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One of the nice things about being away from ...
October 31, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
One of the nice things about being away from home and my computer for a few days is that it gives me the opportunity to spend quality time with my notebook. I've filled several pages with tiny scrawls for my Dragon Age campaign. My main push now is mapping out the main "dungeon" in the module. So far I feel pretty good about it, offering up a variety of puzzles, backstory, and roleplaying opportunities. I'm trying hard to provide a rich experience, with each room having interesting things to do and see. I'd much rather have players rewarded for investigating areas carefully than simply rush them through a series of room and combats.
Yesterday I finished up the main entrance level, though I'll have lots of dialog and detailed notes to put in. I may even prototype one of the puzzles in NWN as the scripting is somewhat complex. One of the nice things about having a couple of years before a module can be put into a game is that it gives me lots of time to write. For the avid readers out there, I'm hoping for plenty of backstory in journals, signs, and notes scattered about.
Hopefully today I can work on the second main level, at least getting the mapping done. So far I've been making lists of rooms I need to arrange as well as the major plot events. I'm having fun with splitting up the party and letting the various NPCs and PC interact in their smaller groups. Should be fun.
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Some of my better ideas happen right when I w...
October 29, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
Some of my better ideas happen right when I wake up, then I work hard to remember it until I can write it down. Funny how creativity works.
I'm most of the way writing the dialog for the first act of the first module. The next big project is mapping everything, putting in interesting locations that help the story unfold as well as presenting fun challenges for the player.
I've also begun to sketch and model some of the custom content I'll need for the game. It's still very preliminary, but I'd like to get some normal mapped low polygon models ready for the release of Dragon Age.
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I cleaned up a bit around here
October 23, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
I cleaned up a bit around here. The Demon introduction page actually says that it's released now. The title of this main page includes the Demon campaign. I'm still mulling over when it makes sense to open up a Dragon Age section of the web. Pretty soon, I suppose, as that's what I mostly work on these days.
Not much to report on the DA front. I've been steadily working on dialog and planning. Much of the first module will be a dungeon crawl of sorts, which requires considerable amount of interior planning. Hopefully I won't leave anything important out, like a place for the original inhabitants to go to the bathroom.
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It's been awhile since I posted, so I thought...
October 20, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
It's been awhile since I posted, so I thought I'd throw a tidbit to the people visiting the site. Work on my Dragon Age project is my focus these days. I continue to write dialog, plan the story, and try to learn how to do 3d modeling using normal maps.
Without spoiling too much, the tentative title for the new module is "Dark Waters" and centers around three friends living on an island many years after a devastating war. We'll see how it goes.
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I managed to fix the weird bug the one player had
October 13, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
I managed to fix the weird bug the one player had. It turns out that he'd downloaded a PRC pack which ended up corrupting his character. I ended up creating a mini module that gave his first level character the xp and items he lost. Being a nice guy can be time consuming on occasion.
I continue to chug away on my Dragon Age writing. Just for fun, I fiddled with my little soccer game in NWN so the opposing player would periodically kick the ball. It was in a semi-random direction, so it's somewhat useless at the moment. Maybe I'll fiddle with the AI a bit more if I get a chance.
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It looks like the 1
October 08, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
It looks like the 1.64 update for NWN is out there now. I'm bracing myself for bug notices relating to the update. I might try to sneak in some of the new skies, or perhaps the new troglodytes as well. We'll see if I really have the time this weekend. Someone's given me a weird Dreamcatcher 3 bug to track down that looks like it could take some time.
I've been making some good progress on my Dragon Age project. Dialog takes forever to write and I'm slowly working my way through it. It took me a couple years to write and plan the Shadowlords module, so it looks like I'm starting at just the right time.
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Every once in awhile I get a weird idea and h...
October 04, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
Every once in awhile I get a weird idea and have to test it out. I wanted to simulate a soccer-like game using a creature for a ball. After about 15 minutes of scripting, I had it generally working. Now I'm trying to recall my high school trigonometry, thinking about how to write AI to get shots into goals. In a sense it's a prototype of a small minigame I'd like to do for my Dragon Age campaign, though we'll see if it really works out.
I also noticed that Demon only has around 16,000 downloads (Dreamcatcher 1 has over 115,000). Part of it is probably due to Dreamcatcher being out for so long, allowing people to download it multiple times with each new version. It may also be that the NWN community is slowing down a bit, with the people playing it now being the most hardcore.
In general, I think there's a big value in getting modules out soon after a game is released, which encourages me to get everything ready for a Dragon Age campaign. I think once people finish the game, they look around for other things to do. If there's nothing of interest, it often gets uninstalled after six months or so and forgotten.
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It seems like it took forever, but I finally ...
October 02, 2004 by Adam in NWN1
It seems like it took forever, but I finally tracked down the issue with Shifters and updated the hak pack to fix it. Basically I'd padded the portrait.2da and appearance.2da files with bogus entries, causing assorted weirdness when polymorphing as a shifter. Hopefully I didn't mess anything up. What was a twenty minute job took four hours as I kept being interrupted by kids and family.
I've written about five pages of dialog for my Dragon Age project. I've been thinking about it for a couple months now and the story is starting to write itself. I'm trying hard to lay the groundwork for the characters at the beginning of the game so that the player gets a good sense of the world and their place in it. One of these days I'll get around to opening up a "Dragon Age" section of this site, though I'm not quite there yet.
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About Me
I've won multiple awards for my Neverwinter Nights modules, which I've been working on since the year 2000.
In the real world, I'm a web developer for a healthcare organization. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
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