Screenies!

A few exterior shots of Al-Qasr Al-Kabir, a town in the deserts of Calimshan. This area has actually been complete for awhile but isn't tested yet. People like screenshots right?

When will Path of Evil 2 be ready?

After taking some time away from the toolset, things are going steadily. I just finished up a series of 5-6 quests the other night. They are the "main plotline" in an area, though not part of the main plot of the campaign itself. Still, it's rather a lot of dialog, a fair amount of scripting, and a lot of skillchecks.

Some of the quests kept braching out. As I was implementing a quest, I kept thinking "Well, the pc might want to do this..." Once quest wound up with six possible solutions, and one single conversation turned out to be longer than anything in Path of Evil 1, clocking in at nearly 2500 words.

On player recently emailed me said they were anxious for a sequel and wondered when it would be ready? Unfortunately I can't estimate that. Path of Evil 2 is much larger than the first. As it currently stands there are more quests than all the questpaths of Path of Evil 1 combined, and it's only about halfway done. First I'm not a veteran author, so I don't really have a good estimate of how long it's going to take to implement some things because I don't have the experience some authors do. Second, things tend to grow (like my example above).

The third thing is polish. Getting something workable takes time, but polishing takes almost as much time as getting the basics up and running. There's putting together a quest, and there's putting in more dialog options, companion talks, the extra oxcart here or there in the area to make it look better, adding/changing music as appropriate for an area.

Finally there's bug testing. Bug testing takes time. I learned a lot from the first module about what works, and initial testing in some areas of POE2 has seen the payout of that, some quests even worked right the very first time! :-) Plus I learned a few tricks to speed testing like putting doppleganger npc's in one area to save the running around, and a special npc capable of advancing the quest to test further into a quest if something is broken earlier in it.

So my building has multiple passes. I lay out the basics: build the area, write up the basic quests/dialog/journals, do scripting. Then comes a polish pass, adding more conversation options to allow pc personality, adding companion conversation, putting in extra detail in the area, deciding music/area titles etc. Then comes bugtesting. here I add in the testing dopplegangers and try to run through various things. I get a huge list of stuff that's broken and then go back to fix it. Then test again... and again.... and again.... Then finally everything "works" and I release it.

Then the bugfixing starts again as others find bugs. :-)

Yoga Bear (non NWN2)

Yoga Bear is a non profit that sponsors yoga for cancer survivors. My mother is a cancer survivor, and I did yoga before a balance disorder forced me to stop. Yoga is great for stress relief and as a mild form of excercise that anyone can do.

On June 27, Yoga Bear will be having it's yogapalooza fundraiser in Atlanta, Austin, Cleveland, NYC, SF and DC. You can go to www.yogabear.org for more information.

This blog post is part of Zemanta's "Blogging For a Cause" campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.

Getting back to work

I'd gotten burned out after working on NWN2 for about 6 months straight, and needed a break to clear my mind. Work is beginning again, with two more quests and a small area implemented recently to the Path of Evil campaign. I've got about 45-50 quests plotted out (I expect about 80 or so quests), about half those implemented, and about 2/3 of implemented quests seemingly working without bugs.

One large area of 20 or so quests is virtually complete (except for fixing the quest bugs of course), I could release it as a standalone adventure since it's almost all sidequests.

I bought and played Mysteries of Westgate. I liked it a lot, definitely a worthwhile experience. I especially liked the area design (and the triangle market in particular). Area design is easy to do, but hard to do well. The area designers were very creative in their use of placables, I saw usage I'd have never thought of. Something I didn't like: it's always raining in the docks area, but not raining in other parts of the city....

A bit burned

I haven't done much work recently. I've been a bit burned out. But considering that I've been working tons on this, plus all the things I've been doing for work (new servers, new phone infrastructure etc) it's no surprise. A break will allow me to come back refreshed, productive and turning out higher quality content than plodding along.

1.5 on the Vault (almost)

1.5 is now on the Vault, except I haven't heard back on the request I made 4 days ago to the Vault admins for uploading the hak.

Next up, a set of custom skydomes using the ground textures. Now external dungeons won't have to just go for the skydome_black. 23 skydomes using the cobblestone, cliff and rocky textures. All have been darkened significantly since they are now ceilings underground instead of ground in sunlight. This will give those external dungeons more a sense of being underground than just areas in darkness. The cliff and rocky skydomes will probably be the most useful for people, but cobblestone looks good for areas under city streets, like in say Calimport Muzad....

The actual making of custom skydomes are actually easy enough to make. The tutorial out there is very straightforward. Getting things that look artistically good.... well hopefully people appreciate my effort anyway.

SoZ

I've been playing SoZ this week. I figured I wanted to see some of the assets in-game before using them myself to get some ideas.

So there hasn't been much direct progress on POE 1.5. I have finished all the questgiver conversations for the optional quests. Judging by the amount of time I spent on the rogue optional quests, all optional quests should be implemented this weekend if I don't spend too much more time on SoZ.