Update on the Mod's Current Development

I mentioned some of this already in a few comments, but I owe it to everyone to make an official detailed posting. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing the speed-of-progress I would like from my mod, so rather than leave everyone in suspense and do a disservice, I'm temporarily suspending the mod's development until I have something substantial. I'm not cancelling it, I'm just suspending it. As I look at the months flying by based on my prior post dates, I'm realizing my development is not proceeding as quickly as I'd like, and I'm feeling embarrassed by the downtime.

This would be the part where an author makes excuses, such as they have a wife (I don't), kids to take care of (nope), or a dying relative (nah, I've been pretty lucky). I've been healthy, enjoying life, and my boy Trump even won the election. By all accounts, life is good. The blame is mostly because I didn't anticipate how difficult juggling multiple mod development can be, namely for Crusader Kings II. It's like writing multiple novels at once, only each novel requires a different tool to publish it (Clausewitz for CKII, Aurora for NWN). What's worse, I've built up a following for both titles, and people on both aisles asking for updates, lol. One distinction I can't ignore is the number of potential users -- I could mod for a currently active game with a vibrant growing community and have my mod enjoyed by up to thousands, or I can mod for a game with a small community and possibly have it enjoyed by a few hundred.

When I first started this mod, NWN Vault was still online and Lamb's Demonheart mod was still in development, so the game looked very attractive to me. Now, not so much, but considering how much work I've put into the story and what I've done in-game so far, it feels like a tremendous waste of time to quit on it all now. To put what I've done in perspective, the average Goosebumps novel is 22,000 words, and I've currently typed over 3x that much, yet I still have a long way to go. Oh, and I'm writing for free, and unlike a book author, writing is only half of my struggle -- the hard part is making it all work in Aurora. I've realized now why most mods exclusively focus on hack-and-slash, lol.

I'll offer an update when I have something concrete. Just to reiterate, I'm not cancelling the mod; I'm suspending it. I promise the next update I make on this blog will be a substantial one, because I'm exhausted throwing out minor posts just for the sake of reminding everyone I'm alive. Hell, maybe I'll just wait until the entirety of chapter one is complete, so I can redeem myself. Once I do that, I can finally start promoting the mod.

I hope no one has a history major in fantasy.

Greetings again, everyone. Admittedly, since my last post, I've mostly modded for Crusader Kings II, of which I released a Game of Thrones portrait overhaul pack (download link here, if interested). Plus, work at the printing plant has picked back up in preparation for the Halloween and Christmas book printing season, as we're getting hit with literally a record number of book order requests.

I've been touching up several areas of the script, and I finished a new area. I've taken my character through the paces of a few scenes to ensure everything feels satisfying. For example, with regards to the dialog, I'm cautiously avoiding info dumping the reader with too much history -- a mistake I feel the Age of Decadence PC game commits. I want my world to feel alive, but not at the expense of it reading like a history book. I initially introduced historical details to the player slowly across the main script, until I discovered something I laughably overlooked as I was modding my scenes -- random NPC villager dialog! I overlooked this because my direct inspiration was from Japanese visual novels, which don't have the luxury of utilizing random NPC conversations, but with NWN I can include my history as optional content, told through the lives of NPC's. I can also create in-game books for readers who want to further embrace my world's subtleties. 

I feel the difference between my mod and Age of Decadence is Age of Decadence sometimes force feeds this history to the player. My approach is more subtle and optional. For example, one NPC mentions he's paranoid by the Rooks standing around the city, like statues, staring ominously at everyone. From here, you can engage him for more details and offer your own opinion, or just ignore him. These conversations will provide insight into the world, while providing clues to the tension surrounding the city's inhabitants.

My world isn't Faerun or borrowed from anyone else's. I made it myself, and while I don't have the time to put as much detail into it as the Forgotten Realms would, I needed it to be my own world due to certain advanced technologies and bastardized Christian religious views to make my story work. I wasn't about to selfishly force these plot points into an existing world, and again, I didn't want to get caught up in world history. My focus is on the characters. I understand a certain amount of history must be told to make my world feel believable, but once I feel I've fulfilled that quota, it's on to the action. This train of thought is something I borrowed from Black Lilith adult visual novels, where the character's universe is loosely introduced to frame the content, but for the most part the focus is on the characters and what they do to one another.

I'll try to showcase more of the conversations in my next blog post, and expand on the character section in this blog. I don't want to reveal all the characters, but I have a few more locked down that I've discovered are too major to ignore that I'd like to discuss.

Obsidian and Paradox's "Tyranny" and how it relates to my mod.

This isn't an update, but I wanted to talk about a game currently in development that has me excited because it is very reminiscent of the approach I'm taking to my mod. It's called Tyranny, and it's a joint project between Paradox Interactive and Obsidian. It utilizes Pillars of Eternity's graphics engine, so it shares the look and feel of a Neverwinter Nights game with the classic isometric RPG perspective. It's not often games explore evil as a central concept, and even fewer have tried it without parodying it (*cough* Overlord). Tyranny might be the first genuinely evil and serious game I've come across.

Now you're probably thinking, "There are several games you choose to be evil. How is this different?" According to what we know from the website and a developer diary, when you start the game, you discover evil has already won; the good guys lost! Second, you have a position of high authority within this evil faction. Most developers would have started the player as a slave/rebel and had them work their way up to overthrow this evil, but apparently, you won't be doing that. Furthermore, a person of your lofty status should be powerful, so we're promised we won't be killing rats. After all, your character contributed to evil winning in the first place!

So how does this relate to my mod? There are similarities, but because it contains some detective story elements, I've made the factions and character motivations vague. The Church of Knox has misconstrued evil inclinations, but they try not to wear evil on their sleeves. The Church's intentions are justified under the pretext of keeping it's citizens safe, but at what point does safety and security begin to restrict the very people they're trying to protect? Your character's stuck in a political whirlwind of conflicting interests, and while I can't be specific due to spoilers, I can say it's not as simple as Church vs. heretics. I imagine Tyranny's characters (whoever they will be), are similar to some of my characters who will exploit others and abuse positions of authority. Furthermore, your character in my mod can be quite evil, and Malakai actively encourages this behavior. I will start the player off weak and at lvl 1, but this is important to create a sense of vulnerability and to put the player in a position of being exploited, otherwise the player could simply fight their way out to escape their problems. Finally, my mod isn't about good vs. evil, because there was never good to begin with! After all, aren't all humans inherently evil? You can take that argument up with Adam and Eve!

Obviously, Tyranny is made by a group of people, so there are certain ambitious I can't match. Tyranny incentivizes multiple play-throughs, but my mod will be lucky to get 2-3 play-throughs. I'll probably have most of my major decisions come near the ending half of the mod to cut down on excessive branching paths. Reputation, journal entries, and alignment adjustments will calculate what path your protagonist takes. There will be bad endings along the way to keep the player on their toes, but I can't afford the time to branch out from each bad ending.

But hey, here is what it all comes down to: My mod has sex. I doubt Tyranny can do that without cutting away from the action, but if I'm wrong, I applaud them. Pillars of Eternity didn't even have romance, and was a major reason I quit it. I understand they didn't include it because Pillars of Eternity was a Kickstarter and they wanted to focus on gameplay, but it doesn't change the fact it didn't have romance! Maybe the video game industry can one day mature enough to reach the realm of TV, like Game of Thrones. The people who don't want sex in games don't have to play them, period.

Game of Mods. Plugging away on chapter one.

Hello everyone, hope you all are enjoying Game of Thrones season six debut! I'm continuing to build up the first chapter of my NWN mod for its eventual release. A lot of it is still in bits and pieces, but the first scene is done in its entirety, which I'm glad because it might be one of my hardest scenes in the mod due to  the use of cinematics and character movement waypoints. I also have a sex scene done in its entirety, which I may include at the end of chapter one. I've also completed a number of the maps/locations, and the script for chapter one is entirely done, so at this point I'm just plugging my resources in.


Speaking of chapters, now that I've further refined the script and created more of the in-game content, I'm reversing my decision on releasing a demo. Now, the demo will be chapter one in its entirety. I'm doing this for two reasons: First, I don't want people to replay through the content twice to test my mod, although I appreciate everyone who offered to! Second, chapter one is basically the introduction, so I know it won't contain many profound branching options, so it makes the most sense to get that content out of the way before I start going crazy with the rest of the story. The less stuff I have to worry about transferring to chapter two, the better. With this in mind, it's possible chapter two will be one big giant final chapter. Considering it's the year 2016, I want to see how much content I can cram into it before people's computers croak, or my own as I work on the editor. I mean it's crappy Neverwinter Nights graphics, how bad could it be, right? I believe Demonheart's author, Lamb, broke hers up to make it easier for her to work, and not necessarily for user performance reasons, so I think as long as the mod is editing fine on my end, I can make it as big as I want.

Chapter one consists of the protagonist meeting the main cast, traversing parts of her city, the lore, and various miscellaneous events to further define the type of character you want to play. I'm still open to improving upon the chapter after its release - based on feedback - but the story is final.

Meanwhile, my script file has become so big, it's hard to scroll through it! I predicted this would happen, so I made a table of contents at the top with bookmark shortcuts linking to different parts of the file. That procedure worked for a while, until I noticed having a single file made it awkward for branching decisions! Navigating certain non-linear segments was becoming a nightmare, especially when taking a break and revisiting it later. It was affecting my writing enthusiasm! To counter this, I converted my single script file into multiple files; then, I used Microsoft Excel to point to the different files, forming what visual novel enthusiasts would recognize as a decision tree. It's been a great resource to organize my thoughts, and I figure after my mod is finished, I can provide the file as an optional walk-through. It's helping me navigate my script, so it should help others navigate the game.

I promise this won't be a hard mod. Any mod or game requiring a walk-through is not good game design. I don't like players getting lost or confused, so I'm providing detailed journal entries, adding landmarks to the areas (fountains, statues, etc.), and keeping the main quest as the focus. There won't be many side-quests, and when there are, they will focus on the main cast and be short, and certainly not fetch quests. Going back to what I said in an earlier blog entry, I want to keep the story focused and treat the player's time with respect, especially because there are mystery elements to the story, and I can't afford for the player to forget who the characters are because they were too distracted killing rats from a random quest giver.

I'll end this entry by saying I've been dabbling with an under-appreciated PC game called The Age of Decadence. It reminds me a bit of my mod, favoring character interactions over combat. Depending on your class, the story changes dramatically, with many choices and consequences; however, that part is too ambitious for my mod, considering I'm a single developer! My only issues with Age of Decadence are it's turn-based combat and the women are ugly as hell -- they look like men! It's pretty sad when Neverwinter Nights graphics are superior to some of today's titles, but it's also refreshing to see good game design and stories take precedence over graphics. Maybe developers will one day distance themselves from the Call of Duty clones and work on real games!.. Or not.

Aurora is such a tease.

The struggles of modding this beast persist. It's been a happy Christmas and New Years, so time for an update!

I've developed a few new areas, conversations, worked on load screens, and added more characters. I have bits and pieces completed for several scenes, but not enough to string them together. I do, however, almost have the first scene completed in its entirety, other than an annoying issue where a door doesn't want to talk to me. (It's official, I'm going crazy).

My biggest setback is tackling various advanced challenges of the Aurora engine, such as cutscenes or nuisances outside the confines of the engine. For example, the door in this image is too far away to engage in the conversation because Aurora is a whore, so I had to work around the issue, trick the player, and insert an invisible object placed closer to the player using a door's portrait. In another example, an NPC wouldn't die to a fireball spell in a cutscene, so I had to simulate it by timing his death with the impact of the fireball, because I guess cutscenes give special treatment to NPC's. I had to reload the mod about nine times before the timing synced up. By the way, the two images in this post happen early in the mod, so I don't consider them spoilers.

I feel confident 90% of my mod's vision can be accomplished within the construction kit, but that other 10%  is concerning me. Sadly, that is the part I must address first. After all, if I can't finish my mod's most challenging aspects, then why waste time accomplishing the easy stuff, only to hit a brick wall? I understand I could change parts of my script to avoid brick wall moments (and to an extent, I probably will), but it's aggravating knowing there are things the engine is capable of that I simply don't have knowledge of.

Unfortunately, knowledge of NWN modding is more elusive today than it was in the past. Before I proposed this project back in April of 2014, IGN's Neverwinter Vault was alive and well. It was the ultimate resource for NWN modding. It ceased to exist of that same year around the end of June. My timing couldn't have been worse. The NWN Community Vault was released to rectify this, but the loss of forum posts littered with technical knowledge wounded me, unless their forum is archived somewhere I'm overlooking. It would be like someone creating an ambitious Skyrim or Fallout mod, then mid-way in they're told the Nexus is permanently down. If the NWN Community Vault hadn't been born, I definitely would have cancelled this mod, as I refuse to mod a game without a dedicated community site.

I feel like I need to speed this mod along, so I'm going to be more transparent regarding my setbacks, as I'm not going to get any of it done procrastinating on the issues. If any of you would like to collaborate with me on any Aurora engine questions I may have, let me know. I'd love to find one or more people I can bounce questions off of, who I will, of course, credit in my mod. Regardless of no assistance, I'll continue development, but I'm just saying the sooner I tackle my questions, the sooner you guys get your mod. (Damn, I'm turning into Malakai. I sense a shift in my alignment.)

Clarification on Malakai's personality.

I hope you all are enjoying Fallout 4. I know I am! As I prepare my demo for an eventual release, I wanted to clarify an important detail that's annoying the hell out of me. Some of you may remember this screenshot I released earlier of Malakai speaking to the protagonist. As I continue expanding my story script, I'm already regretting that screenshot, because there's an important change I'm making to Malakai. No, I have no qualms with his condescending tone, or the fact he's an asshole. It's the word he throws out at the end -- whore.

The word itself is fine; however, I noticed several characters are calling the protagonist a whore! Drunks, orcs, bandits, sailors... If I'm not careful, her father might call her a whore! I feel like it's getting comical, and a word can lose its meaning when it's used too often. There are a few other similarities I'm noticing outside of the screenshot, but overall, I'm sensing this clash of similar personalities is driving Malakai into monotonous territory, so I'm changing him. He will still be a condescending asshole, but I want to emphasize he's also intelligent, calculating, and manipulative. I'll save the trashy immature one-liners for NPC's who only think with their dicks and not their brains (clarification #2: Malakai thinks with both).

Those kids really love Star Wars and Frozen.

I've been trying to keep these updates going, but my work schedule has been pretty hectic. I work at a coloring book manufacturer, and our busiest months are before Christmas. The upcoming Star Wars movie is also complicating things -- a day doesn't pass without printing either Star Wars or Disney's "Frozen," making this my busiest year on record, and requiring a lot of working weekends. For better or worse, after the Christmas rush dies down, there's almost no work, and I'm practically laid off, so that will be my peak modding days.

Regarding the mod itself, I'm focusing on the early content because I want to get something released as a tech demo, of sorts. Obviously, the mod runs fine for me, but I need a few people to test it so I can iron out any requirements or anything else unforeseen. I've received some great comments about how I can best tackle this, and I've decided I'll do a demo covering just the first half hour. I'm keeping it short because I plan on having you guys play through it again when the final version (of chapter 1?) is released, rather than worry about transferring decisions, calling it a prologue, etc. When you rush through the mod on your second play-through, I suspect it will only take a few minutes, lol. I suppose that is one advantage to a text-heavy mod is that it makes it quicker to play-test. Looking at my script, if I were to create a prologue, it would last about three hours -- not small enough for a demo, and not big enough for a separate release, in my opinion.

On an unrelated subject, I recently finished my mod for Crusader Kings II. It's a static portraits mod, meaning you can substitute your own images as portraits. This has been done before by others, but what I've done is released template packs, art files, and information to train others who want to achieve the same results. Plus, I'm sharing this link so anyone can connect with me on Lover's Lab, if you happen to use that forum.
www.loverslab.com/topic/52211-ck2-static-custom-portrait-replacer-ver-098-244-horse-lords-compatible/?p=1310789