Has it been that long...

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

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!

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

Eyes of Eilistraee: Progress, progress

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!

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

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

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

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!

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

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!

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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!

eR