Thad's NWN Mod Idea

[Thad]

Was originally going to keep this as part of the existing BioWare Contest thread, but I think Burrito made a good point when he suggested I make it its own thread.

So here's my thread about the development of my own contest entry.

As this is a story-centered mod and the gameplay comes second, I'm starting with the story I've worked out so far.

...Actually, I already tried to lay it all out and my fucking browser crashed.  So I'm starting over.

Anyway.

As the story starts, you're accosted by a large man who I think I'll call Magnar.  He calls you a coward.  As the conversation progresses, it becomes clear that your character is a mercenary working for Magnar's kingdom, and that you just fled the field in a major battle, exposing his flank.  The battle had already gone somewhat sour by that point, and the two of you are the only apparent survivors; Magnar is wounded but managed to get away.  Apparently he's a legendary hero in his kingdom.

There should be a number of options as to how to play the conversation, from arrogance ("I ran because your kingdom's not paying me enough to die for it") to shame ("This was my first time leading a unit and I thought I was ready") to pragmatism ("The battle was already lost; why should I throw my life away?").

Eventually, another NPC arrives; I think I'll call him Timothy.  Apparently you and Magnar aren't the only survivors of the battle; Timothy was a fellow merc under your command.  The two of you are friends; he doesn't blame you for running.

Timothy and Magnar decide they need to head back to Magnar's kingdom (I need to come up with names for the two warring kingdoms; for now I'll just call them Magnar's Kingdom and The Enemy Kingdom) to warn of the defeat and the enemy army's advancement.  The catch is that the enemy has cut off the road back, and you're going to have to go through a dark and menacing forest to get there.

Timothy gives you a choice: you can come back to the kingdom, or he can give you a Recall Potion to send you back home.  (In case you ask, they can't just use the Recall Potion to get back to the kingdom because the area surrounding the kingdom has anti-teleportation wards; it'd be at a pretty distinct military disadvantage if it didn't.)

If you opt to take the potion, Timothy will bid you farewell.  Magnar will offer some parting words, which will depend on his opinion of you, which should presumably be based on a combination of your charisma score and your choices in your earlier conversation with him.  Either he's sympathetic ("Go, lad; some of us just aren't cut out for war") or disgusted ("Don't ever let me see your face again").  Either way, you head home.  I think, for character customization purposes, there should be a prompt where you describe the location of your home, be it forest, mountain, or whatever, but any of the choices will take you to a remote village.  You meet an older villager who's doing some kind of work appropriate to the setting -- chopping wood, herding sheep, hunting for food, or what have you.  He recognizes you and welcomes you back, not judging you for giving up the fight and coming home, and asks you to help him with whatever task he's doing.  The quest ends with the supposition that, as large as the war between these two kingdoms seems, your village is small, remote, and inconsequential enough that it's unlikely the war will ever come to your doorstep.

Otherwise, you go into the forest with Magnar and Timothy.  I need to fill in the forest portion of the mod, but I think the best way to play it is to make the forest some sort of enchanted dreamscape -- I think this is the best way to get a lot of storytelling done within the limitations of the contest.  As I can't add any more characters at this point, a dream environment would allow me to use Magnar and Timothy as other characters.  Plus, given that dialogue is supposed to be short, I could walk the player through a series of disconnected sequences -- flashbacks and whatever else.  I could also use this portion to get inside Magnar's and Timothy's heads, have them talk about things they wouldn't mention out loud -- Magnar's worry that he can't live up to his own reputation, Timothy's decision to become a mercenary because his mother is ill, things like that.

Anyway, eventually you make it out of the forest and reunite with the real Timothy and Magnar.  The three of you walk into a clearing, where Timothy stops you and lets Magnar walk on ahead, only to be hit with an arrow from an unseen assassin.  This is an attack which Magnar could easily fend off under normal circumstances, but between his wounds from the battle and his disquiet from the forest, he is totally unprepared and the arrow kills him.  The assassin (still unseen; remember that I've reached my limit of 3 NPC's here) tosses a bag of gold at Timothy's feet.

(This scene could play out a number of different ways depending on what I discover from playing with the engine; this scenario is my favorite but might be too hard to execute in this fashion.  Alternately, you could make camp and Timothy could kill Magnar in his sleep; there's any number of other possible ways this can go down but the point is that Magnar dies because of Timothy.)

Timothy, feeling he owes you an explanation, tells you that he has no allegiance to either kingdom and that, as noted above, he became a mercenary to get enough money to help his sick mother.  The Enemy Kingdom offered him a substantial amount of money to help kill Magnar, and he accepted.

At this point, you have two choices to make: what to do with Timothy, and where to go from here.  You can let Timothy go, either out of friendship or in exchange for a taste of his reward money.  You can kill him, either to avenge Magnar's death or to take the reward money.  Or you can subdue him and take him back to Magnar's kingdom to face justice.  Regardless of which decision you make regarding Timothy, you can head back to Magnar's kingdom to send the warning of his death and the army's advancement, defect and turn to the Enemy Kingdom in the hopes of getting better pay, or you can still return home to your village (in which case I assume Timothy would walk you both past an enemy checkpoint to a zone you could teleport out of freely).

That's the rough story I've managed to work out so far -- I think that could easily take up fifteen minutes to play through and amount to 3500ish words, though I can't really know for sure until I start hammering out the actual script.  (The description I just gave came out to 1050 words, so it seems like 3500 shouldn't be too hard to manage.)

Feedback is appreciated.

...I think I'd also like to do another mod, time permitting, maybe go for comedy, but comedy's a lot harder to write in a medieval fantasy setting I think.  But I think this is a good idea to go with for the first one.

[Brentai]

Not a bad setup, but I got halfway through that before realizing you're running right into the problem I'm having now, which is this:

You are only allowed to use one 4x4 area in the Toolset to tell your whole story.

This one totally shattered my story concept, too, since I wanted at least three areas, or even one area I could divvy up into sections.  Thing is, though, 4x4 is tiny as hell, and it's only possible to carve it up if you forgo some niceties of design (read: don't waste any space on physical borders and let the player deal with the existence of the map's edge himself - I'm almost tempted to toss in some sort of cockbrained "magical barrier" explanation for convenience, which actually might work out the way your setting is built).

Either way, you're stuck with only one tileset - "forest" will work out fine for your purposes.  You'll just have to force all the conversations to take place on a relatively constrained stage, and probably skip the "village" area altogether.

[Thad]

Hm, thanks for the info.  Good food for thought.

I still haven't actually messed around with Aurora yet -- I am compiling a new version of KDE today, and I may still be tomorrow -- so I need to poke around that a bit more before finding my limits.

Really I only need 3 places -- clearing, forest, another clearing.  I like my village idea, but you make a good point on why it's not feasible -- suppose I could handle it in narration or something, take out NPC #3.

Nice thought on working the "magic wall" idea into my existing plan, too.

[SpoonyGundam]

There should be a number of options as to how to play the conversation, from arrogance ("I ran because your kingdom's not paying me enough to die for it") to shame ("This was my first time leading a unit and I thought I was ready") to pragmatism ("The battle was already lost; why should I throw my life away?").

Timothy gives you a choice: you can come back to the kingdom, or he can give you a Recall Potion to send you back home.  (In case you ask, they can't just use the Recall Potion to get back to the kingdom because the area surrounding the kingdom has anti-teleportation wards; it'd be at a pretty distinct military disadvantage if it didn't.)

At this point, you have two choices to make: what to do with Timothy, and where to go from here.  You can let Timothy go, either out of friendship or in exchange for a taste of his reward money.  You can kill him, either to avenge Magnar's death or to take the reward money.  Or you can subdue him and take him back to Magnar's kingdom to face justice.  Regardless of which decision you make regarding Timothy, you can head back to Magnar's kingdom to send the warning of his death and the army's advancement, defect and turn to the Enemy Kingdom in the hopes of getting better pay, or you can still return home to your village (in which case I assume Timothy would walk you both past an enemy checkpoint to a zone you could teleport out of freely).

These choices are the ones that, if done right, are most interesting to me. Most of the choices in games like KotOR or Fable seemed either very obviously good or very obviously bad. The D&D system has the advantage of ethics (Or whatever lawful/neutral/chaotic is called.) in addition to the good/bad scale that any highly-touted choice-making game carries. Even so, I don't remember options in the official NWN campaigns often having much of an effect on ethical alignment, though I could be wrong. More of these are good.

It's also refreshing that these choices alter the story immediately and appear to continue altering it after the fact, rather than simply giving you a different ending. KotOR, for example, is pretty much the exact same game until the climax for light and dark sides. The only choice I can think of that has any real bearing is whether you kill or recruit that Jedi who I can't remember the name of on Dantooine. But again, "KILL, YES/NO?" isn't exactly a grey area as far as good and bad goes. Sure, it might be unrealistic for every choice to drastically alter the plot instantly, but a few turning points can certainly be made. And someone who can craft a more intricate plot that readily questions the player's morals AND ethics is simply a more valuable asset.

It's also worth mentioning that the majority of these things, I would assume, are simply going to be people pelting out their plots as quickly as possible, with the player's dialogue choices offering little more than exposition. Maybe it's just hopeless optimism, but I would think that someone showing some kind of ambition in his work would prove more appealing than the guy who has the beginnings of the next great cut-and-paste epic in Tolkien rip-off land.

Then again, constraints and so forth.

EDIT: I also seem to remember NWN actually telling you what choices will change your allignment. Don't do that. It's silly and would completely negate the thinking and conflict and such.

[Thad]

These choices are the ones that, if done right, are most interesting to me.

They're the things that leapt to mind most immediately when I read I had to include multiple endings.  The "Your friend kills the famous hero to get money for his sick mother; what do you do?" crossroads is, of course, pretty damn melodramatic, but it occurred to me as a pretty complex decision to revolve the mod around.

The D&D system has the advantage of ethics (Or whatever lawful/neutral/chaotic is called.) in addition to the good/bad scale that any highly-touted choice-making game carries. Even so, I don't remember options in the official NWN campaigns often having much of an effect on ethical alignment, though I could be wrong. More of these are good.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of it in those terms so much as terms of motivation -- it's not just what you do but why you do it (if you kill Timothy, do you do it for honor or for greed?), but of course it DID occur to me that there's a law/chaos issue on those motivations (killing him to avenge Magnar or bringing him to justice are lawful, letting him go give the money to his sick mother is chaotic, for example).

It's also refreshing that these choices alter the story immediately and appear to continue altering it after the fact, rather than simply giving you a different ending. KotOR, for example, is pretty much the exact same game until the climax for light and dark sides.

To be fair, my whole mod would be much shorter than, say, KotOR from the confrontation with Bastila onward.

The only choice I can think of that has any real bearing is whether you kill or recruit that Jedi who I can't remember the name of on Dantooine.

It irritated me to no end that there was no way to turn Juhani to the Dark Side.  She whines constantly about her fear of giving in to the darkness within her, but THERE IS NO WAY IN THE GAME SHE WILL EVER ACTUALLY DO SO UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE.

2's Influence system was an improvement, but didn't go far enough -- Bao-Dur and Handmaiden still don't like seeing you kill innocent people even if their alignment's maxed out at Dark Side.  (Of course 2 wasn't actually made by BioWare, but I'm not sure how relevant that fact is to the current conversation.)

But again, "KILL, YES/NO?" isn't exactly a grey area as far as good and bad goes. Sure, it might be unrealistic for every choice to drastically alter the plot instantly, but a few turning points can certainly be made. And someone who can craft a more intricate plot that readily questions the player's morals AND ethics is simply a more valuable asset.

It's also worth mentioning that the majority of these things, I would assume, are simply going to be people pelting out their plots as quickly as possible, with the player's dialogue choices offering little more than exposition. Maybe it's just hopeless optimism, but I would think that someone showing some kind of ambition in his work would prove more appealing than the guy who has the beginnings of the next great cut-and-paste epic in Tolkien rip-off land.

Then again, constraints and so forth.

Thanks for the thoughts; good things for me to mull over.  I like to think I have a good framework on my hands here.

[Brentai]

Yeah, I like the fact that you can mouth off all you want to whoever you want in NWN proper and get the same conversation.

...I also like that the focus of this contest is finding people who are able to write dialogues that don't turn out that way.

Anyway, Thad and whoever else is on this shizzy, I highly suggest you do what I did and go through all the Aurora tutorials before you put any more eInk to ePaper.  Even if module programming is a secondary skill for your purposes here it'll give you a clearer idea of what you can and can't get away with.  I'm nearly back to square one, myself.  :(

[Thad]

Anyway, Thad and whoever else is on this shizzy, I highly suggest you do what I did and go through all the Aurora tutorials before you put any more eInk to ePaper.  Even if module programming is a secondary skill for your purposes here it'll give you a clearer idea of what you can and can't get away with.  I'm nearly back to square one, myself.  :(

Was debating on whether I should run the tutorials first or just dive on in.  Thanks for advice again.

[Brentai]

If it helps any, here's a 4x4 map I cocked up while playing with the editor.



Not sure if my mod's going to look anything like that in the end, but it's still a good picture of what kind of segmenting you can do.  You'll just want to make sure that if there are supposed to be any surprises, you hide them behind encounter or script triggers, because a player can pretty easily zoom out and see about 3 tiles in both directions.  Or you could just be a jerk and set the fog clip distance to something like 5 meters.  :D

(EDIT: Nevermind, the minimum fog clip distance is 30m.  Which is about 3 tiles.)

[SpoonyGundam]

You might be able to work the village thing in there if you include a hut or something in the second clearing. There would be plenty of nondescript hovels in a medieval fantasy setting, so it wouldn't really be that farfetched for the two areas to look exactly the same. Though it might be necessary to have some narration explaining where you are, simply to reinforce the idea that it isn't that close to where you start. You know, just in case the judges play through them multiple times.

And KotOR 2 did seem a little better, but I admittadly only played through it once, so I don't really know if there were any game-turning choices showing up. Parts of it just bothered me too much to run through it again.

"Hi, I'm Mandalore. Based on my initial Feat selection and equipment, the designers think I should be a ranged character. Good luck with that, since the designers also decided to make it impossible for me to take off my heavy armor, completely negating any kind of dexterity bonus. And just to rub it in, one of my special implants increases my dexterity for no effect. You might as well just make me a melee fighter, even though I'm the only human character that can't become a Jedi and I kind of suck in comparison because of that. I might not be good for a whole lot of anything, but that won't stop me from forcing myself into your active party. Twice."

Fuck you, Mandalore. You used to be cool.

[Brentai]

It's kind of relieving to know that I'm not the only person who doesn't deal with d20 rules very well.

[Thad]

Finally broke out Aurora today; made a couple really really simple mods (the most complex things I did were a short conversation and a door to another place; I won't be using the latter for the contest obviously).  Think I will delve into more tomorrow but right now my head hurts.  (My head hurting is unrelated to my playing with Aurora.)

Thoughts:

Yeah, the village sequence is pretty much out.  Think I'll try and handle it in narration.

I think rather than having a "walk through the forest" quest it'll make a lot more sense just to set the whole thing in the same clearing.  Maybe have a portal in the middle with some explanation that it can only be accessed at certain times of day; therefore you have to make camp for the night before you can use it -- which works the the dream idea and the Timothy-killing-Magnar-in-his-sleep idea pretty well.

[MadMAxJr]

Is the scripting language anything like C at all?

[Brentai]

Code:

void main()
{
    object oFalstadd;

    // Give the speaker some XP
    GiveXPToCreature(GetPCSpeaker(), 50);

    // Set the variables
    SetLocalInt(OBJECT_SELF, "nRescued", 1);

    // Move miner to exit
    oFalstadd = GetObjectByTag("ct_Falstadd");
    AssignCommand(OBJECT_SELF, ActionMoveToObject(oFalstadd));
}

Just a little bit, yeah.

[Conmantine]

Finally broke out Aurora today; made a couple really really simple mods (the most complex things I did were a short conversation and a door to another place; I won't be using the latter for the contest obviously).  Think I will delve into more tomorrow but right now my head hurts.  (My head hurting is unrelated to my playing with Aurora.)

Thoughts:

Yeah, the village sequence is pretty much out.  Think I'll try and handle it in narration.

I think rather than having a "walk through the forest" quest it'll make a lot more sense just to set the whole thing in the same clearing.  Maybe have a portal in the middle with some explanation that it can only be accessed at certain times of day; therefore you have to make camp for the night before you can use it -- which works the the dream idea and the Timothy-killing-Magnar-in-his-sleep idea pretty well.

You know, you could probably set the entire thing in the forest part.  Have Magnar catch up with the player in the forest and begin accosting him for leaving the battlefield, then have Timothy kill Magnar at the end of the forest.  If you want to keep the forest idea in.  Personally, I find a forest a bit more interesting than a clearing, but I'm not sure what you can do with Aurora.

[MadMAxJr]

Hmm.  With the forest, can you give the illusion of having extra zones?  Such as hitting a map edge, moving the character to the other end of the map, and reposition the trees/objects to fake a 'its a new zone, honest' kind of thing? 

[Thad]

You know, you could probably set the entire thing in the forest part.  Have Magnar catch up with the player in the forest and begin accosting him for leaving the battlefield, then have Timothy kill Magnar at the end of the forest.  If you want to keep the forest idea in.  Personally, I find a forest a bit more interesting than a clearing, but I'm not sure what you can do with Aurora.

Pretty fine line really.  The forest tiles don't seem to allow for too thick a grouping of trees.

So Aurora calls it a forest but it looks pretty much like a clearing to me.

Hmm.  With the forest, can you give the illusion of having extra zones?  Such as hitting a map edge, moving the character to the other end of the map, and reposition the trees/objects to fake a 'its a new zone, honest' kind of thing? 

I don't think so, but maybe.

[Thad]

Cobbled together a small forestscape I'm fairly happy with.  Screenshots forthcoming but it's fairly heavily wooded, comes up on the edge of a cliff face, and contains a portal in the middle of some ruins.  Think I might add a stream later but haven't decided.

Need to think of a title.  Forest of Dreams, Dreams in Darkness, and variations on those themes seem like a fairly obvious call.  I like the sound of A Hero's Death but it sorta gives away the ending -- though I suppose Death of a Salesman does too and it's still the great American play.  ...Maybe throw in a line at the beginning where Magnar tells you you should have died a hero's death rather than flee from battle, drop the title there.

Should probably get started on scripting, moving characters around, and things of that nature soon here.  Felipe says he has a book on Aurora which I can have; I meant to get it from him last night but forgot.  As I'll be seeing him at work every day this week and going to a party at his place on Friday, I expect I'll have it by the end of the week.

[Thad]

...Have kinda been alternating between work on this project and on my Mac Mini.

Went through the Fern tutorial linked from the contest page today.  Didn't cover a lot of things I still need to figure out (how to have a character walk onto a map after you're already there, how to force a conversation rather than have you initiate, and how to adjust alignment, off the top of my head), but DID go through a lot of useful stuff, particularly in the conversation editor.

Was full of coding practices that made me want to weep, though.  (Set a variable called nFirstTimeTalked to 1 to indicate that this is NOT the first time you've talked; use meaningless numbers in your naming conventions like at_falstadd01 rather than, say, a meaningful reference to what the script is other than something involving Falstadd.  I grant that at least the character limit plays a part in the latter, but there's still got to be a better way of doing it.)

[Brentai]

Was full of coding practices that made me want to weep, though.  (Set a variable called nFirstTimeTalked to 1 to indicate that this is NOT the first time you've talked; use meaningless numbers in your naming conventions like at_falstadd01 rather than, say, a meaningful reference to what the script is other than something involving Falstadd.  I grant that at least the character limit plays a part in the latter, but there's still got to be a better way of doing it.)

OH GOD THANK YOU.  I thought it was just me.

Er, do they actually reverse nFirstTimeTalked like that, though?  I must not have noticed and just did it the sane way assuming that's what they were telling me to do.  Huh.

[Thad]

Yeah.  Consistently, in fact, if you go through his version of the mod where he uses it with the miners too.

I changed it to something like "nAlreadyTalked".  Something that makes sense, dammit.  (Suppose I could've gone with nDidntAlreadyTalk but I can't imagine anything good coming of variables based on double-negatives.  Unless you're working in Perl.  ...Hey, I even started that last comment with the word "unless".  Good show, Boyd.)

...My primary language is Java.  I know a thing or two about making absurdly long and descriptive variable names.

(Actually, there seem to be some things in the scripting language itself that seem to be based on the Java convention of multiple words delimited by caps -- GetCurrentState(), as opposed to the C convention of all-lowercase with underscores, ie get_current_state() -- but I do believe the Java convention generally involves an initial lowercase, ie getCurrentState().  I realize this is going to sound like colossal nitpicking to most people, but it's kinda tricky to change a habit developed over about five years.  Realize these conventions are arbitrary anyway, but it's good to have common practices and I particularly dislike the fact that they tend to mix both styles, with some conventions I identify as Visual Studio-style to make things even MORE inconsistent.)

...My gripes notwithstanding, I am tremendously impressed with the scripting engine so far, as well as the pretty-damned-useful wizards.  Once I'm done making submissions for an extremely restricted contest, I could make some really cool things with this.

But I feel like I really should finish Tempe High: The Zelda Quest first.  It's embarrassing enough that it's taken me longer to complete a game based on my high school than it did to ACTUALLY complete high school as it is.