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
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Friday, January 09, 2009
Happy New Year!
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
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
Friday, August 01, 2008
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
eR
Thursday, April 24, 2008
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
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
Thursday, April 10, 2008
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:
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
Monday, March 31, 2008
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
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
Friday, March 07, 2008
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
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
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