also an eager halfling ranger who wants to get out into the wilds on a new adventure as soon as possible.

The player's first quest is to solve the mystery of who is attacking the village of Barrow Vale and why. Vai the Nightseer, who joins the party early on in the story, has important information about this mission. She won't give her clues up easily though, as her poor relationship with the villagers gives her little inclination to help them. After the updates Vai's attitude is now much more transparent and the player dialogue options are much more focused.

Finally I managed to grab a screenshot of the Ogre caves area that the player needs to explore to complete an element of the main storyline. The ogre models are taken from the CEP and have been contributed by the DLA team. Don't they look mean!

Eyes of Eilistraee: Area updates

2007-04-27T07:45:00.000Z

I honestly don't know where I'd be now if I hadn't decided to focus on one build of Eyes of Eilistraee that used content from CEP 2.0. The sheer volume of quality placeables has allowed me to give distinct visual themes to a number of areas - something that would have been impossible otherwise. If I want to make an ancient elven city with some districts left untouched by time and others tainted by the presence of Tanar'ri demons, I can!

I'm pretty happy with the way the final act is shaping up. A lot of polishing is still required but the overall structure, branching game play paths and area themes are in place.

Hopefully by the end of next week I should be able to do a complete run through and highlight the areas that need attention. Following that I have some side quests that I'd like to add just to expand the player's options and to re-enforce some of the core story elements in the module.

Keep you posted.

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Progress at last!

2007-04-13T10:07:00.000Z

Workload for my day job has effectively put a hold on EOE development for Neverwinter Nights over the last 3 - 4 weeks. It's frustrating to have to drop everything then pick up where I left off, but that's life. The good news is I've put in a good few hours this week fixing bugs (some odd things happening when henchmen rejoin after dying and escaping prisoners running away without stopping to thank the PC for freeing them - how rude), developing areas with groups of placeables that fit the theme for that area and generally tidying up content that was added a while ago but still felt a bit unrefined.

Garron the ranger is officially out as a starting henchman and will be replaced with Lina Ghostwhisper. She's a different sort of character - a bit more light-hearted and fun. Speaking of Openings the starting area of Sundabar's East Gate (see the city screenshot from the toolset) has undergone a few significant changes to make it feel a bit more closed and imposing. A few of the encounters that the player could have on the city streets have been moved to a tavern as they make sense as more private affairs.

The mid section of the module - where the player gets a significant choice over which path they take - still requires work to ensure that both paths diverge successfully and that the player can complete the goals has he/she wishes to and that the game world reacts accordingly.

Keep you posted.

ER

Eyes of Eilistraee: Let the setting do the talking

2007-03-12T12:55:00.000Z

One of the design principals I try and follow in building neverwinter nights modules is the "show don't tell" approach to delivering the back story. In a lot of cases it's much more interesting for a player to learn something through some kind of interaction, even if the player is largely passive, than to force them to read an in-game book or character journal for the same information.

As a result of this approach, I'm constantly trying to find engaging ways of delivering plot related information whether it be ambient or critical, so that players feel that they are discovering my story rather than being spoon fed.

Last night, whilst updating one of the cavern areas close to the village of Barrow Vale, I was struggling to come up with a back story that covered the history of the cavern's current and previous inhabitants. After rejecting one particular back story, I started to think about the history of the people of Barrow Vale and their relationship with werewolves. After a bit of tinkering around, I came up with the premise that the caverns were the retreat of werewolves who'd been driven out of the tribe when the human members had decided to settle down and build Barrow Vale. Over time, the werewolves had waned in power (for various reasons) and other inhabitants had taken root in the caverns - making their own distinctive changes in an area once inhabited by lycanthropes. With a “layered” history I used lycanthrope habitation as a background theme for the design of the area then overlaid the influence of the cavern’s newer inhabitants with appropriate terrain features and placeables.

This link between the people of the village and the caverns gives me an opportunity to plant plot elements in the caverns that relate to the back story for the module. I think this will raise the areas above your standard "stone dungeon" variant and create a more interesting atmosphere (with appropriate placeables, secrets etc) and provide the opportunity for the player to explore the history of Barrow Vale should they wish to do so.

Last note: Apologies for a lack of screenshots. They are coming I promise.

eR

Content Loading

2007-02-06T16:28:00.000Z

Over the last weekend and last week or so I've managed to spend a fair amount of time on the areas in acts 1 and 2. The village of Barrow Vale (where the story really kicks off) has had most of its connecting areas polished and improved with new encounters, CEP placeables and adjustments to layout. A few new 'minor' puzzles have found there way into some of the crypt areas that are accessible from the village, as well as a larger puzzle that will require a fair bit of testing before it's stable.

On the characters front just about all of the henchmen have their party banter, interjections and progression points mapped out. It'll be a fair challenge to implement all of these but a few sustained sessions should see most of that stuff in the module and working.

I have to admit that the wealth of stuff in the CEP is making dressing areas a whole lota fun although finding the right placeable can be a bit of a trawl due to the sheer volume of assets.

In the next update on Eyes of Eilistraee I hope to post a few screenshots so that folks can get an idea of the setting and areas they'll hopefully be exploring in the future.

Thanks for stopping by ;)

eR

Henchman Profile: Kyrie

2007-02-02T13:58:00.000Z

Kyrie (chaotic good, human female, fighter) hails from the village of Barrow Vale nestled in between the cold forests and harsh mountains of the north. Uninspired by mundane village life, she left her home and headed for the city of Westgate seeking adventure.

After spending a number of months enjoying the delights of the city, Kyrie found herself broke and unemployed. Ever a capable swordswoman she became a mercenary to pay her way. However, after seriously wounding two well respected noblemen in a dispute over fees, she was forced to flee into Westgate’s underworld to escape hanging.

She spent the following months working as a lookout for the Night Masks until news reached her that Barrow Vale had been under attack from a group of wizards. After a harsh re-assessment of her loyalties Kyrie gave her employers the slip, stole out of the city and headed home.

Henchman Profile: Federo Blacklock

2007-01-12T14:42:00.002Z

Federo Blacklock (chaotic neutral, human male, rogue) has a notorious reputation as a gambler, swindler, thief and con artist in the cities and townships along the Sword Coast.

Born in the Amnian capital of Athkatla he was fortunate enough to be educated within the city’s wealthy elite. However, a taste for skulduggery and a rebellious streak saw him join the ranks of Shadow Thieves upon completion of his schooling. Following a number of successful robberies and scams he became very popular within the guild only to have his rise to fame cut short, when the Shadow Thieves put a price on his head for failing to pay off huge gambling debts. Settling his debt with the proceeds of a successful heist against the Zhentarim saw Federo earn new enemies faster than he could placate old ones.

With the recognition that his life was in danger he decided to put as much distance as possible between himself and his victims. Under the shadow of darkness he left Athkatla and headed north. Following months without word, a recent sighting has sparked a rumour that Federo has holed up in some disreputable tavern in a northern village called Barrow Vale.

Federo VO line 1

Federo VO line 2

Eyes of Eilistraee: New NPC profiles on the way!

2007-01-12T14:39:00.000Z

Just about to upload a new profile, more to follow soon.

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Update

2007-01-04T13:24:00.000Z

This is just a short update on my progress with Eyes of Eilistraee just to show that I’m still beavering away on it despite the lack of recent news.

What’s new? Well quite a bit. The module was always fairly neatly split into 3 acts and since the last update acts 1 and 2 have received a lot of attention. As a result much more of the module is playable (and robust) and you really start to get a good feel for the scope and story. Act 3 is a bit shorter than the others and so shouldn’t take too long to implement. 4 out of the 5 optional henchmen have basic implementations (I.e they’ll join you, get fired and re-hired) and I’m starting to give them some life by dropping in appropriate interjections based on location & PC actions.

So a lot has been achieved over the holiday period which is great news for everyone, especially yours truly. One less positive aspect is that I’m having trouble getting hold of someone to create additional art resources to help me promote the module. I have some cool stuff (that will make it on to this blog in the future) but I need a few more art assets to take the production values up a notch. Any volunteers?

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee & CEP 2.0

2006-11-14T17:10:00.000Z

I'd originally planned to support a CEP and non-CEP version of Eyes of Eilistraee for Neverwinter nights. However with the advent of NWN2 and its, lets face it, far superior graphics I've decided that Eyes of Eilistraee will be CEP 2.0 only. It's my hope that this will actually pull in more players who want to play a better looking module even though the download requirements will have shot up.

Focusing on a CEP only version will allow me to get more out of the pack and make EoE a lot prettier. It won't look as good as NWN2, but at least it'll look better than vanilla NWN.

Regarding a progress update, there's still a lot of fleshing out to do and sections of the module are constantly getting revisited either for a makeover or quality check. Although I did toy with the idea of migrating the whole project to NWN2 I've rejected that for a number of reasons. The main one being that I'm happy with the NWN toolset, tilesets, my custom assets and using the CEP. I know how to do this stuff and hopefully I know how to do it well ;)

eR

Plot critical NPCs

2006-09-01T15:48:00.000Z

A couple of weeks ago there was a fairly heated discussion on the death and respawn system in Neverwinter Nights 2 for Companions. In this thread a lot of concern was expressed over how easy NWN2 would be if after dropping dead your companions just come back to life. The reason for the inclusion of this feature in the NWN2 OC is that certain companions have a role to play in the plot - or at least cut scenes in the game. A role that they can't fulfil if dead.

This is not a new problem. The Bioware designers made the character Imoen essentially immortal for a certain section of BG2 (spellhold I think) for plot reasons along the lines of she has to be alive to contribute to the story. The issue with this is that A) you need characters to be alive for certain parts of the plot but B) making them invincible breaks the immersion of the game.

As it stands Eyes of Eilistraee is about to encounter this same problem with one henchman in particular. Because they have a large role in the plot - their death in combat and non resurrection would essentially break the storyline.

Good job I spotted this now, at least I can rethink the final act of the module before it's too late... I hope!

eR

Henchman Profile: Xanthea Demure

2006-08-17T15:33:00.000Z

Princess Xanthea Demure (lawful good, halfling female, wizard) is a descendant of Lurien’s last ever ruling monarch. She has been educated in the arts, literature and magic and belongs to a social elite who are happy to live under Lurien’s gentle theocracy, providing they don’t tinker with the taxes too much.

Although a little vain due to her pampered upbringing, she has little in the way of self interest and sees the frivolity of the Hin’s ways as something she should seek to defend rather than actively participate in. Xanthea believes that her royal blood makes it her duty to protect the peace and prosperity of Lurien and the Hin.

To this end she has undertaken a mission to resolve the “Faithstone Crisis” brewing in Lurien. Her quest has taken her to the town of Barrow Vale where she was last seen searching for a map of a tomb buried under the town before promptly disappearing.

Eyes of Eilistraee: Character Profiles

2006-08-17T15:29:00.000Z

To reward the patience of those guys who keep stopping by here to see if there's any new news on Eyes of Eilistraee, and by way of an apology for the lack of updates, I've decided to upload some NPC henchman profiles to give a flavour of the type of companion the player can expect to adventure with.

So look out for details on Princess Xanthea Demure coming very (and I mean it) soon.

eR

Eyes of Eilistraee: Update

2006-06-28T10:04:00.000Z

After 2 months without any news you'd be forgiven for thinking that Eyes of Eilistraee, like oh so many other Neverwinter Nights projects, was dead in the water. It isn't. The module is progressing in the toolset and it's still my intent to release this as a Neverwinter Nights module rather than a Neverwinter Nights 2 module.

So if you're checking this site occasionally, and I know there are a few of you out there who are ;), please sit tight. Things are still happening, and more news is coming soon. I promise.

eR

Well no news is good news, right?

2006-04-28T12:18:00.000Z

Yeah it's been a while. If you'd like to know why the updates have slowed down, please see the end of this post. Well, although I've not been posting here, I have been putting a good number of hours on Eyes of Eilistraee and things are really starting to come along.

In the last few days the focus of development has shifted from the opening stages into the mini-quest that opens up the main storyline. I just have to complete a few conversations and a lot of the hard work for act 1 of the module will be done. Even though I've spent my time implementing existing plans, I've still had time to come up with a few changes that'll probably make the whole experience a lot more fun.

One of the main changes is the introduction of a henchman called Garron. Garron joins the player at the start of the module (although he's been a companion of the player for some time prior to this) and helps lead him/her into the main storyline. I made Garron a halfling ranger since it's not an overly used character combination and because I wanted him to be both useful (his skills are handy for the forest areas early in the module) and endearing from the outset. He's an eager beaver type of character which is very useful kick starting a story.

I aim to have another post up by the end of the long weekend - with a report of what else I've been working on. That may not happen if I end up being busy with other things, but fear not - with any luck one of those 'things' will hopefully be building a certain module in Neverwinter Nights ;)

A side note: When I set this blog up my intention was to update it at least weekly. Alas that goal has fallen by the wayside since my day job has forced me to sub-contract at another company to do boring work with just about enough break time to eat something before returning to the grindstone. Should this situation change, and boy do I hope it does, I'll be back to regular postings but until then there may be a period of infrequent posting until I can sort things out.

A Time for Focus: Dialogue

2006-03-17T13:29:00.000Z

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.

eR

Zioni gets Custom Head Model and Portrait

2006-03-16T11:51:00.000Z

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.

eR

Cool Custom Content Coming along for EOE...

2006-03-08T14:47:00.000Z

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!

eR

Back to the dialogue..

2006-02-22T14:31:00.000Z

After something of a prolonged hiatus I'm back working on NPC / Player dialogue for Eyes of Eilistraee (EOE). I took a break from conversation writing when I realised that too many aspects of the story and its characters were still up in the air. After a lot of background work developing the main plot and reworking some of the main & side quests to give them more emotional "punch", I now have a much clearer picture of where things are going story wise. I even have an ending or two (depending on the players actions of course!).

As a result of this cogitation some of the current conversations will be subject to a re-write. Sadly this can't be helped and although it feels like extra work now, it should, fingers crossed, pay off in the long run.

eR

Plot developments...

2006-02-15T12:58:00.001Z

Spent some time developing the main plot for Eyes of Eilistraee. It always seems hard to develop the beginning and the end of a storyline because my brain always seems to form ideas at random - never in a useful order! The ending has to be a result of the player's actions which is why the final act / section of the module acts as a hub where the player has a lot of freedom to determine how the end of story unfolds. This also allows me to keep the scope of the ending realistic and focused.

eR

A new module in the works!

2006-02-13T15:08:00.000Z

The last time I checked the vault (www.nwvault.com) I noticed that I had a few comments on the Pawns download page stating that is was a shame that Pawns of the Shadovar was the only module I'd released thus far. Well for all those folks who are interested (and who bump into this blog ; ) ) fear not, I am working on a new module.

The module in development (my third if I include "The Last Blood of Malavhan" which sadly died along with my last hard disk) has an entirely new storyline and is set in the Forgotten Realms. It's called Eyes of Eilistraee and focuses a power struggle for two legendary gem stones created by a drow goddess called (yes you've guessed it..) Eilistraee. For this module I plan to really develop the player's henchmen with a view to creating a group of interesting characters who'll regularly interact with the player (A la Baldur's Gate 2) and hopefully make adventuring a lot more fun.

I'm planning to keep this blog updated with the module’s progress as often as I can. So far I have:

Almost all of the areas built in skeleton form (few placeables and no NPCS) in the toolset.
Created introductory characters and background info characters for the main quest in the toolset.
Created a number of encounter templates and hostile creature blueprints.
Developed my own scaleable encounter system.
Planned out a ton of conversations, encounters and general quest and main plot progression on paper (word docs, txt files and spreadsheets).

There's a lot of work still to do but I think planning wise I'm pretty much done. I'm sure my plans will change along the way, but at least now I'm in a position to implement almost all of the main storyline (and its variable paths) into the module via the toolset.

I'll keep you posted.

eR

Hey! I have a blog!

2006-02-13T10:58:00.000Z

Oooo! New toy!

This is the first post in Elven Rogue's blog (or newsletter). I intend to post updates on my Neverwinter Nights projects here, so keep checking for updates on Pawns of the Shadovar or Eyes of Eilistraee!

eR